America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror

Mahmood Mamdani, Professor of Government and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University, is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost analysts of the history and politics of the nation state in the developing world. Mamdani’s area of expertise is the constraints imposed by Western colonial and post-colonial powers on the prospects for popular non-Western nationalist movements to create viable states, and hitherto his work has focused on Africa. His books Citizen and Subject, which traces the influence of the colonial state structure on politics in post-colonial Africa, and When Victims Become Killers, which focuses on the causes of the Rwandan genocide, have become required reading for students of the modern African state. So much so that Mamdani is rightly credited with helping to give voice and shape to a whole new generation of critique on the factors that enable and constrain “Third World” political movements to develop in the contemporary globalized order.

Mamdani’s latest book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and The Roots of Terror, shifts focus from Africa to the Middle East. But in so doing, it sketches, with similar clarity and insight, the same themes that have bedeviled African national development: most crucially, the ways in which Great Powers, principally the United States, have treated the Middle East as subjugated territory on which to play out their geopolitical ambitions. The results, as Mamdani shows, have been an unmitigated disaster for the populations of many Middle Eastern countries, notably Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. But because the US has couched its regional ambitions in the language of morality, Mamdani persuasively argues that the logic and propaganda it uses to facilitate such aggression will ultimately turn in on itself, and lead, not to a world dominated by a US Empire, but to a world with which the US will have to make accommodation.

The book begins with an analysis of the ways in which the “war on terror” has politicised religion, and in particular the pervasive association between “Muslim” and “terrorist” now made in the minds of many in America. Mamdani shows how this propaganda has sought, not to demonize all Muslims, but more insidiously, to divide them into good Muslims who are moderate, and bad Muslims who are fundamentalist. Such a division not only subsumes political fanaticism and religious belief as if there were no differences between the two, but is also racist. Behind this assumption is the idea that fundamentalist Islam is premodern and backward, whereas moderate Islam embraces Western values, which are modern and progressive. From this, it is only a short step to begin to imagine that invading countries to bring them democracy is a form of “liberation.”

In reality, the development of religious fundamentalism, its politicization, and the demonization of particular groups on the grounds of belief need to be seen largely in the context of modern Western politics. As Mamdani points out, while the concepts of the Islamic state and popular Islamic-based political movements have been aspirations for intellectuals and activists in Egypt, India and elsewhere, the promotion of religious fundamentalism as a political entity has largely been the work of the US government. This is evident from the ways in which religious fundamentalism has become increasingly influential within the US itself; a fundamentalism that has successfully hijacked what Mamdani calls “culture talk,” and which has promoted the idea of a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and Christianity for its own political purposes.

It is also evident that, in its pursuit of a policy of fighting covert and proxy wars across the world after its defeat in Vietnam, the US government was among the biggest funders of Islamic fundamentalist groups devoted to fighting a modern “Jihad.”

Mamdani devotes most of the book to an exploration of the ways in which the US government developed the policy of proxy war; the context, Mamdani argues, in which fundamentalist Islamic “terrorists” have flourished in the contemporary world. He traces the beginnings of this policy to the US defeat in Vietnam in 1975, and to the collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa around the same time. Defeat in Vietnam led to a new ideology for the American administration: that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars.”

The shift of the Cold War to Africa provided the perfect opportunity for the United States to experiment with its new strategy of proxy war, using the Apartheid regime in South Africa to fight the MPLA in Angola and to fund Renamo in Mozambique.

It was, however, with the advent of the Reagan administration in 1981 that the US strategy of fighting proxy wars, or “low intensity conflicts,” as a way of containing both the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism reached its full-blown state.

The Reagan administration fought two proxy wars in the 1980s, in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. In Nicaragua, the Contras received covert funding from the US government and were hailed as “freedom fighters” by Reagan in their ultimately successful attempt to destabilize and overthrow the Sandinista regime. But it was in Afghanistan that the US strategy of covertly funding terrorists truly blossomed, and a whole new generation of Muslim fundamentalists was groomed into fighting a Jihad.

The war in Afghanistan represented the high point of the Cold War, Mamdani argues, in which the US aim was not to reach accommodation with either the Soviet Union or with Afghan nationalists, but to create the Soviet’s “own Vietnam.”

In 1985, Reagan appeared on television outside the White House with a group of Afghan men, all from the mujahideen. “These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers” Reagan announced. The stage was thus set for a decade of brutal conflict in Afghanistan, in which covertly funded Muslim fundamentalists were the US weapon of choice.

The United States and its allies had long had an ambivalent relationship with political Islam. Prepared to fund it on occasion – Hamas, for example, was initially encouraged by Israel and played off against the PLO – it was nonetheless only tolerated when it suited the US’s wider regional interests. Hence, because the Islamist regime that came to power in Iran after the 1979 revolution was also nationalist, it was considered a threat to US interests and was relentlessly opposed. This was the context in which Saddam Hussein was recruited as a US ally, to fight a proxy war against the Iranians. Saddam’s troops, trained and armed (including with chemical weapons) by the United States, invaded Iran in 1980.

While the Iran-Iraq war helped solidify the perception that Shiite Muslims were revolutionary and Sunni Muslims moderate, it was ironically a fundamentalist form of political Islam that the United States encouraged as a means of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

In its proxy war with the Soviet Union, the United States provided Afghanistan’s Islamist mujahideen with money and logistical support (including weapons), channeled primarily through Pakistan. In return for its help in the Afghan war effort, Pakistan was granted massive amounts of US aid throughout the 1980s despite its appalling human rights record, and again in 2001, with the US invasion of Afghanistan.

A massive propaganda and fund-raising machine targeted the worldwide Muslim population, so that the mobilization of recruits occurred through a range of Islamic institutions. The ideas of Jihad were developed at these training centers, ideas that were hitherto marginal within the Islamic tradition. It has been estimated that over 80,000 men were trained militarily within Pakistan from 1982 to 1992, and that a total of $3 billion in covert US funds were funneled to the mujahideen, through banks such as BCCI – “the bankers of Jihad,” as Mamdani puts it.

Following policy developed in South East Asia in the 1970s and Latin America in the mid 1980s, the US also funded the war through drugs. By the end of the war in 1990, Afghanistan and Pakistan had become the world’s largest producers of opium and heroin, a trade controlled with the utmost brutality in the fight for regional supremacy.

Thus, it was the Afghan war that gave right wing Islamists the organization, numbers, skills, reach, and confidence to mobilize and organize in an unprecedented way. Fundamentalist political Islam, argues Mamdani, “is a modern political phenomenon, not a leftover of traditional culture.”

In the final chapters, Mamdani argues that it was the events of September 11 that created the opportunity the US administration needed to shift from covert to overt war in the pursuit of its interests in the Middle East. With a massive groundswell of sympathy behind them, the US government was able to present the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003 as a war against terror.

Yet, within the US’s apparent volte-face, ironies abound, perhaps the most obvious of which is that the enemy that turned on the US on September 11, 2001 was an enemy the US had trained and funded for many years. From this perspective, it is not difficult to see how convenient the events of September 11 were for an administration on record as wishing to invade Iraq, since it gave them the perfect excuse to do so.

As Mamdani makes clear, Iraq had been softened up for invasion by a decade of a new and utterly devastating weapon of proxy war: UN sanctions. Sanctions appear to have led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children under the age of five, and they put severe stress on Iraqi state infrastructure. Thus, the threats cited by the US as an excuse to invade Iraq were bogeymen. The “Muslim terrorists” were in fact US creations, while the specter of militant nationalism in Iraq had been broken by a decade of extreme punishment by the sanctions regime. Thus, American boys are fighting in Iraq today because the occupation of Iraq is in fact an overt form of imperialism, reflecting US interests in the region, rather than the interests of the Iraqi people.

But it is also in Iraq that Mamdani suggests we may finally see the unraveling of US ambitions to dominate the globe. In taking the fight against nationalist and militant Islamic terror into a state that still retains some sense of national identity and infrastructure – however beleaguered and battered - the US has chosen to shed the veil of covert brutality and opted for overt conflict with the nationals of another state.

Just as the US failed to defeat nationalism in Vietnam, Mamdani argues, so they will fail to defeat it in Iraq. Dividing Muslims into “good” and “bad” is an increasingly hollow effort as such propaganda is played out on the ground in Iraq. This is partly because to be Muslim and anti-American is no longer a right wing Islamist opinion, but a popular sentiment in the face of military occupation. It is also partly because, however hard it tries, the US cannot wipe out nationalist aspiration across the world and replace it with privatized, globalized and militarized alternatives.

Just as the US had to accept it could not defeat nationalism militarily in Vietnam, so it has to accept that it cannot defeat it now – either through covert or overt military means. In Mamdani’s words: “To win the fight against terrorism requires accepting that the world has changed, that the old colonialism is no more and will not return, and that to occupy foreign places will be expensive, in lives and money. America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live in it.” Let’s hope that Mamdani’s gifts of prophecy are as abundant as his gifts of analysis, and that the invasion of Iraq does indeed represent the dying throes of the American imperial project