Washington’s ‘Good Terrorists, Bad Terrorists’
Policy in Middle East
By
Nauman Sadiq
May 02,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Karl Marx famously said that history
repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as
farce. The only difference between the Afghan
jihad back in the ‘80s that spawned Islamic
jihadists like the Taliban and al Qaeda for the
first time in history and the Libyan and Syrian
civil wars, 2011-onward, is that the Afghan
jihad was an overt jihad: back then, the Western
political establishments and their mouthpiece,
the mainstream media, used to openly brag that
the CIA provides all those AK-47s, RPGs and
stingers to Pakistan’s intelligence agencies,
which then distributes those deadly weapons
among Afghan “freedom fighters” to combat the
Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
After the 9/11 tragedy, however, the Western
political establishments and corporate media
have become a lot more circumspect, therefore
this time around, they have waged covert jihads
against the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi regime in
Libya and the anti-Zionist Assad regime in
Syria, in which Islamic jihadists (aka
terrorists) have been sold as “moderate rebels”
with secular and nationalist ambitions to the
Western audience.
Since the regime change objective in those
hapless countries went against the mainstream
narrative of ostensibly fighting a war against
terrorism, therefore the Western political
establishments and the corporate media are now
trying to muddle the reality by offering
color-coded schemes to identify myriads of
militant and terrorist outfits that are
operating in Syria: such as the red militants of
the Islamic State, which the Western powers want
to eliminate; the yellow Islamic jihadists, like
Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, with whom the
Western powers can collaborate under desperate
circumstances; and the green militants of the
Free Syria Army (FSA) and a few other
inconsequential outfits, which together comprise
the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition.
If we were to draw parallels between the
Soviet-Afghan jihad of the ‘80s and the Syrian
civil war of today, the Western powers used the
training camps located in the Af-Pak border
regions to train and arm Afghan Mujahideen
against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan with
the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
Similarly, the training camps located in the
border regions of Turkey and Jordan are being
used to provide training and weapons to Syrian
militants to battle the Syrian regime with the
collaboration of Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi
intelligence agencies.
During the Afghan jihad, it is a known
historical fact that the bulk of so-called
“freedom fighters” was comprised of Pashtun
Islamic jihadists, such as the factions of
Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul
Rab Rasul Sayyaf and scores of others, some of
which later coalesced together to form the
Taliban Movement.
Similarly, in Syria, the majority of so-called
“moderate rebels” is comprised of Islamic
jihadists, such as Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar
al-Sham, al-Tawhid Brigade, al-Nusra Front, the
Islamic State and myriads of other militant
groups, including a small portion of defected
Syrian soldiers who go by the name of Free Syria
Army (FSA).
Moreover, apart from Pashtun Islamic jihadists,
various factions of the Northern Alliance of
Tajiks and Uzbeks constituted the relatively
“moderate” segment of the Afghan rebellion,
though those “moderate” warlords, like Ahmad
Shah Massoud and Abul Rashid Dostum, were more
ethnic and tribal in character than secular or
nationalist, as such.
Similarly, the Kurds of the so-called Syrian
Democratic Forces can be compared with the
Northern Alliance of Afghanistan. The socialist
PYD/YPG Kurds of Syria, however, were allied
with the Baathist regime against the Sunni Arab
jihadists for the first three years of the
Syrian civil war, i.e. from August 2011 to
August 2014.
At the behest of American stooge in Iraqi
Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, the Syrian Kurds
have switched sides in the last couple of years
after the United States policy reversal and
declaration of war against one faction of the
Syrian opposition, the Islamic State, when the
latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and
overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in June 2014.
Regarding the Western powers’ modus operandi of
waging proxy wars in the Middle East, since the
times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the
eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of
the master strategists at NATO to raise money
from the oil-rich emirates of Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, UAE and Kuwait; then buy billions of
dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms’ markets
of the Eastern Europe; and then provide those
weapons and guerilla warfare training to the
disaffected population of the victim country by
using the intelligence agencies of the latter’s
regional adversaries. Whether it’s Afghanistan,
Chechnya, Libya or Syria, the same playbook has
been executed to the letter.
More to the point, raising funds for proxy wars
from the Gulf Arab States allows the Western
executives the freedom to evade congressional
scrutiny; and the benefit of buying weapons from
the unregulated arms’ markets of the Eastern
Europe is that such weapons cannot be traced
back to the Western capitals; and using jihadist
proxies to achieve strategic objectives has the
advantage of taking the plea of “plausible
deniability” if the strategy backfires, which it
often does. Remember that al-Qaeda and Taliban
were the by-products of the Soviet-Afghan jihad,
and the Islamic State and its global network of
terrorists is the blowback of the proxy war in
Syria.
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On the
subject of the supposed “powerlessness” of the
US in the global affairs, the Western think
tanks and the corporate media’s spin-doctors
generally claim that Pakistan deceived the US in
Afghanistan by not “doing more” to rein in the
Taliban; Turkey hoodwinked the US in Syria by
using the war against Islamic State as a pretext
for cracking down on Kurds; Saudi Arabia and UAE
betrayed the US in Yemen by mounting airstrikes
against the Houthis and Saleh’s loyalists; and
once again Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt went
against the ostensible policy of the US in Libya
by destabilizing the Tripoli-based government,
even though the renegade general in eastern
Libya, Khalifa Haftar, is an American stooge who
had lived for two decades in the US right next
to the CIA’s headquarter in Langley, Virginia.
If the US policymakers are so naïve then how
come they still control the global political and
economic order? This perennially whining
attitude of the Western corporate media that
such and such regional actors betrayed them
otherwise they were on the top of their game is
actually a clever stratagem that has been
deliberately designed by the spin-doctors to
cast the Western powers in a positive light and
to vilify the adversaries, even if the latter
are their tactical allies in some of the
regional conflicts.
Fighting wars through proxies allows the
international power brokers the luxury of taking
the plea of “plausible deniability” in their
defense and at the same time they can shift all
the blame for wrongdoing on the minor regional
players. The Western powers’ culpability lies in
the fact that because of them a system of
international justice based on sound principles
of morality and justice cannot be constructed in
which the violators can be punished for their
wrongdoing and the victims of injustice, tyranny
and violence can be protected.
Leaving the funding, training and arming aspects
of insurgencies aside, but especially pertaining
to conferring international legitimacy to an
armed insurgency, like the Afghan so-called
“freedom struggle” of the Cold War, or the
supposedly “moderate and democratic” Libyan and
Syrian insurgencies of today, it is simply
beyond the power of minor regional players and
their nascent media, which has a geographically
and linguistically limited audience, to cast
such heavily armed and brutal insurrections in a
positive light in order to internationally
legitimize them; only the Western mainstream
media that has a global audience and which
serves as the mouthpiece of the Western
political establishments has perfected this game
of legitimizing the absurd and selling the
Satans as saviors.
About the author: Nauman Sadiq is an
Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and
geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of
Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism
and Petroimperialism.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
