-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 5, 2007 5:21:15 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: "The CIA Created Bin Laden": The Middle Ground
REAPING WHAT WE SOWED IN AFGHANISTAN
No Regrets for the CIA?
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
200110/msg00290.html
David Corn is the Washington editor of the Nation. His first novel,
Deep Background, a political thriller, was published recently by
St. Martin's Press.
As I write, I am trying to hold my breath. My office is across the
street from the Senate Hart Office Building. Through yellowing
leaves, I can see the corner of the building that was closed after
an letter containing anthrax spores was opened by a staffer for
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. From the roof of Hart, bright
white puffs of steam pop out of vents, and in a reverie of paranoia
I envision hardy anthrax bacteria lofting over Capitol Hill and
bouncing against my window.
A former director of the Soviet bioweapons program told the
Financial Times that he invented a variation of anthrax that could
travel several miles. Yet experts quoted in The New York Times say
that if the spores were expelled by the building’s exhaust system,
the concentration of the bacteria would be too low to cause
infection. Which Times should I heed? Lets go with New York. But
who wants to work a football field away from anthrax? And why has
the index finger of my left hand been itching since yesterday? At
this point, law enforcement authorities cannot say whether the
anthrax attacks are the work of the September 11 plotters. Perhaps
the mayhem of that day inspired and unleashed others. I find it
convenient to believe it is Osama bin Laden or his associates who
are going postal, for of late I've been wondering how the
politicians, policy advocates, and intelligence personnel who
championed and supported the fundamentalist-dominated Afghanistan
resistance in the 1980s are reacting to the recent turmoil and
horror. Do they have reason to experience dark, nagging stabs of
regrets?
As many of us know by now, bin Laden received his start in the
destroy-a-superpower game by raising funds and recruiting
volunteers for the mujaheddin, the faction-ridden force that waged
a guerilla war in Afghanistan against Soviet invaders. The CIA
poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this effort, as did
Saudi Arabia, and the Pakistani intelligence service disseminated
the weapons and money supplied by Uncle Sam. So do the American
godmothers of the mujaheddin now lose sleep over having bolstered
the resistance in which bin Laden first developed a following and
in which some of his present crew learned their chops?
A few weeks back, I was at a conference on terrorism, and in the
hallway I spotted Charles Cogan, a former senior CIA official who
oversaw the Afghanistan project. What do you say, I asked him, to
the criticism that the CIA helped create the bin Laden monster?
Very curtly, he replied, "We had nothing to do with him, we never
had any direct contact with him. It's a canard." Before I could
query him further, Cogan uneasily shuffled away.
That is the CIA line these days. Osama bin Laden? He was never one
of ours. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Milton Bearden, CIA
station chief in Pakistan in the 1980s, says the same: "Despite
what has been often written, the CIA never recruited, trained or
otherwise used the Arab volunteers who arrived in Pakistan.... As
fundraisers, however, Arabs from the Persian Gulf played a
positive, often critical role in the background of the war....
Among the more prominent of these Arab fundraisers was one Osama
bin Laden." (Bearden acknowledged that in 1987 bin Laden did
participate in key battles and "the military legend of Osama bin
Laden was born.")
There is no evidence that the CIA
actually shook hands with bin Laden.
But the story's not that simple.
Michael Pillsbury, a congressional aide in the 1980s, was one of
the fiercest champions of the mujaheddin. Largely because of his
efforts, the Reagan administration decided to send Stinger surface-
to-air missiles to the resistance. He now says, "I think it is
factually false that the U.S. in any way backed Osama and his group
of Arabs. I was there. I know who we backed. No reliable official
source has ever confirmed that the U.S. program included Osama and
his Arabs. They were quite distinct, and at a separate location
from the Afghan fundamentalists.... It has been sad for me to see
this falsehood spread on several TV magazine shows."
There is no evidence that contradicts these assertions, no proof
the CIA actually shook hands with bin Laden. But the story's not
that simple. The CIA supported the mujaheddin with money and guns.
So did bin Laden -- with no objection from the CIA. Did some of bin
Laden’s "Arab Afghans" receive a share of U.S. weapons and money
doled out by Pakistani intelligence? Probably. And in his memoirs,
former CIA director Robert Gates notes that the Agency did attempt
to increase the number of Arabs flocking to Afghanistan to wage
jihad with the Muslim fundamentalists. Bin Laden's Al Qaeda and his
Taliban friends, as organizations, may not be not direct
descendants of the mujaheddin, but that does not mean the United
States and the CIA are off the hook.
Washington (and Langley) began providing covert assistance to the
mujaheddin in 1979, during the Carter Administration. This secret
war was too tempting to resist, for here was a way to hurt the
Soviets and perhaps draw Moscow into its own Vietnam. In the Reagan
years, Washington allowed Pakistani intelligence to call the shots
in terms of which resistance groups -- there were seven major
factions -- would benefit most from U.S. largesse. Not all those
Americans who called for arming the mujaheddin saw the Afghan
fighters as pawns in a Cold War struggle. Some argued these Afghans
were freedom-fighters combatting a totalitarian and brutal invader
and as such deserved the backing of freedom-lovers in America.
There was a problem with that idealistic view: key blocs of the
resistance were not fans of freedom, especially freedom for women.
Pakistan's favorite resistance element was led by Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, whose political party called for women to be veiled in
public and for "open public resistance to un-Islamic ideas and
practices."
Andrew Eiva, who ran a small Washington-based group lobbying for
assistance for the resistance, had an enlightening conversation
with Hekmatyar in the early 1980s. Eiva recalls: "He told me that
he faced two enemies. 'One comes at us from the north with troops
and tanks. This I can defeat,' he said. 'The other comes at us from
the west with pornography, divorce, abortion and movies. This I am
more worried about.'" There were mujaheddin groups with more
moderate attitudes. But for years, the United States, via Pakistan,
armed and strengthened forces that considered America as the next
enemy. (There were also periodic charges that elements of the
resistance were involved in drug trafficking, engaged in human
rights violations, and sold U.S.-supplied arms, like the Stinger
missiles, to other nations or groups.)
Flash forward to 1989. The Soviets pull out of Afghanistan. For the
next three years the ever-fractious resistance fights on against
the communist government that remains in Kabul. What did the United
States do? It disengages. A few members of Congress propose a
reconstruction fund for war-shattered Afghanistan, but this notion
goes nowhere. The Reaganites never got behind the idea, and, now,
the Bush I Administration doesn't care. Soviets gone -- end of the
Afghanistan story for Washington's covert warriors. In 1992, the
mujaheddin take Kabul, but bloody civil war ensues among the
resistance. For over two years, the forces of Prime Minister
Hekmatyar clash with those of President Burhanuddin Rabbani. The
civilian death toll is estimated at 15,000 to 25,000. Once again,
Washington pays little attention.
Osama bin Laden was a hero
of a war encouraged and financed by the CIA.
In response to the disorder, the Taliban movement -- made up mostly
of 20,000 students who studied in ultra-religious schools in
Pakistan -- forms and moves on the government. In 1995, the Taliban
seizes control. In fact, many Afghans are relieved to see a
semblance of order restored, and Pakistan is backing the more-
fundamentalist-than-the-fundamentalists Taliban. In place is a
regime that will provide bin Laden -- a hero of a war encouraged
and financed by the CIA -- with a sanctuary where he can devise
attacks on American civilians.
No direct contact with bin Laden? There’s much more to it than
that. In a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser and a
key force behind the initiation of U.S. assistance to the
resistance, was asked if had any regrets pertaining to the
Afghanistan operation. He replied, "Regret what? That secret
operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the
Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?" The
interviewer continued: "And neither do you regret having supported
the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future
terrorists?" Brzezinski countered, "What is most important to the
history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet
empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe
and the end of the cold war?" (The interview has been translated
and distributed via email recently by author William Blum.)
Relatives of those killed on September 11 might have a different
take on the importance of "some stirred-up Moslems." A few days
ago, I called Brzezinski, and he told me he still has no regrets.
He maintained that the Carter Administration funded the moderates,
not the fundamentalists. The true problem, he asserted, was that
the Soviet Union, then supporting terrorists around the world,
"pulverized" Afghanistan society through the 1980s, and that set
the stage for the ugly infighting of the 1990s and the subsequent
rise of the Taliban. How can you assume, he asked, that there would
be no terrorism today, had there been no U.S.-supported resistance
to the Soviets in Afghanistan? Perhaps if the Soviets had not been
confronted and drained in Afghanistan, he suggested, the Soviet
Union might have lived on a little longer and might have, in that
time, fostered other sorts of terrorism.
Perhaps. Historical what-ifs are impossible to prove. But
Brzezinski is quick to note that the policymakers who succeeded him
in subsequent administrations screwed up by bugging out once the
Soviets had departed: "That was immoral." In other words, they
messed up the project he began. Here, then, is the lesson for
Brzezinski and the CIA and the other muj-backers (past and
present): be careful when you start (or underwrite) a secret war,
for the consequences of such action can extend far beyond your
intentions. Who can say where bin Laden -- and the 6,000 killed on
September 11 -- would be today, had the United States not assisted
the muj and had not bolted (as it usually does at the end of a
secret war)? No one. But we do know what did occur in Afghanistan,
and we do know -- sort of -- where bin Laden and the dead are today.
All this ought to be pondered as the United States once again
becomes entangled in Afghanistan. A British report estimates it
could take ten years and cost billions of dollars to rebuild
Afghanistan. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw declares, "We
have to be prepared for a lengthy commitment.... We are not going
to turn our backs on them again." I am not sure I would take that
bet. Also at issue is whether to support the Northern Alliance, the
anti-Taliban resistance, in the way the United States backed the
original mujaheddin. In his Foreign Affairs piece, ex-CIA man
Bearden cautioned the Bush White House not to aid the new Afghan
resistance, arguing such assistance would probably lead to "general
civil war that would continue until the United States simply gave
up." Who says irony is dead, post-September 11?
Back to anthrax. There must be some amount of the bacteria floating
near my office. In all likelihood, a minimal, harmless,
undetectable quantity, a stray bacterium here or there. Nothing to
worry about, right? If it does turn out to be anthrax from
Afghanistan (with hate), I assume that, too, will not cause the
covert warriors to rethink how they handled matters there in the
1980s and 1990s.
See what's free at AOL.com.
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