Politics of terrorism

AN AFGHAN DIARY - Zahir Shah to Taliban: J. N. Dixit; Konark Publishers Pvt. Ltd., A-149, Main Vikas Marg, Delhi-110092. Rs. 500.

BIN LADEN - The Man Who Declared War On America: Yossef Bodansky; Forum, An Imprint of Prima Publishing, 3875, Atherton Road, Rocklin, California-95765. $.31.50.

AMERICA'S NEW "campaign against the politics of terrorism on the international stage has already begun with a big bang. In full swing at present is Washington's post-modern military offensive against Afghanistan's Taliban regime and, more significantly, against its patron-guest, Osama bin Laden. The U.S. suspects that Osama is hiding in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, a terribly impoverished country that borders Pakistan.

Osama's name denotes the lion. But the larger international community tends to see him as the archetypal terrorist-villain in the context of its anguish over the apocalypse-like attacks that occurred on American soil on September 11. Yet, in the world-view of the passionate but misguided sections of the masses within the pan-Islamic society across the world, Osama is actually a poster- hero of their faith. The fundamentalist segment of the pious clergy of the Muslim world often tends to believe, openly or tacitly, that Osama's agenda might in some ways enhance the defence of Islam itself. On balance, however, the arguably diffused elite of the Muslim world has not yet taken a definitive view of Osama and his conspicuous hate agenda. Is Osama the cult figure who can really set the stage for a cataclysmic clash of civilisations in line with a theory of possibilities as envisioned by Samuel Huntington? Or, is Osama simply a megalomaniac with a confused ideological orientation about a terroristic espousal of the ``cause'' of Islam as perceived by him? These are questions with no precise answers at this juncture.

In a sense, it is the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that has provided the political space that Osama needed to pursue his agenda. With both Osama and the Taliban being the prime targets of the U.S. military forces at this time, the evolution of the Afghan polity and society is as important to the specialists and the ordinary readers alike as indeed the profile of Osama is. It is in this context that ``An Afghan Diary'' by J. N. Dixit, formerly India's high profile Foreign Secretary, makes for compelling reading.

Dixit's book is a period-specific work focussed on a critical phase in Afghanistan's contemporary history. Having served as India's Ambassador to Afghanistan from 1982 to 1985, he seems to have found it an irresistible proposition to chronicle the efforts made by some key Afghans themselves to sustain a leftist revolution in their country with some inspiration and much support from the old Soviet Union. Detailing an eyewitness account of some of these efforts, Dixit notes how the leftist revolution, which occurred in 1978 after the overthrow of King Zahir Shah and then of his cousin (Daud) and lasted until 1989 with fluctuations, failed. In his view, it was a failure of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan to transcend ``the orthodoxies and ethnic factiousness of (the) Afghan civil society''.

Necessarily, the main body of the ``Diary'' has to do with the events of the 1980s prior to the Soviet/Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan under the impact of America's determined campaign against Moscow's geopolitical priorities of that period. Yet, in short but suitable updates, Dixit has outlined the rise of the Taliban in the mid-1990's the context of a post-Soviet interlude of an internecine warfare among several ``mujahideen'' groups, which had been aided variously by the U.S. in the earlier war against the Afghan leftists and the Soviet communists. Those fratricidal Afghan ``mujahideen'' groups lost credibility even as the foreign governments, the benefactors of such factions, became disillusioned with them by the mid-1990s. So, as Dixit points out, ``the Pakistan Government with the support of Saudi Arabia took the initiative to create an alternative organisation to take control of Afghanistan''. Thus born, ``the Taliban started operating as a military force sometime towards the end of 1995'', Dixit notes accurately.

Yossef Bodansky's book on ``Bin Laden'' is exhaustive in its sweep of ``the radicalisation of an engineer''. Written before Osama's suspected scientific crimes of terror against humanity in September this year, the book traces in some immense detail how ``the man who declared war on America'' really came to do so. The author's meticulous account is based on extensive research and it is also considerably linked, by inference, to the intelligence profiling of Osama.

Mirrored in Bodansky's work is not only the West's view of Osama but also the impressions from other parts of the world including India.

As a military and threat analyst with good credentials within the U.S. congressional and strategic community, Bodansky undertook the work in the context of Osama's suspected plotting of the American embassy bombings in Africa in 1998.

Tracing the environment in which Osama could rise as an individual force, the author says: ``For the hard-core Islamists, the lesson of the Gulf War (of 1991) - that the West can coerce and defeat - is counterbalanced by the legacy of Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union was ostensibly defeated, and that of Somalia, where the United States was driven out by Islamist forces (in the early 1990s).

And since the Muslim world lacks the military and scientific- technological abilities to confront the West head-on, the only way the West can be confronted is through international terrorism''.

Needless to say that Bodansky's view will not be shared by many Islamists and secularists. Yet, this book on Osama deserves to be read for its painstaking and forthright profiling of Osama, the man who has incited religious hatred and war.

P.S. SURYANARAYANA

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