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jihald

jihald This is a book about the blowback from the Afghan "jihad" against the USSR. The United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan, China, France, Britain and others had helped the "Afghanis" (Arabs, Afghans, and other Muslim "holy warriors") to fight their battle against the Soviets and communism. Cooley goes into some of the unnerving specifics of how these countries and some of their private citizens and corporations helped in this jihad. Cooley presents a fairly good case that the support of the Islamists against leftists and communists in the Arab world ended up creating possibly an even greater threat to democracy and stability in the region. His histories of the development of militant Islamists in Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are the most vivid. Anwar Sadat, for example, turned to the Islamists and ended up losing his life to one of the very groups he hoped would counter the Nasserists and other leftists. Cooley claims that the United States has put itself in harm's way by supporting the Afghanis and others in the Cold War battle against communism/socialism. Many of these Afghanis have come back to haunt the United States, most notably Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and Osama bin Laden. The Saudi government also had given huge sums of money for the Afghan jihad, only to see some of the people they supported turn on them, especially bin Laden. Cooley sees the brief American "love affair" with Islamism to be a "marriage of convenience." Hoping to weaken the USSR by proxy in Afghanistan, the United States helped to create, according to Cooley, "a monster of Islamic extremism, the Taliban movement." The Afghan jihad also helped other "monsters," according to Cooley, including a strengthened Gamaa Islamia in Egypt and the far more brutal and dangerous GIA (Armed Islamic Group) and FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) in Algeria. He claims that the slaughter in Luxor in November 1997 was instigated by people trained by the CIA in Afghanistan, that the World Trade Center bombing was right out of CIA training manuals supplied to the Afghanis by the Pakistani ISI, and that many of the most brutal atrocities committed in Algeria were accomplished by Afghanis. Cooley also claims that BCCI (the Bank of Credit and Commerce International), a bank with a rather scandalous reputation, was very much involved in the Afghan war. The increase in the drug trade from Afghanistan he attributes to the CIA and other intelligence agencies and authorities turning a "blind-eye" to the problem of drug production in Afghanistan. He claims that the CIA actually supported the selling of drugs in order to finance the jihad. Cooley also claims that there was a policy in the U.S. government, among a small circle of people, to actively sell drugs to Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan in order to weaken their resolve. This was, he claims, an idea instigated by a French cold warrior, Count Alexander de Marenches. Cooley also claims that the DEA and the CIA seemed to be at odds on the program. Hardly a surprise there, but the story of William French Smith's visit to Afghanistan at the height of the war is a colorful one. Cooley's chapter on "Po! ppy Fields, Killing Fields, and Druglords" is chilling, although not very well documented. He also tries to draw the roadmap for the movement of weapons and personnel that "leaked" out of Afghanistan after the war. His stories about the attempts to buy back the U.S. stinger missiles is one that might keep some of the relevant parties up late at night. One of the nagging questions about the Afghan war has been why the Soviets ever got involved. Cooley's argument seems to be that they were trying to take advantage of the fall of Iran in February 1979. They were also wary of a possible U.S. attempt to move its influence in the region from Iran to another place close to them, such as Afghanistan. The fact that the Afghan leader at the time was educated in the United States seemed to support this fear for some in the Politburo. According to Cooley, it was a small number of people in the Politburo who made the fateful decision to invade, without much consultation from the outside. It was to be the Soviet Vietnam. Some of the subsidiary effects of the war, such as the increased drug problem and the culture of violence were to plague the Soviets for some time to come and are now plaguing the Russians in Chechnya and in the development of their own mafias, for example. This is essentially a story of the twentieth-century version of the British-French-Russian "Great Game in Asia," which turned sour for most of those involved. The decision to weaken the USSR "at any cost" seems to have been made without calculating all of the potential costs. The decision was to weight the fall of the USSR much higher than the possible creation of an Islamic threat, which, according to Cooley, will be the source of terrorism and other nasty subsidiary effects for a long time to come. Cooley does not pull any punches in his criticism of the parties involved in the ugly war in Afghanistan. He seems particularly vitriolic in his criticism of those who sold the stingers, allowed the drug production and sales to increase, and financially and otherwise supported the Islamists without regard for the danger these people might have posed, and are posing years after the end of the war. He claims that the Afghan jihad was at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Western and Muslim states who supported the war. This is a highly controversial book. Cooley seems to accuse the CIA and others of the most heinous acts in support of the Afghan war. His cynicism with regard to policy makers from Washington to Paris to Riyadh is stunning. This makes the lack of source material all the more unfortunate. Many of the specifics are developed without any citations of sources. Some of the most controversial statements in the book have virtually no backup. Policy makers need verification to make proper decisions. Scholars need the same in order to write solid works. Nevertheless, scholars will have some difficulty with this book. The evidence he shows for some of his arguments might not be supportable in a court of law if some of his cases against certain organizations went to trial. He may also have difficulty in a high-level academic conference if some of his accusations were up for debate. If he has hard evidence and reliable sources, why did he not present them in detail? Then again, given the nature of the issues, such hard evidence may not surface for years. On the positive side, the book is full of war stories from the field. Mr. Cooley's rich experience in the Middle East and Central Asia gives credibility to his arguments. Bibliography:

Word Count: 1148