Al Qaeda was born out of the end of the Afghan war. Thousands of young mujahideen, or holy warriors, had gone to Afghanistan to fight the Russians, urged to do so by their own governments, religious leaders, and the Americans. They came from everywhere in the Islamic world, among them the brightest, most idealistic, and most courageous. Many died, and all were scarred by combat against a brutal enemy whose actions were not encumbered by CNN crews filming the fighting.
In many ways, the fate of the survivors was much worse than what happened to America's Vietnam veterans. The latter came home to a country that treated their sacrifice with indifference and contempt. The mujahideen, in many cases, weren't able to go home at all.
When the Afghan war ended, those who remained alive were a special breed. They had been hardened by the war physically and spiritually. Their contact with the relatively primitive Afghan tribesmen, whose faith was both simple and violent, intensified their own personal beliefs. These were men who prayed with an intensity that was rare in the Islamic world, and who also knew how to handle hand grenades and rocket launchers. Before the war, countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt had been afraid of the Soviets, wanted to please the United States, and—in some cases—were frightened of the religious fervor of these young warriors. The governments thought these passionate young men would be much better off getting killed in Afghanistan than staying at home and causing trouble. After the war, the last thing that most Islamic regimes wanted was to have these men return home.
The United States, which had been instrumental in arming, training, and deploying these men, lost interest in Afghanistan once the Soviet Union withdrew its troops and began to collapse. Afghanistan was not of great strategic interest to the U.S., and the cost of maintaining its network of operatives—let alone its secret army—was high. The first Bush administration made a decision that was obvious at the time and disastrous in retrospect: to pull the plug on the Afghani operations. It shut down all operations and left its erstwhile allies dangling in the breeze.
Many of these operatives had been functioning covertly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their own passports and identity papers had been replaced by Afghan and Pakistani documents. That was standard operating procedure for everyone's protection. However, as the United States shut down its operations, it did not return the original papers—which were in Washington or had been destroyed—nor did it make any provisions for returning the Islamic international brigade to their homes. This was partly due to U.S. indifference. Even more, however, it was a response to the pressure of allied Islamic governments, which didn't want these holy warriors back.
The best of them, a few thousand perhaps, were left stranded thousands of miles from their homes in a foreign country that was in shambles. There is a Western medieval term: paladin, meaning a knight who is somewhere outside of the normal social structure. Skilled at war, he is available for hire, as long as the cause is just. The paladin is also seen as a force for good, serving and protecting the faith as he travels homeless through the world. The end of the Afghan war created a band of paladins, bound together by the shared agony of Afghanistan and their betrayal by their own government and the Americans. Homeless but skilled in war, they were stranded in a strange land. But it was a land where their skills were needed by the factions fighting one another in the long civil war that followed victory over the Soviets.
In due course, some were able go home either because they were well connected or because they obtained forged papers. The rest remained scattered. They were bound together by the memory of war, the sense of victory, and the profound feeling of betrayal. The sentiment was aimed not only at the United States—the U.S. was to them just a Christian country that was using them, something that was not unexpected. The much deeper wounds of betrayal were attributed to their own governments—particularly the Islamic monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula that they labeled “hypocrites.”
This is a subtle aspect of the warriors' psyche—but crucial to understanding them. They did not regard this as simply a personal betrayal. For them, it represented the fundamental disease of the Islamic world. The outside threats to Islam (the Soviet Union and the United States) were manageable, but the real problem was the internal corruption of the Islamic world. Until that was dealt with, the Islamic world could never deal with Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Communists who were using, abusing, and oppressing the Islamic world for their own ends.
It is vital to remember that the Afghan warriors were among the best and brightest. Like the International Brigade that fought in the Spanish Civil War, many were well educated. Obviously, all had traveled a bit, and all knew the arts of warfare. They knew more than a little about the world and its history and could analyze events through their religious prism. A theory developed among them as to what was wrong and what was to be done.
The Problem
From their point of view, the problem of the Islamic world went back to the Christian Crusades and the loss of the Caliphate. Islam, which originated in the Arabian Peninsula, had swept through North Africa and the Indian Ocean basin in a series of brilliant political and military maneuvers. At various times, this vast empire covered points from the Pyrenees to the Philippines, as far south as Zanzibar and as far north as Grozny and Vienna. The range of the empire over time was far grander than the Roman Empire ever was.
At the heart of the empire was the Caliph, a ruler who combined political, military, and religious authority. His task—and that of the political and religious bureaucracy through which he governed—was to hold the Caliphate together, to protect it from foreign encroachment, and to extend its sway. In one sense, it was simply one of many human empires and behaved like it. In another sense, like the Holy Roman Empire in its earliest conception, it represented a divine presence in the world.
It was the intention of the mujahideen to resurrect the Caliphate and ultimately to raise it to the greatness it once had. This did not strike them as at all improbable. Empires come and go. They had—in their minds—brought down the Soviet Union. Israel had been resurrected after 2,000 years. The United States, a relatively unpopulated continent 200 years ago, was now a global empire. In 1600, Britain was a savage island of warring tribes, and 250 years later, it ruled the world. The Islamic world had much fewer challenges than any of these. Nothing had to be invented. The pieces simply had to be put together again.
~~America's Secret War: Inside The Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies -by- George Friedman
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