“Intertwined Timelines: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the USA.”
Naeem Inayatullah
(Presented in the course “Making Sense of 9/11.” Ithaca College, November 1, 2001.)
* We all want to learn but it is okay to not want to learn. What I want you to do is notice the tension between wanting to and not wanting to learn.
1. Starting with our need: how to understand the events of 9/11.
The US government assumes that this act was done by Al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. We will assume the same.
What do we know about Osama bin Laden?
A multi-millionaire
Part of the royal Saudi family
Recruited by the CIA to recruit Muslims to fight a holy war against the Soviets.
Influence by a strict and severe strain of Sunni Islam called Whabbism. Whabbism is what the Saudi’s exported and what the Taliban imported as their official ideology.
He saw plenty of battle action against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, he asked the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia to be put in charge of fighting the Iraqis.
He was furious when he was not allowed to do so, and even more furious when the Saudis asked/allowed the USA to fight that fight, and fumed when after that war was over, US troop were allowed to stay in Saudi Arabia.
We know – although I have not been able to confirm this to my own satisfaction – that he is married into the family of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the spiritual and operational leader of the Taliban.
Al-Qaida operates all over the world but let us assume with the US government that it has its base in Afghanistan.
The question we want to know is why is al-Qaida is based in Afghanistan:
Buffer state: between Soviets and Britain and before between Russia and the British.
Afghanistan is, therefore, a perfect place for a Guerilla movement. Al-Qaida emerged as a consequence of the effort by large parts of the world, but especially three states – Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the US – to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979). Thus, the creation and power of the Mujahideen, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden were, not in a small part, the result of the actions of the U.S. What want to know is why some of these people turned against the U.S. And we might want to know why we could not anticipate that they would turn against the US. (come back to this in the end.)
But getting to that requires that we trace the story through a small part of the history of Afghanistan.
Go through the history
Afghanistan Time Line:
- 7 October 2001: US starts bombing of Afghanistan.
- October, 1998: Iran mobilizes 200,000 troops on border with Afghanistan.
- 20 August, 1998: US cruise missile attack four training camps near Khost in response to bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on 7 August, 1998.
- 8 August 1998: Taliban take the northern city of Mazar-i Sharif. 4 to 5,000 people killed including 9 Iranian Diplomats.
- 27 September 1996: Taliban take Kabul and declare Afghanistan a Islamic State.
- 3 April 1996: - 1000 clergy elect Mullah Mohammad Omar as Amir ul-Momineen, Leader of the Faithful.
- Fall 1994: Emergence of Taliban.
- From withdrawl of Soviets to present: infighting between the various Mujahideen groups for control of Kabul and country.
- 1991: Collapse of Soviet Union.
- July 1990: Afghan refugees begin to return home.
- February 1989, last Soviet troops exit Afghanistan.
- February-April 1985: Mikhail Gorbachev assumes power in Moscow.
- 24, December, 1979- February, 1989: Soviet-Afghan War. Seven Mujahedeen parties, based in Peshawar Pakistan, are selected by Pakistan’s President Zia-ul-Haq to receive military supplies pouring in from both the West and Muslim sources.
- 24, December, 1979 Soviets invade Afghanistan. Babrak Karmal installed as President.
Chip
Back to me.
After Afghanistan, the most important state in this theatre of operations is Pakistan. We might need to know why Pakistan has been so supportive of the Taliban. There are two reasons:
Strategic (strategic depth): describe the three borders of Pakistan.
Ideological (Talibanization or Purification of Pakistan).
To give you a sense of this, let me do a timeline for Pakistan.
Lets start with the military coup of Zia ul-Haq in 1977.
Especially after the Iranian Revolution (1979) which is in the same year the invasion of Afghanistan, Zia implements three things in Pakistan:
i. Islmacization of the culture, institutions, and laws.
ii. He becomes the prime dispenser of the massive military and economic aid coming from the Islamic world and from the West for the Mujahideen; he is extremely careful to dole out the funds to those parties that reflect his and Pakistan’s interests. Even those Zia favors resent his and Pakistan’s influence in the fight against the Soviets.
iii. Most important: he builds the ISI into a very powerful secret internal government.
In sum, these are the dark years of Pakistan, where its people are culturally repressed by General Zia.
It is crucial to understand that the US accepts Zia’s internal repression of Pakistan because it has bigger fish or bears to fry – the USSR. It sacrifices the freedoms of the people of Pakistan for what it thinks of as the greater good of defeating communism.
In 1988, after eleven years of rule, Zia meets his end in an exploding plane. In my opinion, this is one of life’s ironies, that his fate is sealed by the very means that he governed the country.
Benizir Bhutto is elected, followed by Nawaz Shrif, Benizir again, and Sharif again. But this does not mean that these two civilian Prime Ministers can undo any of Zia’s policies and institutions. Indeed, they are thwarted at every turn by the ISI.
Under the presidency of Nawaz Sharif – but still under the de facto control of the ISI, Pakistan explodes a nuclear device (1998). This is a mirror response to the Masculinist Bravado of India’s own nuclear explosion under its own Fundamentalist Hindu party, the BJP (1996).
Fed up with the direction of the country, General Musharraf stages a coup in October 1999 and gets down to three tasks quickly:
To curtail the rampant corruption of previous politicians;
To undermine the religious intolerance of the radical Islamacist parties in Pakistan; in his first speech he tries to reassert Islam’s inherent toleration.
And, to he tires to bring the ISI under control.
Last month, General Musharraf was more or less forced to accept the ultimatum given to him by the USA – either you are for us or you are against us. At the moment he has to walk a razor’s edge between the will of the US and the possibility of civil war in Pakistan.
It is important to note that the support for the Taliban in Pakistan is intense but very small, between 5-6%. In the Army, easily the most powerful institution, the support is more worrisome, 15-30%. The vast majority of the population is against the Taliban and against the purificationist Islamacist parties. However, there is also almost 100% dislike of the USA, its use of Pakistani airspace or military bases. The longer the bombing goes on, the more innocent people are killed, the more the people of Pakistan will turn out into the streets of Pakistan against the USA and against General Musharraf. This is perhaps the most volatile problem. A destabilization of Pakistan, besides meaning terrible things for most of my immediate and extended family, will probably not good for any of your families either.
Also crucial to understanding the tensions in the region is the role of Iran. In some ways, Iran is the inspiration for Islamic revival and pride. It was the example of their revolution that moved people to think that a theocratic nationalism was possible. Ironically, it is this very inspiration in others – for example, in the Taliban – which Iran has come to fear and which it wants to check. And, strangely enough, this puts Iran in the same camp as the US.
Iran Timeline:
- September, 2001: Adjusts its anti-Taliban rhetoric when it finds itself on the same side as the US. Declares that it will shoot down US planes in its airspace.
- October, 1998: Iran mobilizes 200,000 troops on border with Afghanistan.
- 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini dies.
- 22 September, 1980: Iraq (supported by other Arab leaders and the West, including the US) invades Iran. War lasts until 1988.
- November, 1979: Revolution takes 63 members of the US embassy as hostages for 444 days. (Embassy taken 4 November 1979; released 20 January, 1981.)
- 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini takes power.
- 1953: Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq overthrown with help of CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt (cousin of Teddy Roosevelt.)
- 1941- 1979: Shah Mohammad Reza Phalavi
- Between two World Wars: Russian and British rivalry for control of Iran.
It would also be impossible to begin an understanding of these events without paying attention to the pivotal role played by Iraq. For it is Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and then Iraq’s massive defeat and utter destruction at the hands of the US, that turned the some of the Mujahideen, Osama bin Laden, and much of the Muslim world away from concerns about fighting communism and towards confronting the power of the US. The destruction of Iraq, is seen by many, is nothing short of a massacre.
Iraq Timeline:
- 28 February, 1991: Formal Ceasefire.
- 17 January, 1991: US/British attack on Iraq.
- 15 January, 1991: Iraq does not comply with UN deadline to leave Kuwait.
- 2 August, 1990: Iraq attacks Kuwait.
- 25 July, 1990: Saddam Husain meets with US ambassador April Glasspie.
Saddam Husain becomes president of Iraq in 1979.
1980, Iraq invades Iran. Why? Khomeini was calling the Baathist party – one of the most socialist parties in the Islamic world – as non-muslim; Khomeini was calling for armed revolt and an overthrow of Sadam Husain and exporting “terrorist” activities across the border. But one thing is clear: Saddam Husain had little support from the Arab world even though like them the Iraqis are Semitic whereas Iranians are Aryans; and the Iraqis are Sunnis whereas the Iranians are Shi’a. Sadam Husain was supported by the West and the US – more so Reagan than Carter. France was supplying arms to Iraq but this was approved by the US.
The war lasts 8 years and winds down in 1988.
In 2 August, 1990 Iraq attacks Kuwait – there are many reasons for this cavalier violation of international law, some of them you will not like.
The US led coalition gives Iraq until January 15, to leave Kuwait. Saddam Husain remains defiant.
17th January, 1991, US led bombing begins
28 February, 1991, formal cease-fire. [That month of bombing changed my life – after this event, I would never be the same again. That month was for me, perhaps what the events of 9/11 seem to be to you.]
What might be the point of delivering such a narrative for you? I might have three points:
To show how complex this narrative is: there is no clear us and them – alliances are constantly shifting; no Islam versus the West; no pure innocence and pure evil; its shades of gray. I am talking about the narrative, not the judgments we might be willing to make about death, destruction, genocide, rape, and the disregard of humanity. We can and perhaps should make those judgments, but they will have to come after we acknowledge the messiness of this Jackson Pollock like picture.
To suggest to you that most people in that part of the world know this history or at least some version of it very well. It is we here in the US who do not know it. We do not know it because we seem to be able to afford to not know it. We have things to do, careers to build, parents whose expectations we wish to meet. We are busy. And this suggests a huge gap between their need to make sense of history and our absence of that need. And it is this gap between needs, between our understanding of the world and their understanding that might be the greatest danger of all. [quote from Isabel Allende]
“She suggested that she write a testimony that might one day call attention to the terrible secret she was living through, so that the world would know about this horror that was taking place parallel to the peaceful existence of those who did not want to know, who could afford the illusion of a normal life, and of those who could deny that they were on a raft adrift in a sea of sorrow, ignoring, despite all evidence, that only blocks away from their happy world there were others, these others who live or die on the dark side. “You have a lot of work to do, so stop feeling sorry for yourself, drink some water, and start writing,” Clara told her granddaughter before disappearing the same way she had come.” (Isabel Allende, House of Spirits, p. 414)
To suggest to you that such complexity makes not just a mockery out of simple solutions, rather, more starkly, such complexity generates tragedy out of the very effort to solve our problems. If you said to me, Naeem, suppose you were going to die tomorrow, what would you tell me is the most important lesson you have learned in your short and shallow life? If I were not smart enough to keep quiet, I would say this:
as a species and as a civilization, we humans try to solve problems without accounting for the complexity and richness of life. We make simple minded and half-hearted efforts. Such efforts – and not some abstract notion of evil --are the ultimate cause of all our problems. My nine year old is always taking short cuts in his work, and I am always repeating: “the long way IS the short way.” I believe in pursuit of self-interest in life, but I also believe that if we are going to follow self-interest it should be our long-term self-interest – some people call this enlightened self-interest some people call it ethics. The idea behind all three is the same: let me tell it to you in the form of a parable:
My nine year old, Kamal, was playing with some other boys at recess when they saw a plane flying overhead. One of the boys, Mike, picked up a rock and performed an action consisting of three parts. He curses at the plane, saying “You damn Afghanistanis! Go back to where you came from!” At the same time he hurls a rock at the plane. And, he starts running in the direction of the plane. As the rock comes down, Mike ends up running into its trajectory. The rock hits him on the head.
What we want to know is why some of these people turned against the US?
There was a time when there interest and ours overlapped. But as soon as the Soviets were beaten, they might have said: “one super-power down, one to go.”
And we might want to know why we could not anticipate that they would turn against the US?
This is the real question. This is because we have such a weak grasp of the reality in the Third World. And, we have a weak grasp of that reality because we do not have the need, or should I say, we have not yet had the need, to know that reality. The central fact of that reality is how hated we are in the rest of the world. The central reason for that hatred is our history of misguided, un-enlightened interventions.