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Q: You were in Pakistan when the United States bombed
Afghanistan and the Sudan. What did it look like to you?
 

Ahmad: The United States is a superpower that claims
to be judge, accuser, and executioner. You don't allow
that in your system. We don't allow it in our system.
But we are allowing it on a world scale. Why didn't
the United States go to international forums and
present the evidence that it had against bin Laden
before bombing Afghanistan and the factory in
Khartoum? There is increasing evidence now that the
factory was not producing any chemical weapons. The
camp they hit in Afghanistan I visited in 1986. It was
a CIA-sponsored camp. The United States spent $8
billion in producing the bin Ladens of our time.
 

Q: What do you mean by that?
 

Ahmad: He was socialized by the CIA and trained by the
Americans to believe deeply that when a foreigner
comes into your land, you become violent. Bin Laden is
merely carrying out the mission to which he committed
with America earlier. Now he is carrying it out
against America because now America, from his point of
view, is occupying his land. That's all. He grew up
seeing Saudi Arabia being robbed by Western
corporations and Western powers. He watched these
Saudi princes, this one-family state, handing over the
oil resources of the Arab people to the West. Up until
1991, he had only one satisfaction: that his country
was not occupied. There were no American or French or
British troops in Saudi Arabia. Then even that small
pleasure was taken away from him during the Gulf War
and its aftermath.
 

Q: What is the background of the CIA role in
Afghanistan?
 

Ahmad: After the Soviet Union intervened in
Afghanistan, an Islamic fundamentalist dictator in
Pakistan, Zia ul-Haq, promoted, with the help of the
CIA, the mujahideen resistance. Now what you had was
Islamic fundamentalists of a really hardcore variety
taking on the Evil Empire. They received $8 billion in
arms from the U.S. alone. Add another $2 billion from
Saudi Arabia under American encouragement. And, more
than that, American operatives went about the Muslim
world recruiting for the jihad in Afghanistan. This
whole phenomenon of jihad as an international armed
struggle did not exist in the Muslim world since the
tenth century. It was brought back into being,
enlivened, and pan-Islamized by the American effort.
The United States saw in the war in Afghanistan an
opportunity to mobilize the Muslim world against
communism. So the United States recruited mujahideen
from all over the Muslim world. I saw planeloads of
them arriving-from Algeria, the Sudan, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine. These people were
brought in, given an ideology, told that the armed
struggle is a virtuous thing to do, and the whole
notion of jihad as an international, pan-Islamic
terrorist movement was born.
 

They were trained and armed by the CIA. The militants
of the Islamic movement almost everywhere have all
been trained in Afghanistan. The CIA people now call
it "Islamic blowback."
 

Q: Why do you think the West is so ready to treat
Islam as the enemy?
 

Ahmad: After the Cold War, the West had no viable
threat around which it could organize its policies.
All powers, all imperial powers-especially democratic
ones-cannot justify their uses of power only on the
basis of greed. No one will buy it. They have needed
two things: a ghost and a mission. The British carried
the White Man's Burden. That was the mission. The
French carried la mission civilisatrice, the
civilizing mission. The Americans had, first, Manifest
Destiny, and then found the mission of "standing watch
on the walls of world freedom," in John F. Kennedy's
ringing phrase. Each of them had the Black, the
Yellow, and finally the Red Peril to fight against.
There was a ghost. There was a mission. People bought it.

Right now, the United States is deprived of both the
mission and the ghost. So the mission has appeared as
human rights. It's a very strange mission for a
country that for nearly 100 years has been supporting
dictatorship, first in Latin America and then
throughout the world. And in search of menace, it has
turned to Islam. It's the easiest because the West has
encountered resistance here: Algeria, then Egypt,
Palestinians, the Iranian revolution. And a portion of
it is strategically located: It's the home of the oil
resources for the West.
 

Q: What is your view of the Taliban of Afghanistan?
 

Ahmad: The Taliban is as retrograde a group as it is
possible to find. Last year, I spent two weeks in
Afghanistan. One day, I heard drums and noises from
the house where I was staying. I rushed out to see
what was going on. There was a young boy who couldn't
have been more than twelve years of age. His head was
shaved. There was a rope around his neck. He was being
pulled by that rope. There was one man behind him with
a drum. He slowly beat the drum.

I asked, "What has the boy done?"

People told me he was caught red-handed.

"Doing what?" I asked.

"He was caught red-handed playing with a tennis ball."

I went off to interview one of the Taliban leaders. He
said, "We have forbidden boys to play with balls
because it constitutes undue temptation to men." So
the same logic that makes them lock up women behind
veils and behind walls makes them prevent boys from
playing games. It's that kind of madness.

These people are anti-women, anti-music, anti-life,
and some of the highest officials of the United States
have been visiting them and talking to them. The
general impression in our region is that the U.S. has
been supporting them.
 

Q: Why would the United States do that?
 

Ahmad: When the Soviet Union fell apart, its
constituent republics became independent. The Central
Asian republics, whose majority population is Muslim,
happen to be oil-rich, gas-rich states. Their gas and
oil used to pass through the Soviet Union. Now a new
game starts: How is this oil and gas going to get out
to the world?

At this point, American corporations move in. Texaco,
Amoco, Unocal, Delta Oil-all of these are now going
into Central Asia to get hold of these oil and gas
fields. They don't want to take any pipelines to Iran
because Iran is, at this moment, boycotted. It's an
enemy of America. So Afghanistan and Pakistan become
the places through which you lay pipelines. And you
cut the Russians out. Just look at the story here:
President Clinton makes personal telephone calls to
the presidents of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan,
and Azerbaijan, urging them to sign pipeline
contracts. And the pipeline has to go through
Afghanistan. In this game, both Pakistan and the U.S.
get into the business of saying who will be the most
reliable conduit to ensure the safety of the
pipelines. And they pick the most murderous, by far
the most crazy, of Islamic fundamentalist groups, the
Taliban, to ensure the safety of the pipelines.

In this situation, the U.S. concern is not who is
fundamentalist and who is progressive, who treats
women nicely and who treats them badly. The issue is,
who is more likely to ensure the safety of the oil and
gas resources.
 

Q: What's behind the rise of fundamentalism not just
in the Islamic world but also in the United States,
Israel, Sri Lanka? What gives power to these
movements?
 

Ahmad: There are a number of factors. The first is the
fear of-and reaction to-homogenization. Globalization
of the economy, the shrinking of spaces through modern
technology, the power of the media in creating common
tastes, everybody eating McDonald's hamburgers or
wearing jeans-all this has made a whole lot of people
uncomfortable with what is receding from their own way
of life. That discomfort is used by rightwing
ideologues to say, "Come to us. We will return you
your old-time religion. Come to us. We will give you
back your old ways, your old memories." And people who
don't know any better often follow.

There is a second factor, and that is a disappointment
with modernism, a sense of disillusionment with life
as it is constructed in our time. It seems empty, void
of meaning. It feels like families are breaking up but
there is no substitute for the proximities, the
comfort, the security of family life. These are
changes that occur from technology and from the
expansion of the tentacles of capitalism into every
aspect of human life. In many ways, advertisers are
deciding the color of underwear that we wear, the kind
of sexual advances that we make to our wives and
lovers. Once that starts happening, people feel a loss
of individual autonomy. In search of autonomy, we look
for some specific, unique way of relating to
ourselves. Fundamentalism offers that. Old-time
religion offers that. New-time religion also offers
that.
 

Q: The media critique of fundamentalism seems to be
very selective in its targets. What about Saudi
Arabia?
 

Ahmad: This is a very interesting matter you are
raising. Saudi Arabia's Islamic government has been by
far the most fundamentalist in the history of Islam
until the Taliban came along. Even today, for example,
women drive in Iran. They can't drive in Saudi Arabia.
Today, men and women are working in offices together
in Iran. In Saudi Arabia, they cannot do that. Saudi
Arabia is much worse than Iran, but it has been the
ally of the U.S. since 1932, and nobody has questioned
it. But much more than that is involved. Throughout
the Cold War, starting in 1945, the U.S. saw militant
Islam as a counterweight to communist parties of the
Muslim world.
 

Q: You mentioned the Iranian revolution. Is there a
parallel between Iran in the 1970s, which looked like
an impregnable U.S. fortress, and Saudi Arabia in the
1990s?
 

Ahmad: I think it was 1981 or 1982 that a fairly
senior CIA official who had either retired already or
was on the brink of retiring wrote a very interesting
article in the Armed Forces Journal. The article was
entitled "The American Threat to Saudi Arabia." His
argument primarily was that the policies that the U.S.
government and corporations were pursuing out of greed
were going to turn Saudi Arabia into a model of Iran,
a totally dependent state and extremely vulnerable to
revolution.

Osama bin Laden is a sign of things to come. The U.S.
has no reason to stay in Saudi Arabia except
exploitation and greed. Saudi Arabia is not threatened
with invasion by anyone that we know of. Any potential
aggressor, such as Saddam Hussein, has already been
knocked out from any capability of invading Saudi
Arabia. And the Americans demonstrated in 1991 that
they are capable of mobilizing against any attack on
an ally in the Middle East. So what's the
justification of an American military presence, an
intelligence presence, a massive presence in every
other area in Saudi Arabia? Every ministry is
infiltrated with American advisers. It's creating deep
discontent there.

The answer is money. Money in ten different ways. The
Saudis' oil is essentially controlled and marketed by
American interests. Saudi wealth is invested in the
U.S. and Europe. And the Saudis, since the early
1980s, went into the arms market, so the U.S. dumped
something like $100 billion worth of armaments in that
place.

The Saudi people are going to be discontented. But
Saudi discontent shouldn't be seen only as Saudi.
Unlike Iran, Saudi Arabia is an Arab country, part of
an Arab world. The Saudis are the guardians of our
Muslim holy places, and they have been unable to guard
them. The Arabs are, at the moment, an extremely
humiliated, frustrated, beaten, and insulted people.
If you look at the situation from the standpoint of
the Arab as a whole, this is a most beleaguered mass
of 200 million people. What is actually uniting them
at the moment is a sense of common loss, common
humiliation.

This people has only two choices now, as its young
people see it: It's either to become active, fight,
die, and recover its lost dignity, lost sovereignties,
lost lands, or to become slaves. Terrorism is not
without a history. All social phenomena have
historical roots, and nobody here is looking into the
historical roots of terror.
 
 

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Editor's Note: Eqbal Ahmad, the Pakistani
scholar-activist who died on May 11, 1999, gave a
prescient interview to David Barsamian in the November
1998 issue of The Progressive.