Violent Influence of Afghan War Vets
Nov. 3 -- Many were secretly trained and armed by the Central Intelligence Agency, to help them in their successful decade-long “holy war” to drive the Soviet military out of Afghanistan.
Now, many Muslim veterans of that conflict, also known as the mujahedeen, are suspected by the U.S. government to be at the center of a global effort to engage in terrorism and other forms of violence against the United States and other countries around the world.
Since Soviet forces left Afghanistan in defeat in 1989, the mujahedeen and their radical Islamic followers and associated groups are suspected of terrorist activity in more than 30 countries across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans, Europe, and North America.
They’ve fueled insurgencies and civil wars in global hotspots like Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya and Tajikistan and have aided violent political groups across the Middle East and North Africa, and have set up training camps for militants in at least seven countries.
The most notorious Afghan war veteran, Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, who heads an organization believed to include many Afghan war vets, is suspected of funding and orchestrating a good deal of that activity, according to FBI indictments against him.
The FBI suspects bin Laden is connected to, and in some cases responsible for masterminding, nearly every major foreign terrorist attack against the United States since 1990, which together have claimed well over 200 American lives.
The list includes: the attempted bombing of U.S. soldiers passing through Yemen in 1992; plots to assassinate President Clinton in the Philippines in 1994 and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1995; the 1995 and 1996 bombings aimed at U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia; and the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
It also includes, most recently, the Oct. 12 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen’s port of Aden, which killed 17 sailors, injured many more and severely damaged the ship. The president of Yemen has said a number of Arab veterans of the Afghan war have been detained by Yemeni authorities in connection with the suspected terrorist act.
Motivations
There are many explanations for this vast pattern of violence.
It’s been attributed to resentment against the United States over abandonment after the Afghan-Soviet war, to a simple need for channeling the violent skills and experience obtained during the war, to a fanatical anti-Western and anti-Israeli sentiment, and to an extremist Islamic ideology that advocates ridding Westerners from lands containing Muslim holy places.
It’s also been attributed to a still-unfilled power vacuum in Afghanistan after the destructive war, and to unstable Pakistan, enabling militant groups to establish and fund worldwide networks of extremist cells and to set up training camps designed to create new generations of combatants to fight inside and outside Afghanistan.
