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 t's
a cliché to say how dirty and complicated the U.S. war on
terrorism will be, but you don't get the full measure of how true
this might be until you understand the nature of America's allies
in this fight.
And not even
the sugar-on-top allies — Syria, Iran, and Sudan. Just the
bargain-basement, can't-do-it-without-them allies, Pakistan and
Saudi Arabia, are bad enough, with their direct and indirect support
of terrorism over the years, their Byzantine and conspiratorial
internal politics, and their well-developed capacity for betrayal.
Dealing with
these allies will require more cold-bloodedness and calculation
than the U.S. has been capable of since the height of the Cold War.
Dorothy, you're not in NATO anymore.
Take Pakistan.
There is plenty of talk of how the U.S. is experiencing "blowback"
from its support for Afghan rebels in the 1980s. But this isn't
quite true if by "blowback" one means an unintended consequence,
since the Paks deliberately molded the rebels into an international
terrorist force.
The Pak security
service, the ISI, is what the CIA is in the most feverish fantasies
of the Left — a double-dealing agency involved in the nastiest
of dirty tricks, indeed in the active fostering of terrorism. Except
Islamabad doesn't have a Frank Church, and probably never will.
In his book
Bin Laden (which now sells for something like $1,500 on <a
href=www.amazon.com> amazon.com</a>), Yossef Bodansky details
how the ISI went out of its way to hide the true nature of the Afghan
rebels from the CIA:
The United
States was convinced that it was supporting a genuine national
liberation struggle, albeit with a strong Islamic foundation,
and Islamabad went to great lengths to ensure that the United
States did not discover firsthand the kind of mujahideen the American
taxpayers were sponsoring. Toward this end the CIA was isolated
by the ISI from the training infrastructure it financed.
The Saudis,
meanwhile, funded the training of Islamic extremists on the NIMBY
grounds — better in Afghanistan than Riyadh. But eventually
the Saudis began to fear that the terrorist force would come back
to bite them, since the extremists hate the Saudi regime. So, the
Saudis, according to Bodansky, cut a deal with the Paks.
The ISI would
keep the Afghan extremists from Saudi Arabia, in exchange for Saudi
lobbying on Pakistan's behalf in Washington. The Saudis would convince
the U.S. that Pakistan was a responsible power, keeping a lid on
Islamic extremism.
This was a
cynical enough deal, but in this part of the world cynicism piles
on top of cynicism until it's hard to know who's betraying whom.
The Paks reneged on the deal.
Bodansky writes,
By fall of
1995 Riyadh had begun to realize that the ISI had been taking
Saudi money and Islamabad had been building on Saudi influence
in Washington while Saudi "Afghans" were being trained
and supported in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Iran for operations
in Saudi Arabia.
There's "blowback"
for you. In the story of the rise of Islamic terrorism, "blowback,"
or some form of cheating and manipulation, is basically all there
is. According to Bodansky, to improve their image in the West, the
Paks closed down some Taliban training camps in 1996, only to reopen
the camps under the auspices of an outfit the Paks controlled even
more directly.
Bodansky even
credits suspicions of ISI and Saudi involvement in terrorist attacks
on their own soil, as a result of particularly vicious internal
political maneuvering.
So, as the
debate over "the coalition" continues, it's important
to remember that these are SOBs who are barely even our SOBs.
By all means, use them in any way we find helpful, but don't sentimentalize
them, and don't let their feelings or interests get in the way of
pursuing what we think is right.
They will betray
us at the first opportunity, and — who knows? — may be
doing so already.
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