Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

Finished reading this brilliantly written book by Mahmood Mamdani this week. The book provides an in-depth analysis of how militant Islam has come to haunt the USA who was itself responsible for creating it. Ronald Reagan learnt his lessons well after the Vietnam episode and tried to minimize American personnel casualities in its exercise to "rollback" Soviet Union. Its idea seemed brilliant in 1980s - use militant Islam against Soviet Communism. CIA limited its role to providing logistics and 'training of the trainer' kind of programmes and outsourced everything else to ISI. Saudi Arabia, being increasingly seen in the Muslim world as an US ally who had betrayed the just cause of its fellow-Muslims in Palestine, readily pitched in to redeem its position through Afghanistan. Pakistani and Arabian charitable organizations were used to channel CIA funds for Afghan 'Jihad'. Another major source of funding was drug trade. Opium began to be cultivated on large scale as most Afghan commanders doubled up as drug lords. ISI ran several heroin processing laboratories in Pakistan for processing these. The same trucks that would carry CIA-provided weapons to Afghanistan would return full of opium grown there. CIA, not unaware, would justify it as source to fund the war for 'right' cause. ISI on its part channeled most of the 'war' fund to these hand-picked drug lords and, as Mamdani puts it, some of the bloodiest battles in Afghan war was fought between these drug lords, rather than the Soviets. Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the “moral equivalents” of America’s Founding Fathers. The era of proxy wars has come to an end with the invasion of Iraq. And there, as in Vietnam, America will need to recognize that it is not fighting terrorism but nationalism, a battle that cannot be won by occupation.

Read one more book in the meantime - A Call to Honour : In Service of Emergent India by Jaswant Singh. Decent reading but just one of the books you read for the sake of it but has nothing new to offer.