The September 11 Commission in Washington carefully avoided any investigation of the history or strategic motives of those accused of planning the airliner attacks. This is because such an analysis would quickly lead back to the role of the U.S. government, military and CIA in organizing, arming, and training such extreme Islamist fundamentalist forces, and in wiping out progressive secular forces in Afghanistan and neighboring areas.
These issues were exposed in the pages of the Revolutionary Worker newspaper within weeks of the September 11 events. The following is excerpted from the article "Afghanistan Intrigue: The CIA and Osama bin Laden," that was first published on Sept. 30, 2001. The full article can be found on the RW Online page dedicated to exposing the U.S. juggernaut of war and repression (rwor.org/resistance)
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Within hours after hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. government claimed that its "prime suspects" were the al-Qaida organization and its leader, Osama bin Laden.
Within days, the U.S. president was threatening war on Afghanistan--accusing the Muslim fundamentalist government of that country, the Taliban, of "harboring" the networks that attacked the U.S.
Who are these forces around Osama bin Laden that the U.S. government has accused? Where did they come from? Who trained and organized them?
The answers to these questions lead back to the CIA--back to major crimes, campaigns and global rivalries of U.S. imperialism.
Osama bin Laden first appeared on the stage 20 years ago as a major recruiter for U.S.-backed armed forces who were fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan..
In 1978, bureaucrat-capitalist forces allied with the Soviet imperialists staged a coup and took over Afghanistan's weak central government in Kabul. Resistance to the Kabul regime developed among a wide range of forces who were hostile to each other--from Maoists, who opposed Soviet domination, to traditional patriarchal clans who were in an uproar over girls going to school. And in 1979, the Soviet army invaded to prop up their local allies. According to Charles Cogan, the former CIA station chief for this area, U.S. arms were arriving at the scene within 13 days of the Soviet invasion. The U.S.-Soviet rivalry produced a war that would tear Afghanistan apart. More than one million Afghani people were killed and one-third of the population fled into refugee camps. .
The U.S. ruling class threw its resources behind some of the most reactionary forces in Afghan society- -who came to be called the Afghan Mudjahadeen. Their program for Afghanistan was the all-round defense of traditional feudal society--including the protection of big estates from land reform and the violent defense of traditional practices oppressing women. They were organized under the banner of jihad-- holy war--to drive foreign troops from the Muslim world. But the truth is that this modern jihad was controlled from the White House and conducted to serve the interests of U.S. imperialism.
These U.S. interests were completely opposed to those of the masses of people. The U.S. wanted to bog down their Soviet imperialist rivals. The U.S. was looking to fund and arm forces who would fight the Soviet Union, while precisely not opposing imperialism and traditional Afghani feudalism in any fundamental way. Brzezinski and Carter dreamed that an anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan could be spread across the border among the Muslim peoples of the USSR's Central Asian republics.
Bin Laden comes to Afghanistan This U.S. takeover of the Afghan resistance was done with great secrecy. Millions of dollars were funneled through the intensely conservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia. The training of the Afghan Mudjahadeen was carried out largely from bases along the Pakistani-Afghan border by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI)--under the close supervision of the CIA's "covert war" experts. The weapons they provided in the beginning were Soviet- and Chinese- made--so the U.S. backing would not be obvious.
Osama bin Laden came to this region in 1980 as a "Checkbook Mudjahadeen." He spent two years bringing funds from the Saudi ruling class to reactionary forces within the Afghan resistance. He is the son of a construction capitalist whose close ties to the Saudi monarchy made him a billionaire.
When the CIA and Pakistan's ISI decided to train tens of thousands of Muslims from around the world to fight in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden was one of the key organizers of the effort.
Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia , estimates that after 1982 more than 100,000 Muslims from dozens of countries received political or military training in the CIA-backed camps of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
According to Ahmed Rashid, Osama bin Laden helped build the Khost tunnel complex, a major arms storage depot, training facility and medical center built with CIA funds. Nearby, bin Laden established a military camp for about 9,000 followers of Wahabbism, the Islamic creed promoted by the Saudi monarchy and Afghanistan's dominant Pashtun nationality. This Khost camp became the headquarters for al-Qaida [which means "military base"] and in 1998 was a target of Bill Clinton's cruise missile attack on Afghanistan.
The CIA's Ugly Army Through the 1980s, a war-hardened army with a quarter million fighters took shape in Afghanistan under CIA guidance.
It has been widely reported how some of these forces burned down schools and slit the throats of schoolteachers for teaching boys and girls together in mixed classes. M.N. Cham* recounts that in the desperate camps of refugees where they recruited fighters, the Mujahedeen severely punished and even killed anyone who questioned the dogmas and reactionary social norms of their Islam in any way. These military operations were combined with massive drug smuggling. .The U.S. hand was more and more impossible to miss--especially after March 1985, when President Reagan's National Security Decision Directive 166 authorized a massive escalation of U.S. funding and weapons supply. The Afghan war against Soviet forces was a multi-billion dollar operation--largely paid for by the CIA and the Saudi ruling class. U.S. contributions exploded, from $30 million in 1980 to over $600 million per year after 1987. 65,000 tons of U.S.-made weapons and ammunition a year were entering the war by 1987--including the high-profile Stingers used against Soviet helicopters. By the end of the 1980s, Mudjahadeen commanders were openly meeting with U.S. congressional leaders and with Ronald Reagan himself--they were part of a global network of such CIA-organized cutthroats that included the contras of Central America and UNITA in southern Africa. The U.S. media shamelessly called all these forces "freedom fighters."
It is inconvenient now, for both the U.S. government and for Osama bin Laden, to remember that bin Laden was a key operative in the largest CIA covert war in history. His movement (and several other Islamist armed movements) emerged from the CIA training camps in Pakistan.
After the Soviet Defeat On February 15, 1989, the last of the Soviet Union's troops left Afghanistan in defeat. The fighting continued as the various feudal warlords split into warring camps. . M.N. Cham writes in A World to Win "The Taliban [which means "students of religion"] appeared on the political scene of Afghanistan soon after a trip by a high ranking Pakistani delegation to Turkmenistan to negotiate trade between the two countries which would go through Afghanistan. Supported by Pakistan, the Taliban emerged with the slogan of securing the roads and fighting piracy. The banner of anti- corruption was raised, religious schools were emptied as the `students' joined the struggle, and it was not long before Taliban artillery were pounding the gates of Kabul, finally capturing it in September 1996. The Taliban have their roots in the pro-U.S. Muslim fundamentalist forces, are Wahabi Muslims (a sub-branch of Sunni) and represent Pashtun chauvinism."
An editorial in the Kathmandu Post (September 20) said, "When the Taliban...entered Kabul on 27 September 1996, the US state welcomed the development with the hope that the new rulers might bring stability to the region despite the fact that they are notoriously illiberal in social terms.". The U.S. dreamed of an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan into Pakistan. It was part of their plan for dismantling the former Soviet empire and linking Central Asia directly to Western corporations and markets. The Taliban was their hope for establishing some stability in Afghanistan's chaos. Robert Scheer documents that as recently as May 17, 2001, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a $43 million aid package to the Taliban which "in addition to other recent aid, makes the U.S. the main sponsor of the Taliban."
For the masses of people, this Taliban has been a nightmare of extreme religious reaction and repression..
A Turning Point in the Gulf In December 1991, the USSR collapsed. This changed all kinds of alignments on a world scale. Thousands of war-hardened Islamist fighters were spreading out from Afghanistan throughout the Muslim world. Some 4,000 of them settled in the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina alone.
Chossudovsky writes: "The CIA continued to support the Islamic `jihad' out of Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set in motion in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Pakistan's military and intelligence apparatus essentially `served as a catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of six new Muslim republics in Central Asia.' "
At the same time, these Islamist veterans of the Afghan war also came into intense conflict with pro- U.S. governments--and with larger U.S. interests--over the Persian Gulf war. A key turning point was when the U.S. brought 540,000 troops into the Persian Gulf in 1991 to attack Iraq's armed forces.
The jihad movement had been formed to wage war against foreign invasion in the Muslim world. And yet now, hundreds of thousands of non-Muslim U.S. troops were based in Saudi Arabia--the guardian of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed state of Israel was refusing to even discuss Palestinian control of another holy Muslim site in Jerusalem.
There were deep splits within the Saudi ruling class over the Gulf War. Prominent ruling class forces, including Osama bin Laden, considered it treason when Saudi King Fahd welcomed NATO forces into the Arab world.. In 1996 Osama bin Laden moved back to Afghanistan. And in 1998, he reportedly participated in the creation of an "Islamic front for Jihad" to wage war against the U.S. The U.S. authorities claim that his role is (as it was in his days in the Afghan war) one of funneling money. Many of the old networks funded and trained by the CIA now reassembled themselves for a jihad against the U.S. and the Arab governments working with the U.S. The arms supplied by the CIA, the training camps, the religious schools, and the trained fighters all became the infrastructure of this force..
Blowback of the Empire "Most Americans are probably unaware of how Washington exercises its global hegemony, since so much of this activity takes place either in relative secrecy or under comforting rubrics. Many may, as a start, find it hard to believe that our place in the world even adds up to an empire. But only when we come to see our country as both profiting from and trapped within the structures of an empire of its own making will it be possible for us to explain many elements of the world that otherwise perplex us.... The term `blowback,' which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own internal use, is starting to circulate among students of international relations. It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of `terrorists' or `drug lords' or `rogue states' or `illegal arms merchants' often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations."
Chalmers Johnson, Blowback--The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
"Who has put the masses in the U.S. in harm's way? The U.S. power structure points the finger to the Middle East. But the answer lies on U.S. soil. These imperialists--who have perpetrated countless crimes and rained havoc on the people of the world through their relentless global exploitation and their military actions--have created a situation where millions of people all around the world hate the government of the United States.
"As the dust clears from our eyes, the people in the most powerful country in the world find ourselves held hostage to the inevitable repercussions of the actions of this U.S. power structure and their bloody military machine. Now, besides the horrors that they have perpetuated against the people around the world--horrors that multiply the tears shed in NY and Washington a thousand times--these cold- hearted imperialists have called forth the same kind of devastation in the belly of their own beast.
