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Eqbal Ahmad | Excerpt
Barsamian: Moving to Afghanistan and the evolving situation there. The Taliban movement, you suggest in an article, has connections with not just Pakistan but also with the United States.
Ahmad: Afghanistan has suffered criminal neglect at the hands of the United States and its media. In 1979 and 1980, when the Afghan people started resisting Soviet intervention, the whole of America and Europe mobilized on their side. For the media, it was such a big story that CBS paid money to stage a battle that it could broadcast as an exclusive. Afghanistan was in the news every day. It disappeared from the news the day the Soviets withdrew. Then, Afghanistan was abandoned by the media, by the American government, by American academics, and as a result by the American people. These people who fought the West's battle with the West's money and with the West's arms, and in the process distorted themselves, distorted Pakistan, and contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union, found themselves totally abandoned after the Cold War. The Taliban's rise takes place in that vacuum.
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We happen to be talking at a time when Osama bin Laden is a central figure of the news and discourse in America. To date, no one has examined what has produced Osama bin Laden. There have been hints that he worked with the CIA, that he first engaged in violence because he was brought in to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. There are hints that he was recruited into the jihad by the CIA. The United States and the Saudis financed it. But this is not enough. No one has identified how his country, Saudi Arabia, has been robbed by Western corporations and Western powers. No one has identified what bin Laden grew up seeing. The Saudi princes, this one-family state, have handed over the oil resources of the Arab people to the West and its investment firms. He has seen it being robbed. All through this time, he had only one satisfaction: his country is not occupied. There are no American, French, or British troops in his country. Then he realizes, in the early 1990s, that even this small pleasure has been taken away from him. He has already been socialized by the CIA, armed by the Americans, and trained to believe deeply that when a foreigner comes into your land, you become violent. You fight. That was what the jihad in Afghanistan was about.
In the early 1980s, a fairly senior CIA official who had either retired already or was on the brink of retiring wrote a very interesting article in the Armed Forces Journal. The article was entitled “The American Threat to Saudi Arabia.” What's interesting about this long article was that a CIA analyst wrote under the name of Abdul Qasim Mansoor. He took an Arab name to hide his identity. His argument primarily was that the policies that the U.S. government and corporations were pursuing out of greed were going to turn Saudi Arabia into another Iran, a totally dependent state and one extremely vulnerable to revolution.
Osama bin Laden is a sign of things to come. The United States has no reason to stay in Saudi Arabia except exploitation and greed. Saudi Arabia is not threatened with invasion by anyone that we know of. Any potential aggressor, such as Saddam Hussein, has already been knocked out.
Moreover, the Americans demonstrated in 1991 that they are capable of mobilizing against any attack on an ally in the Middle East. What, then, is the justification of an American military and intelligence presence in Saudi Arabia? Every ministry is infiltrated with American advisers. It is creating deep discontent there. The answer is money. Money in ten different ways. Saudi oil is essentially controlled and marketed by American interests. Saudi wealth is invested in the United States and Europe. The Saudis went into the arms market early in the 1980s. The United States has dumped something like 100 billion dollars worth of armaments in that place. The Saudi people are going to be discontented…
I want to add something else. Saudi discontent shouldn't be seen only as Saudi. Unlike Iran, Saudi Arabia is an Arab country and is part of the Arab world. Therefore, the discontents that occur in it are also occurring around it. The Arabs are at the moment an extremely humiliated, frustrated, beaten, and insulted people. They are the guardians of our Muslim holy places, and they have not been able to guard them. They are the only people who since the creation of the United Nations have lost territory to invaders and not been able to regain it…
Palestine has been totally occupied, and its people continue to lose land, water, and lives. In this situation, they make agreements with the United States supervising. Those agreements are not honored. They sign accords. The accords are not honored. They are violated night and day, as Oslo has been. The United States promised redresses and doesn't do anything. The Arabs have only two choices now, as its young people see it. It's either to become active, fight, die, and recover its lost dignity—lost sovereignties, lost lands—or become slaves.
If you look at the situation from the standpoint of the Arabs as a whole, this is a most beleaguered mass of 200 million people. They have a wealth of oil, and that wealth is not reaching them. Their oil wells have been separated from their people. Tribes have been given flags: Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia. The Saudi tribe has been given a state in order to separate that oil from the people. These are issues that the media should at least have looked into. They don¹t have to agree with this analysis, but they must look into the history of a conflict. Terrorism is not without a history. All social phenomena have historical roots. Nobody here is looking into the historical roots of terror…
What happened in Afghanistan has not been discussed in the West. When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, the U.S. saw in it an opportunity that was twofold. One, they hoped to tie up the Soviet Union in a Vietnam-like war in Afghanistan itself. Two, which becomes more important later on, they saw an opportunity to mobilize the entire Muslim world in a violent way against the Soviet Union, against communism. In an effort to mobilize the entire Muslim world against the “evil empire,” the CIA started supporting the flow of volunteers from all around the world to fight in Afghanistan, to be socialized into the ideology of anti-communism, and to be trained to hit communists wherever they found them. That's how the militants were recruited and flown in. I have seen planeloads of them arriving from Algeria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, even from Palestine, where at that time Israel was supporting Hamas against Al Fatah, Yasir Arafat's faction of the PLO. These people were brought in, given an ideology, and told that armed struggle is virtuous…
The U.S. has spent billions in producing the bin Ladens of our time. In 1986, I visited the camp they hit in Zhwahar, Afghanistan, in 1998. It was a CIA-sponsored camp. Even after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the United States did not withdraw its support from bin Laden and others. They continued their support…
Barsamian: You say, “Osama bin Laden is a sign of things to come.” What do you mean by that?
Ahmad: The United States has sowed in the Middle East and in South Asia very poisonous seeds. These seeds are growing now. Some have ripened, and others are ripening. An examination of why they were sown, what has grown, and how they should be reaped is needed. Missiles won't solve the problem.
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