Socialist Action /October 2001
Who is Bin Laden? What is the Taliban?
By Gerry Foley
As we go to press, the world is waiting for a U.S. military attack on
Afghanistan. It is clear that the American rulers' objective is to demonstrate
their capacity for destruction and their ruthlessness, and to score some
general political points based on that.
U.S. government spokespersons are increasingly having to admit that in
attacking Afghanistan they have little hope of hitting the terrorist networks
that they accuse of responsibility for the Sept. 11 slaughter.
There is no evidence that any government, not even the Taliban, materially
backs the constellation of groups inspired and financed by the Saudi Islamicist
multimillionaire Osama Bin Ladin-whom the U.S. accuses without any proof
of masterminding terrorist attacks on targets.
('Islamicist" is a term used to describe political currents that
claim to want to build states based on a narrow interpretation of Islamic
religious law. They represent a small minority of Muslims in the world and
are themselves divided by different political interests.)
In the organizational and political vacuum left in the wake of Afghanistan's
ruinous civil war and the guerrilla struggle against Soviet occupation,
the Taliban may seek the help of relatively small groups of Islamicists
against their internal enemies. But they have neither the resources nor
interest in supporting any external terrorist campaigns.
All the available information about Bin Laden's organization Al-Qaida
indicates that it is a loose network of small conspiratorial groups scattered
in as many as 34 countries.
None of the alleged highjackers have been linked to any mass movement
in the Middle East. A few, including the so-called leader of the cell, Mohammad
Atta, have been linked to the Egyptian Islamic terrorist organization, the
Islamic Jihad, which was involved in the assassination of the country's
president, Anwar Sadat, in 1981.
Following that event, there was a war between the Egyptian government
and the Islamicist terrorist groups, lasting for more than a decade, which
resulted in more than 1200 deaths, mainly of innocent civilians and Islamic
activists themselves. The Islamic conspiratorial organizations were decimated.
The prisons are still filled with their members.
Ayman al-Zawahri, cited widely in the big business press as Bin Laden's
"right-hand" man, served three years in prison on charges of being
involved in Sadat's assassination. He left Egypt in the 1980s after being
released. In 1998, his organization joined the Front for the Liberation
of Islamic Holy Places, a grouping apparently inspired by Bin Ladin.
In the same year, the Jihad was accused of involvement in the U.S. embassies
in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. It became the target of a major repressive
campaign by the Egyptian government. In 1999, Al-Zawahri was condemned
to death in absentia as one of the defendants in a mass trial of Islamic
fundamentalist leaders.
An article analyzing the Islamic fundamentalist groups in the Sept. 14
issue of the Egyptian daily Middle East Times noted: "While some of
these groupings do not have a popular base, they do not need one to operate
efficiently."
Ibrahim Naggar, one of the defendants in the trial that brought Al-Zawhri's
death sentence, said that Bin Ladin came out against attacks on the Egyptian
government, calling on the terrorists to focus entirely on U.S. and Israeli
interests, and calling for focusing their propaganda on military personnel.
These groups appear thus to be narrow circles totally innocent of any
orientation to build mass movements opposed to imperialism in the decisive
countries of the Middle East, which is more and more a social powder keg.
In general, such Islamicist fundamentalist groups, no matter how violent,
represent little threat to imperialism's basic interests in the region,
and can even be manipulated by the imperialists to defend their interests.
Over the long term, they have been more of an asset than a liability for
imperialism.
In the past, Islamicists were used to help bring down the nationalist
governments of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965.
In the later case, gangs organized by Islamicist leaders massacred at least
half-a-million poor peasants and wiped out the Communist Party, with U.S.
approval.
Bin Laden was a U.S. agent
In fact, the state that has given by far the most "aid and comfort"
to Bin Ladin is the United States itself, which used him as an agent in
the Afghan civil war. He played no political role before his Afghan involvement,
beginning in 1986.
The U.S. government did not use him simply as a conduit of aid to the
Afghan fighters but as a means of reinforcing the most reliable social conservatives
in Afghanistan. In fact, the main leaders of the Afghan struggle, like the
recently assassinated Sheikh Massoud, the hero of the Panjir valley and
generally acknowledged to be the most effective of the military commanders,
were quickly pushed from power by the Taliban with the aid of forces linked
to Bin Laden.
The Taliban was created by the Pakistani special forces with the assent,
and perhaps even the blessing of the United States. The Taliban appeared
only in 1994, five years after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. And
they first appeared as guards of Pakistani convoys.
After the Taliban captured the capital, Kabul, in 1996, the Washington
Post wrote that they were "the best opportunity" seen in years
"to put an end to the anarchy that has beset Afghanistan since the
Soviet invasion in 1979." The same paper noted, with implicit approval,
that the Islamicist fundamentalists were "more antimodernist than anti-Western."
The Post gloated that the Taliban victory was a defeat for the Islamic
government in Tehran, which backed the Mujahadin and still supports those
who continue to fight against the Taliban.
The Afghan resistance to the Soviet-backed regimes and to Soviet occupation
was largely local and fragmented, and divided among the different ethnic
groups that live in the country.
The guerrillas had no united alternative to the Soviet-backed regime.
After the Soviets withdrew and the regime fell, they splintered. In those
conditions, a relatively small disciplined group with resources coming from
foreign backers was easily able to gain control of most of the country.
According to Sheikh Massoud, many local commanders were simply bought
by Pakistani money. Moreover, the Taliban was based on the Pushtoon nationality,
which straddles the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Pakistan, which the U.S. has now enlisted in its "war on terrorism,"
is a state based on Islam. It is the product of the British imperialist
strategy of using Islamicists against the Indian national liberation movement.
And religious parties have always been a fundamental prop of the successive
reactionary regimes that have ruled the country.
During the cold war, Pakistan was the key ally of the United States in
the region. It was the central country of the CENTO Alliance, which was
a threat aimed at the Soviet Union until it was shattered by the Iraqi revolution
of 1957.
Now, of course, many of the Islamicists have turned violently anti-American.
However, Washington probably always knew that they were a double-edged sword,
like most of the U.S. allies in the neocolonial countries.
In this way they are similar to the Salvadoran landlords, who could be
relied on to organize murder gangs to crush the rebellious peasants but
refused to carry out the limited land reform the United States considered
necessary to allay social tensions. They also call to mind the ruthless
military regimes of Latin America, whose atrocities embarrassed the U.S.
government before its own people.
The United States is now seeking new allies in the Middle East, from
the surviving mujahadin in Afghanistan, to the Iranian government, to the
Pakistani military dictatorship, and the Hindu chauvinist government of
India. But the imperialists have always had to use reactionary allies in
an attempt to maintain their interests, allies who tended at some point
to become too discredited or too hot to handle.
No stable, much less humane, world order can be based on such alliances.
They have inevitably meant disasters for the peoples of the colonial and
neocolonial world and ultimately to threats to the peoples of the developed
countries themselves.
For example, 40,000 people were killed by the "war against terrorism"
conducted by the Argentine military regime in the 1970s and 1980s. The declaration
of a "war on terrorism" after the attacks in Washington and New
York promises an incomparably greater slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of
desperate people are already trying to flee Afghanistan in anticipation
of U.S. strikes.
However, no matter how much the imperialists may be blinded by their
greed and arrogance, they are hardly so stupid as to think that the small
conspiratorial groups can be destroyed by massive military action. Whatever
military strikes the U.S. military and its allies make, the real objective
is to lay the political basis for tightening repression throughout the world.
And the whole history of such attempts suggests there will be attacks on
the rights of citizens of the developed countries as well.
Socialist Action /October 2001 |