Asking us to do more, but look at the past – II

Abdullah Azzam (1941-1989) was a Palestinian Islamic scholar. He received his doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from Cairo’s Al Azhar University in 1973. He was impressed by Qutb’s vanguard concept, moved to Pakistan in 1979, and joined Islamic University in Islamabad as a professor. He shifted to Peshawar and helped raise funds as well as recruit volunteers for the jihad in Afghanistan against Soviet forces. He motivated Osama bin Laden, who was his student in Jeddah, to join the Afghan jihad.

Once the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, a difference of opinion emerged among the foreign jihadis, especially the Arabs. Azzam wanted to concentrate on forming and strengthening an Islamic government in Afghanistan. Others differed. In 1989, he, along with his two sons, was killed in a remote control bomb explosion in a car in University Town, Peshawar. He was buried in Pabbi in Nowshera district beside his mother.

Maulana Maududi, Sayyid Qutb and other Muslim scholars presented the theoretical aspects of the offensive jihad. These were never used practically until the Americans conceived Operation Cyclone in July 1979 to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken. The funding of Afghan mujahideen, which started in 1979 with $30 million, rose to $630 million per year in 1987. These funds went through the ISI to different factions of the Afghan Mujahideen.

As then-US President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, Zbigniew Brzezinski, admitted later, the day the Soviets official crossed the Soviet-Afghan border, he wrote to President Carter saying that now America had the “opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War”. In 1980, Brzezinski secured an agreement with Saudi Arabia to match US contributions to the Afghan jihad. Subsequently, the mujahideen got 600 Stinger surface-to-air, shoulder-fired missiles, which turned the tide in Afghanistan against the Soviets. The head of the US visa section in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989 told the BBC that he was ordered to issue visas to known Saudi militants recruited by the CIA for training in the US.

The US and Pakistani  leadership, then at the helm of affairs, with a narrow vision, did not visualise that Muslim jihadis, trained by them, would prove to be more dangerous to the world as compared to the Communists. The country most affected by this ill-conceived policy is Pakistan. A liberal country, until the late 1970s, has been turned into a haven for extremists, criminals, global jihadis and terrorists. Everyone is blaming us for their failures in the war on terror. Yes, we have played a major role in promoting extremism, but the western powers should realise our limitations, and come forward with an economic plan aimed at strategic development of extremist-infested areas. The ongoing blame game is only going to complicate the issue and will not help the war on terror.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 10^th, 2010.