“UK resumes arms sales to Pakistan”, cried the first page headline in
a prominent Indian daily. It was further reported that Britain has said that this decision was in tune
with its 'ethical' foreign policy. India was shocked and righteously
indignant: how could Britain have so conveniently forgotten the outrage
her government expressed when General Musharraf derailed democracy
in Pakistan in October 1999 and sent elected leaders to jail on trumped-up
charges; ignored the Commonwealth resolutions condemning the General’s
audacity; overlooked Musharraf’s Kargil perfidy barely a year
earlier; and disregarded the facts regarding undesirable end-users
of British arms to Pakistan - a case that India has laboured diligently,
despite a studied British posture of disbelief, to establish over
the years?
Over two decades ago, Conor Cruise O'Brien expressed an opinion that has
the ring of universal truth:
“People often don’t object
to terrorism as much as they say they do. Take Mrs. Thatcher, for
example. If you were to accuse Mrs. Thatcher of being an habitual
accomplice and armourer of terrorists, she would be sincerely indignant...
To sell guns to terrorists is immoral. To provide authoritarian governments
with weaponry is morally neutral. When the ‘terrorist sign’
is extinguished, and the ‘authoritarian sign’ is switched
on, you know that you have moved from the domain of moral judgement
into that of pragmatism... I have had a good many occasions to observe
democratic statesmen in contact with different categories of murderers
and torturers… I imagine the interior monologue of the average
democratic statesman on making such a contact, to run more or less
as follows: ‘This fellow is a bit of a stinker, of course. His
is a pretty stinky country, after all. Still, the point is that he
did get where he is; the stink is no affair of mine. If they ever
do get rid of him they’ll only put some other stinker, who may
not suit our book as well as this fellow. In any case, the important
thing is that he’s in charge over there, just as we’re in
charge over here. So let’s chat this fellow up and see what we
can get out of him’… There is a freemasonry among governments,
which transcends ideology, regimes, and methods.”
In the grain of the American and British wisdom, “great souls care little
for small morals”. When Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, the
British Embassy in Jakarta reported that, “Certainly as seen
from here, it is in Britain’s interest that Indonesia should
absorb the territory as soon as and as unobtrusively as possible;
and if it comes to the crunch and there is a row in the United Nations,
we should keep our heads down and avoid siding against the Indonesian
government.” The reasons were plainly and simply Britain’s 'national interests', which included:
i.
Sale of British arms
to Indonesia. Defense Procurement Minister Alan Clark
explained, “I don’t really fill my mind much with what one
set of foreigners is doing to another”;
ii.
The waters of the Timor
Gap lie over one of the richest deposits of oil and natural gas, and
British Petroleum, Australian BHP, and US Marathon Petroleum are involved
in drilling operations in the area.
In 1978, the British government sold eight Hawk ground attack jets, which
the Indonesian army used in its saturation bombing during the encirclement
and annihilation campaign in East Timor. In 1993, 24 more Hawks were sold to Jakarta. Tony Blair came to power in 1997 promising
an “ethical foreign policy”, but his government approved
the sale of 16 more Hawk jets and issued 22 new arms export licenses.
Similarly, the Australian Ambassador to Indonesia, Richard Walcott, explicitly
advised his government in August 1975 to take “a pragmatic rather
than a principled stand” with regard to the forthcoming invasion
of East Timor because “that is what national interest and foreign
policy is all about.” In his report he also suggested that a
favourable treaty on the Timor Gap “could be much more readily
negotiated with Indonesia than with Portugal or independent Portuguese
Timor.” The Australian Foreign Minister explained in 1990 that
“the world is a pretty unfair place, littered with examples of
acquisition by force”, and Australia may proceed to share Timor’s
oil with the conqueror since there was “no binding legal obligation
not to recognise the acquisition of territory that was acquired by
force.”
President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were in Jakarta
two days before the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in December
1975 and there is little doubt that they gave the green signal to
invade. US companies supplied about ninety per cent arms used during
the invasion of East Timor. “The United States wished things
to turn out as they did”, writes Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his
memoirs, “and worked to bring this about. The Department of State
desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever
measures it undertook. This task was given me, and I carried it forward
with no inconsiderable success.” Moynihan cites 60,000 East Timorese
killed in first few months. Weapons sales were reduced during 1976, but when
it looked as if Indonesia might run out of military hardware (largely
due to military action in East Timor), the 'human rights' administration
of Jimmy Carter authorised arms sales of $112 million, up from $12
million a year before. Arms sales to Indonesia peaked at over $500
million during the Reagan administration.
Though Britain and the US abstained from all eight votes on East Timor in
the UN General Assembly, surprisingly it was Japan that voted against
all the eight resolutions. The reason was not far to seek. In 1975
Japan was the second largest investor in Indonesia; received 37 per
cent of Indonesia’s exports and provided Indonesia with 25 per
cent of its imports. In 1996 Indonesia became Japan’s top foreign
aid recipient with a contribution of US $965 million. Canada abstained
from voting on five of the UN resolutions on East Timor and voted
against three of them. Again, the reason was not difficult to explain.
It had an estimated investment of CND 8 billion in Indonesia, issued
permits valued at CND 420 million for arms exports to that country,
and has an extensive two-way trade with it.
East Timor is not the only example of how, in the real world of the ‘political
economy of human rights’, ‘national interests’, and
what is now known as the 'strategic interests', of many countries
get inextricably intertwined. These complex interdependencies produce
the strangest of bedfellows. John Cooley has recently documented how
the US, UK, China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and, amazingly, even Israel,
joined together to build the network of violent Islamic groups now
waging 'holy wars' in many parts of the world – Kashmir, the
Middle East, Bosnia, Chechnya, Phillipines, Algeria, Palestine, and
against Coptic Christians in Egypt. The Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan, and its organ,
the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, openly claim to be assisting jehad
in over 30 countries. Cooley recounts how the new jehad
emerged from “a strange love affair which went disastrously wrong”
– a love affair between USA and militant Islam which dates back
to the late Seventies when American strategists dreamt up the idea
of co-opting Islam to fight Communism. The turning point was 1979
when USA 'lost' Iran and the Soviet Union blundered into Afghanistan.
First Jimmy Carter, and then Ronald Reagan, hailed the Mujahideen
(Holy Warriors of Islam) as 'freedom fighters'. The CIA spent directly or through its Pakistan
counterpart, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), billions of dollars
arming and training them to fight the Soviet occupiers. Though USA
and Pakistan were the main players in this game of jehad,
details about other participants in the American proxy war in Afghanistan are edifying:
·
China joined in by letting
the Americans build two electronic listening posts in the province
of Xinjiang, near the Afghan border. These were manned by Chinese
personnel trained by the American intelligence, and provided the US
with “a unique opportunity to eavesdrop on Soviet Central Asia”.
A great deal of weaponry was Chinese, including AK-47/56 assault rifles,
heavy machine guns, mortars and artillery. Cooley states, “The
surviving inhabitants of Kabul can attest to the terror and devastation
spread by the repeated torrents of heavy rockets, mainly of Chinese
origin, which the various factions rained on the city”.
Cooley estimates that China may have trained upto 55,000 Muslim
volunteers, Uighur and non-Uighur, to fight the Soviets alongside
the largely Pakistani volunteers, and CIA paid US $400 million to
China for training these fighters.
·
Washington’s key
Arab allies – the Saudis and President Sadat of Egypt –
“became, for a time, virtual recruiting sergeants and quartermasters
to the secret army of zealots being mustered to fight the Soviets”.
One of great ironies of the cruise missile attack on Osama
Bin Laden’s three camps in Afghanistan, ordered by President
Clinton in 1998 in retaliation to the bombing of two American embassies
in East Africa, is that these camps were built by Bin Laden in 1980
under the direction of the CIA and the ISI, and with American money.
·
A strange and somewhat
unknown participant was Israel, which helped arm and train the Muslim
militants. This may be one of the best kept international secrets
of the last two decades of the 20th century.
·
Britain’s role extended
to Mujahideen training and intelligence, and companies like Control
Risks and Saladin Security picked up contracts for training Afghan
fighters, often using British Special Air Service (SAS) veterans.
When the Soviet forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan in 1989, it was,
for the Mujahideen allies, tantamount to the victory of Islam over
atheistic Communism, and, as such, a harbinger of the revival of Islam
as a global force, and a spur to fresh jehads.
The Cold War policy makers of the late Seventies caused,
rather than merely fuelled, the Islamic zealotry of the following
decades and, Cooley concludes, “the world will continue to experience
this blowback from the Afghanistan war of 1979-89 well into the new
century.”
The story of Afghanistan is
one of the most tragic of any country in modern history. More so,
because, unlike the Holocaust and other great genocides and bloodbaths
of the 20th century, the bloodshed in Afghanistan, and
the 'collateral damage' it is causing in the Indian sub-continent
and around the world, appears to have no end. The story of how Afghanistan
drifted into the tragedy dates back to the 1950s. It is the story
of two superpowers – USA and USSR – hell bent on destroying
Afghanistan in the pursuit of their hegemonic goals in South Asia.
The American engagement with
Afghanistan was gradual, and without strains and stresses during the
three initial decades after 1919. While Afghanistan was given formal
recognition by the Soviet Union, Iran, Egypt, France and Germany within
four years of its 'independence' from the British in 1919, the United States spurned the Afghan request for
recognition for seventeen years and did not confer recognition until
1936. During the 1950s, US support for Pakistan’s claims beyond
the Durand Line soured US relations with Afghanistan. On 15 May
1956, a US State Department note stated it “has always regarded
the Durand Line as the legal boundary between Afghanistan and Pakistan.” When the US decided to provide military assistance
to Pakistan in 1952, the Afghans sent a delegation to USA to ask for
similar support. They were told that “extending military aid
to Afghanistan will create problems not offset by the strength it
will generate. Instead of asking for arms, Afghanistan should settle
the Pushtunistan dispute with Pakistan.”
When Kabul turned to the Soviet
Union for help, the Soviets were more than forthcoming with arms,
economic aid, and support on the border issue on which the stated
Soviet position was:
We
sympathise with Afghanistan’s policy on the question of Pushtunistan.
The Soviet Union stands for an equitable solution of this problem
which cannot be settled correctly without taking into account the
vital interests of the peoples inhabiting Pushtunistan.
But by 1957, the US started
extending considerable financial assistance to Afghanistan to neutralise
the growing Soviet political influence that had resulted from Moscow’s
early initiatives. The US built the Kabul-Jalalabad, Kabul-Kandahar,
and Herat-Islamquila roads bordering Pakistan and Iran; they also
built the Kandahar International Airport, financed the Hilmand Valley
Project and several educational projects, and provided funds for the
Haj pilgrimage for 1,000 Afghans. Total US aid had exceeded $30 million
by the time Eisenhower visited Kabul on December 8,1959. At the same
time, Soviet projects were concentrated in the northern parts of Afghanistan,
bordering the Central Asian republics; and the Soviets also provided
aid and technical support for cotton production and oil exploration.
By 1958 there were two camps
among Afghanistan’s ruling elite – a pro-Soviet faction
headed by Prime Minister Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan, and a pro-West
camp headed by King Mohammed Zahir. The Soviets lost some ground in
1963 when King Zahir visited Washington and Daoud Khan resigned. Mohammed
Hashim Maiwandwal, known for his strong pro-US views, became the Prime
Minister in 1965. He visited Washington in 1967, met President Johnson,
and the meeting resulted in expressions of similar views on political
and security issues in South Asia. This also led to the signing of
a cultural and educational exchange programme between the US and Afghanistan,
and a visit to Kabul by Vice President Agnew in 1969. But, in a sudden
turn of events, Maiwandwal was accused of being a CIA agent and was
forced to resign in November 1969.
Meanwhile, the country's economy
deteriorated despite foreign aid from both superpowers, and there
was widespread disaffection on account of starvation, unemployment
and inflation. Apparently helped by the Soviet Union, and in league
with the pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan
(PDPA), Daoud organised a coup against the King on 17 July 1973, seized
power, and declared Afghanistan a ‘republic’. The Soviet
Union was the first to recognise the new government, and provided
a loan of US $428 million for development projects and a grant of
US $600 million to finance the five-year plan beginning 1973.
As a counter-blast to the Soviet
success, the US abetted, through the good offices of Pakistan, an
Islamist insurgency in the Panjshir valley and Laghman province. The
US also began to provide funds to Pakistan for military training and
financial assistance to the exiled Afghan Islamists living in Pakistan,
with a view to support their struggle to topple the Kabul regime.
Pakistan also assisted the abortive coup of former Prime Minister
Maiwandwal which led to his detention and execution. The US then prompted
Iran and Saudi Arabia to provide huge amounts of aid to Afghanistan
on the condition that Daoud distance himself from the Soviet Union.
All this had the desired results. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
visited Kabul in 1974 and 1976 and this helped to sweep the Pushtunistan
issue under the carpet for a while. The visit also led to the extension of USAID to
Afghanistan and an increased flow of funds for development.
Daoud worked for two years
(1977-78) to improve his relations with Iran, Pakistan and the US,
and purged pro-Soviet members of the PDPA from the government. In
retaliation, the Soviet Union engineered a coup with the help of the
pro-Soviet Khalq and Parcham factions of the PDPA on April 27, 1978.
This group seized power and proclaimed Afghanistan a ‘democratic
republic’. Noor Mohammed
Taraki became the President and Hafizullah Amin the Prime Minister.
Not to be left behind in this
game of one-upmanship, the United States recognised the new government
and appointed Adolph Dubs, who had served as a diplomat in Moscow
during 1972-74 and as Deputy Secretary of State for Near Eastern and
South Asian Affairs during 1975-78, as the new Ambassador in Kabul.
Dubs was abducted and killed by four armed men on February 14, 1979,
despite a rescue operation launched by the Soviet and Afghan troops.
In an act of retaliation and condemnation for this killing, the US
Congress prohibited further aid to Afghanistan and stopped the educational
aid programme.
But the US continued to provide
covert financial and military support to the exiled Islamists in Pakistan,
who were soon able to enlist the support of some clerics in Afghanistan
to declare a jehad against
the government in Kabul. This led to mass uprisings, small insurgencies,
sectarian warfare, and factional fighting within the ruling party
in Afghanistan. Moscow wanted Amin, whom they perceived to be the
main cause of this trouble, to be removed from his post. When Taraki
returned from a trip to Moscow and called Amin for a meeting at his
office on September 16, 1979, a gun battle broke out and Taraki was
killed. Amin now became the President and started mending relations
with the US straightaway.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan
on December 27, 1979, claiming that they had been invited by the Afghan
leaders to defend the country against external aggression. Najibullah
was appointed as President. Although the US was dismayed by the Soviet
invasion, the Carter Administration, prompted by a desire to salvage
the SALT II Agreement with the Soviets, did not do much beyond providing
enhanced covert assistance to anti-Soviet groups in Pakistan. As a
gesture of annoyance with the Soviet invasion, the US also boycotted
the 1980 Moscow Olympics, cancelled the educational and cultural exchange
programme, announced curbs on Soviet fishing privileges in US waters,
and stopped the sale of US technology and food-grain to the USSR.
It was left to the Reagan Administration
to declare its solidarity with Afghanistan by providing financial
assistance to forces fighting the Soviet troops. At this stage, the US dubbed the Soviet invasion as a threat to the security
of Islamic nations and began to portray itself as the champion and
‘natural ally’ of the entire Islamic world. Addressing
a gathering of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Secretary of State George
Shultz said:
This
is a gathering in the name of freedom, a gathering in the name of
self-determination, a gathering in the name of getting the Soviet
forces out of Afghanistan, a gathering in the name of a sovereign
Afghanistan controlled by its own people. Fellow freedom fighters,
we are with you.
The
impact of the ensuing process of legitimisation is described by Eqal
Ahmad:
They
[United States] also invested in this jihad the legitimacy of their
enormous power, and the lustre of their media made glory. On one especially
memorable occasion when Afghanistan’s hard line Islamists visited
the White House, President Ronald Reagan described them as the Muslim
world’s 'moral equivalent of our founding fathers'.
Reagan provided US $625 million
of covert aid to the Pakistan-based Islamic groups, the largest since
Vietnam, and US $430 million for feeding and clothing Afghan refugees
in Pakistan. CIA aid increased in the mid-1980s when the US
provided Stinger missiles. The covert and overt military and financial
assistance to the Pakistan-based jehadis was channeled through the ISI.
As long as President Zia-ul-Haq acquiesced to the US policies, the
latter did not care how the ISI distributed the aid to the Islamic
fighters, or what strategic objectives of its own Pakistan pursued
in Afghanistan or, for that matter, elsewhere, including Punjab and
Kashmir in India. According to one account, “The United States
and its allies supplied to the Mujahideen an estimated ten billion
dollars worth of arms and aid”.
The Soviets, faced with their
own deteriorating economy and opposition to the Afghan war at home,
found a graceful way to exit when Pakistan and Afghanistan signed
the Geneva Accord of May 14, 1988, which enjoined upon both of them
not to interfere in each other’s internal affairs. The Soviet
troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan in February 1989 after ten
years of fighting. The war left 1.5 million dead, and caused the destruction
of all socio-economic structures in Afghanistan, as well as total
lawlessness in areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.
President George Bush announced
on October 7, 1992, that the US would provide financial assistance
for the re-building of Afghanistan and resume diplomatic relations.
Nothing was done in either direction, largely because of the new and
unanticipated problems that emerged after the Soviet withdrawal. The
transitional Islamic government headed by Sebghatullah Mojaddadi was
constituted in April 1990. Burhanuddin Rabbani of the Jamait-e-Islami
party succeeded him in August 1991. Najibullah resigned and tried
to flee to India.
The struggle for power, however,
escalated when Pakistan aggravated the ethnic politics of Afghanistan
by supporting Gulbuddin Hikmatyar against Rabbani, a Tajik from Badakhshan.
The US may have egged Pakistan on this course because Washington was
suspicious of the Tajik-dominated government developing close ties
with Iran, India and Russia, which was perceived as contrary to the
US policy of containing Iran. The Taliban were considered to be the
best alternative because they did not, unlike the Tajiks, share a
common language with Iran. The US ambassador to Pakistan, John C.
Monjo, visited the Taliban headquarters in Kandahar in October 1994,
along with some Pakistani military and civil officers, to start an
exercise for the Taliban to seize power. This the Taliban did after
two years, on September 26, 1996. That a major objective of the US
policy was to establish a pipeline from Central Asia to western markets
via Afghanistan, became clear when the first American to visit Kabul,
after the Taliban had taken the city, was Marty Miller, a Texas oil
man, whose objective was to get the warring factions to agree to the
proposed pipeline.
The assistance and encouragement provided by the US to the Taliban to overthrow
the Rabbani government in Kabul was an expression of its well-tested
methodology. The United States aided and abetted, during the 1950s
and 1970s, violent overthrow of a succession of democratically elected
governments by military adventurists, or violent replacement of one
set of authoritarian regimes by other authoritarian regimes, or aggravation
of civil wars to 'contain communism' and Soviet influence in a number
of countries around the world. This policy had its genesis in the
anti-communist security system and other initiatives in the field
of internal security in other countries developed by the US during
the latter half of Eisenhower's first term.
On December 21, 1954, the US National Security Council (NSC) decided to
have a report prepared by the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB)
“on the adequacy of the current programme to develop constabulary
forces to maintain internal security and to destroy the effectiveness
of the Communist apparatus in free world countries vulnerable to Communist
subversion.” In contrast to the ‘fire-fighting’ operations
of the Truman era, Eisenhower expressed the view that “in certain
kinds of countries inhabited by certain kind of people, it might be
militarily sound and less costly for the US to provide them with light
armament rather than standard heavy equipment. That is, a constabulary
or a Philippine scout-type force might do the trick.”
This internal security strategy came to be known as ‘Programme 1290d’.
The Working Group reviewed 44 countries but selected 22 countries
for initial analysis and intervention. In these reports, the threat
of communist subversion was evaluated to be critical
in Laos and Vietnam; dangerous
in Afghanistan, Bolivia, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia and Syria; potentially dangerous in East Pakistan (now
Bangladesh), Brazil, Chile, Greece and Iran; and contained but needs watching in West Pakistan, Guatemala, Iraq, Korea,
Philippines and Thailand.
The development of the 1290d programme was, however, riddled with difficulties
from the beginning. Instead of a single identifiable programme, there
existed a variety of plans that encompassed economic assistance, anticommunist
propaganda, and training of security forces. Since every major US
agency overseas attempted to promote these programmes, co-ordination
was erratic. For such a specialised and sensitive policy, very low
level personnel, some not even technically competent in security matters,
often conducted 1290d initiatives. Because of personnel and funding problems, the
implementers of 1290d also failed to work out the specific assistance
programmes for developing nations struggling with a multiplicity of
problems including poverty, explosive population growth, political
immaturity and corruption, illiteracy, and racial/ethnic/colonial
conflicts.
But there was a far greater problem with the security aspects of these initiatives
than mere bureaucratic inefficiency. Confusing “revolutionary
nationalism and indigenous discontent with externally supported communist
movements”, the United States often found itself aligned with
repressive regimes and “discredited elites,” whose importance
as bulwarks against communism was totally misunderstood. In fact, wittingly or unwittingly, the US started
abetting the emergence of police states and aiding dictators who violated
human rights. In response to critics of this policy, an official
spokesman, Albert R. Haney, said that the Administration did not have
the 'moral luxury' of helping only those countries with democratic
ideals similar to the United States. “Eliminate all the absolute
monarchies, dictatorships, and juntas from the free world”, Haney declared, “and count
those who are left and it should be readily apparent that the US would
be well on its way to isolation – the fortress America illusion.” This did not mollify critics, particularly in Congress,
who continued to attack policies that aided governments in suppressing
legitimate internal opposition. The early covert initiatives under
1290d were confined to the American hemisphere, particularly Guatemala,
Chile, Brazil and Bolivia. The worried Latin Americans often wondered
whether the US intervention was little more than a ‘Trojan Horse’
intended to penetrate their security services.
Mounting criticism led to the revamping and refining of the 1290d programme,
which started with its re-designation as the Overseas Internal Security
Programme (OISP) on 13 March 1957. The more focused OISP was transferred
from the Department of State to the President, the responsibilities
of all agencies were more precisely defined, and a fairly high calibre
of military and civil personnel were enlisted for its implementation.
The CIA continued to provide, as in the case of 1290d, intelligence/counterintelligence
support and covert operations support as required. But this great
US endeavour received a major jolt when the motorcade carrying the
visiting Vice President Richard Nixon, his wife, and the US delegation,
was attacked by 4,000 Venezuelans in Caracas on April 27, 1958. This
attack was particularly embarrassing, as the 1290d/OISP reports had
for several years declared Venezuela ‘stable’.
At this stage, it began to be pointed out in internal debates that ultra-nationalist
and violently anti-American Latin Americans may not be inspired by
Communist ideology. There was, consequently, increasing Congressional
resistance to increased military assistance to counter suspected Communist
influence, and many Congressmen opposed 'military assistance to regimes
that lacked popular, democratic support within their own nations at
the excuse of being anticommunist.'
But, whatever may have been the liberal American concerns,
and howsoever strongly they were expressed in Congress, academia and
the media, the developments after 1959 saw the growing militarisation
of the OISP. Arguably, the Cuban Revolution of January 1, 1959 was
a significant contributory factor.
A new report produced by a policy review group composed of personnel from
the Departments of Defense and State, CIA and OCB said that “internal
security programs were a valuable means of countering low-intensity
threats to US interests in areas not in immediate danger of communist
subversion.” The group only offered an evasive response to the
criticism regarding the US aiding repressive and military regimes
overseas. In October 1959, a high-powered team of US civil
and military counter-insurgency experts went to Colombia, and from
then on teams of warfare experts visiting countries around the world,
perceived to be of interest to the US and not necessarily connected
to the containment of communism, became the norm rather than an exception.
Thus the internal security doctrine developed for the American hemisphere
under President Eisenhower evolved into a counter-insurgency doctrine
world-wide under President Kennedy.
The mind harks back to US involvement in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos between
1965 and 1975 in which four million people were killed; the coup in Indonesia in 1965 when Gen. Suharto
removed Gen. Sukarno and had one million people – the so-called
Communists in Indonesia – killed; the military coup in Turkey
in 1971; the legitimisation of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during
1970-1980; the setting up of the Contras to overthrow the Sandinista
regime in Nicaragua in 1981 leading to the creation of networks of
US-supported armed terror in El Salvadore and Guatemala; the violent
repression in Haiti by Gen. Raoul Cedras; US-backed UNITA’s (National
Union for the Total Independence of Angola) extra-judicial executions
in Angola in 1988; the 1973 coup in Chile which brought Gen. Pinochet
to power; official support to the Kosovo Liberation Army's terrorist
activities in 1998-99, to name a few.
In the late and lamented 20th century, any behaviour of a Latin
American government that could be construed as ‘irresponsible’
or ‘communist’ – as in Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican
Republic, Chile, Panama and Nicaragua – merited an American invasion
force, an assassination squad, a 'counter-insurgency' team, or at
the very least, a plot ‘to make the economy scream.’ Nobody
could complain; and resistance was out of the question. The United
States was always the judge in its own case.
The Reagan Administration might have liked the US military to become much
more directly involved in Central America but it lacked Congressional
and public support. Therefore it opted for a low-intensity intervention
in Nicaragua and El Salvidor, using local armies – the Contras
and Salvadoran armed forces. In practice the political and economic
impact of these policies was hardly of low intensity. In a decade,
the US spent $5 billion on El Salvador’s five million people,
and at times provided one-third of the government’s operating
expenditure in Costa Rica, and more than half of the Honduran government’s
revenue. The Contra war brought Nicaragua’s economy
to its knees. Throughout the region, US policies polarized local political
forces and caused a nationalist backlash on both the left and the
right. What was sharply limited was the Reagan Administration’s
ability to reach its goals. It could not crush the leftist guerrillas in El Salvador, or reform
the Salvadoran government, or shoot the Sandinistas into submission
on US terms. No amount of dollars or badgering or public relations
could transform these people. The result was an embarrassing loss
of credibility for the United States in Latin America.
Sometimes, even a convoluted and half-hearted US response to an overseas
crisis has led to avoidable complications and bloodshed. Take, for
example, the current tragedy in Sierra Leone.
In 1991 Foday Sankoh, a cashiered army officer, started a rebellion in the
diamond-rich region in eastern Sierra Leone – all for diamonds.
He was supported by President Muammar Qadhafi of Libya. Qadhafi also
assisted Charles Taylor’s armed bandits to overthrow Liberian
President Samuel Doe as well as the President of Burkina Faso. Taylor
offered safe haven to Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF)
and provided several of his best military units for Sankoh’s
initial attack in 1991. The years 1991-98 saw an inconclusive see-saw
war between Sankoh and the democratic governments in Freetown for
political power as well as authority over the diamond mines. These
resulted in considerable mayhem and murder, with Sierra Leone’s
army often making common cause with the rebels. A coalition of West
African nations, led by Nigeria and known collectively as the Economic
Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), sent several
battalions to help the government fight the RUF between 1994 and 1998.
When rebel forces were poised to take Freetown in 1995, the government
turned to a South African mercenary group called Executive Outcomes
who took only a week to drive rebels from Freetown. But in January
1999, well after Executive Outcomes had gone back, Sankoh took over
effective control of Freetown, forcing President Kabbah to plead with
a fellow West African, Kofi Annan, for a UN peacekeeping force. American
perceptions of strategic priority and expediency, however, obstructed
an effective and principled humanitarian intervention. “Kofi
Annan, however, explained that the Security Council would not come
to Sierra Leone’s rescue. It was, after all, a small country
with no important patrons…” Kofi Annan had no choice: the Americans were preoccupied
at the same time with the ‘more important business’ of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) attacks on the Serbs in
Kosovo. So how could a UN peacekeeping force be sent to an insignificant
country like Sierra Leone? This was another example of the UN priorities
having often been determined by the US perception of the right time
to act.
The problem was compounded by the fact that UN involvement in this part
of Africa had an unfortunate history. The UN Security Council had
been passive in the face of the impending Rwandan massacre in 1994,
all because of the United States and Britain refusing to reinforce
the small Belgian contingent that had been stationed there. In Sierra
Leone, the Clinton Administration, unwilling to commit troops and
resources to the problems of an ‘unimportant’ West African
country, but fearing accusations of risking through inaction another
disaster on the scale of the one in Rwanda, where one million people
were killed, found a cost-free way of acting - or, more accurately,
appearing to act. The Americans brokered the Lome Accord, signed in
July 1999, between the RUF and the government of President Kabbah.
The RUF agreed to lay down arms in exchange for a promise of amnesty for
past acts and their inclusion in a new coalition government. Foday
Sankoh, their leader, got the cabinet post of his choice - Ministry
of Mines - thus formalising his illegal nine-year-long control over
the country’s diamond supply. This agreement was repellent to Kabbah, but those
were the terms that the United States approved, and so they were the
best terms that Sierra Leone was going to get in order to have the
UN peacekeepers. In October 1999, the Security Council created a peacekeeping
mission in Sierra Leone. Western nations, including Canada, Australia,
Holland and Poland, refused to commit their troops, and India was
the only country with a genuinely professional army willing to send
troops. The Indian contingent joined those of Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya
and Guinea - in all 6,000 troops. Within a month, Sankoh’s RUF
ambushed Kenyans and took away their rifles, RPGs and armoured carriers.
The Security Council responded by authorising another 5,000 troops with
orders to disarm the rebels. Foday Sankoh was arrested in May 2000.
After Sankoh’s arrest, Charles Taylor has been playing the role
of regional peacemaker with the blessings of the USA. With about 200,000
people dead, 250,000 maimed, and 400,000 rendered homeless refugees
during the nine years in Sierra Leone, Taylor, one of the prime architects
of the conflict, has become America's preferred interlocutor with
the rebels. The UN will now be negotiating Sankoh’s and
Sierra Leone’s fate with a man every bit as unprincipled and
bloodthirsty as Sankoh himself. There is, today, hardly anything that
answers to the description of a government in Sierra Leone. President
Kabbah’s writ does not run beyond his boundary wall. Sankoh’s
men are fighting only fifty miles from Freetown, and Sankoh’s
trial could provoke a full-blown war. The Herculean task that confronts
the UN Peace Keeping Force in Sierra Leone can well be imagined.
Another complexity has progressively crept into international - i.e., Western
- interventions in Third World conflicts. The Western, and more particularly
the American, perspective on contemporary counter-terrorism has substantially
been shaped by the US experience in various conflicts as they combine
with radical shifts in the emerging technologies of warfare. The Revolution
in Military Affairs (RMA) – the use of computers, knowledge management
systems to improve battlefield command and control, the development
of precision guided conventional weapons, stealth systems, new types
of armour and unmanned platforms – has transformed the American
way of war. The truth about RMA, however, is that wars fought
entirely in the air, without a ground component, hide a crucial weakness:
the refusal to risk American (Western?) lives and, consequently, the
necessity of an imperfect engagement and the acceptance of incomplete
victories. The bombing of Iraq in 1991 left that country devastated,
but Saddam Hussain is still in control after nine years. As Anthony
Cordesman points out, further, the 1998 bombing of Iraq did not put
Iraq’s chemical and nuclear warfare research establishments out
of business. Similarly, the 1999 NATO bombings of Serbia/Kosovo
failed to dislodge Milosevic from power. The fact is that air power
alone, without a willingness to commit ground troops with high risk
to the fighting men, cannot protect civilians populations. The truth
that emerges from the Kosovo experience is that you cannot stop ethnic cleansing from 15,000
feet in the air.
But the US attitude predates
Kosovo and the 1991 invasion of Iraq by decades, and is rooted in
the domestic outrage against American casualties in Vietnam. The United
States had already developed RMA to a level that could be used very
effectively during the closing years of the Vietnam War. This risk-free
and casualty-averse American way of war assumes that the US policy
must move in a direction where other countries could be persuaded
to accept high risk of casualties to achieve high gains on the ground
in the process of serving American interests. The US has thus tended
to assume, or at least hope, that some countries desperate for US
arms and money, or non-state actors that such countries could organise
and gather, would not find the risks unacceptable. The zeal of the
Islamic fundamentalists served initially as a handy tool to obstruct
the march of Soviet Communism. Pakistan was found to be a convenient
rallying point for the motley crowd of Islamic fighters from all over
Asia, particularly the Middle East, and Africa. Pakistan also proved
a willing, indeed eager, ally, with its ISI grabbing the American
mandate under the supervision of the CIA.
But the Afghan operations spawned
a terror well beyond the control or the original intent of its sponsors.
The heart of contemporary international terrorism is a legion of trained
veterans of the Afghan War that the Americans and their allies created,
armed, trained and deployed in the 1980s. Today this legion of mercenaries
and mujahideen is the cornerstone of international
terrorism in theatres that sweep across North Africa and Asia, deep
into Europe, and progressively towards America. Trained and armed
during the Afghanistan War, these Islamic warriors and their successors
have now been actively deployed in India (pre-eminently in Kashmir, Assam, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh),
North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, China, Philippines, Tajikistan,
Chechnya and the eastern seaboard of the US. They have also established
a subversive presence in many Western countries.
More importantly, they are
well on the way to destroying at least one of the principals responsible
for their creation: Pakistan. And this is increasingly evident, not
only to the distanced or dispassionate observer, but to many who are
in the very eye of the storm. Eqbal Ahmad, acknowledging both the
American role in creating the Islamic terror and the disastrous choices
made by his own country's leadership, speaks with anguish of the devastating
impact these have had on his own country as well as others:
We
knew of the violent pan-Islamic character which the Afghan war was
assuming with American sponsorship. But no country, not Algeria, not
Egypt, protested the participation of their nationals in a distant
war. Pakistan was hospitable to a fault while all watched casually,
then looked the other way until, that is, the chickens of Afghan insurgency
returned home to roost. I found in 1986, for example, that Egyptian
intelligence had an effective presence in Peshawar and excellent information
on the demography of Jihad.
They were merely keeping a watchful eye. America, after all, was an
ally and benefactor; they could not interfere with its agenda. The
demands for extradition started to reach Pakistan from Algiers and
Cairo only after the U. S. had cashed in its investments in Afghanistan,
and gates of hell had broken loose in Algeria and Egypt. But whom
can Pakistan request to rid their country of the thousands of armed
zealots their government has nurtured and continues to nurture?
This is a rising lament, as the flush of Pakistan's 'victory' in Afghanistan
continues to recede. Mahdi Masud, writing from strife-torn Karachi,
declares that the Afghan War proved to be a disaster for Pakistan’s
internal stability, peace and economic development.
Other by-products affecting Pakistan
are drugs, Kalashnikovs, organised crime, armed militancy and sectarian
violence. Compared to these continuing costs, the US economic and
military aid that came with Pakistan’s involvement in the war
was comparatively of little account. The new dimension of the Kashmir
conflict, arising from the supporting role of the veterans of the
Afghan jehad in the held territory has changed the image of the Kashmir struggle
in the eyes of the western countries already worried about the problem
of terrorism and religious and sectarian fanaticism and violence in
the region. … Pakistan’s
social and political structure has become involved with the Taliban
in multifarious ways, apart from the origins of the Taliban in some of the deeni
madarsas in Pakistan. … While the training camps in Afghanistan
may not be Pakistan-specific, militants from these camps have in the
past entered Pakistan and carried out acts of sectarian violence.
… No political or security consideration is an adequate compensation
for the economic and social price that Pakistan is paying for the
instability these groups have caused.
Significant national and international consequences of Pakistan's involvement
with the Taliban have been noted by others. Writing in The Frontier Post two years ago, Abid Ullah
Jan opined that Pakistan became an enemy of Iran by creating and sustaining
the Taliban at the US’s behest.
We criticise Iran for openly including
India in the new regional gang-up against Pakistan but forget that
we have already [taken] recourse to threatening attitude towards Tehran
by blindly accepting the US dictates for the region. We loathe India’s
exploitation of the current anti-Pakistan sentiments among the Iranians.
… but we forget that we have no one to blame for this situation
but our government and the governments before it. … We must not
forget that the ISI is the primary factor in keeping Afghanistan in
turmoil. … The ISI and many newspaper analysts claim that Iranian
agents are fuelling sectarianism in Pakistan. It is much less than
half the story… It is actually Pakistani terrorists – Sunni
extremists armed and trained by the Taliban
(who are in turn backed by the ISI) – who are responsible for
the worst sectarian violence.
Way back in 1995, Dawn carried
a telling analysis of Pakistan’s policies by M.B. Naqvi, who
argued:
Islamabad’s predicament lies
in having an over-sized military establishment, with commitments in
Kashmir and Afghanistan that are beyond the financial capacity of
the economy. …Invoking the ‘front-line state’ syndrome
is possibly the most dangerous line of least resistance that will
land the country in God knows what troubles and where.
Naqvi was not willing to accept that that there were no people in Pakistan
“who see religious fanaticism and all its works to be destructive,
not only of human freedoms of Pakistan but also of Pakistan state.”
He notes further that,
…religious bigotry cannot
be fought with armies and para-military forces, even if its by-products
might require to be tackled physically. But the latter is not the
main war. Primary theatre of this war is the human mind; the knowledge
and scientific mode of thinking and spirit of relaxed tolerance –
born of the values of freedom and human equality…
Talking about the ‘front-line syndrome’ that has influenced much
of Pakistani foreign policy over the past four decades, Irfan Husain
observes that Gen. Zia-ul-Haq had a vision of a Pakistan-led Islamic
grouping comprising Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics, but
insists that it is now “Time for a reality check”:
The fact is that through our role
in Afghanistan, we have antagonised Iran…. And we have annoyed
Russia and the very Central Asian states we had hoped to befriend.
Basically, they all fear and resent the emergence of Taliban
on their borders... Finally, India is concerned about the spill over
of the Taliban victory into Kashmir… All
in all, the Taliban victory
has translated into a diplomatic disaster for Pakistan. But potentially
even more lethal is the very real prospect of a Taliban
spill over into Pakistan. Already the breeding ground for murderous
religious militias of varying stripes, the country can ill-afford
the menacing presence of these ‘warriors’ violently pushing
their own bizarre version of Islam. And yet that is just what may
soon happen, given the support they already enjoy among extremist
groups in Pakistan.
If any further demonstration
was required that the chaos in Pakistan, and its rising tide throughout
the Indian sub-continent and beyond, is a consequence of the policy
of expediency pursued simultaneously by the US and its client states
such as Pakistan, it comes from the most unexpected quarters. Reacting
to a suggestion that the US wanted the jehadi
organisations to be banned as terrorists, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, head
of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the most active terrorist grouping fighting Indian
troops in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), remarked in an interview to
the The Friday Times:
But
aren’t these groups a product of the US strategy? When it was
in its interest, during the Afghan war, it actively put them together.
The US did not consider them terrorist groups at that time. Now that
the purpose has been served, it feels fit to brand them terrorist
organisations. Is that not wrong and unjust? If they are alluding
to human rights, then it doesn’t befit them to condemn today
what they welcomed yesterday. This simply explains the duality of
American character.
Pakistan's history offers powerful
proof of the consequences of a Third World country surrendering its
sovereignty and independence by working as a surrogate to a
superpower in pursuit of short-term gains. Indeed, the surrender of
sovereignty that Pakistan's engagement with USA has entailed is both
an excessive and unnecessary price for the latter's 'support' to Pakistan's
‘imagined greatness’. This was dramatically demonstrated
when, as the Foreign Minister in Ayub Khan’s cabinet, Zulfiqar
Ali Bhutto was not allowed to see the Bada Ber US Air Force base near
Peshawar. Pakistan had leased this base to United States for launching
U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union and China and to set up electronic
listening posts. Roedad Khan, then a member of the Civil Service
of Pakistan, was Deputy Commissioner, Peshawar, in 1959. He recounts:
On
arrival, he [Bhutto] told me that he would like to visit Bada Ber,
the American base close to Peshawar... and made it clear that he would
like to see everything. I got in touch with the Base Commander who
said that the Minister would be welcome to visit the cafeteria where
he would be entertained and served coffee and sandwiches. He turned
down the Minister’s request to see sensitive areas of the base
but promised, in deference to my wishes, to refer the matter to Washington.
Half an hour later, he got back to me and asked me to inform the Minister
that, except the cafeteria, no other part of the base could be shown
to him. I conveyed this to Mr. Bhutto. He was visibly upset…
At the root is a delusion that
lies at the very heart of the Pakistani state - that it can, through
manipulation and opportunism, secure the greatness that has eluded
it. It is possible, indeed increasingly probable, that Pakistan’s
continued search for ‘front line’ status would eventually
bring about its disintegration. The West’s understanding of Pakistan as a
land dominated exclusively by Islamic fundamentalists, and the protracted
efforts to direct the perceived energies of the zealots to serve the
West’s own interests, have had the effect of depriving Pakistanis
of their capacity to rule their country. This has dehumanised Pakistan
and brought it to the brink of chaos.
