Biting the hand that fed them
By RALPH AMELAN
Jerusalem Post
(October 21, 1999) - UNHOLY WARS: Afghanistan, America and International
Terrorism by John K.Cooley. London, Pluto Press. 276 pp. £20. It is easy
to call an army into being, equip it, fill it with fervor for the fight,
and send it into battle. It is not easy, once the battle is won, to
disband and disarm the troops, and tell them politely to go home.
This is the message of Unholy Wars. The author, an award-winning
journalist, criticizes Western governments, the United States in
particular, for training and arming Muslim guerrilla forces, and sending
them into Afghanistan to fight the Red Army, which had invaded in 1979. In
the short term the initiative paid off. The Soviets pulled out 10 years
later after suffering heavy losses in an unwinnable war, and this defeat
helped precipitate the end of the USSR.
The seasoned and victorious veterans did not take time to celebrate. They
kept fighting, this time turning their attention to overthrowing
governments in their home countries which they saw as too pro-Western and
insufficiently
Islamic. Algeria, Egypt and Pakistan felt this backlash in particular. The
"Afghanis," as they were known, also wasted little time in
biting the hand that had fed them, and launched terror attacks against
Western targets.
It is an interesting story, but not as told here. The book is disorganized
and poorly written, and has the appearance of being unedited.
A few examples must suffice. In the chapter discussing Chinese involvement
in supporting the Afghanis, Cooley starts in 1980 with their decision to
supply the guerrillas, then reviews Chinese foreign policy in the '70s
before returning to the war itself. Finally the author lurches back a few
hundred years to provide a history of Islam within China, something that
belongs at the beginning. Without a firm chronological framework, the
narrative wallows, and the reader is lost.
So is the author. He produces sentences such as, "The famous flight
of Francis Gary Powers, shot down by the Soviets in 1960, causing a
serious crisis between Washington and Moscow in 1960," and "many
[Tunisians] were
shocked by some of Bourguiba's shock reforms." He puts Rabin's death
in 1996 instead of 1995, and the massacre of tourists at Luxor in 1967
instead of 1997.
Many of these faults could have been corrected had his publisher not been
fast asleep. What might have been harder to put right is Cooley's
conviction that arming the Afghanis in the first place was a fatal
mistake, from which
many ills later flowed. In fact the West got good value from the
investment: the Soviet Union was gravely weakened by its defeat in
Afghanistan, and the United States reaped considerable diplomatic gains in
its relations with China and the Middle East.
He also overestimates the influence the Afghanis had on Islamic terror
movements. The returning veterans had arms and battle experience, but the
ideologies that drove them owed nothing to the West, and existed before
the
Soviet invasion. The Khomeini revolution in Iran, for example, was a far
more potent symbol of resurgent Islam than victory in Afghanistan, a
small, less influential country in the Muslim world.
The post-Afghanistan effects, in fact, have been less important than
Cooley believes. Apart from the Algerian civil war and the rise of the
fundamentalist Taliban movement in Afghanistan itself, pro-Western regimes
throughout the Middle East have held firm.
Cooley is more convincing when he questions the advisability in general of
using surrogates or mercenaries to wage war instead of one's own troops.
However, the ramifications of committing American soldiers to fight in
Afghanistan do not bear thinking about: the Cold War might suddenly have
become very hot.
Specialists in the region will look askance at the lack of Arabic sources.
Laymen interested in the subject may want to buy the book, but they will
find it tough going.
Review by amazon.co.uk:
To oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the US formed an
extraordinary anti-communist alliance with militant Islamic forces in
Central Asia. In this controversial book, John Cooley provides a
behind-the-scenes account of this alliance and of how the CIA planned and
ran the "holy war" in Afghanistan. Cooley describes the
development of US foreign policy and CIA covert activity in the 1980s,
which facilitated the training and arming of almost a quarter of a million
Islamic mercenaries drawn from across the Arab world. Cooley marshals
evidence to demonstrate the devastating consequences of this training once
the mercenaries returned to their own countries - from the assassination
of Sadat, the destabilisation of Algeria and Chechenya and the emergence
of the Taliban,
to the bombings of the World Trade Centre and the US embassies in Africa.
Cooley examines the crucial role of Pakistan's military intelligence
organisation; uncovers China's involvement and its aftermath; the extent
of Saudi financial support; the role of "America's most wanted
man", the guerrilla leader Osama bin Laden; the BCCI connection; and
the CIA's cynical promotion of drug traffic in the Golden Crescent.