Terrorism & anti-communism
marvin berlowitz
The following article by Jordan is an excellent contribution to
an argument which has been distorted. The most accurate parallel
in the recent discussions of the struggle against terrorism &the
struggle against Nazi Germany is not "appeasement" ,but the fact
that the U.S. & other capitalist nations also celebrated the Nazis
for their attacks on Communist & Socialist parties in Germany as
well as their promise to invade the USSR. The Cold War also led to
the program of aid & comfort to Nazi war criminals who promised to
contribute to the anti-communist hysteria.
Marv ------------------------------------------------- Viewpoint
- Z. Pallo Jordan
FIGHTING TERRORISM
The uses and abuses of anti-communism
The terrorist attacks two weeks ago on New York and Washington have
caused outrage and shock across the world. Speaking on behalf of
the ANC, President Thabo Mbeki said the acts should be condemned
without reservation.
Addressing Parliament last week, South African foreign affairs
minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said that South Africa is opposed
to terrorism.
She emphasised that during the course of the armed struggle, the
ANC had scrupulously avoided terrorism as a tactic. All these are
absolutely true.
After the terrorist bomb attacks on New York City and Washington,
the government of the USA declared "war on terrorism". President
Bush sounded extremely earnest in his declaration, but a question
arose in my mind:
Is the USA in fact opposed to terrorism? Closer examination of the
dramatis personae involved in the September 11th outrage sheds a
rather different light on US pronouncements past and present.
A United States newspaper reported: "Last week [the US govt] pledged
another $43 million in assistance to Afghanistan, raising total
aid this year to $124 million and making the United States the
largest humanitarian donor to the country."
(The Washington Post, 25 May 2001)
This was barely four months ago. Digging deeper into the recent
archives of the United States press onefinds yet other reports.
Among the most interesting we find: "The Afghan resistance was
backed by the intelligence services of the United States and Saudi
Arabia with nearly $6 billion worth of weapons.
And the territory targeted last week, a set of six encampments
around Khost, where the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has financed
a kind of 'terrorist university', in the words of a senior United
States intelligence official, is well known to the Central Intelligence
Agency."
"The CIA's military and financial support for the Afghan rebels
indirectly helped build the camps that the United States attacked.
And some of the same warriors who fought the Soviets with the CIA's
help are now fighting under Mr Bin Laden's banner.
From those same camps, the Afghan rebels, known as mujahedeen, or
holy warriors, kept up a decade-long siege on the Soviet-supported
garrison town of Khost.
"Thousands of mujahedeen were dug into the mountains around Khost.
Soviet accounts of the siege of Khost during 1988 referred to the
rebel camps as 'the last word in NATO engineering techniques'.
After a decade of fighting during which each side claimed to have
killed thousands of the enemy, the Afghan rebels poured out of
their encampments and took Khost. 'This was the most fiercely
contested piece of real estatein the 10-year Afghan war,' said Milt
Bearden, who ran the CIA's side of the war from 1986 to 1989."
(New York Times. 23 August 1998)
Dig a little deeper to discover further surprises when Steve Coll,
writing in the Washington Post', of 19 July 1992, reveals: "A
specially equipped C-141 Starlifter transport carrying William
Casey touched down at a military air base south of Islamabad in
October 1984 for a secret visit by the CIA director to plan strategy
for the war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
Helicopters lifted Casey to three secret training camps near the
Afghan border, where he watched mujahedeen rebels fire heavy weapons
and learn to make bombs with CIA-supplied plastic explosives and
detonators."
"During the visit, Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing
that they take the Afghan war into enemy territory - into the Soviet
Union itself.
Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to
the Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics.
The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of
Korans, as well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and
tracts on historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to
Pakistani and Western officials.
"'We can do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union,' Casey said,
according to Mohammed Yousaf, a Pakistani general who attended the
meeting. Casey's visit was a prelude to a secret Reagan administration
decision in March 1985, reflected in National Security Decision
Directive 166, to sharply escalate US covert action in Afghanistan,
according to Western officials.
Abandoning a policy of simple harassment of Soviet occupiers, the
Reagan team decided secretly to let loose on the Afghan battlefield
an array of US high technology and military expertise in an effort
to hit and demoralise Soviet commanders and soldiers. Casey saw it
as a prime opportunity to strike at an overextended, potentially
vulnerable Soviet empire."
The so-called mujahedeen, led by Osama Bin Laden, now accused of
being the chief suspect responsible for the destruction of the
World Trade Centre (WTC) and the attack on the Pentagon, it
transpires, has been an ally of the United States Intelligence
community for well nigh two decades. If the US press is to be
believed, he and his network are in large measure a creation of
the virulently anti- Communist elements in the US establishment,
who not only supported them with funds, but also helped train and
equip them to fight the then Soviet Union.
During those years the CIA, its helpers in Pakistan and the Saudi
rulers taught Bin Laden and his associates a host of skills,
including how to move money to fund their operations from country
to country.
As one US commentator writes: "The system is no surprise to the US
government because Washington andits allies have used it, too. The
Bank of Credit and Commerce International was a British-Pakistani
bank that used secret offshore accounts to effect a global
money-laundering fraud that cost victims $8 billion.
Before it was shut down in 1991, it was used to fund the mujahedeen,
then fighting the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan. The
money came from US and Saudi intelligence. Now many of the formerly
US-supported mujahedeen are members of bin Laden's network. They
know all about how to launder money through the international bank
secrecy system."
Yet the alliance among Bin Laden, Taliban, the Saudi monarchy and
the New Right in the United States establishment is not as odd as
it might appear at first sight. There is a remarkable convergence
of views among these allies.
In the USA, the New Right's platform includes a very fundamentalist
reading of the Christian scriptures, (indeed there are states where
pressure from its more extreme supporters has succeeded in having
the theory of evolution banned from the school curriculum). New
Right opposition to women controlling their own fertility in extreme
cases spills over into attacks on doctors and clinics that terminate
unwanted pregnancies. "Family values" is the New Right code for
the restoration of patriarchal relations in the family. Its opposition
to any reforms that will accord equal rights to all US citizens is
as legendary as its xenophobia. The New Right are the most vociferous
proponents of a retributive penal system and the death penalty.
In the Muslim world, but specifically in Afghanistan, the coalition
of forces represented by Bin Laden and Taliban also insists on a
very fundamentalist interpretation of the Q'uran. They are opposed
to women exercising any choice regarding their fertility, and they
enforce strict patriarchal family relations with violence. Women
in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan of today probably have fewer rights
than chattel slaves in the American South before the civil war. It
should come as no surprise that among the principal grievances
cited by the mujahedeen when they rose in rebellion were attempts
by the then Soviet-backed government to extend equal rights to
women. Like their New Right allies, Taliban employs the most brutal
forms of punishment ranging from public floggings to executions.
The parties to this alliance represent the forces of reaction and
extreme backwardness.
It might turn out that the US New Right have sown dragon's teeth
by arming and inspiring what was essentially an anti-modernist
rebellion against a left-wing government. The reality is that Bin
Laden, the Taliban and others of their ilk are today striking out
at what used to be a doting parent. A parent who not only gave them
life but also armed them to wage war on the 'godless Communists'.
But what could have persuaded these reckless offspring to turn
against their parent? On examining the roots of the anti-left
rebellion in Afghanistan one gets to understand today's events
better.
The left-wing party that seized power in Afghanistan during the
late 1970s had no intention of introducing socialism to that country.
Afghanistan was an impoverished, semi-feudal society, barely touched
by the modern world. While Babrak Karmal and his colleagues indeed
drew inspiration from and looked to the Soviet Union for assistance,
their immediate aim was to bring their country abreast of the rest
of Asia. That would have entailed mass literacy by the building of
modern schools, the secularisation of the society, and the construction
of modern infrastructure such as roads, electrification, and
telecommunications. These would have ended Afghanistan's isolation
and narrowed the distance between its people and the modern era.
But it would also have curtailed the power of the Muslim clerics.
Intellectual emancipation would be one outcome of modernisation.
The standard around which the USA, its helpers in the Pakistan
intelligence agencies, the Saudi monarchy and the conservative
religious leaders in Afghanistan mobilised opposition to this
government was rejection, not of socialism, but modernism itself.
They appropriated the banner of Islam for that purpose and advocated
a fundamentalist interpretation of the Q'uran.
The CIA, with a purely instrumentalist approach, recognised that
religion would be a powerful symbol around which to rally opposition
to the Soviet-backed government, but paid little attention to the
unplanned-for outcomes that might produce.
The "bleeding ulcer" of Afghanistan was among the many factors that
sapped the strength of the Soviet Union, leading to its collapse.
What US policy-makers did not realise is that to the radically
anti-modernist mujahedeen, the USA - the land of the skyscrapers,
the home of Hollywood, with hundreds of television channels, millions
educated women and with a strong emphasis on the separation of the
church and state - represented the epitome of the modernism they
had been mobilised to crush. The ideological affinities between
the US New Right and Taliban sealed the alliance.
But while the former necessarily took elements of modernism for
granted, the latter regarded even its most benign expressions as
satanic deviance.
Thus the stage was set for the offspring to rise against their
parents.
The history of the last century abounds with numerous examples of
politicians who have sought to harness anti-Communism, in a very
instrumental manner, to their project. In most instances these have
been reactionaries and conservatives defending discredited systems
of oppression and exploitation. But there have been numerous
instances of liberals, nationalists and ostensibly progressive
people being tempted to either play the anti-Communist card with
a view to some immediate political advantage or to capitulate to
it in the hope of gaining some dubious political advantage. US
policy-makers during the liberal Carter administration of early
1980s probably thought they could ride the tiger of anti-Communism
with impunity.
The conservative Reagan and Bush administrations of the second half
of the 1980s and early 1990s , as the US media reports indicate,
thought they could take that even further. Anti-Communism, they
are discovering today, is a doubled edged sword. While its keen
blade helped sweep away what President Reagan once called "the evil
empire", on its back-swing it returned as a guillotine to wreak
terrible havoc in the very citadels of US power. There is a lesson
there, somewhere!
But the last word should go to two US foreign policy specialists,
Tom Barry and Martha Honey :
"As Americans deliberate an effective response to this tragedy and
crime, we must first reject the call for war. The gauntlet goading
us to militaristic responses that treat human life as callously as
the terrorists treated ours must be categorically rejected. As with
any other crime, the perpetrators and their accomplices must be
brought to justice - in the courts of law, not according to the
fundamentalist 'eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth' precepts. In
recent years, we have made encouraging progress in establishing
and enforcing international norms for human rights and crimes
against humanity. This is an opportunity to forge a broader
international coalition-bringing disparate nations together in a
common determination to fight against such crimes against humanity.
A first principle, then, must be that we treat this as an international
crime, not an act of war, and that the rule of law should guide
international response."
Z. Pallo Jordan is a member of the ANC National Executive Committee.
This article is written in his personal capacity.
-- Antonio Rossin, Italy Neurologist, FP ros...@tin.it
http://www.mripermedia.com/Rossin