by Tamim Ansary
Next to go were the secular modernists of Afghanistan. Their demise began with a seeming triumph for an extreme version of the secularist impulse. A coup by a tiny group of Afghanistan communists smashed the dynasty Nadir Shah had founded in the 1920s. Every member of that clan who could not escape was killed. Then the Soviet Union invaded and took direct control of the country. But the leftward swing of the pendulum was momentary and meaningless; it only triggered an overwhelmingly more massive tribal and religious insurgency. The eight-year, anti-Soviet guerilla war that followed totally empowered the country’s Islamist ideologues. Not only that but the rural Afghan resistance attracted Islamist zealots from around the Muslim world, including jihadists from the Arab world and Deobandis from Pakistan, all of them sponsored by Wahhabi money from the oil-rich Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Among the many who tasted first blood in these battlefields of Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden.
In fact, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, Islam’s secular modernists saw their power erode almost everywhere. In Algeria, the secular government came under siege by the Islamic Salvation Party. In Palestine, the secular PLO gave way to the religious ideologues of Hamas. Islamic Jihad, another militant group rooted in religious ideology, gained a toehold in this region as well. In Lebanon, a series of devastating Israeli invasions emptied the Palestinian refugee camps along the southern border, destroyed Beirut, and drove the PLO to new headquarters in Libya, but this only spawned the radical Shi’i political party Hezbollah, which ended up as the de facto ruler of the country’s southern half and proved itself just as committed to destroying Israel as the ousted PLO.
In Syria and Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood (and its offshoots) fought a grim war with the Ba’ath Party, a war that went largely unnoticed in the West. The Ba’ath governments could not eradicate these Islamist insurgents despite horrific measures such as Syrian president Hafez Assad’s 1982 massacre of nearly all the people of a good-sized town called Hama.
Saddam Hussein, the ruler of Iraq, was a Sunni secular modernist and a sworn enemy of radical religious Islamism. In 1980, directly after Khomeini took power, Hussein invaded Iran. Perhaps he considered the country ripe for the picking due to its internal turmoil; perhaps he had his eye on Iran’s oil; perhaps he felt threatened by Khomeini—as he had good reason to be: Khomeini blatantly announced his intention to export his revolution, and secular Iraq, with its large Shi’i population, was the obvious first market for this export. Whatever Hussein’s aims, his war proved catastrophic for both countries. Both lost nearly an entire generation of their young men and boys. Not since World War I had such vast armies met head to head nor had so many lives been squandered so casually for such trivial gains. And throughout this war, the United States funneled arms and funds to Iraq, bolstering its capacity to keep fighting to the last Iraqi, because the United States feared that the Soviets might gain ground in this strategic region, now that the United States had lost its foothold in Iran. Helping the Iraqis was a way to weaken Iran and possibly keep the Soviets at bay. Here again was a catastrophic intertwining of the Muslim and Western narratives, the one narrative still about secular modernism versus back-to-the-source Islamism, the other still about superpower rivalry and control of oil, though couched in rhetoric about democracy and totalitarianism.
The Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988 with no winners, unless you count Iran’s mere survival as a victory. Iraq certainly ended up in ruins, its treasury exhausted by the pointless bloodshed. Saddam Hussein licked his wounds for two years, and then, in 1990, he made a bid to recoup his losses. A double-or-nothing risk-taker if ever there was one, Saddam invaded and “annexed” neighboring Kuwait, hoping to add that country’s oil to his own. Apparently, U.S. ambassador April Gillespie had given him reason to believe the United States would back him in this venture too.
Instead, the United States led a coalition of thirty-four countries against its erstwhile ally in an assault code-named Desert Storm, a short war that destroyed much of Iraq’s infrastructure and culminated in the firebombing of Saddam’s pathetic draftees as they were dragging themselves back toward Basra on what came to be known as the Highway of Death. This time Iraq was absolutely, totally, and unambiguously defeated—and yet the war ended with Saddam Hussein somehow still in power, somehow still in control of his core military outfit, the elite Republican Guard, and still able to crush—as he savagely did—the rebellions that erupted in the wake of his defeat by the West.
After the war, the United Nations imposed sanctions that virtually severed Iraq from the world and reduced Iraqi citizens from a European standard of living in 1990 to one that approached the most impoverished on Earth. Incomes dropped about 95 percent. Disease spread, and there was no medicine to stem it. Over two hundred thousand children—and perhaps as many as half a million—died as a direct result of the sanctions. One U.N. official, Denis Halliday, resigned because of these sanctions, claiming that “Five thousand children are dying every month. . . . I don’t want to administer a program that results in figures like these.”5 Iraqis, who had suffered through so many years of deepening horror trapped in a war-mad police state, were now reduced to inconceivable squalor. The only sector of Iraqi society on whom the sanctions had little impact was the Ba’ath Party elite, Saddam Hussein and his cohorts, the very people the sanctions were intended to punish.
And in the east, the Soviets, who had invaded Afghanistan less than a year before Iraq invaded Iran, pulled out of Afghanistan less than a year after Iraq finally left Iran. The Afghan communists clung to power for another three years, but when they did at last go down, the entire Soviet Union was crumbling too, its empire unraveling in Eastern Europe, its constituent republics—even Russia—declaring independence until there was nothing left to declare independence from.
In America, conservative historian Francis Fukuyama wrote that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history: liberal capitalist democracy had won, no ideology could challenge it anymore, and nothing remained but a little cleanup work around the edges while all the world got on board the train headed for the only truth. In fact, he offered this thesis in a book titled The End of History and the Last Man.
On the other side of the planet, however, jihadists and Wahhabis were drawing very different conclusions from all these thunderous events. In Iran, it seemed to them, Islam had brought down the Shah and driven out America. In Afghanistan, Muslims had not just beaten the Red Army but toppled the Soviet Union itself. Looking at all this, jihadists saw a pattern they thought they recognized. The First Community had defeated the two superpowers of its day, the Byzantine and Sassanid empires, simply by having God on its side. Modern Muslims also confronted two superpowers, and they had now brought one of them down entirely. One down, one to go was how it looked to the jihadists and the Wahhabis. History coming to an end? Hardly! As these radicals saw it, history was just getting interesting.
For years, they had been describing a world bifurcated between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. For years they had been predicting an apocalyptic showdown between good and evil, God and Satan, a great global battle to resolve all the contradictions and melt all factions into a single world, Medina universalized.
For the West, the end of the Cold War meant Afghanistan could be abandoned. There was nothing left to do there. The United States and its western European allies had pumped billions of dollars worth of arms and money into the country, but now they disengaged entirely, rejecting proposals from several sources that they sponsor some sort of conference, broker some sort of peace, help cobble together some sort of political process to help the country find its way back to civil order. CIA station chief Milton Bearden explained the reason for this sudden disengagement succinctly: “No one gives a shit about Afghanistan.” The tribal armies that had battled the Soviets fell to quarrelling over the country they had won with the arms they had scored. The Soviets had already destroyed the Afghan countryside. Now, the civil war am
ong the various guerilla armies destroyed the cities. Foreign jihadists who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s swarmed back to make the rubble their base of operations for a war against the West.
Step one was erecting in Afghanistan a pure version of the community they envisioned, one in which every man, woman, and child lived exactly according to the letter of God’s law as they understood it or suffered the punishment. For this reason, jihadists, sponsored by Wahhabi money from Saudi sources, helped develop the Taliban, a party of primitive ideologues that emerged out of the refugee camps in that tribal belt that vaguely separates Afghanistan from Pakistan.
And eventually, some subset of the militant Jihadists holed up in the carcass of Afghanistan crafted a scheme to fly hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and Pentagon headquarters in Washington, D.C.
On that day, September 11, 2001, two world histories crashed together, and out of it came one certainty: Fukiyama was mistaken. History was not over.
AFTERWORD
Although history is not over, the period since 9/11 has not mulched down enough to enter history yet: it still belongs to journalists. It is not too soon, however, to reflect on this period as a manifestation of two great, out-of-sync narratives intersecting.
In the weeks immediately after the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., President Bush rallied the United States for military action with rhetoric that evoked long-standing themes of American and Western history. He said the terrorists were out to destroy freedom and democracy and that these values must be defended with blood and treasure, the same rallying cry raised against Nazism in the thirties and communism in the fifties. Since then, the United States and a coalition of largely unwilling allies have poured a great many troops into Iraq to fight a war cast rhetorically in much the same terms as the Cold War, and the twentieth century world wars, and so on back into earlier chapters of the Western world historical narrative.
But did the perpetrators of 9/11 really see themselves as striking a blow against freedom and democracy? Is hatred of freedom the passion that drives militantly political Islamist extremists today? If so, you won’t find it in jihadist discourse, which typically focuses, not on freedom and its opposite, nor on democracy and its opposite, but on discipline versus decadence, on moral purity versus moral corruption, terms that come out of centuries of Western dominance in Islamic societies and the corresponding fragmentation of communities and families there, the erosion of Islamic social values, the proliferation of liquor, the replacement of religion with entertainment, and the secularization of the rich elite along with the ever-hardening gap between rich and poor.
One side charges, “You are decadent.” The other side retorts, “We are free.” These are not opposing contentions; they’re nonsequiturs. Each side identifies the other as a character in its own narrative. In the 1980s, Khomeini called America “the Great Satan,” and other Islamist revolutionaries have echoed his rhetoric. In 2008, Jeffrey Herf, a history professor at the University of Maryland, suggested that radical Islamists are the Nazis reborn, motivated at core by anti-Semitism and hatred of women. It’s a common analysis.
Herf and others see the Islamist doctrine as boiling down to a call for cutting off heads, cutting off hands, and clamping bags over women. There’s no denying that radical Islamists have done these things. Yet radical Islamists themselves see the main conflict dividing the world today as a disagreement about whether there is one God, many gods, or no God at all. All the problems of humanity would be resolved, they contend, if the world would only recognize the singleness of God (and of Mohammed’s special role as his spokesperson).
Secular intellectuals in the West don’t necessarily disagree about the number of gods. They just don’t think that’s the burning question. To them—to us—the basic human problem is finding ways to satisfy the needs and wants of all people in a manner that gives each one full participation in decision making about his or her own destiny. One God, two gods, three, none, many—whatever: people will have differing views, and it’s not worth fighting about, because settling that question will not help solve hunger, poverty, war, crime, inequality, injustice, global warming, resource depletion, or any of the other ills plaguing humanity. Such is the secular position.
Yet secular and Western are not synonymous, despite what Islamists may declare. A 2001 survey by the City University of New York showed that 81 percent of Americans identified with an organized religion, 77 percent of them with Christianity. Of the rest, many called themselves “spiritual.” Declared atheists were so few they didn’t even register on the charts. Whatever the conflict wracking today’s world, it’s not between those who are and those who aren’t religious.
In fact, the West has its own religious devotees who want to put God at the center of politics, most notably the Christian evangelicals who have wielded such clout in the United States since the 1970s. Tariq Ali wrote a book after 9/11 titled The Clash of Fundamentalisms, suggesting that this tension between Islam and the West boils down to a religious argument between fundamentalist extremists. If so, however, the two sides don’t present opposing doctrines. Christian fundamentalists don’t necessarily disagree about how many Gods there are; they just don’t think that’s the question. Their discourse revolves around accepting Jesus Christ as one’s savior (whereas no Muslim would ever say “Mohammed is our savior”). So the argument between Christian and Muslim “fundamentalists” comes down to: Is there only one God or is Jesus Christ our savior? Again, that’s not a point-counterpoint; that’s two people talking to themselves in separate rooms.
The fact that the Muslim world and the West have come to the same events by different paths has had concrete consequences. After 2001, U.S. strategists acted on the premise that the climactic terrorist act of modern times somehow fit into the framework of power politics among nation-states. After all, that’s what European wars had been about for many centuries. Even the Cold War came down to a confrontation between blocs of nations, the warring entities lined up along the ideological fault line ultimately being governments. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, therefore, the Bush administration looked around, over, past, through, anywhere but directly at the specific terrorists of that day, in its quest to find the government behind those men. Reflexively, U.S. strategists—and many analysts in the Western media—sought an adversary of the same genre, the same class, the same type the country had confronted in earlier wars.
Thus it was that, after a brief initial incursion into Afghanistan and a transitory obsession with Osama bin Laden, the Bush team zeroed in Saddam Hussein as the mastermind and Iraq as the core state responsible for terrorism against Western citizens, the state whose conquest and “democratization” would put an end to this plague. But after Saddam Hussein had been captured and hanged, after Iraq had been fully occupied, if not subdued, terrorism showed no real sign of abating, whereupon U.S. government strategists shifted focus to Iran. And depending on what happens there, Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and a host of other nations await their turn as designated chief “state sponsor” of terrorism.
With its policies deeply rooted in the Western narrative, the United States has prescribed democracy and sponsored elections to remedy local ills in Iraq and Afghanistan and other troubled regions. Upon the successful completion of such elections, the countries in question are said to have become democracies or at least to have moved closer to that happy state.
But I keep remembering the elections held in Afghanistan after the Taliban had fled the country. Across the nation, people chose delegates to represent them at a national meeting organized by the United States to forge a new democratic government, complete with parliament, constitution, president, and cabinet. That summer in Paghman, a town near Kabul, I met a man who said he had voted in the elections. I couldn’t picture him in a voting booth, since he looked like the traditional rural villagers I had known in my youth, with the standard long shirt, baggy pants, turban, and beard, s
o I asked him to describe the voting process for me—what was the actual activity?
“Well, sir,” he said, “a couple of city men came around with slips of paper and went on and on about how we were supposed to make marks on them, and we listened politely, because they had come a long way and we didn’t want to be rude, but we didn’t need those city fellows to tell us who our man was. We made the marks they wanted, but we always knew who would be representing us—Agha-i-Sayyaf, of course.”
“And how did you settle on Sayyaf?” I asked.
“Settle on him? Sir! What do you mean? His family has lived here since the days of Dost Mohammed Khan and longer. Go over that ridge, you’ll see his house across the valley—biggest one around! Every year at Eid, he comes by and gives candy to the children and inquires about our problems, and if someone needs help, why, he fetches money out of his pocket and hands it over then and there, whatever he has on him. That man is a Muslim! Did you know that my sister’s husband has a cousin who is married to Sayyaf ’s sister-in-law? He’s one of our own.”
It struck me that what Western planners called “democracy” was an extraneous apparatus this man shouldered because he had to, under which load he carried on with his real life as best he could. In him flowed two streams of history that were unrelated and interconnecting awkwardly. And if this was happening an hour outside Kabul, it was happening all over the country.
From the Western side, it seems plausible (to some) to assert that funding and arming rulers amenable to Western ways in places like Pakistan, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt helps bring democracy to those societies, not to mention the blessings of a free market. It also seems plausible (to some) to assert that Islamic social values are backward and need correction by more progressive people, even if force must needs be applied to get it done.
