Reaction Paper #2

Reaction paper #2

Part I: Readings

               

                Though the USSR was involved during the entire Saur Revolution, their role was, at least publically, rather minor compared to what was coming. However, by the end of 1979, Babrak Karmal gained power over Amin and became the new head of state.[i] With strong Russian influence he continued to Sovietize the country. Some means were violent and others were merely coercion, but the plan approved by the Kremlin involved ousting the older traditionalists in favor of youth who had been raised in the communist system. This included changing the national curriculum to a soviet system that emphasized Russian and Political Science and even advocated spying on the students’ own families.[ii] The focal point of Karmal’s coming to power was his attempt to win over the Islamic traditionalists in order to gain more supporters for the Soviets by establishing a Ministry of Islamic Affairs.[iii] However, as always, the general public is fairly adept at seeing through the scheming of the government. Especially since the majority of Afghanis have always been and probably always will be skeptical of a centralized authority because of the tribal roots and isolated ethnic groups that make Afghanistan unique in the region. It was rather plain to most local leaders that this was a thinly veiled attempt to bring the clergy under greater supervision by the Soviet authorities in Kabul.

                Karmal’s plan was undermined from the beginning, even if just because of the nature of the two systems. It would be impossible to have a government that acknowledged the supremacy of Islam that was communist, simply because the two systems cannot coexist. They each preach that the other is wrong. The protest came in the form of a movement called Allah-u-Akbar, meaning God is Great.[iv] They engaged in both violent and non-violent forms of protest, making it difficult for Karmal to gain any sort of mandate whatsoever. What Karmal needed and failed to gain was party unity. As Karmal rose to power another ethnic conflict flared – that of the Parchamis and the Khalqis. Neither group would obey the other, and since various ministers and leaders were one or the other, the government was effectively divided in half. Karmal responded by dividing the police force into a secret police called the KhaD (trained by the KGB) and a standard police force, each under a leader from a different ethnic group.[v] The warfare between these two groups is probably what effectively ended Karmal’s reign. As the soviets became more aware of Karmal’s unpopularity, they took the steps to take him out of power.[vi] By the time these events had occurred, Gorbachev was now in office. Great changes were soon coming to Russia, and Afghanistan was no longer in the Soviet plan.

                Pakistan’s Military dictator, Zia ul-Haq, was ready to oust the Soviets in Afghanistan as soon as possible, despite the fact that he was already hated for overthrowing Pakistan’s elected government headed by Ali Bhutto in July 1977.[vii] Instead of accomplishing the goal himself he set up as system of political parties that would accomplish the goal for him. Nevertheless, both Kabul and Moscow were convinced that recent uprisings in Afghanistan were organized and armed by Pakistan.[viii] The US quickly got involved even though The Carter Administration’s previous exploits in Iran were already heavily criticized. The United States’ self-imposed policy of being the automatic antagonist of anything Soviet necessitated an intervention on behalf of Afghanistan, but direct intervention would have been a mistake. Furthermore, and independent Pakistan was essential to larger US plans. Therefore, Carter announced that the US would be helping to defend Pakistan’s Independence by means of military aid in January of 1980. Zia was not happy with simple aid, however. He would not get what he was really looking for, a full scale US initiative, until Reagan became president. It would become the largest CIA covert operation ever.[ix]  By 1985, The United States was very deeply involved in what was even a more ridiculous version of Iran/Contra, but thankfully, less publicized. As the Soviets and Americans continued to offend each other in the Cold War, Reagan shortsightedly became determined to defeat the Soviets at all cost. That includes funneling more and more taxpayers dollars into arming and providing for the Afghan Resistance who would later turn on the United States, 9/11 style.

                The Afghan resistance itself was mediocre. There was a nearly unlimited supply of manpower (even the official Afghan army wasn’t loyal to a Russian-influenced government) due to desertions, refugees, and a generally disgruntled public.[x] There were unlimited arms thanks to the involvement of the United States, and there was nearly unlimited cash flow as well thanks to the Saudi and American taxpayers. Nevertheless, organization was a major weak point. None of the individual groups of rebels would cooperate with each other, despite them all having essentially the same goal. Furthermore, they fought as martyrs for religious reasons, but usually those tactics aren’t very smart and lead to rather larger death tolls than necessary. But since they believed that death on the battlefield of a jihad was an automatic ticket to heaven, this apparently wasn’t such an issue.

                Negotiations between the USSR and the US/Pakistan/Rebel groups began as early as Brezhnev’s reign. However, only Andropov and Gorbachev were responsive to negotiations for the removal of Soviet troops in Afghanistan.[xi] This meant that negotiating was a long and slow process that lasted for several years and across several administrations. The deal was completely brokered by the United Nations. By 1985 Karmal was on his way out, and in his place came the former head of the secret police, Dr. Najibullah.[xii] Ironically, Vladimir Putin, another former head of secret police, would become the President of a “multi-party parliamentary democracy” called Russia. Najibullah was Gorbachev’s means to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan as soon as politically possible. His greatest antagonist was the council of Islamist leaders of the Jihad under the influence of General Zia of Pakistan. Though they had virtually no mandate or public support, they managed to get in the way of most of Najibullah’s policies with regard to reconciliation.[xiii] Despite these setbacks, a new constitution was finally enacted in November of 1987 to coincide with the conclusion of the Geneva Accords between the USSR, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the United States which was signed in April 1988. The Document established Islam as the state religion and at least theoretically created a multi-party parliamentary democracy. It is important to note that the UN agreement, brokered by Diego Cordovez essentially involved only the US and Soviet Union. The Afghani rebels were largely left out of the negotiations in Geneva.[xiv]

                The single event that may have saved the Najibullah Regime was the sudden death of General Zia in a plane crash in August 1988.[xv] This prevented him from continuing his resistance against the Afghani democratic government and was a crippling blow to the Islamist groups in Peshwar that were a continuous thorn in the side of Najibullah. In addition, Benazir Bhutto became the President of Pakistan in the following November elections, though Pakistan would maintain its interventionist role in Afghani politics. After this event, the mujahideen were too weak to pose any strong threat to Kabul, and their underestimation of the strength of the elected government would prove to be their downfall.             

Najibullah’s regime was successful in that it gave the Afghanis what they had wanted all along, which was basically autonomy for each tribe with financial support from Kabul. Groups attained autonomy in different methods. Some, like the Hazaras, won their autonomy independently while others gained it as part of the new government’s policies. The huge influx of cash from the US and Saudi Arabia, as well as the blossoming Poppy industry, allowed for financial autonomy to go along with political autonomy, but the money also financed the fighting between rival groups in a newly recognized Afghanistan. As the nation disintegrated into groups, the US and Saudis continued to fund the mujahideen and other countries like Iran began to influence individual groups. By 1989, as the US was pre-occupied by the coming fall of the Soviet Union and the invasion of Kuwait, Pakistan dismissed its elected government and launched an offensive on Kabul, prevented only just in time by the United States.[xvi] The end of the Najibullah government finally came when the Soviet Union dissolved unexpectedly in 1991. Without Soviet Aid, the Afghan government, along with most governments in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, were powerless. The Peshwar-based leaders seized the opportunity, and on April 24, 1992, the Peshwar Agreement was signed.[xvii]

                Again, the infighting between Islamist leaders prevented any real positive action from taking place, as the Peshwar Agreement became null due to the resistance of Hekmatyar.[xviii] As there was no incumbent political force with any traction, the Taliban (a Persian word for religious students) emerged quickly and strongly in 1994. Though these young rebels claimed to be students of Islam, they were in fact merely students of Jihad, born and raised in the refugee camps of Pakistan. Its ideology is characterized by its fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran, and its resistance to innovation, modernity, women’s rights, and the tribal culture in general. Pakistan’s goals were predominantly economic and geographic in nature, and thus had no qualms about helping out the fledgling Taliban. As such, the Taliban launched its Offensive with Pakistani weapons and cash.[xix] They encountered almost no resistance and easily acquired tanks and missiles to aid in their takeover of Afghanistan. Their military tactics had greatly improved upon the old guerilla style of fighting from the civil war, as well. It was relatively simple for the Taliban to capture first Kandahar, then Heart and Kabul, while the existing military retreated to the north. The Taliban military offensive was marked by a distinct disregard for any international law and was particularly violent and sadistic, most especially in the killing of Najibullah in Kabul.

                On May 25, 1997, Pakistan finally recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan, and encouraged other countries in the region to follow suit. They quickly took over all mosques and imposed their own version of Shari’a law, closed schools and universities, and drove women off the streets.[xx] Their opposition, led by an alliance of military leaders fighting the Taliban called The United National and Islamic Front began to fight back in the North. Notably, it wasn’t until the summer of 1997 that food was used as a weapon of war, as the Taliban enforced a food blockade on the city of Mazar and starved several thousand Hazaras before massacring the city, despite UN attempts to negotiate. Unfortunately, these Taliban actions were merely revenge for the mass killings of Taliban soldiers by Hazaras in Mazar the previous year, proving the disastrous consequences of ultraviolent and inhumane warfare. By 1998, Iran and Russia both began providing aid to the Alliance, while Saudi Arabia and Pakistan contracted to support the Taliban, probably due to their cultural similarities in how they interpret the Koran. Somewhat important in the Taliban takeover were oil politics, due to the vast natural resources and pipelines in the region. An 875 mile gas pipeline financed by an Argentinean oil company required serious bribery of and support for the Taliban, who controlled the land. The projects wouldn’t survive, but the support for the Taliban by western countries for purely economic purposes would remain important. It seems the majority of US interest in the area has to do with oil, including maintaining necessary alliances to get the oil. The political repercussions of this purely economic approach have been vast.

                The Taliban were not a random group of rebels with a common ideology that happened to succeed. The key to their success is the influence of the religious leaders in Afghanistan, and their importance in the political system. Afghani religious leaders had been shoved to the side in favor of political reconstruction in a centralized manner that effectively shut down the individual tribes and their claim to rule. The fighters themselves were more “a sort of religious proletariat.”[xxi] Their religious interpretations come from an Islamic theological school in Deoband, India and were inspired by and 18^th century Indian Muslim named Shah Waliullah as a reaction to more liberal interpretations of Islam. Politically, the group was anti-British and Pan-Islamist.[xxii] The later generations of the Deoband Islamists found a home in Pakistan, and so Pakistan became (and remains) a supporter and enabler of the Taliban, though mostly for its own reasons. If Pakistan could maintain strong influence or control over Afghanistan, they would obtain a wide network of supply lines for military and private purposes as well as vast economic potential. It is safe to say that ideologically, the Pakistani government couldn’t care less about the Taliban even though Pakistan is a state expressly formed to be a Muslim one, but the economic opportunities were too good to pass up.

                Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban, assumed power in Kabul as a prophet of the Islamic faith. The Taliban remained in control of Afghanistan through its system of individual small militias.[xxiii] Throughout the process, the UN was faced with the task of getting humanitarian aid to those oppressed by the Taliban regime. Kofi Annan, the new secretary general of the UN, wrote that, “It could be argued that the role of the United Nations in Afghanistan is little more than an alibi to provide cover for the inaction – or worse – of the international community at large.”[xxiv] The only well organized and well funded system in the Taliban government was the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. This was the ministry that enforced the wearing of the Burqa, ensured that women could not hold jobs or be cared for by male doctors, and closed all schools for girls. It even prevented owning music cassette tapes and flying kites. The Taliban made it impossible for NGOs and humanitarian aid groups to continue to work in Afghanistan, and eventually they had to pull out leaving the Afghanistan population under an oppressive regime with no aid.[xxv] The Taliban did not even attempt to rebuild the economy or infrastructure, which led to mass poverty and famine. When they tried to claim their UN seat, they were vehemently rejected. Instead the UN imposed economic sanctions, and demanded the extradition of Osama Bin Laden in the autumn of 1999 for the fatwa issued against the United States. Furthermore, economic reasons forced the surrounding countries of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan to cooperate with the Taliban

Osama Bin Laden wasn’t joking when he said that he would not distinguish between soldiers and civilians, as the world learned on 9/11.  In the video he released soon after, he alluded that the United States was a false idol that was corrupting the purity of Islam.[xxvi] Bin Laden was born and raised in a privileged family in Saudi Arabia that was close to the royal family, and he was trained as a civil engineer. Interestingly enough, the concept of Jihad had largely disappeared from mainstream Islam for nearly a millennium until the Afghan revolution. Bin Laden would act as a major funding source throughout the revolution, and set up permanent camps in Peshwar. After the revolution, al-Qaida (meaning “the base”) was formed to wage jihad on the rest of the world, in accordance with their pan-Islamist goals, led by a coalition of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the mastermind and the field marshal, respectively. Psychologically speaking, both men were outsiders as youth. Zawahiri had been tortured in prison in Egypt for a crime he had likely not committed, conspiring in the murder of Anwar Sadat. They had been influenced by charismatic radical Islamism theorists as students.

Bin Laden’s real qualms with the United States began during the Gulf War when he opposed the Saudi Government allowing US troops on their soil, quoting the Prophet saying that no Jews or Christians should be allowed in the country.[xxvii] Rejected by his home country, he headed for Sudan where he set up his first al-Qaida training camps. As early as 1993, mainstream Muslims rejected their actions and their interpretation of the Koran, especially since Bin Laden’s terror attacks usually killed just as many Muslims as Americans. One of the reasons that he survived so long was that it was very difficult to pinpoint him as the instigator of many of the terrorist attacks. The actually planning and execution was left to others, he simply and vaguely chose the targets. Over the years, many terrorists have been caught and cooperated with authorities. This may show how some did not share the same ideological commitment to the goal, or else they would have kept silent. The extent of the al-Qaida network is much vaster than anyone expected pre-9/11. What is not commonly known is that the Palestinian cause fell under Bin Laden’s ideology. In fact, September 11 is the anniversary of Palestine falling under the British Mandate.[xxviii] Ten years later, with Bin Laden dead, it is still important that the autonomy of the al-Qaida network ensures that terrorism will never be gone, even when the highest leaders are.

                After September 11, the US almost immediately mobilized in Afghanistan with NATO support. They met almost no resistance by al-Qaida or the Taliban and an interim government was set up by December of 2001.[xxix] Originally the US had not planned on regime change, but instead had only wanted to flush out al-Qaida and their Taliban supporters. Why, then were they still there after the Taliban surrendered only three months after 9/11? The answer is that the country itself has no infrastructure, military, or police force to maintain Peace and Security as a pre-requisite for legitimate governance. Even in 2002 it was recognized that Karzai would be just a glorified mayor of Kabul due to the remaining existence of old tribal conflict, the drug trade, and foreign intervention. If any of these three become unstable, the reconstruction of Afghanistan have been and will be threatened.

Part 2: Documentary Film – The Man Who Knew[xxx]

                “The Man Who Knew” is a Frontline Documentary about John O’Neill, the FBI agent who singlehandedly developed the FBI’s counterintelligence initiatives to respond to the terrorist attacks of Al Qaida. The documentary itself poses instant questions because John O’Neill became a martyr when he was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. The retrospective documentary could not help but take a nearly prophet-like angle on John O’Neill. They make his flaws sound like he was a misunderstood genius (which may in fact have been the case). But nevertheless, he made mistakes, as even the interview subjects acknowledged. All the people interviewed were friends with him, so it presents a somewhat biased view, though this may be a consequence of the fact that anyone who had been opposed to O’Neill in the 90s declined to comment. Though their complaints likely had legitimacy then, the fact that he was killed in the terrorist attack he had foreseen is too much for any reputation to bear. The documentary follows O’Neill’s career in the FBI throughout the 1990s and shows the real process by which the government discovered the existence of and began plotting against Al Qaida. Regardless of the slant of the documentary, it is clear that there was major oversight in the government with regard to US vulnerability to a terrorist attack. It painted a frightening picture of a bureaucracy reminiscent of “1984” where belonging was more important that accomplishing a goal. Americans truly paid a price, both before and after 9/11.

Part 3: Class Discussions

               

                Class discussions have been rather varied in the last few weeks, but I will attempt to touch on all of them. First was the music video for “A Man Like Putin”, which interestingly depicted the cult of personality enjoyed by Vladimir Putin who is effectively a dictator for life since he keeps re-appointing himself as prime minister and re-running for president. It is difficult to know how many real supporters he has compared to who is bullied into supporting him. It also brings to light Russia’s propaganda machine, which really is one of the best in history. It’s really quite amazing what the great propaganda machines of the USSR, China, Germany, and even the US during WWII could accomplish. From the musical point of view, the song is mediocre. The beat is overly simple, the rest of the arrangement is rather lacking in substance, and the lyrics have no poetic value. But the purpose of the song, while very obvious, gets the job done.

                In class we also discussed public media around the world. There a few different models for the organization of public media depending on the country. In Britain, the BBC is highly centralized, which has allowed it to become a huge conglomerate of media providing a great portion of the news and entertainment available in the UK. They have managed to remain mostly independent of government influence. The opposite is true for the American system, which is highly decentralized, meaning that individual stations are responsible for a good amount of funding and each have different programming. Though the government does give some money to Public broadcasting, that amount has fallen in recent years. It is safe to say that the American system is less effective. It has fewer viewers and less funding and falls prey to more government intervention. However, its local nature makes it easier for the average person to contribute to public radio and television. Various countries have modified versions of these two models, and it’s really up to the culture of the country as to which model is more effective.

                The last thing briefly discussed was the variety of Islamic law that exists in the Muslim world. Many different groups have their own brands of the religion that may or may not align with one of the three major sects- Shiite, Sunni, and Sufi. The practical result of there being no single authority on Islam is that the groups wind up fighting more with each other than they ever do with western countries or other religions. This also brings up a conversation on ethnocentrism, which is related to religion in a way. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s culture/ethnicity/religion is superior to another’s and therefore the other should be abandoned in favor of one’s own. Pretty much everyone is ethnocentric even if just a little bit, because it is part of human nature to seek out the familiar and to fear the unfamiliar.

                               

               

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[i] Rasnayagam, 94

[ii] Rasnayagam, 98

[iii] Rasnayagam, 94

[iv] Rasnayagam, 95

[v] Rasnayagam, 96

[vi] Rasnayagam, 100

[vii] Rasnayagam, 102

[viii] Rasnayagam, 104

[ix] Rasnayagam, 105

[x] Rasnayagam, 113

[xi] Rasnayagam, 118

[xii] Rasnayagam, 119

[xiii] Rasnayagam, 120

[xiv] Rasnayagam, 122

[xv] Rasnayagam, 125

[xvi]Rasnayagam, 139

[xvii] Rasnayagam, 141

[xviii] Rasnayagam, 142

[xix] Rasnayagam, 145

[xx] Rasnayagam, 154

[xxi] Rasnayagam 177

[xxii] Rasnayagam, 179

[xxiii] Rasnayagam, 196

[xxiv] Rasnayagam, 197

[xxv] Rasnayagam, 198

[xxvi] Rasnayagam, 215

[xxvii] Rasnayagam, 229

[xxviii] Rasnayagam, 244

[xxix] Rasnayagam 252

[xxx] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/