This is part III of an ongoing series on US foreign policy that is written in response to
Peter Beinart's now well known essay in
The New Republic . In my previous entries I discussed the pros and cons of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky the nature of "Islamo-Fascism", and why this term provides a misleading parallel that justifies a WWIV approach to fighting terrorism. In this essay, I wish to discuss Islamic radicalism as an example of "blowback". If you would like to view my two previous entries on the same topic, they are available
here .
In my last entry of December 15, I argued that Islamic Radicalism certainly exists, that it is predisposed to use terror against US interests, military and civilian, and that in power, it would likely be totalitarian in nature. This is the truth underlying the right's and the Bush administration's call for a permanent, aggressive military campaign against "terrorism" and Peter Beinart's call for Democrats to take up the cudgels against "Islamo-Fascism".
I also have argued however, that the use of the term "fascism" is misleading and misapplied, and that the claims of a unique, all encompassing, movement similar in nature to Soviet totalitarianism or Nazi Germany is a misused analogy and thus a misleading claim. In this installment I wish to address whether or not the rise of Islamic Radicalism requires a permanent militarization of US foreign policy, and how US foreign policy contributes to the spread of Islamic Radicalism.
A couple of years before 9/11 Ahmed Rashid published a book entitled Taliban that was probably unjustly destined for obscurity. Events intervened however, and following 9/11, Rashid's book became popular and widely visible for a period of time. It is distressing that people have not paid more attention to this book, because his chronicle of the roots of the Taliban, Islamic Fundamentalism in Central Asia and elsewhere may be one of the best single sources for understanding the movement and also understanding how blunders in US foreign policy helped to create and exacerbate a dangerous movement. Looked at in this way, Islamic Radicalism is an example of "blowback" resulting from poorly conceived and dangerously destabilizing policies.
Rashid's book discusses the history of Afghanistan and the historical nature of Islam in Afghanistan. While we are now accustomed to thinking of Afghani Islam as uniformly fundamentalist, Rashid documents how the Taliban was a movement based on an aggressive, universalizing conception of Islam among the most conservative Pashtun. This movement was exacerbated by the destruction of Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion and subsequent civil war that occurred after the Soviet withdrawal. During the war against the Soviet Union, Osama Bin Laden formed Al Quaeda as an organization to bring both troops and financial and technical expertise to the mujahadeen fighting the Soviets.
This movement received financial and military assistance from the US as well. It also was backed by the Saudis who used the opportunity to aggressively promote radical Wahabi'sm. Rashid argues that the Taliban was primarily a creation of the Saudi sponsored madrassa movement and Pakistani intelligence. It was able to take advantage of the chaos, corruption and brutality of the rule of the warlords following the Soviet withdrawal, and with the help of foreign Islamicists recruited by Al Quaeda, win decisive battles against other factions, including the Northern Alliance and thus come to power. In power, of course, it proved to be a viable base for Al Quaeda.
Rashid's book goes on to chronicle the rise and spread of radical Islamicism in Central Asia and the Caucusus, a facet of the war on terror now curiously ignored in the US press. Throughout Central Asia and the Caucusus, radical Islam feeds on the brutality of the Russian military in Chechnya, the economic dislocation and political corruption of post-Soviet regimes, and a reaction against the former Soviet Union's forced secularization of the Central Asian republics. The parallels between radical Islam and aggressive chauvinist movements in Serbia and Romania is chilling: totalitarian governments left no space for opposition and thus created a vacuum for the most extreme nationalists and religious extremists to gain popularity. As noted in my previous essay, these movements skillfully employ powerful cultural symbols to build and manipulate popular support in an effort to revivify real, invented or imagined traditional pillars of societal stability, authority and cultural identity. This, and their willingness to use terror both as a means of gaining power and as a means of governing, is what provides some, but very limited parallels of Islamic Radicalism to fascism.
Rashid's book is not the only decent source and I have relied on it at length here primarily because it is the most accessible source on Central Asia, the history of the Taliban and Al Quaeda, and also because as I said earlier, it has been unfairly, and quite dangerously (IMO) ignored. Bernard Lewis' academic work is in actuality also quite illuminating and should be read in addition to other scholars such as Edward Said. As an aside, I should add, that there is clearly a Soviet and Russian complicity here as well. Russia's "war on terror" in Chechnya has been a war against a people who had little sympathy for Islamic terrorism. The terrorists who murdered children and others in a Russian school were the blowback of this policy in Russia. It is indeed odd that the US media has largely ignored the faux Russian elections in Chechnya and that no attention has been brought to Bush's remarks of several years ago about "sharing a kindred soul" with former KGB agent Vladimir Putin.
Throughout the Middle East the US has ridden the tail of the tiger. Historically we have preferred nominally secular and repressive governments such as Sadat's and Mubarak's in Egypt, fundamentalist monarchs as in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait or military dictators in Pakistan and Algeria. These regimes are now our allies in the war on terror, and yet they themselves help to create a climate of repression and fundamentalism while periodically engaging in actions directly contrary to US interests such as the Saudi sponsorship of radical madrassas or Pakistan's past involvement in aiding the Taliban and Al Quaeda, sponsoring terrorist attacks on India, or, turning a blind eye as its nuclear weapons technology was passed to potential US enemies. Similarly, US support of the Shah of Iran, and then later, of Saddam Hussein in the 1980's also helped to create an environment in which radical Islam could evolve and prosper.
Of course, the story would not be complete without reference to US policy towards Israel and Lebanon. In the latest round of violence, Israel has succeeded in winning the war of perceptions. Suicide bombers targeting Israeli civilians-including Arab Israelis- have eroded any moral authority in the eyes of the US public and other parts of the world that the Palestinian movement might have had. While these attacks are rightly condemned and are in fact counterproductive to the Palestinian cause, moral opprobrium should not be reserved for these attacks alone.
Brutal Israeli actions for the last several decades along with Palestinian displacement and desperation has succeeded in undermining the secular, democratic forces within the Palestinian movement and strengthening the hand of such movements as Hamas among the Palestinians and Hezbollah among the Lebanese. Every Israeli rocket attack, every Palestinian house demolished, every Palestinian child killed by occupation troops serves to help create an environment in which moderate voices are drowned out and extremist voices win. I will got out on limb here as well: the collapse of the previous Israeli-Palestnian accord cannot be blamed on Arafat alone.
In the interest of space and time, I have been somewhat vague and have left out a considerable number of details and instead confined myself to illustrating a few of the events and policies that have created and served to reinforce the rise of radical Islam. Because radical Islam is primarily stateless, and even when it has a nation state's backing it is relatively powerless to effect its voice in international affairs, it chooses asymmetric warfare as a means of advancing its agenda. The logic of asymmetric warfare is to attack your opponent where it is weak and this means largely (though not exclusively) civilian economic targets that can potentially destablize your enemy. 9/11 was frightening not merely because it killed 3,000 people, but because it reminded us that a stateless organization, or one backed by an otherwise inconsequential state to the current power arrangements of the world, could theoretically launch a crippling attack in spite of the US massive military might.
In the years following 9/11 it has been extremely unpopular to discuss the blowback theory. It is wrongly conceived as a means of "blaming the victim" or of attributing moral equivalence to the US and radical Islam. To some degree, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky do simplistically have a tendency to do so. But as I argued in my first essay, there overstatements and oversimplifications should not obscure from the valid points that they make. The blowback thesis is unpopular with the right and the Bush administration because it suggests a radically different way of confronting the threat of asymmetric warfare. In my next essay, I will take up this issue.