CAP: Peace Article/Excerpts

Why They Hate Us So

NOTE: This article is no longer online. It should be available at your local library. Here are some excerpts.

* Why They Hate Us So. On 9/17/01, The San Francisco Examiner had an article discussing what people love and hate about the U.S. and the history of our involvement in Afghanistan as part of our Cold War battles with the USSR.

"People are really deeply shocked by the doomsday-like pictures," said Mirjana Bobic, a popular author and head of cultural programming on Serbian state television in Yugoslavia. "But you know, every stick has two ends, and if you are beating others you should expect a boomerang effect." ...

Yet anti-American sentiment is far broader and appears to have intensified since President Bush, after taking office in January, opposed a draft treaty on global warming and revived an unpopular U.S. proposal for a Star Wars-like missile shield. ...

"There are lots of degrees of anti-Americanism, but it would be dangerous to lump them all together," said Sergio Romano, a former Italian ambassador to Moscow. "There are growing divergences between the United States and other countries, but many who are critical of America would never dream of resorting to what we saw Tuesday." ...

The story goes back 22 years, to 1979. America had decided, post Vietnam War, that American deaths were an unacceptable price to pay for victory (let alone defeat) in far away countries of which they knew little. But in 1979, this was still a bipolar world. The Soviet Union was already ailing, in far worse shape than anyone imagined but, around the world, the proxy struggles between the superpowers went on; in the Middle East, in Angola, Ethiopia, South Yemen.

In Afghanistan, a communist government was in power, propped up by the Russians. But Moscow's trusted puppet, Muhammad Daoud, cousin of the ousted King Zahir Shah and sometimes called the "Red Prince," had gone, murdered with most of his family in a military coup. Moscow was much less sure about Daoud's replacement, President Nur Muhammad Taraki. Because Afghanistan was at best a very rum sort of communist state. In Kabul, the apparatchiks wore suits and their wives wore skirts and heels and even went to work.

But the secular, atheistic fabric of the state was flimsy and fragile. A little way out in the rugged countryside, it remained rigidly tribal; women wore the burqa, Islamic piety was universal, and Russia was Satan.

Nudged and funded by the CIA, Iran and Pakistan, the tribal leaders began to cause their overlords some trouble.

Moscow under Leonid Brezhnev, fat and autocratic and often drunk, decided enough was enough and sent in the army. The Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was under way....

Building on a modest program of assistance that had started six months before the Soviet invasion, Brzezinski got Carter to sign a secret directive to send covert aid to the Mujahedeen, the tribal Islamic warriors who were then in the earliest stages of giving the Russians hell.

The Afghan Civil War was under way, and America was in it from the start -- or even before the start, if Brzezinski himself is to be believed....

To keep the war going, the CIA, in cahoots with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan's military intelligence agency ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate), funnelled millions of dollars to the Mujahedeen. It was the remotest and the safest form of warfare: the United States (and Saudi Arabia) provided funds, and America also a very limited amount of training. They also provided the Stinger missiles that ultimately changed the face of the war.

Pakistan's ISI did everything else: training, equipping, motivating, advising. And they did the job with panache: Pakistan's military ruler at the time, General Zia ul Haq, who himself held strong fundamentalist leanings, threw himself into the task with a passion....

But during that process of supply and training, as veteran journalist John Cooley puts it, the United States indirectly "hatched a monster of Islamist extremism, the Taliban movement."

By 1989, the Mujahedeen had put the Russians to flight. But then they themselves, representing the whole ethnic spectrum of the country, just carried on fighting for supremacy.

The long civil war had also produced millions of refugees, more than 3 million of whom ended up in Pakistan. And it was in their squalid camps that Pakistan alighted accidentally on the civil war's appalling resolution.

A militia sprung up from the thousands of Islamic seminaries that opened in Pakistan during the civil war to give a rigid Islamic education to the young refugees; a militia composed of youths who had been born or at least raised in exile.

They were deracinated, ruthless, they had nothing at all to lose. All they had, all they held to tightly, was a fiery belief in the most reductive, regressive form of Islam ever practiced anywhere.

And America, now bent, perhaps, on destroying them, was in there at the creation....

Still, among scholars and Muslim clergy, the question of suicide and killings of innocent people leaves much room for debate.

Lacking a sophisticated arsenal, the Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups have turned suicide bombings into a powerful weapon in the latest Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Abdul-Moti Bayoumi, of the Islamic Research Center at Cairo's al-Azhar University, mainstream Islam's top seat of learning, says for jihad to be legal, it must fulfill several conditions.

Among them: a Muslim should not provoke the aggression; a Muslim should only fight the one who fights him; and children, women, and the elderly should be spared.

"There is no terrorism in jihad or a threat to civilians," Bayoumi said....

And while terrorists and the deadly acts of terrorism spread fear throughout much of the United States, there is also the worry that the United States will push further into isolationism and snobbery.

Former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti expressed such a fear in the Italy's Senate on Wednesday. "As we voice our solidarity with the anguish of the United States, we must make it clear that it should avoid the kind of indiscriminate action that it has taken in the past that only makes things worse," he said.

The warning from Moscow was much harsher.

"U.S. foreign policy has been characterized by a high degree of self-confidence, complacency and intoxication with its own power following the Cold War," Vladimir Lukin, a deputy speaker of the Russian Parliament and a former ambassador to Washington, said in an interview. "If the U.S. prefers to pretend that it rules the world, such myopia will continue to result in horrible acts of terror," he added.

In Beijing, the People's Daily advised Bush to take the disaster as "a serious warning" against "hegemonist foreign policies." One posting on China's increasingly nationalist Internet chatrooms said Tuesday's attacks were "the result of America being the world police."

U.S. officials acknowledge that Americans often underestimate the effect of their government's policies on people around the world.

"If President Bush goes on television and says we're going to get the terrorists and those who harbor them, that means a lot of people are going to suffer," one U.S. diplomat said. "We think we're doing it for the right reasons ... but our policies have enormous impact and many people have suffered a lot because of what they see as our arrogance."

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