25. BILL CLINTON: BOOMER REALIST

CLINTON AND THE WORLD

Indeed, events in the second half of the 1990s that would soon come to have great significance to America were taking place in Afghanistan, events which at the time drew little attention from the world (except from the CIA which was watching developments closely).  A group of religious diehards, the Taliban, were in the process of taking over all but the very northern portions of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was well-recognized as being a relatively ungovernable country, inhabited by numerous tribes and ethnic groups with a long history of mutual hatred. Since the downfall of the Afghan Shah in 1973 Afghanistan had been, with frequent Soviet interference, ruled by various mutually hostile factions of the Afghan Communist Party.  Then with the final collapse of the pro-Soviet government and the creation in 1992 of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, the schisms switched from ideological differences to strictly personal, tribal and ethnic differences, merely continuing the politically unstable situation.

The Pashtun tribesmen, living in the south and southeast of the country, were the largest of the ethnic groups – and long-accustomed to running the country, even though they comprised only a little over 40% of the Afghan population. Tajiks made up not quite 30%, Hazara not quite 10%, Uzbeks also not quite 10%, and the other 10% a mixture of other tribes.  Afghanistan was thus not truly a nation, but merely a collection of nations – which made the idea of building a democracy in Afghanistan very complicated, if not totally unlikely to ever come to pass.

With the creation in 1992 of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, the country was plunged into a vicious civil war, with various alpha males representing Afghanistan's various tribal groups fighting among themselves, switching loyalties as their perceived self-interests shifted back and forth.

But in 1994 the civil war was joined by yet another small group of mostly Pashtuns, formed around the leadership of an Islamic fundamentalist teacher, the mullah Muhammad Omar, and his students or taliban.  The Taliban were mostly Afghans who had originally fled Afghanistan and had established themselves with the Mullah Omar in the Pastun regions of Pakistan.²  The Taliban began to grow rapidly in number, drawing madrasah (religious school) students and young ideologically-inspired militants from among the huge Afghan refugee population in Pakistan.  But it also began to draw membership from Islamic fundamentalists from all around the Muslim world because of its well-known commitment to the strictest form of shari'a, Islamic social and religious law.  Also, various elements of the Pakistani government, particularly its intelligence service, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), began to give considerable support to the Taliban.

In 1994 the Taliban crossed from Pakistan into Afghanistan and easily seized the key southern city of Kandahar (well placed within Pashtun territory) – where the political reach from Afghanistan's capital city Kabul had been virtually non-existent anyway.  The Taliban then made Kandahar the center of their operations.  They became famous for their ruthless grip over the local population, imposing the strictest Islamic political order through a reign of Islamic terror: conducting executions for various offenses, especially ones committed by women.  Local Shi'ites (disdained by the Sunni Taliban who considered all Shi'ites as heretics) and ethnic Hazaras (whom the Pastun looked down on as a greatly inferior class of people) also came under the wrath of the Taliban (tens of thousands were simply executed for the sin of being Shi'ite or Hazara).  But this brutal intimidation of the local population worked.  Villages were afraid to come up against the Taliban. And soon the southern or Pashtun section of Afghanistan fell under their strict rule.

Attempts were made by the Kabul government, in particular by Afghan Defense Minister, Ahmed Shah Massoud, to draw the Taliban into a national coalition. But the Taliban were not interested.  With strong support coming from the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia – and from a new Pakistani-based jihadist organization, al-Qaeda – the Taliban were able to advance their troops on the capital Kabul.  In September of 1996 they surrounded the city, forcing the government to evacuate and retreat to the northern provinces, where what was left of the original Afghan government managed to continue to hold out under the leadership of Massoud.

Afghans soon were streaming north to the Massoud-led "Northern Alliance" in order to escape the on-going massacre by the Taliban. By 2001 over a million refugees had fled various parts of Afghanistan to find refuge in Massoud's north. And Massoud had begun efforts to organize this chaotic situation into something of a stable, western style republic which he hoped would soon bring the country out of the increasingly harsh rule of the Taliban.

Meanwhile Pakistan, once a modernizing, staunchly pro-Western ally, was sending tremendous amounts of aid to the Taliban.  From the American point of view this made little sense, for certainly Pakistan had to realize the danger that the Taliban presented to Pakistan's own government.  Presumably Pakistan believed that by backing the Taliban, they had this militant organization under better Pakistani control.  That would prove to be a very wrong assumption.

Another jihadist group with a huge global mission, even beyond the Middle East, was Arab al-Qaeda.  It was founded in the late 1980s by Sunni Arab Muslims through another organization, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, but was heavily supported with Saudi Arabian financing – and led by a Saudi expatriate, Osama bin Laden.  Bin Laden (son of a very wealthy Saudi construction contractor) took refuge in the Sudan in 1992 after being expelled from his native Saudi Arabia by the Saudi king because bin Laden had been loud and long in his verbal attacks on the Saudi government for permitting American troops to be stationed in the country during the 1991 Gulf War.

According to Islam, all of Arabia is holy ground. The stationing of kaffirs (infidel or unbelievers) anywhere in Arabia is a great sin against Allah.  But the Saudi king knew he needed the presence and protection of American troops in Saudi Arabia against the expansionist designs of Saddam Hussein.  Thus Bin Laden's unrelenting religious purism had become intolerable to the Saudi royal family.

At the same time, the military government of the Sudan initially proved very supportive of bin Laden's sense of religious mission, and permitted the establishment in their country of training bases where young Muslim militants could be instructed in the art of Islamic Jihad.  But when al-Qaeda began to be involved in attacks on neighboring Arab governments – notably, an attempted assassination of Egyptian President Mubarak in 1995 – Sudanese authorities decided that it was better to send bin Laden and his organization on its way (1996).

At this point bin Laden and his organization moved part of their operations to Afghanistan, where the Taliban allowed al-Qaeda to set up new training camps. Meanwhile, next door in Pakistan, bin Laden's operational headquarters drew vital and increasing (but secret) support from Pakistani governmental and military officials who wanted to see Pakistan look less Secular Anglo and more Sunni Arab in profile.

Al-Qaeda's goals were from the very beginning to spread Islam to the world by whatever means necessary, replacing Western influences (whether Secular or Christian) with Islamic domination (the Sunni version of Islam, of course).  Early on it became involved in all sorts of very violent bombings and assassinations, such activities soon becoming its well-recognized professional hallmark.  Besides its military training camps in Afghanistan and in the tribal lands of Pakistan, it set up cells of jihadist "operatives" in cities all around the world, training young men (and women) in the art of suicide bombing (to the glory of Allah, the great rewarder of suicidal jihadism).  And al-Qaeda infiltrated mosques everywhere, demanding the preaching of a very militant version of Islam.

In a way, it found itself in competition with Iran (Iran being the fatherland of Shi'ite Islam) to see whether Sunni or Shi'ite Islam would be the first to conquer the world.

²It is important to note that the old British border, the so-called Durand Line of 1893 between Pashtun Afghanistan and Pashtun Pakistan has never been respected by the Pashtun, who in this mountainous border region tend to honor no government at all anyway, Afghani or Pakistani.