Amin Saikal is professor of political science and director of the Centre for Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra.
Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism
by john cooley
London, Pluto Press, 1999. 276 pages. UK £20
The issue of international terrorism has once again come under the spotlight. The renewed attention has much to do with the United States’ indictment of the Saudi multi-millionaire dissident Osama Bin Laden for allegedly masterminding the August 1998 bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which hundreds were killed and injured.
Bin Laden’s continued protection by the ultra-orthodox Islamic Taliban militia in defiance of a United States’ demand for his extradition and the United Nations’ imposition of sanctions on the Taliban since mid-November 1999 have ensured the issue a prominent place on the international agenda for the foreseeable future. This comes at a time when Russia has also resolved to crush the ruling Islamic group in Chechnya for its alleged expansionism and role in the bombing of several Russian residential blocks of flats at considerable human cost in mid-1999. Moscow has backed America’s efforts against Bin Laden, simultaneously citing a global “Islamic threat” to legitimise its disproportionate use of force to resubjugate the Chechens. All this raises a number of questions about the origins and magnitude of modern international “terrorism”, the role of the major powers in it, and what may constitute appropriate responses.
These questions are by no means new. They have attracted increasing journalistic and scholarly interest ever since Palestinian fighters blew up three passenger planes in the Jordanian desert in 1970. Numerous articles and books, looking at the issue from diverse perspectives, have competed for the right answers. While some of these publications have been brief, dealing with a particular aspect of the problem, others have attempted to probe more widely and in the context of changing global conditions. The book under review falls in the latter category.
John Cooley’s central concern in Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism is to unfold the story of the relationship between global terrorism, the Afghanistan conflict (especially following the Soviet invasion of the country in late December 1979) and the role of the United States and some of its key regional allies in the management of that conflict. He does this with a commendable degree of thoroughness and perceptive analysis. His tracing of American policy and its contributions—sometimes wittingly, other times unwittingly—to the growth of international “terrorism” is persuasive and to the point. As such, the book is a useful source of information about, and insight into, a problem which requires continuous clarification and investigation. It illuminates a few dark corners in America’s relations with some of its allies and Islamic groups which many scholars have touched upon but been unable to detail to the extent that Cooley has.
Cooley admirably pieces together information to describe the international network that the United States developed to support the Afghan Islamic resistance forces (the Mujahideen) in the 1980s so that they could inflict on the Soviets the sort of defeat the Americans had suffered in Vietnam. It was in this context, as he argues, that America substantially contributed, if not directly, at least indirectly, to the growth of people like Bin Laden and his Taliban and other supporters.
Cooley’s accounts and prognosis, however, suffer from a number of flaws. Thus, he appears confused in his description of some of the power positions and various family and political relationships in Afghanistan. For example, he is not sure whether Mohammed Daoud was the cousin or nephew of King Zahir Shah. Whereas on page 11 he describes Daoud as Zahir Shah’s cousin (which is correct), on page 96 he describes him as the king’s nephew. Again, on page 51 Cooley claims that Pakistan’s President General Ayub Khan was an ethnic Punjabi, while the fact is that he was an ethnic Pathan, which on the Afghan side of the border is called Pashtoon.
The occasional contradiction and oversimplification are also evident. For instance, on page 58 Cooley asserts that Pakistan’s military intelligence (ISI) and the CIA regarded one of the Mujahideen groups, namely the Hezbi Islami, “as the most ruthless and militarily effective of the seven rival groupings of holy warriors”. However, shortly thereafter (p. 61) he makes it clear that the CIA had reservations about the effectiveness of the Hezbi Islami leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who to all intents and purposes was the Hezbi Islami. Cooley makes no clear distinction between various Islamic movements or groups in terms of their position on the ideological scale. Thus, he simply implies that the Turkish Rafeh (Welfare) party was as fundamentalist as Pakistan’s Jamaat Islami (Islamic Association), without providing any evidence that this was really the case (p. 48).
Cooley is inclined to make sweeping generalisations, without attempting to substantiate them. For example, he claims that the Palestinian Islamic radical group Hamas had its roots in the Afghan jihad. There is no evidence to support such a claim. By most accounts, Hamas owes its origins to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. Similarly, Cooley makes numerous claims about the activities of Bin Laden in the Arab world, especially Egypt, but rarely provides any documentary sources or evidence to elevate his claims above the journalistic (chapter 6).
Cooley fails to provide a judicious and detailed account of the foundations of the Afghan Islamic resistance and of the participation of ordinary Afghans, who do not necessarily have a scholarly understanding of Islam, but who were the main factor in the resistance’s success. He also overlooks some of the options which may currently be available to the United States and the international community in dealing with Bin Laden, or the Pakistan-supported Taliban, or even Pakistan itself—more specifically the ISI—as the real source of many problems in the region and beyond. He does not explore how the position of the moderate anti-Taliban Islamists in Afghanistan could be strengthened as one possible way of bringing about a negotiated settlement of the Afghanistan problem and freeing the international community of one of the real sources of “terrorism”.
That said, Cooley’s book is an informative and thoughtful piece which, despite some factual errors, certainly warrants a wide readership.
