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Our terrorists
New
Internationalist
Friday, Nov 6th, 2009
Once upon a time, the CIA trained, financed and
supported Osama bin Laden and his mujahidin networks in Afghanistan
to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After the end of
the Cold War, bin Laden turned against the West and we no longer
had any use for him. His persistent terrorist attacks against
us for more than a decade, culminating in 9/11, provoked our
own response, in the form of the ‘War on Terror’.
This is the official narrative. And it’s false. Not only
did Western intelligence services continue to foster Islamist
extremist and terrorist groups connected to al-Qaeda after the
Cold War; they continued to do so even after 9/11.
The CIA’s jihad
The story begins in the summer of 1979, six months before the
Soviet invasion, when the CIA had already begun financing elements
of an emerging Islamist mujahidin force inside Afghanistan.
The idea, according to former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski and former CIA Director Robert Gates, was to increase
the probability of a Soviet invasion, and entrap ‘the
Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire’.1
Osama bin Laden arrived in the country later that year, sent
by then-Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal, where
he set up the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) which helped finance,
recruit and train mujahidin fighters.2 Bin Laden, the MAK, and
the Afghan mujahidin in total received about half a billion
dollars a year from the CIA, and roughly the same from the Saudis,
funnelled through Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence
(ISI).3
By around 1988, as Jane’s Defence Weekly reports, ‘with
US knowledge, Bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate
of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across at
least 26 countries’.4 US and Western intelligence agencies
facilitated this process, seeing rightwing Islamist movements
as a counterweight to Communist, leftwing and nationalist political
trends. They supported the Saudis and other Gulf states, as
well as Pakistan, Turkey and Azerbaijan among others, in proliferating
Islamist extremist institutions in far-flung countries such
as Algeria, Yemen, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Funding for
these activities was intertwined with the establishment of organized
criminal financial centres in Malaysia, Madagascar, South Africa,
Nigeria, Latin America, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Turkestan,
and elsewhere.5
Islamism and the CIA’s destabilization doctrine
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in particular in
1991 when the Saudis accepted the stationing of 300,000 US troops
in the country due to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Osama bin
Laden reportedly turned against his former masters in Riyadh
and Washington. Since then, bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist
network became our enemy, targeting Western citizens and interests
throughout the 1990s, culminating in the most devastating strike
of all in the form of the 9/11 atrocities in the US.
Full
article here
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