THEOperation Cyclone with which the United States financed the Afghan guerrillas during the Soviet invasion, it still remains the largest aid program ever run by the CIA. The support started from the moment the 40th army entered Afghanistan concerned military supplies through triangulations with third countries, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Aid to the galaxy Mujahideen it consisted not only of equipment and weapons, including the legendary ones Stinger able to bury the Red Army in a real Vietnam, but also and above all in operational techniques.
The Pakistani Secret Service (l 'Inter Services Intelligence, ironically abbreviated as ISI...) was essentially the CIA delegate in the logistics management of the guerrilla that had between the Pakistani provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal areas straddling Afghanistan with the base camp for all anti-Soviet activities.
As long as the USSR represented a common enemy, the guerrilla warriors Mujahideen it remained enveloped in a romantic cortex perceived in the West as an all-Afghan legend of resistance and liberation.
The altars were discovered later. With the Soviet withdrawal of the 1989, Afghanistan freed itself of the Communist yoke but fell back into a new feudalism with entire armies with arsenals and refined operational capabilities around the country and without control.
The end of the war and theOperation Cyclone they left an even greater legacy: despite the internal lacerations and the impossibility of a single coordination among the various Muslim factions, for the first time in recent history the idea of an Islamist cartel had been created. jihadists Arab Sunnis or Iranian Shiites rushed to defend the Islamic land, thanks to Washington's help they had succeeded where even 600 years of history had failed: arming and fomenting a new fundamentalism.
That the legend of Bin Laden was born there may be irrelevant. Much more interesting is to note how the rise to power of the Taliban in Kabul in subsequent years has passed through the economic and military support of Pakistan, in turn foraged by the US. Just Islamabad was the first to recognize the new fundamentalist regime in the 1997 together with Saudi Arabia.
The proximity of the waahbismo Saudi Arabia to the Taliban ideologies appears an important junction to understand some aspects of the current geopolitical scenarios. Saudi Arabia (with its Gulf cousins) is the main source of financing for the jihadism global Sunni. That Ryad's intelligence, the Ri'asat Al-Istikhbarat Al-'Amah, contemplate it Sharia in the statute, it can not be a secondary data ...
This is not the place to investigate the origin and the reasons for relations between the USA, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. However, two factors have contributed in the past to implement the triptych:
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the fear of Shiite Iran that has aligned Saudis and the United States with the same goal of Tehran's isolation
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the excellent relations between the then USSR and India, which convinced Washington to tolerate the creation of a nuclear arsenal in Islamabad
In both cases we are faced with the fact that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan enjoy a strong upward trend in the United States, multiplied by oil power and assets Ryad's financial statements.
In the early '90 meanwhile, just as the Taliban reunited Afghanistan, a certain continuity between jihad and American foreign policy found its European side also in the former Yugoslavia. The funding of the Clinton Administration to the Bosnian militias of Izebtegovic is known to all. The identification of the 7a muslimanska brdska brigada of the Bosnian Army with the specific title of "Muslim" to many in his time he escaped.
A detail? Perhaps, the fact is that in Bosnia the same script of Kabul was repeated: to oppose Serbia and its uncomfortable regime, we resorted to the pact with the devil. Among the '93 and the' 95 in addition to the inevitable Saudi support, the Bosnian Muslim brothers were joined by militiamen hezbollah and Iranian Shiites. The special unit El Mudžahid formed by foreign Islamic volunteers was at the center of many controversies already at the time.
Saudis and Iranians together in the name of Allah? Washington's geopolitical creativity knows no limits ...
The Srebrenica massacre from multiple sources is said to have been allowed (and perhaps inflated in numbers) to prepare world public opinion for the anti-Serbian escalation of the conflict. A sort of Pearl Harbor of the Balkans to be clear ...
Truth or fantasy, the fact remains that the legacy of the "holy war" in the former Yugoslavia is about 3000 Jihadists with experience of war, today free to circulate in Sarajevo and surroundings. Not only. Salafist groups have already appeared in Osve, Zenica, Gornja Maoca, Tuzla, Dubnica and in Sarajevo itself. In rural areas there is talk of ISIS training camps and black flags and an increasing number of plots of land purchased by Saudi banks. A detail also this ... (read also "The Balkans and bad conscience")
At the end of the century, history repeats itself in Kosovo. The patron saint of the KLA is the USA. After the conflict, extended in the name of Allah for two years also to neighboring Macedonia, many militiamen recycle themselves in the Parliament of Pristina. Christian Serbia is being annihilated, while the European ruling class is enriched with new figures whose past is compromised with fundamentalism.
Speaking of the beginning of the millennium, the examples are obvious: the Second Iraq War; support for Assad's opposition and the civil war in Syria; the fall of Gaddafi and the resulting Libyan anarchy; the close link with an ever less secular Turkey ...
To say that the birth and development of the Islamic State are somehow connected to American foreign policy does not appear to be a stretch.
How is it possible? Has America fallen into the Islamist trap?
How much the war winds in the Middle East and the terrorism in Europe depend on American miscalculations or compromising choices, it is not easy to establish it.
It seems out of the question that a new idea of fundamentalism, just embryonic thirty years ago, has now consolidated itself, enjoying four indisputable benefits:
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patronage of countries able to condition markets and international politics (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Turkey on all);
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experience of war on the field in different theaters, not just Middle Eastern;
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technological and IT tools unimaginable only ten years ago;
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a rabid social base and growing demographically opposed to a weak and increasingly sterile West.
With these premises, we just have to wait. As long as there is time.
(photo: White House)
