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Evolution of Islamic Terrorism

It would seem expedient, before analysing the role of Islamic terrorism in the current developments in the Caucasus, to look at the roots of this phenomenon and its development into a factor of global politics.

Dr. Vladimir Kuznechevsky (History) believes (Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 24/09/99, "In Whose Shadow Do the Terrorists Hide?"), the analysis of the past twenty years shows that the acts of terror in the USA, Africa and Russia are only a cover for much deeper developments.

He provides a chronicle of the most barbarous crimes of terrorists in the past few years.

1993. The explosion in the New York World Trade Centre: six dead, over 1,000 wounded. The Armed Islamic Group is blamed. 

1995. The armed Islamic group from Algiers terrorised Paris for three months, staging explosions in the underground, in Place de l'Etoile, and attempting to blow up a Paris-Lyons train. The toll included ten dead and over 100 wounded.

Spring 1995. The explosion in Oklahoma, USA, killed over 150 and wounded hundreds. The explosion was carried out by an American, but modus operandi - a car crammed with explosives and parked at a building - was clearly that of Palestinian Islamic extremists.

1997. A group of Islamic extremists in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous province of China, where some residents profess Islam, demanded the creation of the "Independent Eastern Turkestan" and the secession of  "the independent Islamic state" from China, and staged a series of explosions in Urumqi and blew up a bus bomb in Beijing.

1998. The explosions at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Africa. The MO was the same as in Israel: cars filled with explosives parked at the embassies. The explosions claimed the lives of over 200. The US FBI put the responsibility for the explosions on Usama bin Laden, who had proclaimed a jihad (holy war) against the USA.

February 1999. The Uzbek extremists who call themselves Islamists make an attempt on the life of Uzbek president Islam Karimov by staging a series of car explosions. Innocent civilians were killed.

July-August 1999. Islamic extremists invade Daghestan from Chechnya.

August 1999. Islamic extremists occupy a Kyrgyz region bordering on Tajikistan shortly before the Shanghai Five summit in Bishkek.

September 1999. Terrorist acts in Russia (Buinaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk), with hundreds killed and wounded. The first investigation results prove their connection with Chechnya and those who call themselves "Islamic fighters", namely Shamil Basayev and Khattab. The shadow of Usama bin Laden is clearly seen behind these terrorist acts.

The countries and continents are different, but the MO is the same. It appears that the above events are all links in the same chain, that 1999 is the crowning year, the peak of a certain trend, and that standing behind these events is an organised force. But it is not terror; it is something bigger and more sinister.

Latin word "terror" means "fright", but it also means domination through intimidation. Terror is not staged for intimidation. It has a different objective, set by certain forces. Which ones?

The Americans suggest the most primitive explanation: The non-white race is multiplying quicker than the White race and is fighting to win more living space for itself. In the early 1960s, Zbigniew Bzhezinski came to the Soviet Union and said in the Institute of World Economics and International Relations of the Soviet Academy of Sciences that the Soviet Union should break up with China and team up with the USA instead, because a time would soon come when they would have to join forces in the struggle against non-white nations. Next came the time of research projects on the aggressive essence of Islam and its adepts.

In 1969, most Islamic states and the Palestine Liberation Organisation formed the Islamic Congress organisation, later renamed the Islamic Conference organisation (ICO). It approved a charter that stressed that the organisation was designed to strengthen "Moslem solidarity" and cooperation between the member states and the PLO. Its headquarters was established in Jidda, Saudi Arabia.

That organisation was established at the initiative and request of the PLO, which was forged in 1964 as the union of most organisations of Palestinian resistance to Israel and public Palestine organisations. That date was the beginning of a chain of connected events, which resulted in the creation of an intellectual core within the Islamic Conference, consisting of the formal and informal leaders of Moslem countries. The spiritual leaders of that centre managed, as it appears now, to formulate the task and objective of organised resistance of the pro-Islamic forces to Western civilisation.

They teamed up against Western civilisation then, as the Soviet Union was not among their enemies since at that time it stood up against the West and provided weapons to the Arab states.

The West did not immediately understand that a new powerful force had appeared in the world, if only on the ideological plane. The West was too busy fighting communism in the person of the socialist camp to notice the appearance of a new dangerous enemy under its very nose. Later it saw the first glimmers of truth. Respected Western magazines wrote with wonder in July 1977 about things which more far-seeing analysts predicted a few years back: Modern history began in 1970, when the trans-Arab oil pipe, which daily pumped 500,000 tonnes of oil from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean, leaked on a deserted African shore. It was the day when the wheel of history started rolling by the road that no sci-fi writer could imagine in his wildest dreams.

The leak greatly raised the importance of Libyan oil. The oil magnates from the USA, Britain, France and the Netherlands offered the young and ambitious Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who became Libya's head a year before, to dramatically raise oil deliveries to the West. In reply, Qaddafi reduced oil production, raised oil prices and nationalised the property of oil companies in Libya. The West was shocked when the other OPEC countries did not bow to the ultimatum of the Western trans-national oil corporations but followed the Libyan example and demanded that the Western oil magnates begin talks. A crucial decision was reached in Teheran in February 1971, which sealed the Western oil capitulation.

The Moslem world for the first time became aware of its strength, and this was a lasting awareness. Certain people started formalising this awareness into structures. The fruit of that work was the appearance of an unofficial, but very influential, "Moslem" centre within the Islamic Conference, which started fighting for its place in the sun.

Ayatollah Khomeini returned from Paris to Iran in January 1979 carried out an Islamic revolution there with the support of the Islamic Conference and proclaimed the USA to be the main enemy of humankind.

Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Acting on the US initiative and with the support of the overwhelming majority of Moslem states, the UN General Assembly denounced the invasion and thus gave the green light to the legal involvement of mujaheddin in the Afghan war. In fact, this resulted in the creation of armed groups of the above centre, subordinate to and financed by it. Mujaheddin fighters were recruited throughout the world, trained and dispatched to Afghanistan.

The collective report, "The Fourth Rome or the Second Horde?" read at the session of the Meaningful Unity political club (authored by Sergei Kurginyan, Maria Mamikonyan and Maria Podkopayeva and published in the newspaper Zavtra on 20/01/98) points to the 1979 developments in Iran, known as "the Islamic revolution of Khomeini". The authors believe that nobody could (or wanted to) precisely decode the para-political game that resulted in this outcome in Iran" in the past twenty years. They presume that there was an important (and possibly crucial) element of a top-class para-political game in the Iranian revolution.

As we know, Khomeini came from Paris. His sufficiently refined fundamentalist reflections came into a far from skin-deep contact with other traditionalist quests. By that time, the notion of "the third way," views of "the conservative revolution" and the "two enemies" formula (the USA and the Soviet Union) developed in Europe in its entirety, including the basic modification of "the criminal collusion of the Yalta predators". The movement of "the new Right" used these notions as a weapon.

It was not by chance that the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition met in Teheran in 1943 (there can be no coincidence in the choice of the meeting place for Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill). Britain, the USA, Russia and Germany (as well as France, although to a lesser degree) waged a sanguinary struggle for Iran. 

In 1921, Britain brought the Pahlavi dynasty to power, which subsequently played a major role in the geopolitical collusions of the 20th century. In this way, Britain made up for its defeat in Azerbaijan, which was traditionally important to it, and cut off "the French knot of influence," which always depended on the link between Armenia and Iran.

Germany suffered, saturating the Middle and the Near East, from Egypt and Sudan to Turkey, Iran and Iraq, with its agents. It never, under any circumstances, lost sight of the coveted goal of creating the Berlin-Baghdad (or Berlin-Ankara) axis. Germany has not changed from the Kaiser, Weimar, Nazis and even now when it is a democratic country. This means that it will always play in the above priority spheres, using available possibilities. These are "invariant" spheres.

The game has always been complicated by Germany's synchronous interest for Turkey and Iran, these antagonists of Asia Minor. And Germany could only bring these fundamental opponents together by bridging their hostility with a common, less deep-going and possibly even extraneous ideological card. There was only one major card it could use in the second half of the 20th century - Islamic fundamentalism.

The Russian interest in the region, be it tsarist or communist Russia, has always been the same, too - to reach out to the warm seas and India through Iran. And it does not matter who was doing this at any given historical stage, Trotsky or Ataman Platov. It was a certain invariant, although it clashed with the unchanging British interest of protecting India from Russian or any other influence, no matter what happened in Britain or what millennium was rising in the yard.

The Russians outsmarted Britain after the Second World War by bringing to power the pro-Soviet Mussadeq government in Iran. But they failed to reap the geopolitical fruit of that campaign. In 1953, the British (using the USA, which had gathered a wealth of geopolitical experience by that time) reinstated the Pahlavi dynasty. The shah and his family attempted to modernise Iran.

It would be only partially correct to say that their modernisation drive accumulated too much fundamentalist fuel, which eventually blew up. They did, but the "bomb" blew up only because the strategy of gaining modernisation as a means of attracting new allies to the West was contested by and replaced with another strategy in the second half of the 1970s. It was based on a new attitude to global problems (the Rome Club started talking about growth ceilings and the inadmissibility of enlarging the group of modernised countries) and on the awareness of the need to establish the collaboration of the NATO states, fighting against the Soviet Union, with contrasting, non-democratic and even (see the novelty!) un-modernised states.

It was a combination of these two circumstances that constituted the outside framework of the Iranian process. The rest is nothing but suppositions. It is possible that the shah worked too hard to become friendly with Israel, disregarding the specific nuances of the British attitude to the problem. Or the shah wanted too much to industrialise his country, even if this were achieved with the assistance of Moscow ("if the others continue to so stubbornly ignore Iran's interests"). It appears that the development of a non-democratic" component of the global system of the future "golden billion" was completed by that time.

It was completed with the assistance of the right (I wouldn't like to say radical right) elites of the USA, Germany, Britain and France. But this did not mean that the architects of that new system did not quarrel. (The CIA still suspects the German and French special services of involvement in "the Khomeini revolution".) It was probably at that time that two concepts, "oil for food" and "drugs for weapons," merged to produce a novel world outlook and economic fuel. And lastly, it was probably the time of the unification of those groups of the Western elite, which did not shy away from the "reactionary," rightist elements in their struggle against the Soviet Union.

The shah was making one mistake after another - with the help of his Western advisers. And the revolution happened. It was the first of the large revolutions, which could be called truly conservative. This is how Iran saw it, and this is how the Soviet orthodox politicians, who equated Islamic fundamentalism with religious obscurantism, regarded it.

But other forces in the Soviet Union saw the changes in Iran as a part of a two-handed big game dangerous to the Soviet Union. It was a game where the "second" hand could split the camp of the enemies of the USA and Western expansion as a whole and form a bloc of "geopolitical fighters," acting in the interests of the anti-Russian and anti-Soviet forces of the West and marching under the new/old mobilisation banners. It could rally fighters programmed to struggle against the Soviet Union, unsuited but selfless fighters prepared to spill blood (their own and of other people) in the quantities, which the American sybarites were not prepared to sacrifice.

The timid attempts, made in the spirit of "scientific atheism", to establish agreement with these "fighters" on an anti-American basis fell through very quickly. "Gumhuriya Islami" wrote on 9 September 1979: "We see only one enemy from our barricades - Godlessness (...) in the form of the American military, the interests of the West European monopolies, Zionism, and communism in that form that rules the destitute".

Zionism and communism were mentioned side by side in that article for the first time since the statements made by Russian monarchists after the 1917 revolution and the subsequent concepts of the ideologists of the Third Reich. The communism that "rules the destitute", meaning the Soviet regime, had been denounced before by Mao, Che Guevara, the Red Brigades, Pol Pot and other experimenters. And all of them were guided by Western intellectuals and the conceptual departments of the Western special services.

It was a blow at the Soviet Union delivered from a direction that was first shown by China after its withdrawal from the socialist camp. It was the direction in which Maoism, Trotskyism and other "-isms" playing in the "red field" were given a strong intellectual push by those figures who were simultaneously developing a weapon of the new rightist philosophy and ideology, designed to become an instrument for winning the Western world, saturated with "harmful liberalism", from the inside.

Iranian fundamentalism bore a mark of the Western intellectual quest, which went as far as mutual flirting between the extreme Islamism and the withering West, which needed renewal (French, German and British intellectuals frantically accepted Islam in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and it was a part of the game).

English writer and traveller Freya Stark wrote a book in 1945, "East Is West" (of fundamental significance for the new working paradigm of the Western secret services), in which she spoke up against Kipling's ideas. She suggested that Islam should be regarded as a religion that can serve as the bastion in the struggle against the atheistic communist ideology. This is how one more ancient "invariant" surfaced in the "Eastern policy" of the aggregate West immediately after the "common victory" over Nazi Germany and long before Churchill's speech in Fulton.

In March 1980, Khomeini suggested a 13-Point Programme. One of the provisions reads: "Hold a cleansing campaign designed to eradicate the Western and communist influence in universities". Khomeini gave a new meaning to Islamic fundamentalism. He spoke about two demons, the Soviet Union and the USA (remember "the two Yalta predators"?), and this removed the last brakes from the scepticism of anti-Western Moslems. The Soviet Union is a demon, too! And a jihad (holy war) against it must be waged!

The leftist, basic, anti-American fundamentalist Islam and the rightist, pro-American Islam found a point of contact. At the turn of the 1970s, the rightist Islamists in Pakistan, Indonesia and Afghanistan demanded a jihad against socialism. But that campaign concerned only the right, who were "suppressing" their left-thinking brethren-in-faith. But Khomeini's anti-Americanism allowed the masses to proclaim an anti-Soviet jihad in a different, and more effective, way. Compounded with anti-Iraq, anti-Saudi and anti-Israeli elements, it provided ways to resolve other problems, too.

So, the prerequisites for channelling the renewed anti-Soviet Islam into the requisite direction developed at the beginning of the fatal year 1979. At the end of it, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, where it focused onto itself the vast arsenal of Islamic hatred, which had far-reaching geopolitical consequences. (Bzhezinski is rumoured to say about the movement of Russian troops into Afghanistan: The Russians will bathe in blood now!)

The authors of the report stress that even if choosing the ideology of confrontation with the "third force" (and especially in this case), we should have searched for new, more reliable forms of equitable collaboration with Islam on national territory. Because only suicidals could proclaim a war on Islam beyond the national borders (and this is what the invasion of Afghanistan amounted to), despite the vast number of Moslems at home and without garnering their support for what we called "the unity of the Soviet people".

When choosing the ideology of confrontation with the "third force", we should have searched for Islamic allies abroad in order to "divide" Islam and provide convincing proof of the communist spirituality and its compatibility with Islamic spirituality (at least by putting the existing left Islam against the rightist one). Without this, the "preventive" deployment of troops in Afghanistan lost even the small share of questionable logic that could be found in the attempt to render harmless the "officer of Islam" who is resolved to destroy you.

This is why strategically speaking Russia did not need then, and does not need now, to take fitful local preventive actions. Instead, it should choose its way. It should accept the way suggested by those politicians who see the futility of Leopold the cat's principle. It should accept the clear-cut and final, although painful, way. This must be a systematic and complete choice. And possibly an irremediable choice. A choice made by the elite that is closely linked with the people.

(Following the tragic events in Daghestan, Moscow and Volgodonsk in 1999, the question "What should be done about Chechnya?" changed into "What should be done about Russia to help it survive as an integral state?")

Who should do this? The country's top politician, who relies on the party of power and enjoys the support of both this party and the people, say the authors of the report. He must do this responsibly, delicately, but definitely, at the level of major national and international projects. If necessary, with elements of "preventive" and successful use of force, but if possible - even if slightly possible - without them (which would be most frequently possible, given the wisdom and will of the politician and the coordinated actions of the political elite). This was said and stated nearly two years ago.

Dr. Aleksandr Ignatenko (Philosophy), a prominent researcher of Islam, says that in 1979-1989 virtually all extremists from Islam-proliferating countries were trained during the Afghan war. Those of them who survived were subsequently dispatched to Bosnia, Chechnya and Russia (Daghestan). Military specialists agree that the mujaheddin fighters, both commanders and ordinary fighters, become better organised and trained with every passing year. In fact, they now have army units with corresponding weapons and training.

By the way, the West has not yet seen the true meaning of this phenomenon on the international scene. The USA has only recently denounced bin Laden as the number one terrorist of the world, but its secret services closed their eyes to his activities during the Afghan war. It is slowly that one comes to see the light. Washington remained silent for a whole week during the terrorist invasion of Daghestan. Only when the CIA came to the conclusion that bin Laden stood behind Basayev and Khattab did the State Department speak up against the aggression and supported Moscow's actions to combat the terrorists. But the Western press is still restrained, if not sympathetic about the mujaheddin. Even such respected newspapers as The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and Le Figaro do not write about "bandits" or "extremists," but about "rebels".

So, who is knocking on the door of Western civilisation under the green banner of Islam? There is a vast number of dynamically aggressive elements in the world, above all on the territories that are regarded as the outskirts of the dominant civilisation system. As fate would have it, these are the countries professing Islam. They also have the bulk of the world's poor, who serve as the social basis for the mujaheddin.

History shows that the people who destroy the unity of a social organisation appear en masse in certain periods of history, acting aggressively with regard to the whole of society and forming packs. The only question has always been who would tame this destructive force and channel it in the direction necessary for this dominant force. This has always lasted only until the actions of the destroyers came into contradiction with the goals of those who used them. When that moment came, the leaders always appealed to what has always been stronger than the destroyers - public opinion and the instruments of the state, then driving the destroyers to the place that they initially held in society, which is the bottom of the social ladder, the social basement.

And this is exactly what is happening to the extremists who have found refuge in Islam. They are still going strong. By launching the disunited struggle against Israel in the Middle East, they carried it over to the USA. The trouble is not that they have become stronger organisationally. As long as the world was a bipolar structure, the "fighters of Islam" did not have the freedom of action, as the CIA and the KGB effectively controlled their territories. But the Soviet Union left the world scene. And the geographic territory, which it controlled (Afghanistan, Central Asia and the North Caucasus), proved to be the world's soft spot. Like water that is flowing downstream, so the extremists waving the green banner of Islam went there.

Not of their own free will, of course. The guiding hand can be seen with a naked eye. Well-trained, equipped and armed fighters are concentrating in the North Caucasus, Kyrgyzstan and the adjacent areas of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Judging by the world press, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan form the geographic centre of the Moslem world. And only geographic, writes Vladimir Kuznechevsky. The official state structures of these countries do not take part in the struggle against Western civilisation. Members of the centre cooperate - again, unofficially - in the framework of the Islamic Conference.

It is difficult to say what aggregate funds this centre may have, but according to US, Israeli and West European estimates, the Moslem countries of the Middle East and Asia have accumulated over 10 trillion dollars of surplus capital since May 1970. This money cannot sit idle, it must be used, and it is used, including through the activities of the above centre.

Judging by what scanty information we have, that organisation dramatically differs from the geo-strategists of the Bilderberg Club, which appeared in the 1950s, or the Rome Club, established in 1968, or the Tripartite Commission, into which both developed in 1973. It is not for nothing that those organisations were called "the world governments". They keep their operation secret, but work in a civilised manner. They make press reports, approve resolutions, and openly proclaim their ideas.

The "Moslem centre" is completely different. Speaking through Ayatollah Khomeini and bin Laden, it openly challenged not just the USA, but the whole of the Western civilisation and its basic values. And this challenge is no less threatening than the one, which Hitler announced in the middle of the 20^th century, when Jews and Slavs were proclaimed to be "untermenschen" (subhumans).

The manner in which this new challenge was thrown is impressive. Judging by all appearances, decisions on practical actions against the USA were not formalised in resolutions. But actions are taken, and very harsh actions at that, with a lot of blood spilled. This is not the Western style of relations. The oral word is enough here, and this word is fulfilled much more stringently than the written one.

The wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia not only engaged the vast human resources of the Moslem world, but also provided mind-boggling profits from drug trafficking. Can the Western civilisation reach a compromise with this new political force? Absolutely not. First, the 10 trillion dollars of surplus capital need to act. And when acting, this capital will roll over any owner or a group of such, be it a man, a family, an international organisation or a state. And second, the geo-strategic Moslem centre has been working too long for securing a part of the world to itself. Not that its leaders want absolute domination - although they indoctrinate the rank-and-file mujaheddin in this idea. But this is done only for the propaganda effect. We have had this in history before. Hitler's armies also marched to win the world for the fascists, with "Gott mit uns" (God is with us) written on their belt buckles. It took more than six years, from 1939 to 1945, and 10.3 million German lives for the nation poisoned with fascist ideology to understand that Germans cannot dominate the world.

The current situation is not unlike that period. The jihad must be stopped before it claims millions of human lives. But no one state can do this alone. The paradox of the situation is that the jihad had been initially spearheaded at the West, but Russia has become its zero ground. Like in 1941, the West must understand now that the point at issue in this confrontation is not just Russian, but also Western security.

The more so that the developments are becoming ever more alarming. The FSB told the press recently that following the defeat of the "fighters of Islam" in Daghestan, the leaders of Islamic international extremist organisations held a series of meetings in Pakistan. They discussed the North Caucasus and concluded that the Islamic expansion in the Caucasus is far from over. They decided to grant 30 million dollars for Basayev and Khattab to step up their war against Russia.

Is there a reply to this challenge? Yes. It was formulated by Vincent Cannistraro, a high-ranking CIA veteran, who said in Moscow that the threat of Islamic terrorism could be suppressed only through international cooperation. This is the key to success, he said. It is our common enemy. And it is possible that Russia and the West might pool their efforts towards this end.

The task of combating terrorism was discussed in detail at the September 1999 meeting of Russian Premier Vladimir Putin and the US President in New Zealand. Immediately afterwards, Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright made resolute statements in support of Russia. Next a group of counter-terrorism specialists from the FBI came to Moscow. The European Parliament, the UN, the Pentagon and the CIA proclaimed their support for Russia in the struggle against religious extremism and terrorism.

But this does not mean that the Western powers (above all the USA) will abandon the struggle for the redivision of the spheres of influence on the post-Soviet space, first and foremost in the Caspian and Central Asian regions, in the near future. As we know, rivalry is not accompanied by stability.