In his book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, noted Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid describes how the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency, Britain’s MI6 and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence drew up a provocative plan in 1986 to launch mujahideen attacks in the Soviet territory, presently within Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The task was given to the ISI’s favourite mujahideen leader, Gulbuddi n Hekmatyar. Of course, the idea itself — the use of militant Islamists as a geopolitical tool to lacerate the “soft underbelly” of the Soviet Union — belonged to the U.S. National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Years later, in 1998, when a Le Nouvel Observateur interviewer asked him whether he regretted using political Islam as a natural ally, Brzezinski was unrepentant. He asked: “What is more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
Indeed, it wasn’t an idea that was born in Brzezinski’s clever mind. When the idea of the U.S.’ utilitarian alliance with the benighted version of Islam first appeared in the mid-1950s as the underpinning of the U.S. strategy to gain control of the oil in the Middle East and ward off Arab nationalism, American strategists called it the “Eisenhower Doctrine.” And its current reputation has been ably theorised by ideologues such as Bernard Lewis.
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