Islamic State is the
Cancer of Modern Capitalism
The brutal ‘Islamic State’
is a symptom of a deepening crisis of
civilisation premised on fossil fuel
addiction, which is undermining Western
hegemony and unravelling state power across
the Muslim world
By Nafeez Ahmed
March 29, 2015
"ICH"
- "MEE"
-
Debate about the origins of the Islamic
State (IS) has largely oscillated between
two extreme perspectives. One blames the
West. IS is nothing more than a predictable
reaction to the occupation of Iraq, yet
another result of Western foreign policy
blowback. The other attributes IS’s
emergence purely to the historic or cultural
barbarism of the Muslim world, whose
backward medieval beliefs and values are a
natural incubator for such violent
extremism.
The biggest elephant in the
room as this banal debate drones on is
material infrastructure. Anyone can have
bad, horrific, disgusting ideas. But they
can only be fantasies unless we find a way
to manifest them materially in the world
around us.
So to understand how the
ideology that animates IS has managed to
garner the material resources to conquer an
area bigger than the United Kingdom, we need
to inspect its material context more
closely.
Follow the money
The foundations for
al-Qaeda’s ideology were born in the 1970s.
Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden‘s
Palestinian mentor, formulated a new theory
justifying continuous, low-intensity war by
dispersed mujahideen cells for a
pan-Islamist state. Azzam’s violent Islamist
doctrines were popularised in the context of
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
As is well-known, the
Afghan mujahideen networks were trained and
financed under the supervision of the CIA,
MI6 and the Pentagon. The Gulf states
provided huge sums of money, while
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
liaised on the ground with the militant
networks being coordinated by Azzam, bin
Laden, and others.
The Reagan administration,
for instance, provided $2 billion to the
Afghan mujahideen, which was matched by
another $2 billion from Saudi Arabia.
In Afghanistan, USAID
invested millions of dollars to supply
schoolchildren with “textbooks filled with
violent images and militant Islamic
teachings”, according to the Washington
Post. Theology justifying violent jihad
was interspersed with “drawings of guns,
bullets, soldiers and mines”. The textbooks
even
extolled the heavenly rewards if
children were to “pluck out the eyes of the
Soviet enemy and cut off his legs”.
The conventional wisdom is
that this disastrous configuration of
Western-Muslim world collaboration in
financing Islamist extremists ended with the
collapse of the Soviet Union. As I said in
Congressional testimony a year after the
release of the 9/11 Commission Report, the
conventional wisdom is
false.
Protection racket
A classified US
intelligence report revealed by journalist
Gerald Posner confirmed that the US was
fully aware of a secret deal struck in April
1991 between Saudi Arabia and bin Laden,
then under house arrest. Under the deal, bin
Laden could leave the kingdom with his
funding and supporters, and continue to
receive financial support from the Saudi
royal family, on one condition: that he
refrain from targeting and destabilising the
Saudi kingdom itself.
Far from being a distant
observer of this covert agreement, the US
and Britain were
active
participants.
Saudi Arabia’s massive oil
supply underpins the health and growth of
the global economy. We could not afford it
to be destabilised. It was pro quid pro: to
protect the kingdom, allow it to fund bin
Laden outside the kingdom.
As British historian Mark
Curtis documents meticulously in his
sensational book, Secret Affairs:
Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam,
the US and UK government continued to
covertly support al-Qaeda-affiliated
networks in Central Asia and the Balkans
after the Cold War, for much the same
reasons as before – countering Russian, and
now Chinese, influence to extend US hegemony
over the global capitalist economy. Saudi
Arabia, the world’s leading oil hub,
remained the conduit for this short-sighted
Anglo-American strategy.
Bosnia
A year after the 1993
World Trade Center (WTC) bombing, Curtis
reports, Osama bin Laden opened an office in
Wembley, London, under the name of the
Advice and Reformation Committee, from which
he coordinated worldwide extremist activity.
Around the same time, the
Pentagon was airlifting thousands of
al-Qaeda mujahideen from Central Asia into
Bosnia, in violation of the UN’s arms
embargo, according to Dutch
intelligence files. They were
accompanied by US special forces. The “Blind
Sheikh”, convicted of the WTC bombing, had
been deeply involved in recruiting and
dispatching al-Qaeda fighters into Bosnia.
Afghanistan
From around 1994, all the
way until 9/11, US military intelligence
along with Britain, Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan, covertly supplied arms and funds
to the al-Qaeda-harbouring Taliban.
In 1997, Amnesty
International complained about “close
political links” between the incumbent
Taliban militia, who had recently conquered
Kabul, and the US. The human rights group
referred to credible “accounts of the
madrasas (religious schools) which the
Taleban attended in Pakistan,” indicating
that “these links may have been established
at the very inception of the Taleban
movement.”
One such account, reported
Amnesty, came from the late Benazir Bhutto -
then Pakistan’s Prime Minister - who
“affirmed that the madrasas had
been set up by Britain, the United States,
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan during the
Jihad, the Islamic resistance against
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan”. Under US
tutelage, Saudi Arabia was still funding
those madrasas.
US government-drafted
textbooks designed to indoctrinate Afghan
children into violent jihad during the Cold
War, now approved by the Taliban, became
part of the Afghan school system’s core
curriculum, and were used extensively in
militant madrasas in Pakistan being funded
by Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani ISI with
US support.
Both the Clinton and Bush
administrations were hoping to use the
Taliban to establish a proxy client regime
in the country similar to its Saudi
benefactor. The vain hope, clearly
ill-conceived, was that a Taliban government
would provide the
stability
necessary to install a Trans-Afghan pipeline
(TAPI) supplying Central Asian gas to South
Asia, while side-lining Russia, China and
Iran.
Those hopes were dashed
three months before 9/11 when the Taliban
rejected US proposals. The TAPI project was
subsequently stalled due to the Taliban’s
intransigent
control of Kandahar and Quetta, but has
been
shepherded along by the Obama
administration and is now being finalised.
Kosovo
NATO continued to sponsor
al-Qaeda-affiliated networks in Kosovo by
the late 1990s, reports Mark Curtis, when US
and British special forces supplied arms and
training to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)
rebels who included mujahideen recruits.
Among them was a rebel cell headed by
Muhammad al-Zawahiri, the brother of bin
Laden’s deputy, Ayman, who now leads
al-Qaeda.
In the same period, Osama
and Ayman coordinated the 1998 US embassy
bombings in Kenya and Tanzania from bin
Laden’s office in London.
There was some good news,
though: NATO’s interventions in the Balkans,
accompanied by the disintegration of
socialist Yugoslavia,
paved the way to integrate the region
into Western Europe, privatise local
markets, and establish new regimes
supportive of the Trans-Balkan pipeline to
transport oil and gas from Central Asia to
the West.
The Middle East
redirection
Even after 9/11 and 7/7, US
and British addiction to cheap fossil fuels
to sustain global capitalist expansion led
us to deepen our alliance with extremists.
Around the middle of the
last decade, Anglo-American military
intelligence began supervising Gulf state
financing, once again led by Saudi Arabia,
to Islamist extremist networks across the
Middle East and Central Asia, to counter
Iranian Shiite influence in the region.
Beneficiaries of this enterprise included
al-Qaeda-affiliated militant and extremist
groups from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon - a
veritable arc of Islamist terror.
Once again, Islamist
militants would be unwittingly fostered as
an agent of US hegemony in the face of
rising geopolitical rivals.
As Seymour Hersh revealed
in the New Yorker in 2007, this
“redirection” of policy was about weakening
not just Iran, but also Syria - where US and
Saudi largess went to support the Syrian
Muslim Brotherhood, among other opposition
groups. Both Iran and Syria, of course, were
closely aligned with Russia and China.
Libya
In 2011, NATO’s military
intervention to topple the Gaddafi regime
followed hot on the heels of extensive
support to Libyan mercenaries who were, in
fact, members of al-Qaeda’s official branch
in Libya. France had been reportedly offered
35 percent
control of Libya’s oil in exchange for
French support to insurgents.
After the intervention,
European, British and American oil giants
were “perfectly poised to take advantage” of
“commercial opportunities”, according to
Professor David Anderson of Oxford
University. Lucrative
deals with NATO members could “release
Western Europe from the stranglehold of
high-pricing Russia producers who currently
dominate their gas supply”.
Secret intelligence
reports showed that NATO-backed rebels
had strong ties to al-Qaeda. The CIA also
used Libya’s Islamists militants to funnel
heavy weapons to rebels in Syria.
A Canadian intelligence
report from 2009 described the rebel
stronghold of eastern Libya as an “epicentre
of Islamist extremism”, from which
“extremist cells” operated in the region -
the same region, according to David Pugliese
in the Ottawa Citizen, that was
being “defended by a Canadian-led NATO
coalition”. Pugliese reported that the
intelligence report confirmed “several
Islamist insurgent groups” were based in
eastern Libya, many of whom were also
“urging followers to fight in Iraq”.
Canadian pilots even joked privately that
they were part of al-Qaeda’s air force,
“since their bombing runs helped to pave the
way for rebels aligned with the terrorist
group”.
According to Pugliese,
Canadian intelligence specialists sent a
prescient
briefing report dated 15 March 2011 to
NATO senior officers just days before the
intervention began. “There is the increasing
possibility that the situation in Libya will
transform into a long-term tribal/civil
war,” they wrote. “This is particularly
probable if opposition forces receive
military assistance from foreign
militaries.”
As we know, the
intervention went ahead regardless.
Syria
For nearly the last
half-decade at least, Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
the UAE, Jordan and Turkey have all provided
extensive financial and military support
primarily to al-Qaeda-linked Islamist
militant networks that spawned today’s
“Islamic State”. This support has been
provided in the context of an accelerating
anti-Assad strategy led by the United
States.
Competition to
dominate potential regional pipeline
routes involving Syria, as well as untapped
fossil fuel
resources in Syria and the eastern
Mediterranean - at the expense of Russia and
China - have played a central role in
motivating this strategy.
Former French foreign
minister Roland Dumas
revealed that in 2009, British Foreign
Office officials told him that UK forces
were already active in Syria attempting to
foment rebellion.
The ongoing operation has
been closely supervised under an on-going
covert programme coordinated jointly by
American, British, French and Israeli
military intelligence. Evidence in the
public record confirms that US support alone
to anti-Assad fighters totalled about
$2 billion as of the end of 2014.
While the conventional wisdom
insists that this support to Islamist
extremists was mistaken, the facts speak for
themselves. Classified CIA assessments
showed that US intelligence
knew
how US-led support to anti-Assad rebels
through its Middle East allies consistently
ended up in the hands of the most virulent
extremists. But it continued.
Pentagon officials were
also aware in the year before IS launched
its campaign of conquest inside Iraq, that
the vast majority of “moderate” Free Syrian
Army (FSA) rebels were, in fact, Islamist
militants. It was, officials admitted,
increasingly impossible to draw fixed lines
between “moderate” rebels and extremists
linked to al-Qaeda or IS, due to the fluid
interactions between them.
Increasingly, frustrated
FSA fighters have
joined the ranks of Islamist militants
in Syria, not for ideological reasons, but
simply due to their superior military
capabilities. So far,
almost all “moderate” rebel groups
recently trained and armed by the US are
disbanding and continuously defecting to
al-Qaeda and IS to fight Assad.
Turkey
The US is now coordinating
the continued supply of military aid to
“moderate” rebels to fight IS, through a new
arrangement with Turkey. Yet it is an
open secret that Turkey, throughout this
entire period, has been directly sponsoring
al-Qaeda and IS as part of a geopolitical
gambit to crush Kurdish opposition groups
and bring down Assad.
Much has been made of
Turkey’s “lax” efforts to curb foreign
fighters crossing its territory to join IS
in Syria. Turkey has recently responded by
announcing that it has stopped thousands.
Both claims are mythical:
Turkey has deliberately harboured and
funnelled support to IS and al-Qaeda in
Syria.
Last summer, Turkish
journalist Denis Kahraman
interviewed an IS fighter receiving
medical treatment in Turkey, who told him:
“Turkey paved the way for us. Had Turkey not
shown such understanding for us, the Islamic
State would not be in its current place. It
[Turkey] showed us affection. Large number
of our mujahedeen [jihadis] received medical
treatment in Turkey.”
Earlier this year,
authenticated official
documents of the Turkish military (the
Gendarmerie General Command) were leaked
online, showing that Turkey’s intelligence
services (MIT) had been caught in Adana by
military officers transporting missiles,
mortars and anti-aircraft ammunition via
truck “to the al-Qaeda terror organisation”
in Syria.
“Moderate” FSA rebels are
involved in the MIT-sponsored
Turkish-Islamist support network. One told
the
Telegraph that he “now runs safe
houses in Turkey for foreign fighters
looking to join Jabhat al-Nusra and Isil
[Islamic State].”
Some officials have spoken
up about this, but to no avail. Last year,
Claudia Roth, deputy speaker of the
German parliament, expressed shock that NATO
is allowing Turkey to harbour an IS camp in
Istanbul, facilitate weapons transfers to
Islamist militants through its borders, and
tacitly support IS oil sales. Nothing
happened.
The US-led
anti-IS coalition is funding IS
The US and Britain have
not only remained strangely silent about the
complicity of their coalition partner in
sponsoring the enemy. They have tightened up
the partnership with Turkey, and are working
avidly with the same state-sponsor of IS to
train “moderate” rebels to fight IS.
It is not just Turkey.
Last year, US Vice President Joe Biden
told a White House press conference that
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates,
Qatar and Turkey among others, were pouring
“hundreds of millions of dollars and tens,
thousands of tons, of weapons” into
“al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist
elements of jihadis” as part of a “proxy
Sunni-Shia war”. He added that, for all
intents and purposes, it is not possible to
identify “moderate” rebels in Syria.
There is no indication
that this funding has dried up. As late as
September 2014, even as the US began
coordinating airstrikes against IS, Pentagon
officials revealed that they knew their own
coalition allies were still funding IS.
That month, Gen. Martin
Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, was asked by Senator Lindsay Graham
during a Senate Armed Services Committee
hearing whether he knew of “any major Arab
ally that embraces Isil [IS]?” He
said: “I know major Arab allies who fund
them.”
Despite this knowledge,
the US government has not merely refused to
sanction these allies, but rewarded them by
including them in the coalition that is
supposed to fight the very extremist entity
they are funding. Worse, the same allies
continue to be granted ample leeway to
select fighters to receive training.
Key members of our anti-IS
coalition are bombing IS from the air while
sponsoring them behind the scenes - with the
knowledge of the Pentagon.
The arc of Muslim
state-failure
In Iraq and Syria, where
IS was born, the devastation of society due
to prolonged conflict cannot be
underestimated. Western military invasion
and occupation of Iraq, replete with torture
and indiscriminate violence, played an
undeniable role in paving the way for
the emergence of extreme reactionary
politics. Before Western intervention,
al-Qaeda was nowhere to be seen in the
country. In Syria, Assad’s brutal war on his
own people continues to vindicate IS and
attract foreign fighters.
The continual input of vast
quantities of money to Islamist extremist
networks, hundreds of billions of dollars
worth of material resources that no one has
yet been able to quantify in its totality -
coordinated by the same nexus of Western and
Muslim governments - has over the last half
century had a deeply destabilising impact.
IS is the surreal, post-modern culmination
of this sordid history.
The West’s anti-IS coalition
in the Muslim world consists of repressive
regimes whose domestic policies have widened
inequalities, crushed legitimate dissent,
tortured peaceful political activists, and
stoked deep-seated resentments. They are the
same allies that have, and are continuing to
fund IS, with the knowledge of Western
intelligence agencies.
Yet they are doing so in
regional circumstances that can only be
described as undergoing, in the last decade,
escalating converging crises. As Princeton’s
Professor Bernard Haykel
said: “I see ISIS as a symptom of a much
deeper structural set of problems in the
Sunni Arab world… [It has] to do with
politics. With education, and the lack
thereof. With authoritarianism. With foreign
intervention. With the curse of oil … I
think that even if ISIS were to disappear,
the underlying causes that produce ISIS
would not disappear. And those would have to
be addressed with decades of policy and
reforms and changes - not just by the West,
but also by Arab societies as well.”
Yet as we saw with the
Arab Spring, these structural problems have
been exacerbated by a perfect storm of
interlinked political, economic, energy and
environmental crises, all of which are being
incubated by a deepening crisis of global
capitalism.
With the region suffering
from prolonged droughts, failing
agriculture, decline in oil revenues due to
domestic peak oil, economic corruption and
mismanagement compounded by neoliberal
austerity, and so on, local states have
begun to collapse. From
Iraq to Syria, from
Egypt to
Yemen, the same nexus of climate, energy
and economic crises are unravelling
incumbent governments.
Alienation in the
West
Although the West is far
more resilient to these interconnected
global crises, entrenched inequalities in
the US, Britain and Western Europe - which
have a disproportionate effect on ethnic
minorities, women and children - are
worsening.
In Britain, nearly 70
percent of ethnically South Asian Muslims,
and two-thirds of their children, live in
poverty. Just under 30 percent of British
Muslim young people aged from 16-24 years
are unemployed. According to Minority Rights
Group International, conditions for British
Muslims in terms of "access to education,
employment and housing" have deteriorated in
recent years, rather than improving. This
has been accompanied by a "worrying rise in
open hostility" from non-Muslim communities,
and a growing propensity for police and
security services to target Muslims
disproportionately under anti-terror powers.
Consistently negative reporting on Muslims
by the media, coupled with grievances over
justifiable perceptions of an aggressive and
deceptive foreign policy in the Muslim
world, compound the latter to create a
prevailing sense of
social exclusion associated with British
Muslim identity.
It is the toxic
contribution of these factors to general
identity formation that is the issue - not
each of the factors by themselves. Poverty
alone, or discrimination alone, or
anti-Muslim reporting alone, and so on, do
not necessarily make a person vulnerable to
radicalisation. But together these can forge
an attachment to an identity that sees
itself as alienated, frustrated and locked
in a cycle of failure.
The prolongation and
interaction of these problems can contribute
to the way Muslims in Britain from various
walks of life begin to view themselves as a
whole. In some cases, it can generate an
entrenched sense of separation and
alienation from, and disillusionment with
wider society. This exclusionary identity,
and where it takes a person, will depend on
that person’s specific environment,
experiences and choices.
Prolonged social crises can
lay the groundwork for the rise of toxic,
xenophobic ideologies on all sides. Such
crises undermine conventional mores of
certainty and stability rooted in
established notions of identity and
belonging.
While vulnerable Muslims
might turn to gang culture, or worse,
Islamist extremism, vulnerable non-Muslims
might adopt their own exclusionary
identities linked with extremist groups like
the English Defence League, or other
far-right extremist networks.
For more
powerful elite groups, their sense of
crisis may inflame militaristic
neoconservative ideologies that sanitise
incumbent power structures, justify the
status quo, whitewash the broken system that
sustains their power, and demonise
progressive and minority movements.
In this maelstrom, the
supply of countless billions of dollars to
Islamist extremist networks in the Middle
East with a penchant for violence, empowers
groups that previously lacked any local
constituency.
As multiple crises
converge and intensify, undermining state
stability and inflaming grievances, this
massive input of resources to Islamist
ideologues can pull angry, alienated,
vulnerable individuals into their vortex of
xenophobic extremism. The end-point of that
process is the creation of monsters.
Dehumanisation
While these factors escalated
regional vulnerability to crisis levels, the
US and Britain’s lead role after 9/11 in
coordinating covert Gulf state financing of
extremist Islamist militants across the
region has poured gasoline on the flames.
The links these Islamist
networks have in the West meant that
domestic intelligence agencies have
periodically
turned blind eyes to their followers and
infiltrators at home, allowing them to
fester, recruit and send would-be fighters
abroad.
This is why the Western
component of IS, though much smaller than
the number of fighters joining from
neighbouring countries, remains largely
impervious to meaningful theological debate.
They are not driven by theology,
but by the insecurity of a fractured
identity and psychology.
It is here, in the
meticulously calibrated recruitment methods
used by IS and its supporting networks in
the West, that we can see the role of
psychological indoctrination processes
fine-tuned through years of training under
Western intelligence agencies. These
agencies have always been intimately
involved in the crafting of violent Islamist
indoctrination tools.
In most cases, recruitment
into IS is achieved by being exposed to
carefully crafted propaganda videos,
developed using advanced production methods,
the most effective of which are replete with
real images of bloodshed inflicted on Iraqi,
Afghan and Palestinian civilians by Western
firepower, or on Syrian civilians by Assad.
The constant exposure to
such horrifying scenes of Western and Syrian
atrocities can often have an effect similar
to what might happen if these scenes had
been experienced directly: that is, a form
of psychological trauma that can even result
in post-traumatic stress.
Such cult-like propaganda
techniques help to invoke overwhelming
emotions of shock and anger, which in turn
serve to shut down reason and dehumanise the
“Other”. The dehumanisation process is
brought to fruition using twisted Islamist
theology. What matters with this theology is
not its authenticity, but its simplicity.
This can work wonders on a psyche
traumatised by visions of mass death, whose
capacity for reason is immobilised with
rage.
This is why the reliance
on extreme literalism and complete
decontextualisation is such a common feature
of Islamist extremist teachings: because it
seems, to someone credulous and unfamiliar
with Islamic scholarship, to be literally
true at first glance.
Building on decades of
selective misinterpretation of Islamic texts
by militant ideologues, sources are
carefully mined and cherry-picked to justify
the political agenda of the movement:
tyrannical rule, arbitrary mass murder,
subjugation and enslavement of women, and so
on, all of which become integral to the very
survival and expansion of the “state”.
As the main function of
introducing extreme Islamist theological
reasoning is to legitimise violence and
sanction war, it is combined with propaganda
videos that promise what the vulnerable
recruit appears to be missing: glory,
brotherhood, honour, and the promise of
eternal salvation - no matter what crimes or
misdemeanours one may have committed in the
past.
Couple this with the promise
of power - power over one’s enemies, power
over Western institutions that have
purportedly suppressed one’s Muslim brothers
and sisters, power over women - and the
appeal of IS, if its religious garb and
claims of Godliness can be made convincing
enough, can be irresistible.
What this means is that
IS’s ideology, while important to understand
and refute, is not the driving factor in its
origins, existence and expansion. It is
merely the opium of the people that it feeds
to itself, and its prospective followers.
Ultimately, IS is a cancer
of modern industrial capitalism in meltdown,
a fatal by-product of our unwavering
addiction to black gold, a parasitical
symptom of escalating civilisational crises
across both the Muslim and Western worlds.
Until the roots of these crises are
addressed, IS and its ilk are here to stay.
- Nafeez
Ahmed PhD is an investigative
journalist, international security scholar
and bestselling author who tracks what he
calls the 'crisis of civilization.' He is a
winner of the Project Censored Award for
Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his
Guardian reporting on the intersection of
global ecological, energy and economic
crises with regional geopolitics and
conflicts. He has also written for The
Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age,
The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic,
Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde
diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work
on the root causes and covert operations
linked to international terrorism officially
contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the
7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.
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