The responsibility of the attack on the WTC was taken by al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. (Reuters)
Ten weeks before he was incinerated inside an C130 military transport, blown up by still-unknown assassins, General Akhtar Abdul Rehman Khan, architect of the long war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, unveiled the climax he had scripted. “An Islamic Afghan Republic”, the Pakistan military’s chief of staff explained to his American guests, “could be expected to join with Pakistan, Turkey and an Iran come to its senses, in an Islamic league to oppose southward Soviet expansion.”
This was, in one of its many shifting variants, the doctrine of Strategic Depth: an Islamic Bloc, scholar Dietrich Reetz has explained, stretching from the Urals to the Arabian Sea. This alone, General Akhtar argued, could defend Pakistan against the Soviet “historic desire to expand toward the warm waters of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea”.
In the margins of the diplomatic cable recording the conversation, America’s ambassador to New Delhi, John Gunther Dean, scrawled a single, hand-written word: “Nonsense”. The erudite Ambassador knew, as do historians but not Generals, that neither Russian Czars nor the Soviet Union sought to expand to the Arabian Sea; the idea was manufactured by Imperial Britain, part fear, and part self-serving myth.
As the world marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11—and the rebirth of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which was levelled in its wake—many explanations have been offered for the birth of the dystopian ideas which drove the tragedy. The Afghan jihad and al-Qaeda all had a part, but the road to 9/11 was paved among other things by a myth, birthed by colonialism and reared by military despotism.
From early in the 19th century, British colonial strategists began to consider the idea of a Russian threat, popularised in books published in 1828 and 1829 by Colonel G. de Lacy-Evans. The India Office, historian M.P. Yapp has shown, “was to reject entirely the danger alluded to by Evans; the physical difficulties alone meant that no formidable Russian force could penetrate to India, to say nothing of the opposition such a force was likely to encounter from peoples in its path”.
In spite of this conclusion, the idea of the Russian Peril served an important function: to legitimise the colonial presence in India, and the savage repression of the region’s people, as serving a higher Imperial cause.
The memoirs of Francis Tuker, the last General Officer Commanding of the British Indian Eastern Command, show us how durable these ideas proved. Hinduism, Tuker believed, was a faith of “superstition and formalism”, easily displaced by “a material philosophy such as Communism”. To him, it was necessary to “place Islam between Russian Communism and Hindustan”.
“There was much therefore to be said for the introduction of a new Muslim power supported by the science of Britain,” Tuker wrote. “Islamic countries, even including Turkey, were not a very great strength in themselves. But with a northern Indian Islamic state of several millions, it would be reasonable to expect that Russia would not care to provoke them too much.”
Following the end of the Second World War, this strategic thinking was inherited by the United States: Islamism was an ally in the struggle against communism. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's appointment book for 1953 bears the record of a meeting with “the Honourable Saeed Ramadhan”. Ramadan, as his name is commonly spelt today, had travelled to the US as part of a delegation of three dozen religious scholars and political activists, who its government hoped to cultivate to promote its anti-communist agenda in newly independent Arab states.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts, declassified documents show, described Mr. Ramadan as a “Phalangist” and a “Fascist.” In the Cold War, these weren't necessarily disqualifications.
“By the end of the decade,” journalist and historian Ian Johnson has recorded, “the CIA was overtly backing Ramadan. While it’s too simple to call him a U.S. agent, in the 1950s and 1960s the United States supported him as he took over a mosque in Munich, kicking out local Muslims to build what would become one of the Brotherhood's most important centres”.
In 1949 and 1950, Ramadan travelled to Pakistan. Ramadan became a kind of itinerant preacher for Islamism, broadcasting on its national radio service and attending meetings of the World Muslim Congress in Karachi—the first transnational body connecting the world’s Islamist movements.
The ideas Ramadan brought with him enmeshed with the Islamist project of figures like Abul A’la Maududi, the founder of the Jama’at-e-Islami and, without dispute, the most influential ideologue of the South Asian jihadist movement. In an effort to address the challenges of communal politics in the late colonial period, Maududi sought to draw on a heritage of jihadist movements going back to pre-colonial period.
In 1939, Maududi argued that the pursuit of power—rather than what he called “a hotchpotch of beliefs, prayers and rituals”—was core to Islam. “Islam,” he insisted, “is a revolutionary ideology which seeks to alter the social order of the entire world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.” It was therefore imperative for Muslims to “seize the authority of state, for an evil system takes root and flourishes under the patronage of an evil".
These ideas were, in turn, to suffuse the work of Syed Qutb, the jihadist ideologue who in turn would inspire figures like Abdullah Azzam—the mentor of the leaders of organisations as diverse as al-Qaeda and the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
Evidence exists that America’s fevered Cold Warriors didn’t think too deeply on the forces they were unleashing. Former diplomat Dennis Kux records that John Foster Dulles—Eisenhower's Secretary of State and a key architect of the United States' wars against democracy in Iran, Guatemala and Indo-China—believed that the Gurkhas were Pakistani Muslims, and wanted these famed fighters to be on the anti-communist side.
Even as General Akhtar was pushing the case for an Islamic state in Afghanistan, diplomatic cables show, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was pushing Ambassador Dean to consider “the consequences of the rise of the Islamic fundamentalism”. New Delhi, the Prime Minister said, was willing to “live with any kind of Government in Kabul, which is not run by extreme Islamic fundamentalism”.
Ambassador Dean was, diplomatic records show, persuaded by the Indian case: he feared its degeneration into a narco-state with nuclear weapons, a homeland for movements that would bring destabilisation to the entire region. His bosses in Washington were not: Dean was silenced, and forced to resign amidst claims he was psychiatrically unfit.
President Ronald Reagan famously described the Afghan jihadists as “freedom fighters”: he and others on the American religious right saw in them, not without reason, ideological soulmates.
Even in 1998, as al-Qaeda commenced terrorist attacks against the United States, the architects of these policies were unrepentant. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, and advocate for funding the Afghan mujahideen said in a famous interview: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
From archival material, it is now clear that the United States watched the road to 9/11 being built—and chose not to act. In 1996, for example, the CIA reported the ISI was paying up to $60,000 a month to the Harkat-ul-Ansar—which was in turn cooperating with al-Qaeda and targeting Western nations. It was aware, too, of the ISI’s sponsorship of the Taliban, but chose not to act against Pakistan even as it repeatedly petitioned Islamabad to use its influence to eject Osama Bin Laden from Afghanistan.
Inside the United States Government, some—like President Bill Clinton’s counter-terrorism advisor, William Sheehan—pushed for stronger action against Pakistan. In wry testimony to the official 9/11 commission, Sheehan said he was dismissed as a “a one-note Johnny nutcase”.
From as early as 2006, the United States had begun rebuilding its relationship with Islamist movements worldwide: that year, the State Department organised a conference in Brussels, bringing together western Islamists. Inside three years, President Barack Obama was reaching out to what he described as “moderate Taliban”—men who, David Rothkopf mockingly observed, “advocate stoning unfaithful women to death with only small rocks and pebbles,” and “offer Bin Laden refuge in his home only during inclement weather.”
In Washington, it appeared that fighting Islamism was less significant than other strategic aims: shaping the structure of power across the Middle-East and Pakistan; containing Chinese and Russian influence. The jihadist threat, they argued, could be managed; protecting continued United States influence in nuclear-armed Pakistan was of greater importance. The second rise of the Islamic Emirate is a direct consequence of those beliefs.
The road to 9/11, then, was paved by fantasies that America itself nurtured. In Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and theatres of conflict across Asia and Africa, those ideas have gained in power from the great pools of blood unleashed this day twenty years ago. The curtain has fallen on one act of this nightmare; this tragic performance, though, is far from its end.
