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Terror In the Shadow of the Cold War - Empire? - Global Policy Forum Terror In the Shadow of the Cold War
By Andrew Tait
International Relations and Security Network
September 11, 2002
One year later, terrorism is on the top of the security agenda worldwide. The US government invaded Afghanistan (which had provided a haven for the fundamentalist Muslim terrorist group who were suspected of carrying out the 11 September attacks), increased military spending, and rolled back civil liberties in the US. Now, the US stands on the brink of a renewed war against Iraq, justified by the threat posed by Iraq’s possible weapons of mass destruction. Internationally, civil liberties, military spending, immigration, and many other policy areas have been affected by the events of 11 September. But, although the 11 September attacks constituted terrorism on an unprecedented level, the world has not fundamentally changed in the past year. Rather, the new terrorist threat and the wide-ranging US response is a direct result from the slow melt of the Cold War bipolar order. In the case of the 11 September, three factors, all of them intimately connected to the end of the Cold War, combined.
1) The US was targeted by al-Qaida because they were the only surviving superpower. During the Cold War, the Soviet could be relied on to support armed groups against the client regimes of the US, and vice versa. Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden cut his teeth in just such a war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
2) The end of the Cold War meant that radical opposition to US-backed regimes could no longer find significant international support. In at least one terrorist group, al-Qaida, the decision was made to attack not the client regime, Saudi Arabia, but the US. Al-Qaida’s global focus was mirrored in its international membership.
3)The power vacuum that followed the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan allowed it to become a safe haven for fundamentalist Muslim radicals.
The US administration has called terrorism the most serious threat facing the US, and indeed the Western world, and President George Bush has declared an open-ended war on terrorism, which: “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated”. But while the terrorist attacks have created a sense of vulnerability among US citizens, they have not damaged US military power, but rather have increased the popularity of the Bush administration and enhanced its ability to use force in the pursuit of US interests.
East and West, Left and Right
After the end of the Second World War, a new world order very quickly emerged, in which the US championed liberal democracy against the state socialism of the Soviet Union. An Iron Curtain descended across Europe, and across the world. When the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949, a balance of terror maintained an uneasy peace between the superpowers. The divide between East and West was reflected in the divide between right and left-wing political parties within nation states, while the shooting war was fought in a series of engagements between the superpowers, their client regimes, and opposition movements in Third World countries like Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. But even in the Third World, the Cold War brought some measure of order, as the superpowers helped their proxy regimes to develop a basic state infrastructure. Military aid maintained order in the army, ensuring that weapons supplied by the superpowers were in the hands of regularly paid, disciplined soldiers. The cost of the arms race fell more heavily on the Soviet Union, which had a smaller economy than the US and was forced to spend around a third of its GDP on weapons. In the 1980s, this disparity became a crippling cost that contributed to the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe. The US responded to the collapse of its archrival by reducing support for its Cold War allies. In some countries, such as Angola, former rebels became little more than armed bandits, and in Afghanistan, the Koran proved to be the only force that could end the rule of the gun.
Armed opposition in the Cold War
Armed opposition movements could rely on support from one or the other superpower, but with this came the constraint of working with intelligence agencies such as the CIA or KGB. Neither power would allow a direct attack on the other, because of the danger of nuclear escalation, and no armed opposition movement ever emerged that was able to remain independent of the US or USSR. The competing ideologies of the Cold War, state socialism and liberal capitalism, encouraged political movements to contain conflicts within nation states, particularly the socialist doctrine of class struggle within civil society. The global struggle between the US and the USSR gave a global dimension to each particular struggle. The collapse of the USSR and disillusionment with state socialist regimes in the Third World undermined the attractiveness of left-wing propaganda, but it also removed the justification for US hegemony. The Muslim fundamentalists of al-Qaida rejected the ideologies of both the left and the right, and bypassed political struggles in their home countries - in the case of many al-Qaida members, including its leader Osama bin Laden, Saudi Arabia. Instead they launched an attack directly on the superpower behind the Saudi government, namely the US. Al-Qaida’s ideology was forged in the Afghan anti-Soviet war, and the 11 September attacks were planned from the haven that post-Cold War Afghanistan provided.
Forge and haven of terror
Afghanistan was the final round of the Cold War, and a humiliating defeat for the Soviet Union. It was also a pivotal point in Middle Eastern politics, as fundamentalist Islam emerged as a competitor to the secular left-leaning nationalism that had dominated the region since the 1960s. The 1979 revolution in Iran was the first case of a populist fundamentalist Muslim movement seizing state power, but Iran was an exceptional case. Cut off from the Middle Eastern mainstream by language and religious differences, viewed with suspicion by the Soviet Union, and vehemently anti-American – Iran was quickly bogged down in the war with Iraq, and unable to exert much influence beyond its borders.
Afghanistan was from the start a war with global implications. For the US, Afghanistan offered a chance to trap the Soviet Union in an unwinnable war. By secretly supplying the mujahideen in their struggle against the Soviet puppet government, the US was able to lure the Soviets into a direct intervention. The Soviet invasion of a Muslim country also gave the US a chance to counteract some of the influence of pro-Soviet ideology in the Middle East. However, according to MSNBC international editor Michael Moran, in the Afghan war, where tribal loyalties often counted for more than ideology, the US found it needed more reliable allies. These it found in the reliably anti-Soviet Muslim zealots that flocked to Afghanistan from all over the Middle East. “Bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow’s invasion in 1979,” Moran said. “By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war. So bin Laden, along with Muslim militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable” partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow,” Moran said.
For Saudi Arabia, a war against atheistic communism offered a chance to drain off some of the Muslim radicals that were the chief threat to the Saudi royal family, and a chance to seize the standard of Islamic orthodoxy from Iran. For Pakistan, the third major player, the prize was a US alliance, invaluable in its constant competition with India. The crushing defeat of the Soviet Union was followed quickly by the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. With its mission accomplished, the US focused its attention elsewhere, leaving Afghanistan’s economy, which, apart from the drugs trade, was in ruins in the hands of heavily armed warlords. The only player that maintained interest in the country was Pakistan, which helped create the Taliban militia that in 1994 took Kabul and proclaimed an Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan.
When bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia, he turned against the corruption of the Saudi royal family, and railed against the presence of US troops in the Muslim holy land. In 1988 he split from the MAK and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan. Michael Moran said: “Most of these Afghan vets, or Afghanis, as the Arabs who fought there became known, turned up later behind violent Islamic movements around the world. Among them: the GIA in Algeria, thought responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands of civilians; Egypt’s Gamaat Islamiya, which has massacred western tourists repeatedly in recent years; Saudi Arabia Shiite militants, responsible for the Khobar Towers and Riyadh bombings of 1996.” The international Muslim fundamentalist coalition that was assembled for the Afghan war provided an ideal recruiting ground for a terrorist group with global ambitions. In the absence of superpower support, the relative chaos of post-Cold War Afghanistan provided a logistical haven. And after having defeated the mighty Soviet Union, the radicals of al-Qaida were in no doubt as to their next target - the US.
Aftermath of Cold War
While we may be living in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, the attacks themselves – the ideology, the organization, the safe haven, and the target – are all direct results of the end of the Cold War. And the US response to 11 September, a war that is undefined by time, geography, or adversary, is better understood as an attempt to forge a post-Cold War settlement, than as an anti-terrorist campaign. According to Bush: “The terrible illumination of these events has also brought new clarity to America's role in the world. In great tragedy, we have also seen great opportunities. We must have the wisdom and courage to seize these opportunities.” The rapid and successful invasion of Afghanistan, and current preparations for a war in Iraq are best understood as a display of the global reach of US military power. After all, the end of the Cold War does not make terrorist organizations any more effective than before. Few terrorists have won more than limited concessions in their campaigns, and most have won nothing at all. The ambitious goals of al-Qaida are not matched by their insignificant political or military capabilities. The popularity of fundamentalism in the Muslim world is also far from clear, and the difficulty faced by the Iranian regime is symptomatic of the experience of fundamentalist Islam in power throughout the region – Sharia law doesn’t put bread on the table.
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