Il terrorismo "buono"
6: How we trained al-Qa’eda
See also:
"Al Qaeda's Balkan links" (The Wall Street Journal)
http://www.frontpagemag.com/guestcolumnists/kurop11-02-01p.htm
---
http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/sep03/hed5999.shtml
http://www.spectator.co.uk/
article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2003-09-13&id=3499&searchText=
The Spectator (UK), September 12, 2003
How we trained al-Qa’eda
Brendan O’Neill says the Bosnian war taught Islamic terrorists to
operate abroad
For all the millions of words written about al-Qa’eda since the 9/11
attacks two years ago, one phenomenon is consistently overlooked - the
role of the Bosnian war in transforming the mujahedin of the 1980s into
the roving Islamic terrorists of today.
Many writers and reporters have traced al-Qa’eda and other terror
groups’ origins back to the Afghan war of 1979-1992, that last gasp of
the Cold War when US-backed mujahedin forces fought against the
invading Soviet army. It is well documented that America played a major
role in creating and sustaining the mujahedin, which included Osama bin
Laden’s Office of Services set up to recruit volunteers from overseas.
Between 1985 and 1992, US officials estimate that 12,500 foreign
fighters were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and guerrilla warfare
tactics in Afghan camps that the CIA helped to set up.
Yet America’s role in backing the mujahedin a second time in the early
and mid-1990s is seldom mentioned - largely because very few people
know about it, and those who do find it prudent to pretend that it
never happened. Following the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in
1989 and the collapse of their puppet regime in 1992, the Afghan
mujahedin became less important to the United States; many Arabs, in
the words of the journalist James Buchan, were left stranded in
Afghanistan ‘with a taste for fighting but no cause’. It was not long
before some were provided with a new cause. From 1992 to 1995, the
Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of mujahedin and other
Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside
Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs.
The Bosnia venture appears to have been very important to the rise of
mujahedin forces, to the emergence of today’s cross-border Islamic
terrorists who think nothing of moving from state to state in the
search of outlets for their jihadist mission. In moving to Bosnia,
Islamic fighters were transported from the ghettos of Afghanistan and
the Middle East into Europe; from an outdated battleground of the Cold
War to the major world conflict of the day; from being yesterday’s men
to fighting alongside the West’s favoured side in the clash of the
Balkans. If Western intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahedin,
Western intervention in Bosnia appears to have globalised it.
As part of the Dutch government’s inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre
of July 1995, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University compiled a
report entitled ‘Intelligence and the War in Bosnia’, published in
April 2002. In it he details the secret alliance between the Pentagon
and radical Islamic groups from the Middle East, and their efforts to
assist Bosnia’s Muslims. By 1993, there was a vast amount of weapons-
smuggling through Croatia to the Muslims, organised by ‘clandestine
agencies’ of the USA, Turkey and Iran, in association with a range of
Islamic groups that included Afghan mujahedin and the pro-Iranian
Hezbollah. Arms bought by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of
Saudi Arabia were airlifted from the Middle East to Bosnia - airlifts
with which, Wiebes points out, the USA was ‘very closely involved’.
The Pentagon’s secret alliance with Islamic elements allowed mujahedin
fighters to be ‘flown in’, though they were initially reserved as shock
troops for particularly hazardous operations against Serb forces.
According to a report in the Los Angeles Times in October 2001, from
1992 as many as 4,000 volunteers from the Middle East, North Africa and
Europe, ‘known as the mujahedin’, arrived in Bosnia to fight with the
Muslims. Richard Holbrooke, America’s former chief Balkans peace
negotiator, has said that the Bosnian Muslims ‘wouldn’t have survived’
without the help of the mujahedin, though he later admitted that the
arrival of the mujahedin was a ‘pact with the devil’ from which Bosnia
is still recovering.
By the end of the 1990s State Department officials were increasingly
worried about the consequences of this pact. Under the terms of the
1995 Dayton peace accord, the foreign mujahedin units were required to
disband and leave the Balkans. Yet in 2000, the State Department raised
concerns about the ‘hundreds of foreign Islamic extremists’ who became
Bosnian citizens after fighting against the Serbs, and who pose a
potential terror threat to Europe and the United States. US officials
claimed that one of bin Laden’s top lieutenants had sent operatives to
Bosnia, and that during the 1990s Bosnia had served as a ‘staging area
and safe haven’ for al-Qa’eda and others. The Clinton administration
had discovered that it is one thing to permit the movement of Islamic
groups across territories; it is quite another to rein them back in
again.
Indeed, for all the Clinton officials’ concern about Islamic
extremists in the Balkans, they continued to allow the growth and
movement of mujahedin forces in Europe through the 1990s. In the late
1990s, in the run-up to Clinton’s and Blair’s Kosovo war of 1999, the
USA backed the Kosovo Liberation Army against Serbia. According to a
report in the Jerusalem Post in 1998, KLA members, like the Bosnian
Muslims before them, had been ‘provided with financial and military
support from Islamic countries’, and had been ‘bolstered by hundreds of
Iranian fighters or mujahedin ...[some of whom] were trained in Osama
bin Laden’s terrorist camps in Afghanistan’. It seems that, for all its
handwringing, the USA just couldn’t break the pact with the devil.
Why is this aspect of the mujahedin’s development so often overlooked?
Some sensible stuff has been written about al-Qa’eda and its
connections in recent months, but the Bosnia connection has been left
largely unexplored. In Jason Burke’s excellent Al-Qa’eda: Casting a
Shadow of Terror, Bosnia is mentioned only in passing. Kimberley
McCloud and Adam Dolnik of the Monterey Institute of International
Studies have written some incisive commentary calling for rational
thinking when assessing al-Qa’eda’s origins and threat - but again,
investigation of the Bosnia link is notable by its absence.
It would appear that when it comes to Bosnia, many in the West have a
moral blind spot. For some commentators, particularly liberal ones,
Western intervention in Bosnia was a Good Thing - except that,
apparently, there was too little of it, offered too late in the
conflict. Many journalists and writers demanded intervention in Bosnia
and Western support for the Muslims. In many ways, this was their war,
where they played an active role in encouraging further intervention to
enforce ‘peace’ among the former Yugoslavia’s warring factions.
Consequently, they often overlook the downside to this intervention and
its divisive impact on the Balkans. Western intervention in Bosnia, it
would appear, has become an unquestionably positive thing, something
that is beyond interrogation and debate.
Yet a cool analysis of today’s disparate Islamic terror groups,
created in Afghanistan and emboldened by the Bosnian experience, would
do much to shed some light on precisely the dangers of such
intervention.
6: How we trained al-Qa’eda
See also:
"Al Qaeda's Balkan links" (The Wall Street Journal)
http://www.frontpagemag.com/guestcolumnists/kurop11-02-01p.htm
---
http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/sep03/hed5999.shtml
http://www.spectator.co.uk/
article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2003-09-13&id=3499&searchText=
The Spectator (UK), September 12, 2003
How we trained al-Qa’eda
Brendan O’Neill says the Bosnian war taught Islamic terrorists to
operate abroad
For all the millions of words written about al-Qa’eda since the 9/11
attacks two years ago, one phenomenon is consistently overlooked - the
role of the Bosnian war in transforming the mujahedin of the 1980s into
the roving Islamic terrorists of today.
Many writers and reporters have traced al-Qa’eda and other terror
groups’ origins back to the Afghan war of 1979-1992, that last gasp of
the Cold War when US-backed mujahedin forces fought against the
invading Soviet army. It is well documented that America played a major
role in creating and sustaining the mujahedin, which included Osama bin
Laden’s Office of Services set up to recruit volunteers from overseas.
Between 1985 and 1992, US officials estimate that 12,500 foreign
fighters were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and guerrilla warfare
tactics in Afghan camps that the CIA helped to set up.
Yet America’s role in backing the mujahedin a second time in the early
and mid-1990s is seldom mentioned - largely because very few people
know about it, and those who do find it prudent to pretend that it
never happened. Following the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in
1989 and the collapse of their puppet regime in 1992, the Afghan
mujahedin became less important to the United States; many Arabs, in
the words of the journalist James Buchan, were left stranded in
Afghanistan ‘with a taste for fighting but no cause’. It was not long
before some were provided with a new cause. From 1992 to 1995, the
Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of mujahedin and other
Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside
Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs.
The Bosnia venture appears to have been very important to the rise of
mujahedin forces, to the emergence of today’s cross-border Islamic
terrorists who think nothing of moving from state to state in the
search of outlets for their jihadist mission. In moving to Bosnia,
Islamic fighters were transported from the ghettos of Afghanistan and
the Middle East into Europe; from an outdated battleground of the Cold
War to the major world conflict of the day; from being yesterday’s men
to fighting alongside the West’s favoured side in the clash of the
Balkans. If Western intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahedin,
Western intervention in Bosnia appears to have globalised it.
As part of the Dutch government’s inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre
of July 1995, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University compiled a
report entitled ‘Intelligence and the War in Bosnia’, published in
April 2002. In it he details the secret alliance between the Pentagon
and radical Islamic groups from the Middle East, and their efforts to
assist Bosnia’s Muslims. By 1993, there was a vast amount of weapons-
smuggling through Croatia to the Muslims, organised by ‘clandestine
agencies’ of the USA, Turkey and Iran, in association with a range of
Islamic groups that included Afghan mujahedin and the pro-Iranian
Hezbollah. Arms bought by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of
Saudi Arabia were airlifted from the Middle East to Bosnia - airlifts
with which, Wiebes points out, the USA was ‘very closely involved’.
The Pentagon’s secret alliance with Islamic elements allowed mujahedin
fighters to be ‘flown in’, though they were initially reserved as shock
troops for particularly hazardous operations against Serb forces.
According to a report in the Los Angeles Times in October 2001, from
1992 as many as 4,000 volunteers from the Middle East, North Africa and
Europe, ‘known as the mujahedin’, arrived in Bosnia to fight with the
Muslims. Richard Holbrooke, America’s former chief Balkans peace
negotiator, has said that the Bosnian Muslims ‘wouldn’t have survived’
without the help of the mujahedin, though he later admitted that the
arrival of the mujahedin was a ‘pact with the devil’ from which Bosnia
is still recovering.
By the end of the 1990s State Department officials were increasingly
worried about the consequences of this pact. Under the terms of the
1995 Dayton peace accord, the foreign mujahedin units were required to
disband and leave the Balkans. Yet in 2000, the State Department raised
concerns about the ‘hundreds of foreign Islamic extremists’ who became
Bosnian citizens after fighting against the Serbs, and who pose a
potential terror threat to Europe and the United States. US officials
claimed that one of bin Laden’s top lieutenants had sent operatives to
Bosnia, and that during the 1990s Bosnia had served as a ‘staging area
and safe haven’ for al-Qa’eda and others. The Clinton administration
had discovered that it is one thing to permit the movement of Islamic
groups across territories; it is quite another to rein them back in
again.
Indeed, for all the Clinton officials’ concern about Islamic
extremists in the Balkans, they continued to allow the growth and
movement of mujahedin forces in Europe through the 1990s. In the late
1990s, in the run-up to Clinton’s and Blair’s Kosovo war of 1999, the
USA backed the Kosovo Liberation Army against Serbia. According to a
report in the Jerusalem Post in 1998, KLA members, like the Bosnian
Muslims before them, had been ‘provided with financial and military
support from Islamic countries’, and had been ‘bolstered by hundreds of
Iranian fighters or mujahedin ...[some of whom] were trained in Osama
bin Laden’s terrorist camps in Afghanistan’. It seems that, for all its
handwringing, the USA just couldn’t break the pact with the devil.
Why is this aspect of the mujahedin’s development so often overlooked?
Some sensible stuff has been written about al-Qa’eda and its
connections in recent months, but the Bosnia connection has been left
largely unexplored. In Jason Burke’s excellent Al-Qa’eda: Casting a
Shadow of Terror, Bosnia is mentioned only in passing. Kimberley
McCloud and Adam Dolnik of the Monterey Institute of International
Studies have written some incisive commentary calling for rational
thinking when assessing al-Qa’eda’s origins and threat - but again,
investigation of the Bosnia link is notable by its absence.
It would appear that when it comes to Bosnia, many in the West have a
moral blind spot. For some commentators, particularly liberal ones,
Western intervention in Bosnia was a Good Thing - except that,
apparently, there was too little of it, offered too late in the
conflict. Many journalists and writers demanded intervention in Bosnia
and Western support for the Muslims. In many ways, this was their war,
where they played an active role in encouraging further intervention to
enforce ‘peace’ among the former Yugoslavia’s warring factions.
Consequently, they often overlook the downside to this intervention and
its divisive impact on the Balkans. Western intervention in Bosnia, it
would appear, has become an unquestionably positive thing, something
that is beyond interrogation and debate.
Yet a cool analysis of today’s disparate Islamic terror groups,
created in Afghanistan and emboldened by the Bosnian experience, would
do much to shed some light on precisely the dangers of such
intervention.