Jihad

Jihad

This is a book about the blowback from the Afghan "jihad" against the USSR. The United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan, China, France, Britain and others had helped the "Afghanis" (Arabs, Afghans, and other Muslim "holy warriors") to fight their battle against the Soviets and communism. Cooley goes into some of the unnerving specifics of how these countries and some of their private citizens and corporations helped in this jihad. Cooley presents a fairly good case that the support of the Islamists against leftists and communists in the Arab world ended up creating possibly an even greater threat to democracy and stability in the region. His histories of the development of militant Islamists in Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are the most vivid. Anwar Sadat, for example, turned to the Islamists and ended up losing his life to one of the very groups he hoped would counter the Nasserists and other leftists.

Cooley claims that the United States has put itself in harm's way by supporting the Afghanis and others in the Cold War battle against communism/socialism. Many of these Afghanis have come back to haunt the United States, most notably Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and Osama bin Laden. The Saudi government also had given huge sums of money for the Afghan jihad, only to see some of the people they supported turn on them, especially bin Laden. Cooley sees the brief American "love affair" with Islamism to be a "marriage of convenience."

Hoping to weaken the USSR by proxy in Afghanistan, the United States helped to create, according to Cooley, "a monster of Islamic extremism, the Taliban movement." The Afghan jihad also helped other "monsters," according to Cooley, including a strengthened Gamaa Islam...

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...rces. Some of the most controversial statements in the book have virtually no backup. Policy makers need verification to make proper decisions. Scholars need the same in order to write solid works.

Nevertheless, scholars will have some difficulty with this book. The evidence he shows for some of his arguments might not be supportable in a court of law if some of his cases against certain organizations went to trial. He may also have difficulty in a high-level academic conference if some of his accusations were up for debate. If he has hard evidence and reliable sources, why did he not present them in detail? Then again, given the nature of the issues, such hard evidence may not surface for years. On the positive side, the book is full of war stories from the field. Mr. Cooley's rich experience in the Middle East and Central Asia gives credibility to his arguments.