At
Harper's Magazine, Andrew Cockburn has a blockbuster of a secret
history of Washington's long and early role in fostering "jihad" and the
extremist leaders a
"Anxious as
they might have been to obscure the true nature of their relationship
with unappealing Afghans like Hekmatyar [the mujahedeen commander who
received more CIA money and support than any other leader of the Afghan
rebellion], U.S. officials were even more careful when it came to the
Arab fundamentalists who flocked to the war in Afghanistan and later
embarked on global jihad as Al Qaeda. No one could deny that they had
been there, but their possible connection to the CIA became an
increasingly delicate subject as Al Qaeda made its presence felt in the
1990s. The official line — that the United States had kept its distance
from the Arab mujahedeen — was best expressed by Robert Gates, who
became director of the CIA in 1991. When the agency first learned of the
jihadi recruits pouring into Afghanistan from across the Arab world, he
later wrote, “We examined ways to increase their participation, perhaps
in the form of some sort of ‘international brigade,’ but nothing came
of it.”
"The reality was otherwise. The United States was
intimately involved in the enlistment of these volunteers — indeed, many
of them were signed up through a network of recruiting offices in this
country. The guiding light in this effort was a charismatic Palestinian
cleric, Abdullah Azzam, who founded Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), also known
as the Afghan Services Bureau, in 1984, to raise money and recruits for
jihad. He was assisted by a wealthy young Saudi, Osama bin Laden. The
headquarters for the U.S. arm of the operation was in Brooklyn, at the
Al-Kifah Refugee Center on Atlantic Avenue, which Azzam invariably
visited when touring mosques and universities across the country.
“'You have to put it in context,' argued Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent
and counterterrorism expert who has done much to expose the CIA’s
post-9/11 torture program. 'Throughout most of the 1980s, the jihad in
Afghanistan was something supported by this country. The recruitment
among Muslims here in America was in the open. Azzam officially visited
the United States, and he went from mosque to mosque — they recruited
many people to fight in Afghanistan under that banner.'
"American
involvement with Azzam’s organization went well beyond laissez-faire
indulgence. 'We encouraged the recruitment of not only Saudis but
Palestinians and Lebanese and a great variety of combatants, who would
basically go to Afghanistan to perform jihad,' McWilliams insisted.
'This was part of the CIA plan. This was part of the game.'
"The
Saudis, of course, had been an integral part of the anti-Soviet campaign
from the beginning. According to one former CIA official closely
involved in the Afghanistan operation, Saudi Arabia supplied 40 percent
of the budget for the rebels. The official said that William Casey, who
ran the CIA under Ronald Reagan, “would fly to Riyadh every year for
what he called his ‘annual hajj’ to ask for the money. Eventually, after
a lot of talk, the king would say okay, but then we would have to sit
and listen politely to all their incredibly stupid ideas about how to
fight the war.”
"Despite such comments, it would seem that the
U.S. and Saudi strategies did not differ all that much, especially when
it came to routing money to the most extreme fundamentalist factions.
Fighting the Soviets was only part of the ultimate goal. The Egyptian
preacher Abu Hamza, now serving a life sentence on terrorism charges,
visited Saudi Arabia in 1986, and later recalled the constant public
injunctions to join the jihad: “You have to go, you have to join, leave
your schools, leave your family.” The whole Afghanistan enterprise, he
explained, “was meant to actually divert people from the problems in
their own country.” It was “like a pressure-cooker vent. If you keep
[the cooker] all sealed up, it will blow up in your face, so you have to
design a vent, and this Afghan jihad was the vent.”
http://harpers.org/archive/2016/01/a-special-relationship/…