[lbo-talk] New Al Qaeda plot to kill Musharraf foiled

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Tue May 17 08:36:29 PDT 2005


I wrote:
>
> Yes, I was exaggerating. First of all, by "leftie" I
> meant "anglo-American leftie," of the sort that kept
> denying that Islamism was a big factor in Chechnya
> until it was impossible to deny it. "It's all
> Russian
> propaganda" and so forth. (Not just lefties were
> doing
> this, of course, it was the whole gamut of AA
> political opinion

Coincidentally there is an article on this in the Asia Times:

The 'Talibanization' of Central Asia By M K Bhadrakumar

Three successive waves of political Islam have swept over Central Asia during the 15-year period since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. They might seem dissimilar. But they have common elements - the most important being that they all had extra-regional profiles, even as they sought a habitation and name in the region. To the naked eye, they appear as interpolators on a civilization that was historically eclectic. They are the monstrous progenies of "foreign devils on the Silk Road" - of Central Asia's globalization.

The first wave of political Islam appeared in Tajikistan in 1992, seeking to make the country an Islamic state. The Islamic rebels were initially concentrated in the southern provinces of Kulyab and Kurgan Tyube, but incrementally linked up with elements in neighboring Afghanistan. By 1996 they were operating from within Afghanistan. Their leaders were domiciled in Iran and Pakistan.

The Tajik civil war involved factions, but they were ideological overlaps of secular democracy, nationalist reformism and Islamization. A listing of the parties involved in the protracted Tajik peace process under United Nations auspices (1994-96) is revealing - Russia, the United States, Iran, Pakistan, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

The American perspective on the Tajik civil war (1992-96) was that it was a power struggle involving clans or regional cliques, and was engineered by Russia with a view to justifying its military presence in Central Asia. But, its reasoning was seriously flawed - that there were no Islamist elements in Afghanistan interested in a spillover into Central Asia; the Taliban was an indigenous Afghan phenomenon who did not have any regional agenda; Afghan fratricidal strife was purely about capturing power in Kabul; and that the Taliban would be ultimately a factor of regional stability. (Americans were not alone living in a different intellectual universe. As late as June 1995, at a conference convened by the US Institute of Peace, French scholar Olivier Roy laughed off the very thought that there could be "revolution-exporting Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan".)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/GE12Ag02.html

Nu, zayats, pogodi!

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