Don’t blame the neocons
Brendan O’Neill on how al-Qa’eda became the armed wing of Western liberal opinion It has become fashionable to say one of two things about al-Qa’eda (or to say both of them, if you’re really on the cutting edge). The first is to point out, as London Mayor Ken Livingstone did after the 7 July bombings, that al-Qa’eda has its origins in Western intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Then, Reagan and Thatcher pumped billions of dollars into the anti-Soviet mujahedin (including Osama bin Laden’s Office of Services) and trained these erstwhile holy warriors in urban warfare, bomb-making and sabotage — the very skills that some of them use against us today. The other fashionable thing to say is that al-Qa’eda is largely the invention of American neocons. Post-9/11, apparently, Bush and co. transformed a small gang of deluded nihilists — who could no more restore the Islamic Caliphate than they could set up a base of operations on the moon — into The Greatest Threat Facing Humanity, in a desperate bid to continue winning the votes of a fearful and thus docile American electorate.
Of course, the fact that these statements are fashionable doesn’t stop them from being true (-ish). But they only tell half the story. We hear an awful lot about the birth of al-Qa’eda in the 1980s and the exaggeration about al-Qa’eda since 9/11, but very little about what happened to al-Qa’eda in the decade in between. This is peculiar because, as the US journalist Charles Krauthammer pointed out in Time magazine after 7 July, the 1990s were ‘the seminal period of al-Qa’eda recruitment’; indeed, that was ‘the period during which it created its entire worldwide infrastructure’. Or as the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland argued (in case you would prefer to hear it from someone a little less gung-ho than the war-supporting Krauthammer), ‘the big surge in growth of extremist groups came not after 9/11 or Iraq, but in the mid1990s.’ The seed for al-Qa’eda may have been sown during the twilight of the Cold War, but something in the Nineties allowed this terror group to metamorphose from being one small part of an Afghan-specific guerrilla army into a global, transnational, nihilistic network. What was that?
In a nutshell, in the 1990s al-Qa’eda became the armed wing of Western liberal opinion. The mujahedin may have been set up, supported and armed to the hilt by the right in the 1980s, but they fought alongside the Left in the early to mid-1990s. This was the period of the mujahedin’s second outing, when hundreds of them moved from Afghanistan following the final withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1992 to Bosnia, to fight alongside the Bosnian Muslims in a holy war against the Serbs. They moved there under the approving eye of the Clinton administration and were armed and trained by Clinton’s allies in the region, the Army of Bosnia Herzegovina (ABiH). Some of the mujahedin, especially those from Europe, including from Britain, were inspired to fight in Bosnia after watching or reading news reports in the Western media — especially the liberal media — which presented the civil war in Bosnia as a simplistic battle between good (the Muslims) and evil (the Serbs). Though underdiscussed, the mujahedin’s movement to Bosnia had a transformative effect on the holy warriors and was key to the development of al-Qa’eda. In moving to Bosnia, Islamic fighters were transported from the ghettos of Afghanistan into Europe, from being yesterday’s men in a has-been Cold War clash to fighting alongside the West’s favoured side in the Balkans. As Evan Kohlmann argues in his AlQa’eda’s Jihad in Europe: The AfghanBosnian Network, by 1995 Bosnia had become a ‘strategic foothold for Osama bin Laden and his fanatical allies to infiltrate Europe and the Western world’. Indeed, virtually every major al-Qa’eda attack of recent years has links back to Bosnia. If right-wing intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahedin, then left-liberal intervention in Bosnia globalised it.
The mujahedin moved to Bosnia as part of the ‘Islamicisation’ of that conflict. From 1992 to 1995, Iran, and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia and Turkey, sent arms and logistical support to the Bosnian Muslims and encouraged mujahedin elements to make their way to Bosnia to engage in holy war. This process was given a ‘green light’ by the Clinton administration. Frustrated by United Nations Resolution 713 — a ruling adopted in September 1991 that said member states must suspend ‘the delivery of all weapons and military equipment to Yugoslavia’ — the Clinton administration instead allowed Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims (and the Croats). In 1992 and 1993, numerous Iranian Boeing 747s landed at Zagreb airport carrying tons of weapons, ammunition, anti-tank rockets, communication equipment and uniforms and helmets destined for the ABiH. The Croats also benefited from these secret deliveries, often creaming off around 30 to 50 per cent of the imports as payment for the use of Zagreb territory.
During this first stage of Iranian arming of the Bosnian Muslims and Croats, the Clinton administration adopted a ‘blind eye’ policy — i.e., it knew what was happening and allowed it to continue. As one Croatian official later said, ‘The Americans never protested.’ But it was during the second episode of Iranian smuggling, from April 1994 through to 1995, that the US became much more actively supportive. In April 1994, Croatian officials visited Peter Galbraith, then the US ambassador to Zagreb, and asked him how the US would respond to the reopening of the Iranian weapons pipeline. Galbraith passed the issue on to the US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott and national security adviser Anthony Lake, who raised it with President Clinton on board Air Force One on 27 April 1994. It was there and then, according to David Halberstam’s authoritative account of the Clinton years, War in a Time of Peace, that the Clintonites decided to give a ‘green light’ to the arms supplies from Iran, and so they resumed.
This occurred at a time when the Clinton administration was publicly hostile to Iran. Indeed, Clinton officials lambasted Iran for arming Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the West Bank. Yet at the same time they effectively granted permission to Iran to send arms to the Bosnian Muslims, and by early 1995 Iranian cargo planes were landing in Zagreb three times a week. As the House Republican Policy Committee said in a document dated April 1996, entitled ‘The Clinton Administration’s “Wink and Nod” to Allow Iran Into Bosnia’, ‘The Clinton administration was hypocritical in permitting a growing role for Iran in Bosnia just as it identified Iran as the worst sponsor of terrorism in the world.’ This opening of a gateway between the Islamic world and Bosnia was critical to the movement of mujahedin forces into Europe. By allowing Iran to send weapons to Bosnia the Clinton administration also gave the green light to other Islamic elements. Islamic ‘charities’ in Saudi Arabia and Iran encouraged and financed mujahedin forces — especially those who found themselves at a loose end following the end of the jihad against the Soviets — to go and fight in Bosnia. Speaking in 1994, US Lieutenant-Colonel John Sray, an intelligence officer in Sarajevo from April to August 1994, said that ‘approximately 4,000 mujahedin, supported by Iranian special operations forces, have been continually intensifying their activities in central Bosnia for more than two years.’ Others said the number of mujahedin was lower than that. An internal UN report dated 31 October 1995 says ‘the current estimates of the strength of the mujahedin in Bosnia is approximately 700 to 800 personnel’. US officials were fully aware that the mujahedin were present in Bosnia and were being used as ‘shock troops’ by the ABiH, which was then being loudly supported by the Clinton administration. Yet the US adopted another ‘blind eye’ policy, and made no effort to expel the mujahedin until after the civil war had ended and the Dayton Peace Accords were signed in December 1995.
The mujahedin in Bosnia were fighting what many liberals and left-wingers in the West considered to be a good war. In the early to mid-1990s these jihadists effectively represented the aspirations of many Western liberals, who demanded the defence, by any means necessary, of the Bosnian Muslims against ‘evil’ Serbs. There was a quite remarkable coincidence of interests between the mujahedin and liberal ‘humanitarian interventionists’ in the Western media. There are similarities between Western news coverage of the Bosnian war, which almost always focused on the sufferings of the Muslims, and the videos produced by mujahedin elements to encourage others to sign up to the Bosnian jihad. Indeed, some of today’s most notorious al-Qa’eda supporters claim to have first become interested in jihad after watching mainstream media coverage of the war in Bosnia. The alleged Moroccan mastermind of the Madrid bombings went to fight in Bosnia after watching news reports. Ahmed Omar Sheikh, the Briton convicted in Pakistan of murdering the American journalist Daniel Pearl, was reportedly inspired to join a jihadist movement after watching videos of the Bosnian Muslims’ plight at the London School of Economics, of all places.
For all al-Qa’eda’s bluster about Bosnia which they continue to bang on about today in their propaganda videos and pamphlets in fact the mujahedin had an insignificant impact on the war. The local Muslim population despised them. However, the movement to Bosnia did have a significant impact on the mujahedin themselves. It provided them with a new focus post-Afghanistan; it gave them a leg into Europe, which meant that, subsequently, many of them could move on to Chechnya. It also allowed them to keep the idea of jihad alive into the 1990s and to recruit new and eager young jihadists. This was key to the development of a global network — as reflected in the fact that many of the most notorious terror attacks of recent years have Bosnian links.
Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, a veteran al-Qa’eda associate and one of the leading conspirators indicted by the US for the embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, had a Bosnian visa; he visited Bosnia for a three-day ‘business meeting’ only weeks before putting the finishing touches to the embassy bombings. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, fought in Bosnia in 1992 and financed al-Qa’eda training camps there. At least two of the 9/11 hijackers — Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — got their first taste of jihad in Bosnia. As already noted, the alleged mastermind of the Madrid attacks that killed 191 in March 2004 trained in Bosnia. The Dutch authorities are currently investigating links between Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch-Moroccan who murdered film-maker Theo van Gogh, and an al-Qa’eda cell that has its origins in Bosnia. And on it goes.
It is time, surely, that we told the whole story of al-Qa’eda, rather than focusing only on its Afghan origins or the subsequent exaggeration of its threat by President Bush and his cronies. It is time we interrogated the movement of al-Qa’eda in the early to mid1990s, and explored how that movement was facilitated by liberal politicians and their supporters in the media. This might make many in the West feel uncomfortable, but it might also show that liberal military interventions then were at least as dangerous and unpredictable as neocon interventions are today.
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