Roots of Contemporary Issues like Islam and Christianity, but also secular doctrines like liberalism and Marxism have had to face an ongoing contradiction between the impulse to universalism and respective traditions of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. The universalizing impulse gives the United States a funda- mentalist orientation in doctrine, just as the tradition of tolerance makes for pluralism in practice and in doctrine. Doctrinal tendencies aside, I remain deeply skeptical of the claim that we can read people's politi- cal behavior from their religion, or from their culture. Could it be true that an orthodox Muslim is a potential terrorist? Or, the same thing, that an Orthodox Jew or Christian is a potential ter rorist and only a Reform Jew or a Christian convert to Darwinian evolutionary theory is capable of being tolerant of those who do not share his or her convictions? I am aware that this does not exhaust the question of culture and politics. How do you make sense of a politics that consciously wears the mantle of religion? Take, for example the politics of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda; both claim to be waging a jihad, a just war against the enemies of Islam. To try to understand this uneasy relationship between politics and religion, I find it necessary not only to shift focus from doctrinal to historical Islam, from doctrine and culture to history and politics, but also to broaden the focus beyond Islam to include larger historical encounters, of which bin Laden and al-Qaeda have been one outcome. THE COLD WAR AFTER INDOCHINA Eqbal Ahmad draws our attention to the television image from 1985 of Ronald Reagan inviting a group of turbaned men, all Afghan, all leaders of the mujahideen, to the White House lawn for an introduction to the media. "These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers," said Reagan (Ahmad 2001). This was the moment when the United States tried to har- ness one version of Islam in a struggle against the Soviet Union. Before exploring its politics, let me provide some historical background to the moment. I was a young lecturer at the University of Dar-esSalaam in Tanzania in 1975. It was a momen- tous year in the decolonization of the world as we knew it: 1975 was the year of the U.S. defeat in Indochina, as it was of the collapse of the last European empire in Africa. In retrospect, it is clear that it was also the year that the center of gravity of the Cold War shifted from Southeast Asia to southern Africa. The strategic question was this: Who would pick up the pieces of the Portu- guese empire in Africa, the United States or the Soviet Union? As the focal point of the Cold War shifted, there was a corresponding shift in U.S. strategy based on two key influences. First, the closing years of the Vietnam War saw the forging of a Nixon Doctrine, which held that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars.” The Nixon doctrine was one lesson that the United States brought from the Vietnam debacle. Even if the hour was late to implement it in Indochina, the Nixon Doctrine guided U.S. initiatives in southern Africa. In the post-Vietnam world, the United States looked for more than local proxies; it needed regional powers as junior partners. In southern Africa, that role was fulfilled by apartheid South Africa. Faced with the possibility of a decisive MPLA victory in Angola, the United States encouraged South Africa to intervene militarily. The result was a political debacle that was second only to the Bay of Pigs invasion of a decade before: 182 Ways of Thinking: War and Terror No matter its military strength and geopolitical importance, apartheid South Africa was clearly a political liability for the United States. Second, the Angolan fiasco reinforced public resistance within the United States to further overseas Vietnam-type involvement. The clearest indication that popular pressures were finding expression among legislators was the 1975 Clark amendment, which outlawed covert aid to combatants in the ongoing Angolan civil war. The Clark amendment was repealed at the start of Reagan's second term in 1985. Its decade-long duration failed to forestall the Cold Warriors, who looked for ways to bypass legislative restric- tions on the freedom of executive action. CIA chief William Casey took the lead in orchestrating support for terrorist and prototerrorist movements around the world--from Contras in Nicaragua to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, to Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) in Mozam- bique7 and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) in Angolas-through third and fourth parties. Simply put, after the defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, the United States decided to harness, and even to cultivate, terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered proSoviet. The high point of the U.S. embrace of terrorism came with the Contras. More than just tolerated and shielded, they were actively nurtured and directly assisted by Wash- ington. But because the Contra story is so well known, I will focus on the nearly forgotten story of U.S. support for terrorism in Southern Africa to make my point. South Africa became the Reagan Administration's preferred partner for a constructive engagement, a term coined by Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Chester Crocker. The point of constructive engagement” was to bring South Africa out of its political isolation and tap its military potential in the war against militant-pro-Soviet-nationalism. The effect of “construc- tive engagement" was to bring to South African regional policy the sophistication of a blend of covert and overt operations: In Mozambique, for example, South Africa combined an offi- cial peace accord (the 1984 Nkomati agreement) with continued clandestine material support for RENAMO terrorism. Tragically, the United States entered the era of “constructive engagement" just as the South African military tightened its hold over government and shifted its regional policy from detente to “total onslaught." I do not intend to explain the tragedy of Angola and Mozambique as the result of machinations by a single superpower. The Cold War was fought by two superpowers, and both subordinated local interests and consequences to global strategic considerations. Whether in Angola or in Mozam- bique, the Cold War interfaced with an internal civil war. An entire generation of African scholars has been preoccupied with understanding the relation between external and internal factors in the making of contemporary Africa and, in that context, the dynamic between the Cold War and the civil war in each case. My purpose is not to enter this broader debate. Here, my purpose is more modest. I am concerned not with the civil war, but only the Cold War and, furthermore, not with both adversaries in the Cold War, but only the United States. My limited purpose is to illuminate the context in which the United States embraced terrorism as it prepared to wage the Cold War to a finish. The partnership between the United States and apartheid South Africa bolstered two key move- ments that used terror with abandon: RENAMO in Mozambique, and UNITA in Angola. REN- 183 AMO was a terrorist outfit created by the Rhodesian army in the early 1970s—and patronized by the South African Defense Forces. UNITA was more of a prototerrorist movement with a local base, though one not strong enough to have survived the short bout of civil war in 1975 with- out sustained external assistance. UNITA was a contender for power, even if a weak one, while RENAMO was not-which is why the United States could never openly support this creation of Rhodesian and South African intelligence and military establishments. Because the 1975 debacle in Angola showed that South Africa could not be used as a direct link in U.S. assistance, and the Clark amendment barred U.S. covert aid in Angola, the CIA took the initiative to find fourth par- ties such as Morocco-through which to train and support UNITA. Congressional testimony documented at least one instance of a $15-million-dollar payment to UNITA through Morocco in 1983. Savimbi, the UNITA chief, acknowledged the ineffectiveness of the Clark amendment when he told journalists, "A great country like the United States has other channels... the Clark amendment means nothing" (in Minter 1994:152). By any reckoning, the cost of terrorism in Southern Africa was high. A State Department consul- tant who interviewed refugees and displaced persons concluded that RENAMO was responsible for 95 percent of instances of abuse of civilians in the war in Mozambique, including the murder of as many as 100,000 persons. A 1989 United Nations study estimated that Mozambique suf- fered an economic loss of approximately $15 billion between 1980 and 1988, a figure five and a half times its 1988 GDP (Minter 1994). Africa Watch researchers documented UNITA strategies aimed at starving civilians in government-held areas, through a combination of direct attacks, kidnappings, and the planting of land mines on paths used by peasants. The extensive use of land mines put Angola in the ranks of the most mined countries in the world (alongside Afghanistan and Cambodia), with amputees conservatively estimated at over 15,000. UNICEF calculated that 331,000 died of causes directly or indirectly related to the war. The UN estimated the total loss to the Angolan economy from 1980 to 1988 at $30 billion, six times the 1988 GDP (Minter 1994:4-5). The CIA and the Pentagon called terrorism by another name: "low intensity conflict." Whatever the name, political terror brought a kind of war that Africa had never seen before. The hallmark of terror was that it targeted civilian life: blowing up infrastructure such as bridges and power sta- tions, destroying health and educational centers, mining paths and fields. Terrorism distinguished itself from guerrilla war by making civilians its preferred target. If left-wing guerrillas claimed that they were like fish in water, rightwing terrorists were determined to drain the water-no matter what the cost to civilian life-so as to isolate the fish. What is now called collateral dam- age was not an unfortunate byproduct of the war; it was the very point of terrorism. Following the repeal of the Clark amendment at the start of Reagan's second term, the United States provided $13 million worth of “humanitarian aid" to UNITA, then $15 million for "military assistance.” Even when South African assistance to UNITA dried up following the internal Ango- lan settlement in May 1991, the United States stepped up its assistance to UNITA in spite of the fact that the Cold War was over. The hope was that terrorism would deliver a political victory in Angola, as it had in Nicaragua. The logic was simple: The people would surely vote the terrorists into power if the level of collateral damage could be made unacceptably high. 184 ways of TDmg wur unu Terror Even after the Cold War, U.S. tolerance for terror remained high, both in Africa and beyond. The callousness of Western response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was no exception. Or consider the aftermath of January 6, 1999, when Revolutionary United Front (RUF) gunmen maimed and raped their way across Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, killing over 5,000 civilians in a day. The British and U.S. response was to pressure the government to share power with RUF rebels. AFGHANISTAN: THE HIGH POINT IN THE COLD WAR The shifting center of gravity of the Cold War was the major context in which Afghanistan policy was framed, but the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was also a crucial factor. Ayatollah Khomeini anointed the United States as the "Great Satan," and pro-U.S. Islamic countries as "American Islam.” Rather than address specific sources of Iranian resentment against the United States, the Reagan administration resolved to expand the pro-U.S. Islamic lobby in order to isolate Iran. The strategy was two-pronged. First, with respect to Afghanistan, it hoped to unite a billion Muslims worldwide around a holy war, a crusade against the Soviet Union. I use the word crusade, not jihad, because only the notion of crusade can accurately convey the frame of mind in which this initiative was taken. Second, the Reagan administration hoped to turn a doctrinal difference inside Islam between minority Shia and majority Sunni into a political divide. It hoped thereby to contain the influence of the Iranian Revolution as a minority Shia affair. The plan went into high gear in 1986 when CIA chief William Casey took three significant mea- sures (Rashid 2000: 129-130). The first was to convince Congress to step up the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan by providing the mujahideen with U.S. advisors and U.S.-made Stinger antiair craft missiles to shoot down Soviet planes. The second was to expand the Islamic guerrilla war from Afghanistan into the Soviet Republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, a decision reversed when the Soviet Union threatened to attack Pakistan in retaliation. The third was to recruit radical Mus- lims from around the world to come and train in Pakistan and fight with the Afghan mujahideen. The Islamic world had not seen an armed jihad for centuries. Now the CIA was determined to create one, to put a version of tradition at the service of politics. Thus was the tradition of jihad- of a just war with a religious sanction, nonexistent in the last 400 years-revived with U.S. help in the 1980s. In a 1990 radio interview, Eqbal Ahmad explained how “CIA agents started going all over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight.":2 Pervez Hoodbhoy recalled, With Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq as America's foremost ally, the CIA advertised for, and openly recruited, Islamic holy warriors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Algeria. Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally and mentor funneled support to the Mujahidin, and Ronald Regan feted them on the lawn of the White House, lavishing praise on “brave free- dom fighters challenging the Evil Empire. [2001] This is the context in which a U.S./Saudi/Pakistani alliance was forged, and in which religious madrasahs were turned into political schools for training cadres. The CIA did not just fund the jihad; it also played a key role in training the mujahideen" (Chossudovsky 2001). The point was to integrate guerilla training with the teachings of Islam and, thus, create “Islamic guerrillas." The Indian journalist Dilip Hiro (1995) explained: 185 Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete sociopolitical ideology, that holy Islam was being violated by (the) atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow. [in Chossudovsky 2001] The CIA looked for, but was unable to find, a Saudi Prince to lead this crusade. It settled for the next best thing, the son of an illustrious family closely connected to the Saudi royal house. We need to remem that Osama bin Laden did not come from a backwater family steeped in premodernity, but from a cosmopolitan family. The bin Laden family is a patron of scholarship: it endows programs at universities like Harvard and Yale. Bin Laden was recruited with U.S. approval, and at the highest level, by Prince Turki al-Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence (Black- burn 2001:3). This is the context in which Osama bin Laden helped build, in 1986, the Khost tun- nel complex deep under the mountains close to the Pakistani border, a complex the CIA funded as a major arms depot, as a training facility, and as a medical center for the mujahideen. It is also the context in which bin Laden set up, in 1989, al-Qaeda, or military base, as a service center for Arab Afghans and their families (Rashid 2000:132). The idea of an Islamic global war was not a brainchild of bin Laden; the CIA and Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (IST) hoped to transform the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by Muslim states against the Soviet Union. Al-Qaeda networks spread out beyond Afghanistan: to Chechnya and Kosovo (Blackburn 2001:7), to Algeria and Egypt, even as far as Indonesia. The numbers involved were impressive by any reckoning. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Ahmad Rashid estimated that 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight in the decade between 1982 and 1992. Eventually Rashid notes, the Afghan jihad came to influence more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals. (Rashid 1999). The non Afghan recruits were known as the Afghan-Arabs or, more specifically, as the Afghan-Algerians or the Afghan-Indonesians. The Afghan-Arabs constituted an elite force and received the most sophisticated training (Chos- sudovsky 2001). Fighters in the Peshawar-based Muslim "international brigade" received the rela- tively high salary of around $1,500 per month (Stone 1997:183). Except at the top leadership level, fighters had no direct contact with Washington; most communication was mediated through Pakistani intelligence services (Chossudovsky 2001). The Afghan jihad was the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. In fiscal year 1987 alone, according to one estimate, clandestine U.S. military aid to the mujahideen amounted to 660 million dollars-"more than the total of American aid to the contras in Nicaragua” (Ahmad and Barnet 1988:44). Apart from direct U.S. funding, the CIA financed the war through the drug trade, just as in Nicaragua. The impact on Afghanistan and Pakistan was devastating. Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in Pakistan and Afghanistan; the produc- tion of opium (a very different drug than heroin) was directed to small regional markets. Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at University of Ottawa, estimates that within only two years of the CIA's entry into the Afghan jihad, "the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand.” (2001:4). The lever for expanding the drug trade was simple: As the jihad spread in side Afghanistan, the mujahideen required peasants to pay an opium tax. Instead of waging a war on drugs, the CIA turned the drug 186 trade into a way of financing the Cold War. By the end of the anti-Soviet jihad, the Central Asian region produced 75 percent of the world's opium, worth billions of dollars in revenue (McCoy 1997).13 The effect on Pakistan, the United States's key ally in waging the Cold War in Central Asia, was devastating. To begin with, the increase in opium production corresponded to an increase in local consumption, hardly an incidental relation: The UN Drug Control Program estimated that the heroin-addicted population in Pakistan went up from nearly zero in 1979 to 1.2 million by 1985, "a much steeper rise than in any nation" (McCoy 1997, in Chossudovsky 2001). There were two other ways in which the Afghan jihad affected Pakistan. The first was its impact on Pakistan's military and intelligence services, which were key to giving the CIA an effective reach in Afghanistan and, more generally, in Soviet Central Asia. The more the anti-Soviet jihad grew, the more the intel- ligence services, particularly the ISI, moved to the center of governmental power in Pakistan. The Islamization of the antiSoviet struggle both drew inspiration from and reinforced the Islamiza- tion of the Pakistani state under Zia (Hoodbhoy 2001:7). Second, the more the Afghan jihad gath- ered momentum, the more it fed a regional offshoot, the Kashmiri jihad (Hoodbhoy 2001:7). The jihadi organizations were so pivotal in the functioning of the Pakistani state by the time Zia left office that the trend to Islamization of the state continued with post-Zia governments. Hudud Ordinances14 and blasphemy laws remained in place. The Jameet-e-Ulema-Islam, a key party in the alliance that was the Afghan jihad, became a part of Benazir Bhutto's governing coalition in 1993 (Chossudovsky 2001). By now it should be clear that the CIA was key to forging the link between Islam and terror in Central Asia. The groups it trained and sponsored shared three characteristics: terror tactics, embrace of holy war, and the use of fighters from across national borders (the Afghan-Arabs). The consequences were evident in countries as diverse and far apart as Indonesia and Algeria. Today, the Laskar jihad in Indonesia is reportedly led by a dozen commanders who fought in the Afghan jihad (Solomon 2001:9). In Algeria, when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was prevented from taking power by the Algerian military when it became evident that it would win the 1991 election, those in the political leadership of FIS who had pioneered the parliamentary road were eclipsed by those championing an armed jihad. The Algerian-Afghans "played an important role in the formation of the Islamic extremist groups of the post-Chadli crisis." Though their precise numbers are not known, Martin Stone reports that "the Pakistani embassy in Algiers alone issued 2,800 visas to Algerian volunteers during the mid-1980s." One of the most important leaders of the Algerian-Afghans, Kamerredin Kherbane, went on to serve on the FIS's executive council in exile (Stone 1997:183). The Cold War created a political schism in Islam. In contrast to radical Islamist social move- ments like the pre election FIS in Algeria, or the earlier revolutionaries in Iran, the Cold War has given the United States a statedriven conservative version of political Islam in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan. In an essay on September 11, Olivier Roy has usefully contrasted these tendencies-radical political Islam as against cons vative "neofundamentalism." Islamist social movements originated in the 20th century in the face of imperial occupation; they aimed to rejuvenate Islam, not just as "a mere religion," but as “a political ideology which should be inte- 187 ! grated into all aspects of society (politics, law, economy, social justice, foreign policy, etc.)" (Roy 2001). Though it began by calling for the building of an umma (supranational Muslim community), radical Islamism adapted to the nation state and sprouted different national versions of Islamism. This shift has been the most dramatic in movements such as the Lebanese Hezbullah, which has given up the idea of an Islamic state and entered the electoral process, and Hamas, whose critique of the PLO is that it has betrayed not Islam, but the Palestinian nation. Where they are allowed, these movements operate within legal frameworks. Though not necessarily democratic, they strengthen the conditions for democracy by expanding participation in the political process. In contrast, statedriven neofundamentalist movements share a conservative agenda. Politically, their objective is limited to implementing Sharia (Islamic law). Socially, they share a conservatism evidenced by opposition to female presence in public life and a violent sectarianism (anti-Shia). Though originating in efforts by unpopular regimes to legitimize power, the history of neofun- damentalist movements shows that these efforts have indeed backfired. Instead of developing | roots, neofundamentalism has turned supranational; uprooted, its membe broken with ties of family and country of origin. According to Roy, “while Islamists do adapt to the nation-state, neofundamentalists embody the crisis of the nation-state.... This new brand of supra-national fundamentalism is more a product of contemporary globalization than the Islamic past" (Roy 2001). If the mujahideen and al-Qaeda were neofundamentalist products of the Cold War-trained, equipped, and financed by the CIA and its regional allies--the Taliban came out of the agony and the ashes of the war against the Soviet Union. The Taliban was a movement born across the border in Pakistan at a time when the entire population had been displaced not once but many times over, and when no educated class to speak of was left in the country. The Talib was a student and the student movement, Taliban, was born of warfare stretching into decades, of children born in cross-border refugee camps, of orphans with no camaraderie but that of fellow male students in madressas, of madressas that initially provided student recruits to defend the population- ironically, women and young boys-from the lust and the loot of mujahideen guerrillas. Born of a brutalized society, the Taliban was, tragically, to brutalize it further. An old man in a mosque in Kandahar, an architectural ruin, which was once an ancient city of gardens and fountains and palaces, told Eqbal Ahmad, “They have grown in darkness amidst death. They are angry and ignorant, and hate all things that bring joy to life" (1995). Both those who see the Taliban as an Islamic movement and those who see it as a tribal (Pushtun) movement view it as a premodern residue in a modern world. But they miss the crucial point about the Taliban: Even if it evokes premodernity in its particular language and specific practices, the Taliban is the result of an encounter of a premodern people with modern imperial power. Given to a highly decentralized and localized mode of life, the Afghan people have been subjected to two highly centralized state projects in the past few decades: first, Soviet supported Marxism, then, CIA-supported Islamization. When I asked two colleagues, one an Afghan and the other a U.S. student of Afghanistan, how a movement that began in defense of women and youth could turn against both, 16 they asked me to put this development in a triple context: the shift from the forced gender equity of the communists to the forced misogyny of the Taliban, the combination of tra- ditional male seclusion of the madressas with the militarism of the jihadi training, and, finally, 188 the fear of Taliban leaders that their members would succumb to rape, a practice for which the mujahideen were notorious.17 True, the CIA did not create the Taliban. But the CIA did create the mujahideen and embraced both bin Laden and the Taliban as alternatives to secular nation- alism. Just as, in another context, the Israeli intelligence allowed Hamas to operate unhindered during the first intifadah-allowing it to open a university and bank accounts, and even possibly helping it with funding, hoping to play it off against the secular PLO-and reaped the whirlwind in the second intifadah.18 My point is simple: Contemporary "fundamentalism" is a modern political project, not a tradi- tional cultural leftover. To be sure, one can trace many of the elements in the present "fundamen- talist” project-such as opium production, madressas, and the very notion of jihad Akbar-to the era before modern colonization, just as one can identify forms of slavery prior to the era of merchant capitalism. Just as transatlantic slavery took a premodern institution and utilized it for purposes of capitalist accumulation-stretching its scale and brutality far beyond precapitalist practice or imagination-so Cold Warriors turned traditional institutions such as jihad Akbar and madressas, and traditional stimulants such as opium, to modern political purposes on a scale previously unimagined with devastating consequences. Opium, madressas, jihad Akbar-all were reshaped as they were put into the service of a global U.S. campaign against “the evil empire." When the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan, this new terror was unleashed on Afghan people in the name of liberation. Eqbal Ahmad observed that the Soviet withdrawal turned out to be a moment of truth, rather than victory, for the mujahideen (Ahmad 1992a). As different factions of the mujahideen divided along regional (north versus south), linguistic (Farsi versus Pushto), doctrinal (Shia versus Sunni) and even external (pro-Iran versus pro-Saudi) lines, and fought each other, they shelled and destroyed their own cities with artillery. Precisely when they were ready to take power, the mujahideen lost the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people (Ah mad 1989, 1992a, 1992b). THE QUESTION OF RESPONSIBILITY Who bears responsibility for the present situation? To understand this question, it will help to contrast two situations, that after World War II and that after the Cold War, and compare how the question of responsibility was understood and addressed in two different contexts. In spite of Pearl Harbor, World War II was fought in Europe and Asia, not in the United States. Europe, and not the United States, faced physical and civic destruction at the end of the war. The question of responsibility for postwar reconstruction arose as a political rather than a moral ques- tion. Its urgency was underscored by the changing political situation in Yugoslavia, Albania, and, particularly, Greece. This is the context in which the United States accepted responsibility for restoring conditions for decent civic life in noncommunist Europe. The resulting initiative was the Marshal Plan. The Cold War was not fought in Europe, but in Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, and Central and South America. Should we, ordinary humanity, hold the United States responsible for its 189 actions during the Cold War? Should the United States be held responsible for napalm bombing and spraying Agent Orange in Vietnam? Should it be held responsible for cultivating terrorist movements in Southern Africa, Central Africa, and Central Asia? The United States's embrace of terrorism did not end with the Cold War. Right up to September 10, 2001, the United States and Britain compelled African countries to reconcile with terrorist movements. The demand was that governments must share power with terrorist organizations in the name of reconciliation-in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Angola. Reconciliation turned into a codeword for impunity, disguising a strategy for undermining hard-won state independence. If terrorism was a Cold War brew, it turned into a local Angolan or Mozambican or Sierra Leonean brew after the Cold War. Whose responsibility is it? Like Afghanistan, are these countries hosting terrorism, or are they also hostage to terrorism? I think both. Perhaps no other society paid a higher price for the defeat of the Soviet Union than did Afghani- stan. Out of a population of roughly 20 million, a million died, another million and a half were maimed, and another five million became refugees. UN agencies estimate that nearly a million and a half have gone clinically insane as a consequence of decades of continuous war. Those who survived lived in the most mined country in the world.19 Afghanistan was a brutalized society even before the present war began. The United States has a habit of not taking responsibility for own actions. Instead, it habitually looks for a high moral pretext for inaction. I was in Durban at the 2001 World Congress against Racism when the United States walked out of it. The Durban conference was about major crimes of the past, such as racism and xenophobia. I returned from Durban to New York to hear Con- deleeza Rice talk about the need to forget slavery because, she said, the pursuit of civilized life requires that we forget the past. It is true that unless we learn to forget, life will turn into revenge seeking. Each of us will have nothing to nurse but a catalogue of wrongs done to a long line of ancestors. But civilization cannot be built on just forgetting. We must not only learn to forget, we must also not forget to learn. We must also memorialize, particularly monumental crimes. The United States was built on two monumental crimes: the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans. The tendency of the United States is to memorialize other peoples' crimes but to forget its own to seek a high moral ground as a pretext to ignore real issues. WHAT IS TO BE DONE Several critics of the U.S. bombing of Afgh istan have argued that terrorism should be dealt with like any criminal act. If terrorism were simply an individual crime, it would not be a politi- cal problem. The distinction between political terror and crime is that the former makes an open claim for support. Unlike the criminal, the political terrorist is not easily deterred by punishment. Whatever we may think of their methods, terrorists have a cause, and a need to be heard. Not- withstanding Salman Rushdie's (2001) claim that terrorists are nihilists who wrap themselves up in objectives, but have none, and so we must remorselessly attack them, one needs to recognize that terrorism has no military solution. This is why the U.S. military establishment's bombing campaign in Afghanistan is more likely to be remembered as a combination of blood revenge and medieval-type exorcism than as a search for a solution to terrorism. Bin Laden's strength does not lay in his religious but, rather, in his political message. Even a politi- cal child knows the answer to Bush's incredulous question, "Why do they hate us?" When it comes to the Middle East, we all know that the United States stands for cheap oil and not free speech. The only way of isolating individual terrorists is to do so politically, by addressing the issues in which terrorists "wrap themselves up." Without addressing the issues, there is no way of shifting the terrain of conflict from the military to the political, and drying up support for political ter- ror. If we focus on issues, it should be clear that September II would not have happened had the United States ended the Cold War with demilitarization and a peace bonus. The United States did not dismantle the global apparatus of empire at the end of the Cold War; instead, it concentrated on ensuring that hostile states-branded rogue states--not acquire weapons of mass destruc- tion. Similarly, the United States did not accept responsibility for the militarization of civilian and state life in regions where the Cold War was waged with devastating consequences, such as Southeast Asia, southern Africa, Central America and Central Asia; instead, it just walked away. In the first weeks after September 11, the leaders of the United States and Britain were at pains to confirm aloud that theirs was a war not against Islam, nor even just Islamic terror, but against terrorism. To be convincing, though, they will have to face up to the relationship between their own policies and contemporary terrorism. A useful starting point would be to recognize the fail- ure of the United States's Iraqi policy, give up a vendetta that refuses to distinguish between the Iraqi government and Iraqi people, and to pressure Israel to reverse its post-1967 occupation of Palestinian lands. It is the refusal to address issues that must count as the first major hurdle in our search for peace. For their part, Muslims need to break out of the straightjacket of a victim's point of view. This, too, requires a historical consciousness, for at least two good reasons. One, only a historical consciousness can bring home to Muslims the fact that Islam is today the banner for diverse and contradictory political projects. It is not only anti-imperialist Islamist movements but also imperialist projects, not only demands to extend participation in public life but also dic- tatorial agendas, which carry the banner of Islam. The minimum prerequisite for political action today must be the capacity to tell one from the other. The second prerequisite for action is to recognize that just as Islam has changed and become more complex, so too has the configuration of modern society. More and more Muslims live in societies with non-Muslim majorities. Just as non-Muslim majority societies are called on to realize an equal citizenship for all-regardless of cultural and religious differences-so Muslim-majority societies face the challenge of creating a single citizenship in the context of religious diversity. In matters of religion, says the Koran, there must be no compulsion. Islam can be more than a mere religion-indeed, a way of life--but the way of life does not have to be a compulsion. Islamist organizations will have to consider seriously the separation of the state from religion, notably as Hezbollah has in Lebanon. Instead of creat- ing a national political Islam for each Muslim-majority state, the real challenge faced by Muslims is to shed the very notion of a nation-state. Whatever the terms of the nation-state-territorial or cultural, secular or religious-this political form exported by the modern West to the rest of the world is one part of Western modernity that needs to be rethought. The test of democracy in multireligious and multicultural societies is not simply to get the support of the majority, the 191
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