EDITORIAL • The CIA & Global Terrorism: A Special Relationship, Says Harper’s Magazine

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Editorial by Rowan Wolf

There is an article coming out in the January 2016 issue of Harpers magazine penned by Andrew Cockburn. The full title is “A Special Relationship. The United States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again.” While this article presents what some will find to be stunning information about US intervention in another country, it points to something even more important. The gem being that not only has the US engaged and hired thugs in the past to meet its policy goals, but even after those thugs have turned on their handler, they will hire them again to do the same dirty jobs. Plausible deniability with the “bloody hands” thrice removed, but hands that have been paid for all the same. The secrets of yesteryear finally come to light, but do not assume such practices somehow are locked (safely) in the past. [NOTE: An annotated version of this piece can also be found on our site at https://www.greanvillepost.com/2015/12/16/top-harpers-mag-editor-documents-cia-hand-in-creating-the-terrorist-nightmare/ ]

Cockburn’s article deserves a careful reading, even several times over. He starts out with a foreign services officer in the American Embassy in Kabul (Ed McWilliams) who got himself in all kinds of trouble for documenting and reporting a bombing in 1988. A massive car bomb had been exploded in a minority neighborhood by a mujahideen, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Problematically, the CIA had hired him and his crew to engage in just such atrocities. They really didn’t want an official report floating around  the State Department. – oops.

Clearly the US and CIA would like there to be as little known as possible, but too many people know too much. The wink and a nod story is that the CIA worked with the Pakistan intelligence agency (the ISI) and it was the Pakistani’s who had second hand blood on their hands. However, Cockburn goes on:

“Asked by the ABC News team whether he remembered Charlie Wilson, the Texas congressman later immortalized in print and onscreen as the patron saint of the mujahedeen, Hekmatyar fondly recalled that “he was a good friend. He was all the time supporting our jihad.” Others expressed the same point in a different way. Abdul Haq, a mujahedeen commander who might today be described as a “moderate rebel,” complained loudly during and after the Soviet war in Afghanistan about American policy. The CIA “would come with a big load of ammunition and money and supplies to these [fundamentalist] groups. We would tell them, ‘What the hell is going on? You are creating a monster in this country.’ ”

Creating monsters indeed, but the creation of this monster started well before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan (the kind of official story).

“In fact, the CIA had been backing Afghan Islamists well before the Russians invaded the country in December 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, later boasted to Le Nouvel Observateur that the president had “signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul” six months prior to the invasion. “And that very day,” Brzezinski recalled, “I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” The war that inevitably followed killed a million Afghans.”

Oh yes, so this is the truly dirty double deep plan. The utilization of the mujahideen was to draw the Soviet Union into Afghanistan. And once they were there, these radical forces that were to become al Qaeda provided a focus that brought the Taliban to power as well. Deep plots with no regard for life or land.

Afghan women studying, as equals, in Kabul, 1979. The communist government in power then (PDPA, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan) actually liberated Afghan women from centuries old customs that effectively enslaved them to husband and society. As usual, Western bourgeois feminists have said virtually nothing about the tremendous losses suffered by women and children as a result of Washington’s intervention in Afghanistan on the side of the most reactionary sectors of society.

Cockburn moves past the actions of the Islamic mercs …

“Anxious as they might have been to obscure the true nature of their relationship with unappealing Afghans like Hekmatyar, U.S. officials were even more careful when it came to the Arab fundamentalists who flocked to the war in Afghanistan and later embarked on global jihad as Al Qaeda. No one could deny that they had been there, but their possible connection to the CIA became an increasingly delicate subject as Al Qaeda made its presence felt in the 1990s. The official line — that the United States had kept its distance from the Arab mujahedeen — was best expressed by Robert Gates, who became director of the CIA in 1991. When the agency first learned of the jihadi recruits pouring into Afghanistan from across the Arab world, he later wrote, “We examined ways to increase their participation, perhaps in the form of some sort of ‘international brigade,’ but nothing came of it.”

The reality was otherwise. The United States was intimately involved in the enlistment of these volunteers — indeed, many of them were signed up through a network of recruiting offices in this country. The guiding light in this effort was a charismatic Palestinian cleric, Abdullah Azzam, who founded Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), also known as the Afghan Services Bureau, in 1984, to raise money and recruits for jihad. He was assisted by a wealthy young Saudi, Osama bin Laden. The headquarters for the U.S. arm of the operation was in Brooklyn, at the Al-Kifah Refugee Center on Atlantic Avenue, which Azzam invariably visited when touring mosques and universities across the country.”

 …

American involvement with Azzam’s organization went well beyond laissez-faire indulgence. “We encouraged the recruitment of not only Saudis but Palestinians and Lebanese and a great variety of combatants, who would basically go to Afghanistan to perform jihad,” McWilliams insisted. “This was part of the CIA plan. This was part of the game.”

The US and Saudi’s poured money into the most “extreme fundamentalist factions.” The goals went far beyond the Soviet presence.

“The whole Afghanistan enterprise, he (McWilliams) explained, “was meant to actually divert people from the problems in their own country.” It was “like a pressure-cooker vent. If you keep [the cooker] all sealed up, it will blow up in your face, so you have to design a vent, and this Afghan jihad was the vent.””

Cockburn’s article goes step by step through not so ancient history including the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, and the rise of bin Laden – who was on the capture list by 1996 when a special CIA task force was established just for him (and his operations). Unfortunately, many efforts were road blocked by concerns over the Saudi’s getting upset.

One would think that the events of September 11, 2001 and all that has followed, would have ended relations between the US CIA and al Qaeda, but that would be incorrect.

“In the spring and summer of last year, a coalition of Syrian rebel groups calling itself Jaish al-Fatah — the Army of Conquest — swept through the northwestern province of Idlib, posing a serious threat to the Assad regime. Leading the charge was Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch, known locally as Jabhat al-Nusra (the Nusra Front). The other major component of the coalition was Ahrar al-Sham, a group that had formed early in the anti-Assad uprising and looked for inspiration to none other than Abdullah Azzam. Following the victory, Nusra massacred twenty members of the Druze faith, considered heretical by fundamentalists, and forced the remaining Druze to convert to Sunni Islam. (The Christian population of the area had wisely fled.) Ahrar al-Sham meanwhile posted videos of the public floggings it administered to those caught skipping Friday prayers.

This potent alliance of jihadi militias had been formed under the auspices of the rebellion’s major backers: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar. But it also enjoyed the endorsement of two other major players. At the beginning of the year, Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had ordered his followers to cooperate with other groups. In March, according to several sources, a U.S.-Turkish-Saudi “coordination room” in southern Turkey had also ordered the rebel groups it was supplying to cooperate with Jaish al-Fatah. The groups, in other words, would be embedded within the Al Qaeda coalition.

A few months before the Idlib offensive, a member of one CIA-backed group had explained the true nature of its relationship to the Al Qaeda franchise. Nusra, he told the New York Times, allowed militias vetted by the United States to appear independent, so that they would continue to receive American supplies. When I asked a former White House official involved in Syria policy if this was not a de facto alliance, he put it this way: “I would not say that Al Qaeda is our ally, but a turnover of weapons is probably unavoidable. I’m fatalistic about that. It’s going to happen.””

I will stop here, but Cockburn’s dissertation continues, and I encourage reading the whole article. It is enough to make you pull your hair and cry. When you think to all of the death and the destruction; the displacement of millions of people; refugee’s fleeing the region. Then you think of the insanity happening here where it is so clear that deliberate efforts are being made to put Muslims in the crosshairs – to “legitimate” ever increasing “intervention” “over there” so that “they” don’t get us “over here.” And most sickeningly people continue to buy it. Many wallowing in the hate mongering of Trump and even the Congress who are all too willing to play along.

The insanity is not even close to ending,  and the hell that is being made of people’s lives will like last for generations to come. Some might (and have) called the various events where the US has ended up the target of our own “monsters.” It is referred to as “blowback,” I think not. Rather is is all part of the (very expensive) “game.”

Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author, most recently, of Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 ROWAN WOLF is The Greanville Post's Managing Editor.

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