Fake Terror -
The Road to War and Dictatorship

By Michael Rivero
From What Really Happened

It's the oldest trick in the book, dating back to Roman times; creating the enemies you need.

In 70 BC, an ambitious minor politician and extremely wealthy man, Marcus Licinius Crassus, wanted to rule Rome. Just to give you an idea of what sort of man Crassus really was, he is credited with invention of the fire brigade. But in Crassus' version, his fire-fighting slaves would race to the scene of a burning building whereupon Crassus would offer to buy it on the spot for a tiny fraction of it's worth. If the owner sold, Crassus' slaves would put out the fire. If the owner refused to sell, Crassus allowed the building to burn to the ground. By means of this device, Crassus eventually came to be the largest single private land holder in Rome, and used some of his wealth to help back Julius Caesar against Cicero.

In 70 BC Rome was still a Republic, which placed very strict limits on what Rulers could do, and more importantly NOT do. But Crassus had no intentions of enduring such limits to his personal power, and contrived a plan. Crassus seized upon the slave revolt led by Spartacus in order to strike terror into the hearts of Rome, whose garrison Spartacus had already defeated in battle. But Spartacus had no intention of marching on Rome itself, a move he knew to be suicidal. Spartacus and his band wanted nothing to do with the Roman empire and had planned from the start merely to loot enough money from their former owners in the Italian countryside to hire a mercenary fleet in which to sail to freedom.

Sailing away was the last thing Crassus wanted Spartacus to do. He needed a convenient enemy with which to terrorize Rome itself for his personal political gain. So Crassus bribed the mercenary fleet to sail without Spartacus, then positioned two Roman legions in such a way that Spartacus had no choice but to march on Rome. Terrified of the impending arrival of the much-feared army of gladiators, Rome declared Crassus Praetor. Crassus then crushed Spartacus' army and even though Pompey took the credit, Crassus was elected Consul of Rome the following year.

With this maneuver, the Romans surrendered their Republican form of government. Soon would follow the first Triumvirate, consisting of Crassus, Pompeii, and Julius Caesar, followed by the reign of the god-like Emperors of Rome. The Romans were hoaxed into surrendering their Republic, and accepting the rule of Emperors.

Julius Caesar's political opponent, Cicero, for all his literary accomplishments, played the same games in his campaign against Julius Caesar, claiming that Rome was falling victim to an internal "vast right wing" conspiracy in which any expressed desire for legislative limits on government was treated as suspicious behavior. Cicero, in order to demonstrate to the Romans just how unsafe Rome has become hired thugs to cause as much disturbance as possible, and campaigned on a promise to end the internal strife if elected and granted extraordinary powers.

What Cicero only dreamed of, Adolph Hitler succeeded in doing. Elected Chancellor of Germany, Hitler, like Crassus, had no intention of living with the strict limits to his power imposed by German law. Unlike Cicero, Hitler's thugs were easy to recognize; they all wore the same brown shirts. But their actions were no different than those of their Roman predecessors. They staged beatings, set fires, caused as much trouble as they could, while Hitler made speeches promising that he could end the crime wave of subversives and terrorism if he was granted extraordinary powers.
Then the Reichstag burned down; a staged terrorist attack.

The Germans were hoaxed into surrendering their Republic, and accepting the total rule of Der Fuehrer. Hitler had German troops dressed in Polish uniforms attack the radio station at Gliewitz, then lied to the Germans, telling them Poland had invaded, and marched Germany off into World War Two. The state-sponsored schools will never tell you this, but governments routinely rely on hoaxes to sell their agendas to an otherwise reluctant public. The Romans accepted the Emperors and the Germans accepted Hitler not because they wanted to, but because the carefully crafted illusions of threat appeared to leave no other choice.

Our government too uses hoaxes to create the illusion that We The People have no choice but the direction the government wishes us to go in.

In 1898, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal were arguing for American intervention in Cuba. Hearst is reported to have dispatched a photographer to Cuba to photograph the coming war with Spain. When the photographer asked just what war that might be, Hearst is reported to have replied, "You take the photographs, and I will provide the war". Hearst was true to his word, as his newspaper published stories of great atrocities being committed against the Cuban people, most of which turned out to be complete fabrications.

On the night of February 15, 1898, the USS Maine, lying in Havana harbor in a show of US resolve to protect her interests, exploded violently. Captain Sigsbee, the commander of the Maine, urged that no assumptions of enemy attack be made until there was a full investigation of the cause of the explosion. For this, Captain Sigsbee was excoriated in the press for "refusing to see the obvious". The Atlantic Monthly declared flat out that to suppose the explosion to be anything other than a deliberate act by Spain was "completely at defiance of the laws of probability". Under the slogan "Remember the Maine", Americans went to war with Spain, eventually winning the Philippines (and annexing Hawaii along the way). In 1975, an investigation led by Admiral Hyman Rickover examined the data recovered from a 1911 examination of the wreck and concluded that there had been no evidence of an external explosion. The most likely cause of the sinking was a coal dust explosion in a coal bunker imprudently located next to the ship's magazines. Captain Sigsbee's caution had been well founded.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt needed a war. He needed the fever of a major war to mask the symptoms of a still deathly ill economy struggling back from the Great Depression (and mutating towards Socialism at the same time). Roosevelt wanted a war with Germany to stop Hitler, but despite several provocations in the Atlantic, the American people, still struggling with that troublesome economy, were opposed to any wars. Roosevelt violated neutrality with lend lease, and even ordered the sinking of several German ships in the Atlantic, but Hitler refused to be provoked. Roosevelt needed an enemy, and if America would not willingly attack that enemy, then one would have to be maneuvered into attacking America, much as Marcus Licinius Crassus has maneuvered Spartacus into attacking Rome.

The way open to war was created when Japan signed the tripartite agreement with Italy and Germany, with all parties pledging mutual defense to each other. Whereas Hitler would never declare war on the United States no matter the provocation, the means to force Japan to do so were readily at hand.

The first step was to place oil and steel embargoes on Japan, using Japan's wars on the Asian mainland as a reason. This forced Japan to consider seizing the oil and mineral rich regions in Indonesia. With the European powers militarily exhausted by the war in Europe, the United States was the only power in the Pacific able to stop Japan from invading the Dutch East Indies, and by moving the Pacific fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Roosevelt made a pre-emptive strike on that fleet the mandatory first step in any Japanese plan to extend it's empire into the "southern resource area".

Roosevelt boxed in Japan just as completely as Crassus had boxed in Spartacus. Japan needed oil. They had to invade Indonesia to get it, and to do that they first had to remove the threat of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. There never really was any other course open to them.

To enrage the American people as much as possible, Roosevelt needed the first overt attack by Japan to be as bloody as possible, appearing as a sneak attack much as the Japanese had done to the Russians. From that moment up until the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, Roosevelt and his associates made sure that the commanders in Hawaii, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, were kept in the dark as much as possible about the location of the Japanese fleet and it's intentions, then later scapegoated for the attack. (Congress recently exonerated both Short and Kimmel, posthumously restoring them to their former ranks).

But as the Army board had concluded at the time, and subsequent de-classified documents confirmed, Washington DC knew the attack was coming, knew exactly where the Japanese fleet was, and knew where it was headed. On November 29th, Secretary of State Hull showed United Press reporter Joe Leib a message with the time and place of the attack, and the New York Times in it's special 12/8/41 Pearl Harbor edition, on page 13, reported that the time and place of the attack had been known in advance!

The much repeated claim that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence on it's way to Hawaii was a lie. Among other intercepts still held in the Archives of the NSA is the UNCODED message sent by the Japanese tanker Shirya stating, "proceeding to a position 30.00 N, 154.20 E. Expect to arrive at that point on 3 December." (near HI)

President Lyndon Johnson wanted a war in Vietnam. He wanted it to help his friends who owned defense companies to do a little business. He needed it to get the Pentagon and CIA to quit trying to invade Cuba. And most of all, he needed a provocation to convince the American people that there was really "no other choice". On August 5, 1964, newspapers across America reported "renewed attacks" against American destroyers operating in Vietnamese waters, specifically the Gulf of Tonkin. The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an "unprovoked attack" on the USS Maddox while it was on "routine patrol".

The truth is that USS Maddox was involved in aggressive intelligence gathering in coordination with actual attacks by South Vietnam and the Laotian Air Force against targets in North Vietnam. The truth is also that there was no attack by torpedo boats against the USS Maddox. Captain John J. Herrick, the task force commander in the Gulf, cabled Washington DC that the report was the result of an "over-eager" sonar man who had picked up the sounds of his own ship's screws and panicked. But even with this knowledge that the report was false, Lyndon Johnson went on national TV that night to announce the commencement of air strikes against North Vietnam, "retaliation" for an attack that had never occurred.

President George H. W. Bush wanted a war in Iraq. Like Crassus, George Bush is motivated by money. Specifically oil money. But with the OPEC alliance failing to keep limits on oil production in the Mideast, the market was being glutted with oil pumped from underneath Iraq, which sat over roughly 1/3 of the oil reserves of the entire region.

George wanted a war to stop that flow of oil, to keep prices (and profits) from falling any further than they already had. But like Roosevelt, he needed the "other side" to make the first move. Iraq had long been trying to acquire greater access to the Persian Gulf, and felt limited confined a narrow strip of land along Kuwait's northern border, which placed Iraqi interests in close proximity with hostile Iran. George Bush, who had been covertly arming Iraq during its war with Iran, sent word via April Glaspie that the United States would not intervene if Saddam Hussein grabbed a larger part of Kuwait. Saddam fell for the bait and invaded.

Of course, Americans were not about to send their sons and daughters to risk their lives for petroleum products. So George Bush arranged a hoax, using a public relations firm which has grown rich on taxpayer money by being most industrious and creative liars! The PR firm concocted a monumental fraud in which the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States, went on TV pretending to be a nurse, and related a horror story in which Iraqi troops looted the incubators from a Kuwaiti hospital, leaving the premature babies on the cold floor to die. The media, part of the swindle from the start, never bothered asking why the "nurse" didn't just pick the babies up and wrap them in blankets or something.

Enraged by the incubator story, Americans supported operation Desert Storm, which never removed Saddam Hussein from power but which did take Kuwait's oil off of the market for almost 2 years and limited Iraq's oil exports to this very day. That our sons and daughters came home with serious and lingering medical illnesses was apparently not too great a price to pay for increased oil profits. Following the victory in Iraq, yet another war appeared to be in the offering in the mineral rich regions of Bosnia. Yet again, a hoax was used to create support for military action.

While several American Presidents have willingly started wars for personal purposes, perhaps no President has ever carried it to the extreme that Bill Clinton has.Coincident with the expected public statement of Monica Lewinsky following her testimony, Bill Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack on Sudan and Afghanistan, claiming to have had irrefutable proof that bogeyman extraordinaire (and former Afghani ally) Osama Bin Ladin was creating terrorist chemical weapons there.

Examination of the photos of the debris revealed none of the expected structures one would find in a laboratory that handled lethal weapons-grade materials. Assurances from the CIA that they had a positive soil test for biological weapons fell on their face when it was revealed that there had been no open soil anywhere near the pre-bombed facility. Sudan requested that international observers come test the remains of the factory for any signs of the nerve gas Clinton had insisted was there. None was found. The Sudanese plant was a harmless aspirin factory, and the owner has sued for damages. Later examination of the site hit in Afghanistan revealed it to be a mosque.

Like Germany under Chancellor Hitler, there have been events in our nation which strike fear into the hearts of the citizens, such as the New York World Trade Tower bombing, the OK City Federal Building, and the Olympic Park bomb (nicely timed to divert the media from witnesses to the TWA 800 shoot down). The media has been very quick to blame such events on "radicals", "subversives", "vast right wing conspiracies", and other "enemies in our midst", no different than the lies used by Cicero and Hitler.

But on closer examination, such "domestic terrorist" events do not appear to be what they are made out to be. The FBI had an informant inside the World Trade Tower bombers, Emad Salam, who offered to sabotage the bomb. The FBI told him "no". The so-called "hot bed" of white separatism at Elohim City, occasional home to Tim McVeigh in the weeks prior to the OK City bombing, was founded and is being run by an FBI informant!

And nobody has ever really explained what this second Ryder truck was doing in a secret camp half way from Elohim City to Oklahoma City two weeks before the bombing. So, here we are today. Like the Romans of Crassus' and Cicero's time, or the Germans under a newly elected Hitler, we are being warned that a dangerous enemy threatens us, implacable, invisible, omnipresent, and invulnerable as long as our government is hamstrung by that silly old Bill of Rights. Already there have appeared articles debating whether or not "extraordinary measures" (i.e. torture) are not fully justified under certain circumstances such as those we are purported to face. As was the case in Rome and Germany, the government continues to plead with the public for an expansion of its power and authority, to "deal with the crisis".

However, as Casio watch timers are paraded before the cameras, to the stentorian tones of the talking heads' constant dire warnings, it is legitimate to question just how real the crises is, and how much is the result of political machinations by our own leaders. Are the terrorists really a threat, or just hired actors with bombs and Casio watches, paid for by Cicero and given brown shirts to wear by Hitler?

Is terrorism inside the United States really from outside, or is it a stage managed production, designed to cause Americans to believe they have no choice but to surrender the Republic and accept the totalitarian rule of a new emperor, or a new Fuhrer?

Once lost, the Romans never got their Republic back. Once lost, the Germans never got their Republic back. In both cases, the nation had to totally collapse before freedom was restored to the people.

Remember that when Crassus tells you that Spartacus approaches.

Remember that when thugs in the streets act in a manner clearly designed to provoke the public fear.

Remember that when the Reichstag burns down.

Remember that when the President lies to you about weapons of mass destruction.




Daoud Khan
From Answers.com

Sardar Mohammed Daoud Khan (July 18, 1909 – April 28, 1978), son of Sardar Mohammed Aziz Khan and grandson of Sardar Mohammed Yusuf Khan was an Afghan statesman and President of the Republic of Afghanistan from 1973 until his assassination in 1978 as a result of a revolution led by the quasi-Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).

Khan was known for his progressive policies, especially in relation to the rights of women, and for initiating two five-year modernization plans. His diplomatic relationship with the rest of the world is best summed up by his quote, "I feel the happiest when I can light my American cigarettes with Soviet matches."

Royal Prime Minister
He was appointed Prime Minister on September, 1953 in an intra-family transfer of power that involved no violence. His ten-year tenure was noted for the foreign policy turn to the Soviet Union, the completion of the Helmand Valley project, which radically improved living conditions in southwestern Afghanistan, and tentative steps towards the emancipation of women.

By 1956, having been rebuffed by the US for both sales of arms and loans, and with the independence of the former parts of the British Empire in Southeast Asia, his government turned Afghanistan toward the Soviet Union. His main reason was to train both the Afghan Army and Afghan Air Force as a defense against provocations by the Pakistanis.

His obsession with Pashtunistan and his hostility to Pakistan proved disastrous for the economy. Daoud supported the reunification of the Pashtun people under Afghanistan, but this would involve taking a considerable amount of territory from the new nation of Pakistan.

With the creation of an independent Pakistan the Durand line had become an international border dividing the Pashtun people.

In 1961, to discourage Pashtun reunification efforts Pakistan closed its borders with Afghanistan causing a crisis and greater dependence on the USSR and the USSR became Afghanistan's principal trading partner. Within a few months, the USSR had sent jet airplanes, tanks, heavy and light artillery for a heavily discounted price tag of $25 million.

The crisis was finally resolved with the forced resignation of Daoud in March 1963 and the opening of the border in May. In 1963 Zahir introduced a new constitution, for the first time excluding all members of the royal family from the council of ministers. He quietly stepped down.

President of the Republic
On July 17, 1973, Khan seized power from his cousin King Zahir. Departing from tradition, and for the first time in Afghan history, Daoud did not proclaim himself Shah, establishing instead a Republic with himself as President.

Democracy was curtailed and there was little public representation except through the now largely nominated Loya Jirga. A new constitution backed by a Loya Jirgah was promulgated in February 1977 but failed to satisfy all the factions.

Daoud sought to increase relationships and trade with other Muslim countries and made a tentative agreement with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on a solution to the Pashtunistan problem.

His administration and the army squelched a growing Islamic fundamentalist movement whose leaders fled to Pakistan. There they were supported by Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and encouraged to continue the fight against Daoud. These men --- Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Ahmad Shah Massoud --- would later be major leaders of the mujaheddin.

Any resistance to the new regime was suppressed. A coup against Daoud, which may have been planned before he took power, was subdued shortly after his seizure of power. In October 1973, Maiwandwal, a former prime minister and a highly respected former diplomat, died in prison at a time when Parchamis controlled the Ministry of Interior under circumstances corroborating the widespread belief that he had been tortured to death.

Reneging on his promise to make progressive reforms, he ran a repressive regime with hundreds of arrests and political executions of leftists (including members of the Parcham who had helped him gain power) and Islamists (religious extremists.)

He lessened the country's dependence on the Soviet Union and went to India, Saudi Arabia and newly-oil-rich Iran for aid. Surprisingly, he did not renew the Pashtunistan issue; relations with Pakistan improved thanks to interventions from the US and Iran.

The next year, he established his own political party, the National Revolutionary Party, which became the focus of all political activity. In January 1977, a loyal jirgah approved the constitution establishing a presidential, one party system of government.

Diplomatic Relations with the USSR
President Daoud met Leonid Brezhnev on a state visit to Moscow from April 12 to 15, 1977. He had asked for a private meeting with the Soviet Premier, to discuss with him the increased pattern of Soviet actions in Afghanistan. In particular the intensified Soviet attempt to unite the two factions of the Afghan communist parties, Parcham and Khalq.

Brezhnev described Afghanistan's non-alignment as important to the USSR and essential to the promotion of peace in Asia, but warned him about the presence of experts from NATO countries stationed in the northern parts of Afghanistan.

Communist Coup and Assassination
The April 19, 1978, the funeral for Mir Akbar Khyber, a prominent Parchami ideologue who had been murdered, served as a rallying point for the Afghan communists. An estimated 10,000 to 30,000 persons gathered to hear stirring speeches by PDPA leaders such as Nur Muhammad Taraki, Hafizullah Amin and Babrak Karmal.

Shocked by this demonstration of communist unity, Daud ordered the arrest of the PDPA leaders, but he reacted too slowly. It took him a week to arrest Taraki, Karmal managed to escape to the USSR and Amin was merely placed under house arrest. According to later PDPA writings, Amin sent complete orders for the coup from his home while it was under armed guard using his family as messengers. The army had been put on alert on April 26 because of a presumed "anti-Islamic" coup.

On April 27, 1978, a coup d'état beginning with troop movements at the military base at Kabul International Airport, gained ground slowly over the next twenty-four hours as rebels battled units loyal to Daud Khan in and around the capital.

Daud Khan and most of his family were shot in the presidential palace the following day. His death was not publicly announced after the coup. Instead, the new government declared that President Khan had "resigned for health reasons."





The Cost of an Afghan 'Victory'

By Dilip Hiro
From The Nation
1999

Ten years ago, on February 15, 1989, as the last of the 115,000 Soviet soldiers crossed over from Afghanistan into Soviet Tajikistan, there was quiet celebration in Washington as well as Riyadh and Islamabad. Officials in these capitals visualized Moscow's retreat as the first, crucial step in the re-emergence of an independent Afghanistan ready to ally with the United States. The US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance had played the central role in training, arming and financing the Afghan mujahedeen to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan.

With the Soviet withdrawal accomplished--a severe blow to Moscow in the cold war--Washington put Afghanistan on the back burner. But the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 gave a second wind to the mujahedeen movement, which acquired a momentum of its own. Its seizure of power in Kabul in April 1992, following the fall of the leftist regime of Muhammad Najibullah, paved the way for the rise of the Taliban Islamic movement two years later and its capture of Kabul in September 1996.

Today the Taliban controls 90 percent of Afghanistan and rules the country according to its interpretation of the Sharia, Islamic law--an interpretation that even the mullahs of Iran find repulsive. Unique in the world, the Taliban regime deprives women of education and jobs. It has allowed the training camps near the Pakistani border--originally established by the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI)--to be reopened to give guerrilla training to fundamentalist volunteers from Xinjiang, China; Bosnia; Algeria; and elsewhere to further their Islamist agenda through armed actions in their respective countries. The Taliban has rebuffed Washington's demands that it hand over Osama bin Laden, a Saudi veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and a fugitive extremist accused of masterminding the US Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam last August, which killed 257 people, including twelve Americans. The US government has offered a $5 million reward for his capture.

Did the founders of US policy in Afghanistan during the Carter Administration (1977-1981) realized that in spawning Islamic militancy with the primary aim of defeating the Soviet Union they were risking sowing the seeds of a phenomenon that was likely to acquire a life of its own, spread throughout the Muslim world and threaten US interests?

Perhaps not, but it was not as if they had no choice. When Moscow intervened militarily in Afghanistan in December 1979, there were several secular and nationalist Afghan groups opposed to the Moscow-backed Communists, who had seized power twenty months earlier in a military coup. Washington had the option of bolstering these groups and encouraging them to form an alliance with three traditionalist Islamic factions, two of them monarchist. Instead, Washington beefed up the three fundamentalist organizations then in existence. This left moderate Islamic leaders no choice but to ally with hard-liners and form the radical-dominated Islamic Alliance of Afghan Mujahedeen (IAAM) in 1983.

The main architect of US Policy was Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Advisor. A virulent anti-Communist of Polish origin, he saw his chance in Moscow's Afghanistan intervention to rival Henry Kissinger as a heavyweight strategic thinker. It was not enough to expel the Soviet tanks, he reasoned. This was a great opportunity to export a composite ideology of nationalism and Islam to the Muslim-majority Central Asian states and Soviet republics with a view to destroying the Soviet order.

Brzezinski also fell in easily with the domestic considerations of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator of Pakistan. After having overthrown the elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1977, Zia was keen to create a popular base for his regime by inducting Islam into politics. One way of doing this was to give aid to the exiled Afghan fundamentalist leaders in Pakistan.

As for Saudi Arabia, the remaining member of the troika, it had long been a bulwark of anti-Communism, its rulers lavish in their funding of antileftist forces around the globe--be it in Angola, Mozambique, Portugal or Italy. The fact that the population of Afghanistan was 99 percent Muslim was an additional incentive to Riyadh.

The US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance's financing, training and arming of the mujahedeen--recruited from among the 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan--was coordinated and supervised by the CIA. The day-to-day management rested with Pakistan's ISI. All donations in weapons and cash to the campaign by various sources--chiefly Washington and Riyadh--were handled by the CIA. These amounted to about $40 billion, with the bulk coming from the United States and Saudi Arabia, which contributed equally.

The volunteers underwent military training and political education. Both were imparted by the ISI. In the political classes the mujahedeen were given a strong dose of nationalism and Islam. The fact that the Soviets were foreign and atheistic made them doubly despicable. The intention was to fire up militant Muslims to fight Soviet imperialism. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles in the later stages of the jihad, the mujahedeen made a hash of Soviet helicopter gunships, a critical tool of the USSR's counterinsurgency campaign.

From the start the ranks of the Afghan mujahedeen were complemented by non-Afghan volunteers eager to join the anti-Soviet jihad. The very first to do so was Osama bin Laden, then a young civil engineering graduate from an affluent family of construction contractors in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. He devised a scheme encouraging non-Afghan Muslims to enroll in the jihad. The 30,000 who did so in the eighties consisted of an almost equal number of Arabs and non-Arabs. Bin Laden, who attracted 4,000 volunteers from Saudi Arabia, became the nominal leader of the Afghan-Arabs. He developed cordial relations with the heads of the more radical constituents of the IAAM, including Mullah Mohammed Omar of the Hizb-e-Islami (Khalis group), who was later to emerge as the Taliban's supreme leader. Besides participating in guerrilla actions, bin Laden constructed roads in mujahedeen-controlled areas and refurbished caves as storage places for arms and ammunition. Working closely with the CIA, he also collected funds for the anti-Soviet jihad from affluent Saudi citizens.

On the wider propaganda front, Brzezinski's successors continued his intensive radio campaign (through Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe) to arouse and heighten Islamic consciousness and ethnic nationalism in Central Asia in order to undermine the Moscow-directed Soviet system. The glaring contradiction of the US policy of bolstering Islamic zealots in Afghanistan while opposing them in neighboring Iran seemed to escape both Brzezinski and his successors.

In the end, the Soviet Union collapsed, but for reasons that had nothing to do with the interreligious or interethnic tensions among its citizens, which the US policy-makers had tried to engender in Muslim-majority Central Asia and Azerbaijian.

Following the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Afghan-Arabs, including bin Laden, began drifting back to their homes in the Arab world. Their heightened political consciousness made them realize that countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt were just as much client regimes of the United States as the Najibullah regime had been of Moscow. In their home countries they built a formidable constituency--popularly known as "Afghanis"--who combined strong ideological convictions with the guerrilla skills they had acquired in Pakistan and Afghanistan under CIA supervision. Having defeated Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan, they felt, naively, that they could do the same to US imperialism in say, Saudi Arabia, with its strong links to Washington since its inception in 1932.

During the 1990 Kuwait crisis, the stationing of more than 540,000 non-Muslim US troops on the soil of Saudi Arabia--considered sacred as the realm containing Mecca and Medina, the birth and death places of the Prophet Muhammad--angered many pious Saudis, especially the ulema (religious scholars). They argued that under the Sharia it is forbidden for foreign forces to be based in Saudi Arabia under their own flag. Their discontent rose when, having liberated Kuwait in March 1991, the Pentagon failed to carry out full withdrawal from the kingdom. Among those who protested vocally was bin Laden, who established a formal committee that advocated religious-political reform. In 1993 King Fahd created a Consultative Council, all of whose members were appointed by him and served in a merely advisory capacity; this step failed to pacify bin Laden. During the Yemeni civil war of April-July 1994, when Riyadh backed the Marxist former South Yemeni leaders against the government in Sana, bin Laden condemned the official policy. The authorities stripped him of his Saudi citizenship and expelled him from the country.

But bin Laden's banishment (to Sudan) did not deter other Islamic radicals from pursuing their agenda. In November 1995 they detonated a bomb at a Saudi National Guard base in Riyadh, killing five US service personnel stationed there. Of the four Saudis arrested as suspects, three turned out to be "Afghanis." They were found guilty and executed.

However, what put the US military presence in Saudi Arabia in the limelight was the truck bombing on June 25, 1996, outside the Al Khobar complex near the Dhahran air base. The explosion killed nineteen American servicemen and injured more than 400. This occurred a few weeks after bin Laden had arrived in Afghanistan from Sudan, which he was forced to leave when its government came under pressure from Washington and Riyadh.

Bin Laden then called for a jihad against the Americans in Saudi Arabia. "The presence of American crusader forces in Muslim Gulf states...is the greatest danger and [poses] the most serious harm, threatening the world's largest oil reserves," he said. "Pushing out this American occupying enemy is the most important duty after the duty of belief in God."

After the Al Khobar bombing the Saudi authorities grudgingly admitted the presence of some 5,000 American troops on Saudi soil. They were part of the force in charge of 170 US fighters, bombers and tank-killers parked in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Well-informed Saudi watchers, however, put the number of American servicemen in the kingdom at 15,000-20,000, including several thousand in civilian dress, based in Dhahran, Jedda and the defense ministry in Riyadh.

What is the basis of the US military presence in Saudi Arabia, and what are its aims? When on August 6, 1990, King Fahd invited US troops to his kingdom, it was to bolster Saudi defenses against the threat of an Iraqi invasion following Baghdad's occupation of Kuwait. Once the US-led coalition had expelled the Iraqis from Kuwait, this mission was accomplished. So there was no more need for foreign troops, nor was there any official explanation for their presence.

The unofficial explanation is that the purpose of the US warplanes stationed in Saudi Arabia is to enforce the no-fly zone in southern Iraq. This rationale is flawed in at least three respects. First, since Washington has publicly acknowledged defense agreements with Kuwait and Bahrain, why not limit the stationing of warplanes to those countries and exclude Saudi Arabia because of its special religious significance to Muslims worldwide? Second, the southern no-fly zone was not imposed until August 1992, seventeen months after the end of the Gulf War, ostensibly to prevent Saddam Hussein's regime from persecuting the Shiite population of southern Iraq--so this could not have been the reason American aircraft were stationed there before that time. Finally, with one or two aircraft carriers of the US Fifth Fleet, headquartered in Bahrain, permanently plying the Persian Gulf, is there really a need to station US warplanes on Saudi soil--and thus provide fuel to the likes of bin Laden, who claims that the kingdom is "occupied" by US troops in the same way Afghanistan was by Soviet soldiers?

This leads one to take seriously the explanation offered by those defense experts--such as a former Middle East specialist at the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies--who claim inside knowledge of joint Washington-Riyadh strategy devised and implemented after the armed uprising in Mecca in November 1979. In case there's an antiroyalist coup, they say, the United States would need seventy-two hours to marshal its full military might to reverse the coup. For many years the Saudi defense ministry has been purchasing sophisticated weapons systems, chiefly from the United States. But the Pentagon was reportedly alarmed by the account of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the US-led coalition in the Gulf War, that suggested the Saudi military, especially the air force, was incapable of operating the sophisticated weaponry it possessed. Thus the presence of US military officials at key Saudi military facilities is considered indispensable in order to insure swift coordination and secure communications in case of an emergency.

It was against this background that bin Laden and his acolytes articulated the thesis that their country was occupied. Since then the events in the Persian Gulf, centered around relations between Iraq and the United States, have strengthened the views of Islamic militants. In the midst of the deepening Baghdad-Washington crisis of February 1998, which resulted in the build-up of a US armada in the Gulf, they published an assessment that applied to the entire Middle East.

On February 23,1998, under the aegis of the International Islamic Front (IIF), Shaikh bin Laden, Aiman al Zawhiri (of jihad al Islami, Egypt), Abu Yasser Ahmad Taha (of Gamaat al Islamiya, Egypt), Shaikh Mir Hamzah (of Jamiat al Ulema, Pakistan) and Fazl ul Rahman (of Harkat al jihad, Bangladesh) issued a communique laced with the kind of language used earlier against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

"For more than seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples," it stated.

"Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the Crusader-Zionist alliance, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres...Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there."

Then came the fatwa (religious decree): "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Holy Mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim [again]. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, 'And fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,' and 'fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God.'" This was open season on Americans to all those who agreed with the IIF's stance. Following the Washington-London airstrikes against Iraq in mid-December, bin Laden called on Muslims worldwide to "confront, fight and kill" Americans and Britons for "their support for their leaders' decision to attack Iraq." Earlier, spurning the US demands to hand bin Laden over to Washington, the Taliban government had proposed that the evidence against him be passed on to it so that he could be tried in Afghanistan under Islamic law. The United States refused to cooperate. So in late November, the Taliban supreme judge declared bin Laden innocent.

A decade after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the mood among US and Saudi decision makers has turned from quiet satisfaction to perplexed handwringing. In the words of Richard Murphy, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East and South Asia during the two Reagan administrations, "We did spawn a monster in Afghanistan." The "monster" of violent Islamic fundamentalism has now grown tentacles that extend from western China to Algeria to the east coast of America, and its reach is not likely to diminish without a great deal of the United States' money, time and patience, along with the full cooperation of foreign governments.


Blowback

By Mary Anne Weaver
From The Atlantic Monthly
1996


The CIA poured billions into a jihad against Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, creating a militant Islamist Abraham Lincoln Brigade believed to have been involved in bombings from Islamabad to New York. Is Bosnia next?

One Friday evening, just after sunset prayers, Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman climbed into a camouflaged truck in Peshawar, Pakistan, and set off for his first trip inside Afghanistan. It was 1985, he told me later, and he had just spent three years in Egyptian prisons, where he had been severely tortured as he awaited trial on charges of issuing a fatwa resulting in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat; a military court later acquitted him of that, and of a related conspiracy charge. (Last January in New York the sheikh was sentenced to life imprisonment for seditious conspiracy to wage a "war of urban terrorism against the United States.") As he settled into the back seat of the U.S.-supplied truck, the sheikh, who was then forty-seven and had been blind since infancy, was helped into a flak jacket by the fundamentalist Afghan resistance leader Gulbaddin Hekmatyar.

At that time the Soviet Union was occupying Afghanistan, and the United States was supporting the Afghan resistance; Hekmatyar, though he was one of the most stridently anti-Western of the resistance leaders, was receiving roughly half the arms that the CIA was supplying. The sheikh had first met Hekmatyar in Saudi Arabia a number of years before, and they were friends. They had much in common: both were exceedingly charismatic religious populists; both had committed their lives to jihad, or Islamic holy war; both were fiery orators. They were both given to elliptical, colorful turns of phrase, and their shared message was clear: the imperative to overthrow a secular government,whether in Afghanistan or Egypt and establish an Islamic state.

Outside Peshawar the mountain passes came alive with men. The mujahideen were loading their caravans with AK-47s, mortars, grenades, and mines to return to Afghanistan. Mules and ponies strained under the weight of wooden crates strapped onto their backs. There were no identifying markings on the crates, nor were there any on the contents, but everything was pan of what would become Washington's largest covert-action program since Vietnam -- equipping fighters on the last battlefield of the Cold War. The truck in which Sheikh Omar was traveling joined a convoy of six or seven others and continued toward the Khyber Pass.

The mujahideen preferred to move the arms supplied by the CIA on moonless nights, Nawab Salim, one of Hekmatyar's aides, explained later when he recounted the trip to me. Salim accompanied the sheikh and Hekmatyar into Afghanistan that night; so did Muhammad Shawqi Islambouli, an Egyptian who was fighting in the war, and who was the elder brother of Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli, the assassin of Anwar Sadat. The sun was just beginning to rise when the convoy reached its destination, a battlefield headquarters in the province of Jalalabad, some fifty miles northeast of the Afghan capital, Kabul. Everything there seemed to be highly improvised, and the headquarters consisted merely of a string of battered and pockmarked buildings built into the side of a strategic hill.

For nearly two decades Sheikh Omar had preached his message of jihad throughout the Middle East. Now he was inside Afghanistan, where a jihad was actually taking place. "My strongest emotion was pride," he told me afterward. "I felt so proud of my religion, so proud of the power that Muslims had. And I knew that Allah would aid these people and this religion, and that Islam would be victorious in the end."

Guided by Hekmatyar and Islambouli, the sheikh walked to a sandbagged position on the crest of the hill. From below, in the valley, came the echo of crashing artillery shells. He stood there for perhaps five minutes. "He was weeping," Nawab Salim recalled. After a few moments Sheikh Omar turned toward Hekmatyar. "I have never asked Allah for anything," he said. "But I am under a great disadvantage now. If only Allah could give me eyes for a couple of years, or for a couple of hours, so I could fight in the jihad!"

LAST December 21, in a crowded market in Peshawar, the rugged Pakistani frontier town that had been the primary staging area for the jihad in Afghanistan, a car bomb exploded, killing thirty-six people and wounding about 120 more. Only a month earlier two similar car bombs -- one outside the Riyadh headquarters of a U.S. military training center for the Saudi National Guard, the other outside the Egyptian embassy in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad -- killed twenty-four people, including five Americans. The attack in Saudi Arabia was almost certainly aimed at the Saudi dynasty as well as at the United States. As for the car bombings in Pakistan, they followed threats from three militant Egyptian Islamist groups who demanded that the government of Pakistan stop extraditing those of their members -- all of them veterans of the jihad -- who had stayed on when the war came to an end and were using Peshawar as a base. The groups also demanded that the government of the United States, for its part, release Sheikh Omar.

One of the groups that claimed credit for the bombing in Saudi Arabia -- and one that has warned that there will be further attacks -- had participated in the jihad in Afghanistan, as had all three of the groups believed to have been involved in the November bombing in Islamabad. The sheikh and the CIA (and Saudi Arabia) had been obsessed with driving out the Soviets. As a result the CIA helped to train and fund what eventually became an international network of highly disciplined and effective Islamic militants -- and a new breed of terrorist as well.

Speaking of the bombings, a former U.S. diplomat specializing in Saudi Arabia told me recently, "Whether the attacks were carried out by the same or allied Islamic militant groups is not the most important thing. What is far more troubling is that these attacks illustrate the changing nature of terrorism since the Cold War. There's been a marked decline in the fairly well funded, ideologically organized groups like the Red Brigades. More and more we're seeing a proliferation of amorphous underground Islamic groups that we've never heard of before." He added that larger numbers of people are prone to enter the new-style groups. "That, to me, is highly worrisome. Their operations are easy to do. They're basically low-tech. Sure, a certain amount of training is required -- and then you go to a feedstore and to a Radio Shack. The common element in all these attacks -- whether in Cairo or Riyadh, Isla or Algiers, Europe or New York -- is today's equivalent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: the 'Afghan Arabs,' the veterans of the Afghanistan war."

SIXTEEN years have passed since the CIA began providing weapons and funds -- eventually totaling more than $3 billion -- to a fratricidal alliance of seven Afghan resistance groups, none of whose leaders are by nature democratic, and all of which are fundamentalist in religion to some extent, autocratic in politics, and venomously anti-American. Washington's financial commitment to the jihad was exceeded only by Saudi Arabia's. At the time the jihad was getting under way there was no significant Islamist opposition movement in Saudi Arabia, and it apparently never occurred to the Saudi rulers, who feared the Soviets as much as Washington did, that the volunteers it sent might be converted by the jihad's ideology. Therein lies the greatest paradox of the bombing in Riyadh: it and the explosions in Peshawar and Islamabad could well prove to be part of the negative fallout -- or "blowback," in intelligence parlance -- of the U.S.- and Saudi-orchestrated Afghan jihad.

The bombings -- the first such terrorist attack in Saudi history, and among the worst in Pakistan's -- were the clearest warnings yet of an ominous escalation in the conflicts between the governments in Cairo and Riyadh and their Islamist foes. And the carnage in Islamabad -- the fourth attack against the Egyptian govrnment abroad in recent months (Mubarak narrowly survived an assassination attempt in Addis Ababa) -- indicated that Egypt's militant Islamic groups, facing an increasingly vengeful crackdown at home, were transferring their four-year-old war to the international front. U.S. policymakers were stunned. In less than a week the vulnerabilities of three of Washington's pivotal regional allies had become clear.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan had all served U.S. interests during the jihad Afghanistan; none appears able to cope with its aftermath. Mubarak's anger was palpable when he told me, months before the bombings, that he laid the blame for Islamist terrorism squarely on Pakistan, for, in his words, failing to "clean up" Peshawar and its environs. Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's bewilderment after the bombings was evident, as she once again faulted the United States and the CIA, which she accused of continuing to finance Pakistan's radical Muslim clerics and fundamentalist groups. As for the rulers of Saudi Arabia, whose princes and foundations, ironically, remain the leading benefactors of many of the militant Islamic groups in a shortsighted attempt to placate the kingdom's expanding fundamentalist constituency, they seemed shaken out of their placidity. And government officials in all three capitals began to wonder, as they redoubled their efforts against terrorism, whether the Islamists could still be contained.

For more than a decade some 25,000 Islamic militants, from nearly thirty countries around the world, had streamed through Peshawar on their way to the jihad. They came, without passports and without names, from the Palestinian organization Hamas, from Egypt's AlGama'a al-Islamiya and Al-Jihad, from Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, and from the Philippines' Moro Liberation Front. Five years after the jihad ended, a thousand or so remained, some in Peshawar itself, others encamped in the mountain passes of the ungovernable tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, planning and executing what investigators now believe were terrorist acts that have reached from Cairo to Algiers, Manila to Bangkok -- and to the streets of Islamabad. Riyadh, Peshawar, and New York.

"Even today you can sit at the Khyber Pass and see every color, every creed, every nationality, pass," a Western diplomat told me in Peshawar last spring. "These groups, in their wildest imagination, never would have met if there had been no jihad. For a Moro to get a Sting missile! To make contacts with Islamists from North Africa! The United States created a Moscow Central in Peshawar for these groups, and the consequences for all of us are astronomical."

The diplomat went on to say that many veterans of the Afghan jihad have set up an informal network of small, loosely organized underground cells, with support centers scattered around the world: in the United States, the Persian Gulf countries, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Sudan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The days of mule trains like the one Sheikh Omar joined en route to Afghanistan are long gone; now E-mail and faxes drive the jihad.

PEOPLE in the Peshawar bazaars and in the overcrowded refugee camps still remember Sheikh Omar from the war years. A short, rotund man, dressed in long gray clerical robes and a red fezlike cap with a wide white band, he was easily distinguishable by his blindness and by his full gray-white beard, which rested on his chest. It was in Peshawar that Sheikh Omar became involved with the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials who were orchestrating the war. The sixty or so CIA and Special Forces officers based there considered him a "valuable asset," according to one of them, and overlooked his anti-Western message and incitement to holy war because they wanted him to help unify the mujahideen groups.

Unifying the groups, which had been fighting among themselves for years, proved impossible even for Sheikh Omar. but he did succeed in coordinating some of their activities. As he did so, he favored the two most anti-Western and fundamentalist of them -- one led by Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the other by Professor Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf, who, like the sheikh, held a Ph.D. from the University of al-Azhar, in Cairo. A swashbuckling figure, often draped in blankets of homespun cloth, Sayyaf had taught at Kabul University, but his power base inside Afghanistan was limited. Nevertheless, largely because he was an adherent of the puritanical Wahhabi school of Islam (the dominant school in Saudi Arabia), Riyadh funded him lavishly.

But Sheikh Omar's closest friend in Peshawar was a highly respected Palestinian, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a man of erudition, refinement, and eloquence, who also had a Ph.D. from Al-Azhar but was everything the blustering Sayyaf was not. Like Sheikh Omar, he had been a professor of shari'a law (at the University of Jordan) before joining the jihad. Azzam became the pivotal figure in the Arab world in popularizing the cause. What was called the Service Office, which he led until November of 1989, when he was killed by a still-unidentified assassin, was the largest recruitment center in Peshawar, perhaps in the world, for Arab volunteers. It became, in a sense, the nexus for the pan-Islamic effort both inside and -- after the Soviet occupation ended, in 1989 -- outside Afghanistan.

Money flowed into the Service Office from the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Sheikh Azzam belonged. But the heaviest funding, which may have totaled hundreds of millions of dollars, came from Saudi Arabia -- some directly from the Saudi government, some from official mosques, and some from Saudi princes and members of the kingdom's financial and business elite. Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the governor of Riyadh, who headed a support committee that funded the Arab mujahideen, was a heavy contributor, as was the Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, who chairs the immensely powerful Muslim World League, the main conduit for Saudi government funds to Islamic causes worldwide. As was and is true of much of Saudi Arabia's clandestine funding abroad, the league's funds were often distributed somewhat indiscriminately. The Service Office set up branches in Europe and the United States as the war progressed. East Coast efforts in the United States centered on the Alkifah Refugee Center, on Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue. More than 200 Arabs and Arab-Americans were recruited and sent to the jihad.

As Sheikh Azzam recruited, Sheikh Omar preached. Generally flying first-class, he carried his message of jihad from Pakistani refugee camps to the towns of upper Egypt, into Saudi Arabian mosques, and to Islamic centers in Germany, England, Turkey, and the United States. During his travels, over nearly five years, Sheikh Omar's stature continued to grow, as he shored up old friendships and made new ones along the way. He always kept in mind his ultimate goal: the establishment in Egypt of an Islamic state. Planning ahead, he cultivated men whose assistance would eventually lead to the formation of an international support network for his activities -- an axis that would link Europe and the United States with Sudan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

The sheikh met frequently during those years, in London and Khartoum, with Hassan al-Turabi, the erudite Islamist who today effectively controls the rigid Islamic government in Sudan (whence U.S. diplomats were withdrawn in February because of fears of terrorist attacks). He wooed Pakistani generals, many of whom were, and are, committed Islamists, and all of whom were charmed by Sheikh Omar's extraordinary knowledge of the Koran. And he returned to Saudi Arabia, where he had previously lived, there proving adept at exploiting political divisions within the ruling establishment.

Two of his most abiding friendships, however, turned out to be with his traveling companions on that 1985 trip. Gulbaddin Hekmatyar was named Prime Minister of Afghanistan in 1992, when the puppet Communist government in Kabul finally fell. The fighting continued, now in the form of a fratricidal civil war in which Hekmatyar unleashed a deadly offensive against other factions of the mujahideen, using a formidable arsenal of arms -- all of them supplied by the United States and Saudi Arabia. (Ironically, Hekmatyar and the present leaders of the Afghan government, who among them have stockpiled some 500 "missing" Stinger anti-aircraft missiles supplied by the CIA, are now being challenged by a new and extremely fundamentalist Afghan student militia known as the Taliban, which grew out of the chaos left by the CIA's war. With the strong backing of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, it has managed to wrest control of nearly half of the country -- and several Stingers -- from the leaders of the jihad.)

Muhammad Islambouli, who at one time was a student of Sheikh Omar's at the Upper Egyptian University of Asyut, has since that trip in 1985 become a leading figure in Egypt's militant Islamic Group, or Al-Gama'a al-Islamiya, the first organization to claim responsibility for the Islamabad bomb. The group's spiritual mentor is Sheikh Omar. Like hundreds of other Egyptians who fought in the jihad, Islambouli now divides his time among Europe and Peshawar and the battlefields of Afghanistan, all of which serve as organizational centers or training grounds for Egypt's militant Islamic groups.

WHEN Sheikh Omar entered the United States, in July of 1990, via Saudi Arabia, Peshawar, and Sudan on a much-disputed tourist visa issued by an undercover agent of the CIA, his primary purpose was to set up a U.S. infrastructure, a funding mechanism, and an organizational base for Egypt's militant Islamic groups -- an undertaking that he had largely accomplished by the time of his arrest in 1993.

Many of his followers remained in Peshawar, however, and continued their work. Some teamed up with other militant Islamist groups, including a cadre of demolitions and weapons experts from the Saudi Islamic Movement for Change, which claimed responsibility for the Riyadh car bomb. Others were instructors or trainees in the dozen or so military training camps that hugged the Pakistani-Afghan border on both sides. Still others went off in search of new jihads, in Tajikistan or Kashmir, or joined some 3,000 veterans of the jihad who went as volunteers to Bosnia, where, easily distinguishable by their dark beards, they fought alongside the predominantly Muslim Bosnian army for two years. Last October the Afghan veterans vowed to kill five British soldiers in the United Nations force in retaliation for the death of a Bosnian fundamentalist who had pointed a gun at a British soldier and was shot by him. They are also suspected of having murdered an American employee of the UN. Now there is concern that the jihad veterans will engage in acts against U.S. troops -- a concern that turned to alarm in February, when militant Islamist groups vowed to strike back at U.S. targets in retaliation for the sentencing of Sheikh Omar.

AS they sifted through the rubble of the former Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, investigators, including agents from the FBI (which also has agents in Riyadh), attempted to determine what, if any, links exist between the two attacks, each of which involved more than a thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil -- the same highly combustible mixture used in the World Trade Center bombing in New York.

"The bomb in Riyadh is of far greater interest to me," the former U.S. diplomat specializing in Saudi Arabia told me. "The one in Islamabad was more comprehensible, and highly predictable. Riyadh was not. Never before has the Saudi Islamic opposition been so emboldened. In a sense they ripped off the veil."

About a thousand Saudis had fought in the jihad. Largely funded and supported by their government, they came from good and wealthy families. I asked the diplomat what, in his view, made the Saudis different from other Islamists who came to the jihad.

"Their government sent them," he responded. "It was the patriotic thing to do. But when these guys got there, they met others and began to network; they found a whole new world out there. And despite their wealth, they were underemployed, frustrated, an accident waiting to happen -- and it did. Also, unlike the others who went to Afghanistan as members of Islamic groups -- Gama'a, Al-Jihad, Hamas, and the like -- there were no organized Saudi groups. That's what makes these guys very different: they set up the networks when they came home."

Other U.S. officials agree, and warn that despite the Saudi government's efforts to blame the usual regional suspects -- Iran, Iraq, and Sudan -- for the car bombing, the Islamist discontent in Saudi Arabia is real, and the movement is basically homegrown.

One of its most charismatic and powerful champions is Osama bin Laden, the billionaire scion of a leading Saudi family. Fervent and devout, he was described to me by one U.S. intelligence official as "a religious fanatic with enormous wealth -- a man with a vision, who knows precisely how he wants to convert that vision into reality." Bin Laden worked closely with Saudi intelligence and with Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, in funding the jihad, and eventually came to Peshawar as a mujahid himself. There he befriended Gulbaddin Hekmatyar and Sheikh Omar, and fought with the forces of Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf. He now divides his time between Khartoum and London, where he owns opulent estates, and he places his formidable wealth at the disposal of militant Islamic groups around the world. Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, Bin Laden's brother-in-law and a Saudi financier, was a prime conduit for funding militant Islamic groups in the Philippines, Filipino officials assert; and, according to U.S. investigators, there is evidence that during the mid-1990s, when Khalifa was the head of the Islamic Relief Agency -- a quasi-government Saudi charity -- in the Philippines, he had contact with Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, alleged to be the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing in New York.

Three years ago, at U.S. urging, the Saudi government stripped Bin Laden of his citizenship because of his "irresponsible behavior ... and his refusal to obey instructions issued to him." When I asked a U.S. counterterrorism expert what this meant, he replied, "Osama was warned by Saudi intelligence: Do nothing against us and we'll leave you alone." Bin Laden ignored the warnings, and the Saudis began running intelligence operations against him and his entourage in Khartoum; at the time of the Bush Administration -- presumably with U.S. knowledge -- they had secretly dispatched hit teams with a contract on his life. When the U.S. military headquarters in Saudi Arabia was blown apart, the expert said, "Osama bin Laden was the first guy who came up on the radar screen in Riyadh."

Some months earlier, when I asked Hosni Mubarak about Bin Laden, he winced. "He wants to take over the world," he said. "He's a megalomaniac." Mubarak then expressed both annoyance and concern about what he saw as the passive attitude of Western governments, particularly those of Britain, Germany, and the United States, in permitting militant Egyptian Islamic groups to operate freely from their soil. But he voiced his greatest concern -- rage, really -- about Peshawar and the veterans of the jihad.

He told me about a meeting he had had in Bonn, in April of 1993, with Benazir Bhutto's predecessor, Nawaz Sharif. "It was a tough meeting," he said. "And I couldn't believe my ears: this man was the leader of Pakistan and he told me, quite frankly, 'We cannot control Peshawar. We cannot prevent these people from running loose.' I asked him then if he wanted me to send the Egyptian armed forces to Peshawar to clean up the mess."

Mubarak may finally be getting his wish. Within a week of the Islamabad bombing Pakistani security forces fanned out across Pakistan and arrested more than 300 people, including numerous militant Pakistani clerics and fundamentalists, some sixty Afghans, and two dozen or so Arabs, some from Peshawar, others from Islamabad. (One, a Saudi national who had arrived in Pakistan during the jihad, was deported in February to Saudi Arabia in connection with his alleged involvement in the car bombing in Riyadh.) The security forces also made arrests at the capital's Intemational Islamic University, which Pakistan's Interior Minister called a "haven for Islamic terrorists." Ramzi Ahmed Yousef spent a considerable amount of time at the university before his extradition to the United States, in February of last year; Sheikh Omar lectured there; and Sheikh Azzam was once a tenured professor there. The university's primary benefactors have been the Saudis, who, according to Pakistani officials, used the university as a cover during the jihad for the funneling of fighters, money, and arms.

In the last days of December, Sheikh Omar confounded prison officials by refusing to take his medications for diabetes, high blood pressure, and a heart condition, and thus became a prisoner of great concern to the U.S. government. When I saw him last year, I asked how he felt now that, having worked along side the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United States in Afghanistan, he was facing charges in the United States that could imprison him for life. Many of his followers in Egypt and Saudi Arabia who had fought in the jihad were being tried and imprisoned, and a number had been hanged in Egypt, solely for participating in that war.

"We have an expression in Arabic," he replied. "'Everybody sings for those whom he loves.' In effect, it means that everyone is singing for something different. And that is exactly what happened in Afghanistan. Do you think we were naive enough to believe that the United States government was helping the Afghans because it believed in their cause -- to raise the flag of jihad for Islam? That they were helping a people, a country, to free themselves? Absolutely not. The Americans were there to punish the Soviet Union, and when they were sure that the Soviet Union had suffered and was about to collapse, they stopped everything -- all the aid, all the equipment -- just like that." He snapped his fingers, and his voice began to rise. "They didn't care that there was still a Communist government in power in Afghanistan. They simply turned their backs and walked away. And the Saudis, oh, the Saudis, and the Egyptians -- they did precisely the same. It took three more years for the mujahideen to oust the Najibullah regime. Thousands of lives were lost; crops and livelihoods were destroyed. But not one life mattered to the Saudis, the Egyptians, or the United States."


Mary Anne Weaver is a writer on South Asia and the Middle East for The New Yorker. An expanded version of this article will appear in her forthcoming book, A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey Through the World of Militant Islam, which is due out in the fall of 1998.



Heroin, Taliban and Pakistan

By B. Raman
From Business Line

PAKISTAN'S illegal heroin economy has kept its legitimate economy sustained since 1990 and prevented its collapse. It has also enabled it maintain a high level of arms purchases from abroad, and finance its proxy war against India through the jehadi organisations.

While no estimate of the money spent by it on its proxy war is available, according to Pakistani analysts (Friday Times, March 9), about 80 per cent of its total external debt of $38 billion, that is, about US $30.4 billion, was incurred on arms purchases since 1990.

The use of the heroin dollars for such purposes started after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1988. In the 1980s, at the instance of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Internal Political Division of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), headed by Brig (retd). Imtiaz, who worked directly under Lt Gen Hamid Gul -- who was Director-General, ISI, during the later years of Zia-ul-Haq and the first few months of Ms Benazir Bhutto's first tenure as the Prime Minister (1988-90) started a cell for the use of heroin for covert actions.

This cell promoted the cultivation of opium and the extraction of heroin in Pakistan as well as in those parts of Afghanistan under Mujahideen control for being smuggled into the Soviet-controlled areas to get the Soviet troops addicted. After the withdrawal of the Soviet troops, the ISI's heroin cell started using its network of refineries and smugglers to send heroin to the West and use the money to supplement its legitimate economy.

Not only the state economy, but also many senior officers of the Army and the ISI benefited from the heroin dollars.

After capturing power on October 12, 1999, Gen Pervez Musharraf had Brig Imtiaz, because of his proximity to Mr Nawaz Sharif, arrested and prosecuted for having assets disproportionate to his known sources of income as an officer of the ISI and the Intelligence Bureau.

He was convicted by a court on July 31, 2001, and jailed for eight years. According to evidence produced in the court by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), Brig Imtiaz had foreign exchange bearer certificates worth $20.08 million, a Pakistani rupee account in the Union Bank with a balance of 2.13 billion, a dollar account in Deutsche Bank with a balance of $19.1 million, five residential houses, five commercial units and three shops. This huge wealth was allegedly accumulated by him through heroin smuggling.

It is believed that there are at least 30 Army and ISI officers, serving and retired, who have accumulated similar wealth through heroin smuggling.

The present estimate of Pakistan's annual earnings through heroin dollars, including by this writer, is about $1.5 billion. Direct, precise, evidence for such estimates are difficult to come by. The figures are based on indirect evidence such as the following:

* The Pakistani Government releases its foreign exchange reserves position in two parts. The first part gives the figures of reserves maintained by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP). These are the amounts earned through foreign trade, investment flows, foreign aid and loans and remittances by overseas Pakistanis.

The second part gives the figures of reserves available with other banks. These are the deposits of resident Pakistanis who are allowed to maintain dollar accounts with no questions asked about the origin of the money and about its liability for income tax. Under Pakistan Government orders, these amounts cannot be used by the Government for its purposes, though Mr Sharif froze them temporarily after the Chagai nuclear tests in 1998 in order to be able to use them if the economic sanctions hit the state economy hard.

* US dollars kept by private citizens in their possession without being deposited in the banks. The SBP periodically purchases these dollars to meet debt-servicing and other governmental needs.

It would be reasonable to presume that the dollars kept in the bank accounts of resident Pakistanis and the dollars in private circulation must have been largely, if not totally, derived from the heroin trade. There cannot be any other explanation for it because Pakistan has been having a trade deficit for many years in succession, there has been a 73 per cent decline in foreign direct investments and a negative flow of portfolio investments, and there was no international assistance forthcoming from October 1999 till November 2000, when the IMF resumed its stand-by credit facilities to Pakistan.

Quoting SBP sources, Pakistan's Business Recorder (August 1) gave the following figures which provide a fairly accurate estimate of the US dollars available in private hands during 2000-01:

* The SBP had $1.7 billion, which was the official foreign exchange reserve of the state. In addition, resident Pakistanis had deposits in various commercial banks amounting to $1.5 billion.

* During the financial years 1999-2000 and 2000-01, despite the suspension of credit facilities by the IMF and other multilateral institutions after the military coup, the Government fulfilled debt-servicing (debt and interest payments) obligations amounting to $7.8 billion. Out of this, $4 billion came from the government coffers, and the balance of $3.8 billion was purchased from resident Pakistanis.

In other words, the total amount of dollars in private circulation since the military regime came to power was almost equal to that in the Government coffers, if not more.

The first piece of direct evidence about the total value of the heroin money being pumped into the Pakistani economy every year has come from an unexpected source -- the Taliban. Before 1998, opium was being grown in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan and in the Nangarhar province in Taliban-controlled Afghan territory. All the Pakistani-owned refineries for heroin extraction were located in Taliban-controlled territory.

In 1998-2000, the Pakistani authorities stopped the cultivation of opium in the NWFP. In 2000-01, the Taliban too, under international pressure, ostensibly banned opium cultivation in its territory, but did not dismantle the Pakistani-owned heroin refineries. It demanded that international narcotics control agencies reimburse to it the money lost by its farmers due to this ban so that they can shift to other crops.

Narcotics control officials from the US and other countries, who visited Nangarhar, confirmed that opium cultivation had stopped. However, doubts remain on the following issues:

* Has the Taliban secretly shifted the opium cultivation from the traditional areas in Nangarhar that international experts could reach other remote areas they did not have access to?

* Due to a bumper crop and record heroin production in previous years, the prices of heroin in the international market had been coming down. Pakistani smugglers, supported by the ISI, had enough heroin stocks to meet at least two years' demand of the market. Was the Taliban merely suspending cultivation during this period to stabilise the prices?

Despite these misgivings, the US announced a contribution of $1.5 million to international narcotics control programmes for disbursement to the Afghan farmers who have stopped poppy cultivation. The Taliban is describing this as peanuts and is demanding much more.

This was one of the subjects that figured during the discussions of Ms Christina Rocca, US Assistant Secretary of State, with Mullah Abdus Salam Zaeef, the Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan, and his No. 2, Mr Sohail Shaheen, in Islamabad on August 2. According to the Frontier Post of Peshawar (August 3, 2001), while briefing pressmen after the discussions, a spokesman of the Taliban said: ``We have told the US team that Afghanistan was earning $12 billion a year from the poppy cultivation and we have eliminated the poppy from the country.''

How much of this amount was going to the Taliban and how much to the Pakistanis and the ISI, who owned all the refineries? No direct evidence is available, but one can estimate roughly that out of this at least $11 billion per annum was going to Pakistan from the following circumstantial evidence:

* There are no reports of large amounts in US dollars circulating in private hands in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, whereas Pakistan is awash with them.

* There are no large-scale developments and other activities in Afghanistan that indicate the availability of large funds in cash. There is so much poverty due to lack of development that thousands of Afghans have been migrating to Pakistan.

* Since its capture of Kabul in September, 1996, the Taliban had not been publishing its budget figures. Some details are now available for the first time. According to these figures, during 2001-02, the Taliban would have an estimated expenditure of $82.53 million, of which $43.53 million is shown as the Discretionary Fund of Mulla Mohammad Omer, the Amir.

The balance is to be spent by various departments. Quoting a study of the New York University Centre, the Dawn (June 4, 2001) estimates that the Taliban gets $45 million per annum from the heroin trade, an amount nearly equal to the Amir's Discretionary Fund.

If what the Taliban gets is taken as reasonable, more than $11 billion per annum from the heroin trade goes to Pakistan, that is, more than Pakistani Rs 715 billion at one dollar equal to 65 Pakistani rupees. During 2000-01, the Pakistani state had a total revenue of 570.6 billion, of which 471.6 billion came from taxes. That is, Pakistan's heroin economy is 30 per cent larger than its legitimate state economy.

Is it any wonder that its economy does not collapse despite the worst predictions, and that it is able to defy international pressure on its sponsorship of terrorism against India and on its support to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden?