Know Your Enemy:
Unholy Wars by John K. Cooley
Sometimes history has a long fuse. The diplomatic train-wreck that led to World War I began with the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The Allies’ short-sighted Treaty of Versailles created the conditions for the rise of Nazism in the decades that followed. And the new world of terror we live in today dawned not on September 11, 2001, but December 23, 1979, when the first Soviet tanks rolled across the frontier of Afghanistan.
No clearer picture of that event and its vast consequences could be imagined than Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism by John Cooley. In the second edition, published in mid-2000, Cooley systematically shows how the invasion of Afghanistan and the US reaction to it led directly to the establishment of the terror and drug networks whose actions have cost us so many lives and so many dollars in the 90s and 00s. To readers familiar with the overall story, there isn’t much new here – just detail after terrifying detail about the extent of the threat radical Islamism poses in the Middle East and around the world, and an unsparing roster of familiar-named accomplices and unfortunate decisions.
Though Cooley’s organization is a little bit scattered and his writing is occasionally clunky, one critical point comes shining through in the heavily-annotated 280+ pages: The US didn’t support the Islamic radicals who formed the Afghan mujahadeen – US policy created them. Prior to 1979, radical Islam was a politically-marginal movement, except in the special case of non-Arab, non-Sunni (orthodox) Iran. The US government, starting with Carter and continuing through the Reagan and Bush I years, actively encouraged the most militant fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to spread their extreme beliefs across the Arab world – including to countries like Egypt and Algeria, where secular modernism was finally beginning to emerge as the dominant ideology – then recruited and trained the most fanatical young men from this international movement into a fearsome and effective fighting force. The US actively encouraged Saudis to fund this effort, both through the government and private individuals like the wealthy Bin Laden family. They also encouraged the mujahadeen in Afghanistan to finance their own fight by showing them how to cultivate, refine and traffic drugs like opium.
The consequences of this effort were two-fold. First, it succeeded grandly in miring the Soviets in a grim and unwinnable war in Central Asia, and created, for the first time, a serious drug problem in the Russian military which has since mushroomed into a dreadful epidemic in post-Soviet society. Indeed, the creation of such pleasant institutions as the Russian Mafia and the Eastern European drug networks are directly attributable to US policy in Afghanistan. One could, however, argue that the Afghan war accelerated the collapse of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe – a purpose which to some justified practically any tactics.
The strategy undeniably created a number of highly-toxic byproducts. The radicalized and militant mujahadeen returned to their own countries and immediately began fomenting violence and political unrest against generally stable, moderate governments. Perversely, it was the relatively progressive states like Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan and Yemen which were most destabilized. The new post-Soviet Central Asian states soon faced similar problems. Perversely, counties under more authoritarian rule such as Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere were able to suppress or co-opt the extremists. In places like Sudan, Somolia, and post-war Afghanistan, where radical Islam was already ascendant, the guerillas were able to leverage their training, funding and organization into highly effective secret networks such as Al-Qaida – networks now free of the influence and control of the CIA and other state sponsors.
What makes these groups so dangerous is how well-developed their infrastructure is. These were fighters trained to defeat the Red Army, and they gained confidence from their success. They received advanced instruction in a comprehensive range of warfare techniques, including management and organization. They were, and in some cases continue to be, funded by some of the wealthiest regimes and individuals on earth. And their ideology of radical Islam is much more organic than the artificial intellectual construct of Marxism, and therefore in its way much more potentially explosive.
A book like Unholy Wars is essential reading to understand the true scope and nature of the enemy we are fighting. Militant Islamism is ruthless in its methods and implacable in its objectives: a combination against which the only option is violence. It shares and supports none of the values held dear by modern civil societies, and there can be no cooperation with it, even in temporary support of common objectives. It has no allegiance whatsoever to modern, secular Arab states, even ones who superficially share the radicals’ hostility to the West. Most of all, as an international movement that inhabits failed states, infiltrates and weakens modernizing states, and attacks developed countries, it requires international cooperation to successfully confront.
9:50:20 AM 
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