When U.S. Aided Insurgents, Did It Breed Future Terrorists?

In the varied explanations for the 9/11 attacks and the
rise in terrorism, two themes keep recurring. One is
that Islamic culture itself is to blame, leading to a
clash of civilizations, or, as more nuanced versions
have it, a struggle between secular-minded and
fundamentalist Muslims that has resulted in extremist
violence against the West. The second is that terrorism
is a feature of the post-cold-war landscape, belonging
to an era in which international relations are no
longer defined by the titanic confrontation between two
superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.

But in the eyes of Mahmood Mamdani, a Uganda-born
political scientist and cultural anthropologist at
Columbia University, both those assumptions are wrong.
Not only does he argue that terrorism does not
necessarily have anything to do with Islamic culture;
he also insists that the spread of terror as a tactic
is largely an outgrowth of American cold war foreign
policy. After Vietnam, he argues, the American
government shifted from a strategy of direct
intervention in the fight against global Communism to
one of supporting new forms of low-level insurgency by
private armed groups.

"In practice," Mr. Mamdani has written, "it translated
into a United States decision to harness, or even to
cultivate, terrorism in the struggle against regimes it
considered pro-Soviet." The real culprit of 9/11, in
other words, is not Islam but rather non-state violence
in general, during the final stages of the stand-off
with the Soviet Union. Using third and fourth parties,
the C.I.A. supported terrorist and proto-terrorist
movements in Indochina, Latin America, Africa and, of
course, Afghanistan, he argues in his new book, "Good
Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots
of Terror" (Pantheon).

"The real damage the C.I.A. did was not the providing
of arms and money," he writes, " but the privatization
of information about how to produce and spread violence
– the formation of private militias - capable of
creating terror." The best-known C.I.A.-trained
terrorist, he notes dryly, is Osama bin Laden.

Other recent accounts have examined the ways in which
American support for the mujahedeen in the 1980’s
helped pave the way for Islamic terrorism in the 90’s.
But Mr. Mamdani posits a new - and far more
controversial - thesis by connecting the violent strain
of Islam to a broader American strategy.

"Mahmood’s argument is that terrorism is a defining
characteristic of the last phase of the cold war," said
Robert Meister, a political scientist at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, who has followed Mr.
Mamdani’s work for three decades. He added, "It was a
characteristic that took on, especially in Africa, a
logic of its own, a logic that eventually broke free of
the geopolitics that started it."

In a telephone interview from Kampala, Uganda, where he
has a second home, Mr. Mamdani explained, "What I have
in mind is the policy of proxy war." As his book
recounts, the African continent became a major front in
the cold war after the rapid decolonization of the
1960’s and 70’s gave rise to a number of nationalist
movements influenced by Marxist-Leninist principles.

For the United States, caught in the wave of antiwar
feeling set off by Vietnam, the only way to roll back
this process was to give indirect support to violent
new right-wing groups. Mr. Mamdani asserts, for
example, that the United States policy of constructive
engagement with apartheid in South Africa helped
sustain two proto-terrorist organizations - Unita, the
National Union for the Total Independence of Angola,
and Renamo, the Mozambican National Resistance - that
were armed and trained by the South African Defense
Force. Renamo became what Mr. Mamdani calls Africa’s
"first genuine terrorist movement," a privatized outfit
that unleashed random violence against civilians
without any serious pretension to national power.

In the 1980’s, Mr. Mamdani argues, the American use of
proxy forces became increasingly overt. "What had begun
as a very pragmatic policy under Kissinger was
ideologized by the Reagan administration in highly
religious terms, as a fight to the finish against the
Evil Empire,' " Mr. Mamdani said. Drawing on the same strategy used in Africa, the United States supported the Contras in Nicaragua and then created, on a grand scale, a pan-Islamic front to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Whereas other Islamic movements, like the Iranian revolution, had clear nationalist aims, the Afghan jihad, Mr. Mamdani suggests, was created by the United States as a privatized and ideologically stateless resistance force. A result, he writes, was "the formation of an international cadre of uprooted individuals who broke ties with family and country of origin to join clandestine networks with a clearly defined enemy." According to Mr. Mamdani, the strategy of proxy warfare continued even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the United States looked for new ways to sponsor low-intensity conflicts against militantly nationalist regimes. In a final section on the current conflict in Iraq, the book suggests that it, much more than the end of the cold war in 1989, closed the "era of proxy warfare" in American foreign policy. Scholars familiar with the book say that Mr. Mamdani's account of the late cold war, and its emphasis on Africa in particular, is likely to be disdained by specialists on Islam, some of whom are criticized by name in the opening chapter. "The book is most original in the skewer it puts through what Mamdani calls theculture talk’ that has
substituted for serious explanations of political
Islam," said Timothy Mitchell, a political scientist at
New York University. "Scholar-pundits like Bernard
Lewis and Fouad Ajami tell us that the culture of
Muslims or Arabs cannot cope with modernity. Mamdani
shows us that the origins of political Islam are
themselves modern, and, in fact, largely secular."

But John L. Esposito, a Georgetown University expert on
political Islam, warns that an attempt to explain
Islamic terrorism through international politics alone
risks the same flaw as the cultural approach. "To say
it’s simply politics, without taking into account
religion, misses the causes behind a lot of these
conflicts, just as the reverse misses them," he said.
"It’s religion and politics together."

Mr. Mamdani’s unusual perspective is partly a result of
his own experience in Africa. A third-generation East
African of Indian descent, Mr. Mamdani, 57, grew up in
the final years of colonial Uganda.

"Idi Amin was my first experience of terror, and I
understood how a demagogue could ride a wave of popular
resentment," Mr. Mamdani said, recalling how he and
other Asians were expelled in 1972.

After completing a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1974, he took a
faculty position at the University of Dar es Salaam in
Tanzania, at the time a hotbed of radical African
politics. Among his colleagues were the future Ugandan
president Yoweri Museveni, as well as Laurent Kabila,
the future president of Congo, and Ernest Wamba dia
Wamba, leader of one of the revolutionary factions
against Kabila.

Mr. Mamdani returned to Uganda during the civil war
that ousted Amin and took a deanship at the national
university in Kampala, where he became a leading expert
on agrarian administration and its relation to
post-colonial unrest. Often outspoken against the
Ugandan government, he was exiled a second time in
1985, during another civil war. In the late 1980’s, he
led a Ugandan commission on local government; later he
taught at the University of Cape Town in South Africa
during the tumultuous early years after apartheid.

His previous book, "When Victims Become Killers:
Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda,"
sought to overturn the view that those atrocities had
deep tribal roots. Much of the Hutu-Tutsi ethnic
rivalry, he argued, could be traced to the colonial
period. (The Belgians had introduced and enforced Hutu
and Tutsi racial identities in a segregated social
system.)

Mr. Mamdani, who now directs Columbia’s Institute for
African Studies, lives in New York and Kampala with his
wife, the Indian filmmaker Mira Nair, and their son.

To understand political Islam, Mr. Mamdani says
Africa’s experience is instructive. "Africa is seen as
exceptional, as not even part of the rest of the
world," he said. "But on the contrary, it’s an
illuminating vantage point."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/arts/10MAMD.html