[Peace-discuss] Fwd: When U.S. Aided Insurgents, Did It Breed Future Terrorists?

[Al Kagan]

>FYI
>>
>>
>>When U.S. Aided Insurgents, Did It Breed Future Terrorists?
>>
>>April 10, 2004
>>  By HUGH EAKIN
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>In the varied explanations for the 9/11 attacks and the
>>rise in terrorism, two themes keep recurring. One is that
>>Islamic culture itself is to blame, leading to a clash of
>>civilizations, or, as more nuanced versions have it, a
>>struggle between secular-minded and fundamentalist Muslims
>>that has resulted in extremist violence against the West.
>>The second is that terrorism is a feature of the
>>post-cold-war landscape, belonging to an era in which
>>international relations are no longer defined by the
>>titanic confrontation between two superpowers, the United
>>States and the Soviet Union.
>>
>>But in the eyes of Mahmood Mamdani, a Uganda-born political
>>scientist and cultural anthropologist at Columbia
>>University, both those assumptions are wrong. Not only does
>>he argue that terrorism does not necessarily have anything
>>to do with Islamic culture; he also insists that the spread
>>of terror as a tactic is largely an outgrowth of American
>>cold war foreign policy. After Vietnam, he argues, the
>>American government shifted from a strategy of direct
>>intervention in the fight against global Communism to one
>>of supporting new forms of low-level insurgency by private
>>armed groups.
>>
>>"In practice," Mr. Mamdani has written, "it translated into
>>a United States decision to harness, or even to cultivate,
>>terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered
>>pro-Soviet." The real culprit of 9/11, in other words, is
>>not Islam but rather non-state violence in general, during
>>the final stages of the stand-off with the Soviet Union.
>>Using third and fourth parties, the C.I.A. supported
>>terrorist and proto-terrorist movements in Indochina, Latin
>>America, Africa and, of course, Afghanistan, he argues in
>>his new book, "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold
>>War and the Roots of Terror" (Pantheon).
>>
>>"The real damage the C.I.A. did was not the providing of
>>arms and money," he writes, " but the privatization of
>>information about how to produce and spread violence - the
>>formation of private militias - capable of creating
>>terror." The best-known C.I.A.-trained terrorist, he notes
>>dryly, is Osama bin Laden.
>>
>>Other recent accounts have examined the ways in which
>>American support for the mujahedeen in the 1980's helped
>>pave the way for Islamic terrorism in the 90's. But Mr.
>>Mamdani posits a new - and far more controversial - thesis
>>by connecting the violent strain of Islam to a broader
>>American strategy.
>>
>>"Mahmood's argument is that terrorism is a defining
>>characteristic of the last phase of the cold war," said
>>Robert Meister, a political scientist at the University of
>>California, Santa Cruz, who has followed Mr. Mamdani's work
>>for three decades. He added, "It was a characteristic that
>>took on, especially in Africa, a logic of its own, a logic
>>that eventually broke free of the geopolitics that started
>>it."
>>
>>In a telephone interview from Kampala, Uganda, where he has
>>a second home, Mr. Mamdani explained, "What I have in mind
>>is the policy of proxy war." As his book recounts, the
>>African continent became a major front in the cold war
>>after the rapid decolonization of the 1960's and 70's gave
>>rise to a number of nationalist movements influenced by
>>Marxist-Leninist principles.
>>
>>For the United States, caught in the wave of antiwar
>>feeling set off by Vietnam, the only way to roll back this
>>process was to give indirect support to violent new
>>right-wing groups. Mr. Mamdani asserts, for example, that
>>the United States policy of constructive engagement with
>>apartheid in South Africa helped sustain two
>>proto-terrorist organizations - Unita, the National Union
>>for the Total Independence of Angola, and Renamo, the
>>Mozambican National Resistance - that were armed and
>>trained by the South African Defense Force. Renamo became
>>what Mr. Mamdani calls Africa's "first genuine terrorist
>>movement," a privatized outfit that unleashed random
>>violence against civilians without any serious pretension
>>to national power.
>>
>>In the 1980's, Mr. Mamdani argues, the American use of
>>proxy forces became increasingly overt. "What had begun as
>>a very pragmatic policy under Kissinger was ideologized by
>>the Reagan administration in highly religious terms, as a
>>fight to the finish against the `Evil Empire,' " Mr.
>>Mamdani said.
>>
>>Drawing on the same strategy used in Africa, the United
>>States supported the Contras in Nicaragua and then created,
>>on a grand scale, a pan-Islamic front to fight the Soviets
>>in Afghanistan. Whereas other Islamic movements, like the
>>Iranian revolution, had clear nationalist aims, the Afghan
>>jihad, Mr. Mamdani suggests, was created by the United
>>States as a privatized and ideologically stateless
>>resistance force.
>>
>>A result, he writes, was "the formation of an international
>>cadre of uprooted individuals who broke ties with family
>>and country of origin to join clandestine networks with a
>>clearly defined enemy."
>>
>>According to Mr. Mamdani, the strategy of proxy warfare
>>continued even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as
>>the United States looked for new ways to sponsor
>>low-intensity conflicts against militantly nationalist
>>regimes. In a final section on the current conflict in
>>Iraq, the book suggests that it, much more than the end of
>>the cold war in 1989, closed the "era of proxy warfare" in
>>American foreign policy.
>>
>>Scholars familiar with the book say that Mr. Mamdani's
>>account of the late cold war, and its emphasis on Africa in
>>particular, is likely to be disdained by specialists on
>>Islam, some of whom are criticized by name in the opening
>>chapter.
>>
>>"The book is most original in the skewer it puts through
>>what Mamdani calls the `culture talk' that has substituted
>>for serious explanations of political Islam," said Timothy
>>Mitchell, a political scientist at New York University.
>>"Scholar-pundits like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami tell us
>>that the culture of Muslims or Arabs cannot cope with
>>modernity. Mamdani shows us that the origins of political
>>Islam are themselves modern, and, in fact, largely
>>secular."
>>
>>But John L. Esposito, a Georgetown University expert on
>>political Islam, warns that an attempt to explain Islamic
>>terrorism through international politics alone risks the
>>same flaw as the cultural approach. "To say it's simply
>>politics, without taking into account religion, misses the
>>causes behind a lot of these conflicts, just as the reverse
>>misses them," he said. "It's religion and politics
>>together."
>>
>>Mr. Mamdani's unusual perspective is partly a result of his
>>own experience in Africa. A third-generation East African
>>of Indian descent, Mr. Mamdani, 57, grew up in the final
>>years of colonial Uganda.
>>
>>"Idi Amin was my first experience of terror, and I
>>understood how a demagogue could ride a wave of popular
>>resentment," Mr. Mamdani said, recalling how he and other
>>Asians were expelled in 1972.
>>
>>After completing a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1974, he took a
>>faculty position at the University of Dar es Salaam in
>>Tanzania, at the time a hotbed of radical African politics.
>>Among his colleagues were the future Ugandan president
>>Yoweri Museveni, as well as Laurent Kabila, the future
>>president of Congo, and Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, leader of
>>one of the revolutionary factions against Kabila.
>>
>>Mr. Mamdani returned to Uganda during the civil war that
>>ousted Amin and took a deanship at the national university
>>in Kampala, where he became a leading expert on agrarian
>>administration and its relation to post-colonial unrest.
>>Often outspoken against the Ugandan government, he was
>>exiled a second time in 1985, during another civil war. In
>>the late 1980's, he led a Ugandan commission on local
>>government; later he taught at the University of Cape Town
>>in South Africa during the tumultuous early years after
>>apartheid.
>>
>>His previous book, "When Victims Become Killers:
>>Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda," sought
>>to overturn the view that those atrocities had deep tribal
>>roots. Much of the Hutu-Tutsi ethnic rivalry, he argued,
>>could be traced to the colonial period. (The Belgians had
>>introduced and enforced Hutu and Tutsi racial identities in
>>a segregated social system.)
>>
>>Mr. Mamdani, who now directs Columbia's Institute for
>>African Studies, lives in New York and Kampala with his
>>wife, the Indian filmmaker Mira Nair, and their son.
>>
>>To understand political Islam, Mr. Mamdani says Africa's
>>experience is instructive. "Africa is seen as exceptional,
>>as not even part of the rest of the world," he said. "But
>>on the contrary, it's an illuminating vantage point."
>>


-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu