17 - 23 January 2002
Issue No.569
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 17 - 23 January 2002 Issue No.569 |
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The veils of transparency
Tahsin Bashir* wonders what will become of those Afghanistan's liberation left behind twice
The earthquake of September 2001 opened the floodgates, and information began pouring through. Satellite TV stations played the most important role, drowning viewers in details; so, while the world's literate populations may seem to have benefited the most from this sudden freedom, the illiterate also had access to facts and figures. Now everyone can know what is happening in the world -- indeed, everyone can feel that they are on the scene, and that distant events are part of daily life.
This seeming transparency, however, conceals as much as it reveals. Censorship is embedded deep in the mass of information. It is entirely possible to take any side and adduce enough facts to justify its concomitant claims. While we may feel we are in the presence of utter transparency, an implicit selection process means simply that we do not feel we are being manipulated.
The September attacks and the subsequent onslaught of information left many basic issues unanswered. Often, crucial questions are avoided carefully. The "Arab Afghan" phenomenon is one of the issues the media have failed to address until now. What has happened since its appearance in the 1980s? Who are the Arab Afghans, and what is their influence on the national, regional and international scene?
Starting in the last two decades of the 20th century, groups of individuals, called "Islamists" for lack of a better term, appeared in some Arab and Muslim countries, claiming the right to implement what they described as God's will directly, with no regard for either positive law or the moral codes of Islam inherited from past generations. Challenging states with direct political and military action and justifying their recourse to coercion through new, biased religious interpretations, these groups came to constitute a new political force, monopolising definitions of legitimacy and implementing them with total disregard for the complexity and subtle knowledge exegesis requires.
Nation-states in the Arab and Muslim worlds responded to this challenge with state coercion. Few bothered to examine the new "Islamist" trends in depth, considering that general propaganda would suffice to counter them at the ideological level.
The dynamics of this new phenomenon, however, bred conflicts in a number of Arab and Muslim states that were attempting to modernise. State coercion occasionally succeeded in repressing these movements; but this was merely a state of dormancy the Islamists referred to as kumun. As soon as they perceived a weakening in the state's centralised authority, the Islamists emerged and escalated the conflict once again, reclaiming public space and challenging state power, the accumulation of traditional religious interpretation and individual freedoms.
This complicated phenomenon seems to be inherent in the political and social development of the Arab and Muslim states. The Islamists, finding modernity unacceptable, challenged it head on, justifying their opposition through specific interpretations of Islam that imbued them with authority and guaranteed the masses' respect. They believed they could use Islam to justify revolutionary change.
This phenomenon resulted in the creation of a fighting force made up of young Arab Muslims, willing to die in the service of religious interpretations that give them the right to define the "Law" and the power to impose their laws on society by recruitment or force.
While the Islamist movement scored a number of limited successes, it failed to topple state power, which, though weakened, still reigns supreme.
In contrast to these predominantly Sunni groups, Iran under Khomeini's leadership brought off the only successful Islamic revolution, which took over the state system. The Iranian Revolution failed to expand beyond the state's borders, despite the alliances it managed to conclude in Lebanon. Its neighbours, particularly the Sunni governments surrounding it, saw in the revolution a Shi'ite threat; the Iraqi invasion was one possible response.
The Arab Afghans evolved throughout the '80s, creating new conditions in the Middle East and western Asia. Their variant of Islamism also played a direct role in the West, where the Berlin Wall -- and indeed the Soviet Union -- might not have fallen so rapidly had the United States, with the cooperation of key state actors in the Middle East (principally Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, with Egypt's tacit support), not decided early on to use the Islamists in liberating Afghanistan from Soviet imperialism.
In designing what would become the Soviets' own Vietnam, an alliance was created that enabled Islamist fighters to pass from the Arab states through Saudi Arabia and from there to Peshawar in Pakistan, where they received American military instruction and weapons. The war laid waste to the Soviet army and economy, hastening the ultimate demise of the USSR.
The US, and the Arab governments that cooperated with it, clearly succeeded in their endeavours, since the Soviet Union is no longer with us. A cooperative Russian government reigns in Moscow and is allowed to engage America in a reasonable power-sharing contest. In Afghanistan, a few thousand Arabs remained; their assets included US military training and nuts-and-bolts knowledge of the CIA. They did not constitute a state. When the war ended, they were left with no land to conquer. They were, in other words, free, highly-trained agents of change -- whatever form that change was to take.
Few are prepared to delve too deeply into what the CIA and the Departments of State and Defence did to create and develop this independent fighting force. Responsibility for the Arab Afghans after the liberation of Afghanistan is likewise shrouded in secrecy. One thing is clear: they were not retrained, nor brought to accept civilian life and the authority of the legal systems in place in our part of the world.
Were the Arab Afghans intentionally left idle as loose cannons, human weapons with which to pressure the Arab and Muslim countries? What is the role of the US's Arab allies in this respect? Did they neglect the havoc these fighters could wreak, or imagine that they could be recycled to influence events in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya, where Muslims were being targeted? The seeming transparency of the past few months, therefore, contains some elements of a cover-up. There are no good answers to the challenges we face.
Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Al-Qa'eda could never have countered the US's massive power. They may simply disappear, but they will leave behind an unresolved problem. The US and President Bush can claim a political victory, but the re-emergence of one Islamist group or another remains a distinct, and dangerous, possibility. Above all, the Islamists' potential role in formal politics is an issue that we must address. Only then can we hope to achieve modernisation. Only then can we aspire to the cooperation that once made of Islam a force for spiritual development and human progress.
* The writer is a political analyst and former high-ranking diplomat.
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