Author: Rich Lowry
Publication: National Review
Date: October 1, 2001
URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry100101.shtml
It's a cliché to say how
dirty and complicated the U.S. war on terrorism will be, but you don't
get the full measure of how true this might be until you understand the
nature of America's allies in this fight.
And not even the sugar-on-top allies
- Syria, Iran, and Sudan. Just the bargain-basement, can't-do-it-without-them
allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, are bad enough, with their direct and
indirect support of terrorism over the years, their Byzantine and conspiratorial
internal politics, and their well-developed capacity for betrayal.
Dealing with these allies will require
more cold-bloodedness and calculation than the U.S. has been capable of
since the height of the Cold War. Dorothy, you're not in NATO anymore.
Take Pakistan. There is plenty of
talk of how the U.S. is experiencing "blowback" from its support for Afghan
rebels in the 1980s. But this isn't quite true if by "blowback" one means
an unintended consequence, since the Paks deliberately molded the rebels
into an international terrorist force.
The Pak security service, the ISI,
is what the CIA is in the most feverish fantasies of the Left - a double-dealing
agency involved in the nastiest of dirty tricks, indeed in the active fostering
of terrorism. Except Islamabad doesn't have a Frank Church, and probably
never will.
In his book Bin Laden (which now
sells for something like $1,500 on amazon.com), Yossef Bodansky details
how the ISI went out of its way to hide the true nature of the Afghan rebels
from the CIA:
The United States was convinced
that it was supporting a genuine national liberation struggle, albeit with
a strong Islamic foundation, and Islamabad went to great lengths to ensure
that the United States did not discover firsthand the kind of mujahideen
the American taxpayers were sponsoring. Toward this end the CIA was isolated
by the ISI from the training infrastructure it financed.
The Saudis, meanwhile, funded the
training of Islamic extremists on the NIMBY grounds - better in Afghanistan
than Riyadh. But eventually the Saudis began to fear that the terrorist
force would come back to bite them, since the extremists hate the Saudi
regime. So, the Saudis, according to Bodansky, cut a deal with the Paks.
The ISI would keep the Afghan extremists
from Saudi Arabia, in exchange for Saudi lobbying on Pakistan's behalf
in Washington. The Saudis would convince the U.S. that Pakistan was a responsible
power, keeping a lid on Islamic extremism.
This was a cynical enough deal,
but in this part of the world cynicism piles on top of cynicism until it's
hard to know who's betraying whom. The Paks reneged on the deal.
Bodansky writes,
By fall of 1995 Riyadh had begun
to realize that the ISI had been taking Saudi money and Islamabad had been
building on Saudi influence in Washington while Saudi "Afghans" were being
trained and supported in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Iran for operations
in Saudi Arabia.
There's "blowback" for you. In the
story of the rise of Islamic terrorism, "blowback," or some form of cheating
and manipulation, is basically all there is. According to Bodansky, to
improve their image in the West, the Paks closed down some Taliban training
camps in 1996, only to reopen the camps under the auspices of an outfit
the Paks controlled even more directly.
Bodansky even credits suspicions
of ISI and Saudi involvement in terrorist attacks on their own soil, as
a result of particularly vicious internal political maneuvering.
So, as the debate over "the coalition"
continues, it's important to remember that these are SOBs who are barely
even our SOBs. By all means, use them in any way we find helpful, but don't
sentimentalize them, and don't let their feelings or interests get in the
way of pursuing what we think is right.
They will betray us at the first
opportunity, and - who knows? - may be doing so already.
