notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part III)

(71): Congo became independent on June 30, 1960. Less than two weeks later... its richest province, Katanga, seceded... Led by Moish Tshombe... trained by officers from Belgium, the former colonial power there. Katanga's mines were operated by a Belgian company... in which the Rockefellers were soon to acquire a major interest. Late in the summer of 1960, the Eisenhower administration concluded that Patrice Lumumba... was 'an African Castro' and must be eliminated... On August 18, following a National Security Council briefing, Eisenhower asked his aides whether 'we can't get rid of this guy.' (... [Belgium/US collusion to kill Lumumba]) With Lumumba out of the way, in December 1962 President Kennedy concurred with the use of UN troops to quash the Katangan rebellion. In May 1963, a grateful Kennedy welcomed Mobutu in the White House: 'General, if it hadn't been for you, ... the Communists would have taken over. (72): By the end of 1963, anti-Mobutu rebellion broke out in Kwilu, led by Pierre Mulele, a prominent Lumumbist. The rebels were poorly armed, and there was no evidence of outside involvement. But the CIA did intervene on the government's behalf... By October 1964, the CIA estimated the humber of mercenaries in Conto at more than one thousand... Washington was clear from the outset that there would by no US citizens among the mercenaries. Without American support, however, the mercenaries would have been lame. Four US C-130s with American crews transported mecenaries and their equipment across the west-east span of Congo, roughly the same distance as from Paris to Moscow.
(77): [In Angola], Washington was determined to block any possibility of the MPLA coming to powe, having identified it as a Soviety proxy... Washington's preferred option was to give covert support to the two movements that were opposed to MPLA: the Front for National Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which operated more or less as a surrogate of Congo's General Mobutu, and the Union for the Total Dependence of Angola (Unita), which had few external contacts apart from fledgling ones with apartheid South Africa.... Meanwhile, instead of fighting MPLA, FNLA and Unita took to fighting each other. Faced with an ignominious end, Kissinger opted to back a proxy invasion by regular South African forces.... South African troops entered Angola in mid-October 1975, and Cuban troops followed in early November.
(80): On February 10, 1976, the US Congress passed the Clark Amendment, prohibiting any covert aid to any side in the Angolan civil war. The next month, on March 31, the UN Security Council branded South Africa the aggressor and demanded that it compensate Angola for war damages...
(81): The Angolan fiasco reinforced the lessons of Vietnam, but those lessons provoked contradictory interpretations by the executive branch and by Congress, each asserting a different influence on post-Vietnam US foreign policy... Pulbic resistance... was echoed in Congress with the election of a host of antiwar legislators and led to a number of changes: the draft was abolished; the Pentagon's budget for special operations was cut; the CIA's paramilitary capabilities were reduced and its activities subjected to congressional oversight; and the president was required by the War Powers Act to seek congressional approval before any extended commitment of US troops overseas.... The clearest expression of this surge in antiwar sentiment was the amendment of the Freedom of Information act and the passage of the Clark Amendment. The two years and three months between the passage of the 1973 War Powers Act and the 1976 Clark Amendment marked the high point of the antiwar movement that swept the United States.
(83): Enacted in 1976, the Clark Amenment was repealed in 1985.
(87): CIA chief William J. Casey eventually took the lead in orchestrating support for terrorist and proterrorist movements around the world--from Renameo in Mozambique to Unita in Angola, and from contras in Nicaragua to the mujahideen in Afgahnistan--through third and fourth parties. In a nutshell, after defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal at home, the US government decided to harness and even cultivate terrorists in the struggle against guerillas who had come to power and regimes it considered pro-Soviet.
(91): A State Department consultant who interviewed refugees and displaced persons concluded that Renamo was responsible for 95% of the instances of civilian abuse inthe war in Mozambique, including the murder of as many as ten thousand civilians.
(91): Political terror had brought a kind of war never befroe seen in Africa. The hallmark of the terror was that it targeted civilian life: blowing up infrastructure such as bridges and power stations, destroying health and educational centers, mining paths and fields, and kidnapping civilians--particularly children--to press-grang them into recruits. Terrorism distinguished itself from guerilla struggle by making civilians its preferred target. If left-wing guerillas claimed that they were like fish in water, right-wing terrorists were determined to drain the water--that is, civilian life--so as to isolate and eliminate the fish. What is now termed collateral damage was not an unfortunate by-product of the war; it was the very point of terrorism.
(95): The CIA and the Pentagon called terrorism by another name: "low-intensity conflict" (LIC). The move from counterinsurgency to low-intensity conflict signified a strategic reorientation in US war strategy...
(97): With the shift in military strategy to rollback, a clear distinction was made between counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict: the ambition of counterinsurgency during the Vietnam era had been to defeat revolutionary insurgents; LIC aimed to undermine revolutionary governments, not just movements.
(109): Following the 1982 coup that installed Montt as dictator of Guatemala, Pat Roberston and other Christian-right leaders lobbied succssfully for the resumption of US military aid to the country. when Montt's army annihilated entire Indian villages, Gospel Outreach members defended the 'scorched earth' campaign in religious terms. One enthusiastic pastor put it: 'The army doesn't massacre the Indians. It massacres demons, and the Indians are demons possessed; they are communists.'
(110-111): Israel emerged as a significant military supplier to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the late seventies and early eighties after those countries were found guilty of human rights violations and the Carter administration terminated military aid to all three... As 'a quid pro quo for El Salvador's decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,' Israel supplied the military regime 'with over 80% of its weaponry for the next several years, including napalm for use against the Salvadoran civilian population'... Israel moved into Nicaragua as soon as the Carter administration cut off aid: 'Israel sold Somoza 98% of the weapons he used against the Nicaraguan population' between September 1978 and his ouster the following July.
(111): Israel's military links with Iran began with the Iraq-Iran War... Retired General Aharon Yariv... told a conference at Tel Aviv University in late 1986 that 'it would be a good idea if the Iran-Iraq wars ended in a tie, but it would be even better if it continued.' Israel and the United States shared the same strategic objective: to prolong the Iraq-Iran War as long as possible. To realize that objective, each armed a different side.
(116): [In Nicaragua] When it came to the practice of terror, governments and private groups shared the same minimal objective: to put into question the ability of a government in power to ensure security of person and property for the population it claimed to represent.
(118) [In sum] The United States' embrace of terror can be plotted as a learning curve that went through three successive phases of the late cold War, from southern Africa to Central America and central Asia. Each phase can be identified with a dicstinct lesson. If the patronage of terror in the opening phase was shy, more like the benign and permissive tolerance of the practices of an aggressive regional ally--apartheid south Africa--the Unites States moved to a bold and brazen embrace of terror when it came to the counter-revolutionaries in Central America, combining it with patronage of an illict trade in cocaine as the preferred way of financing its covert operations. It was, however, in the closing phase of the Cold War that the United States came to see the embrace of terror as the means to an international public good. It did this in two ways: by privatizing and by internationalizing the main operations in the war. Whereas both tendencies were already present in US support of the contras, each truly blossomed only with the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, which was so ideologized that it was seen less and less as a national-liberation struggle and more and more as an international crusade: a jihad.
(120-121): The revolutions of 1979 had a profound influence on the conduct of the Afghan War. The Iranian revolution led to a restructuring of relations between the United States and political Islam. Prior to it, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side was the Soviet Union and militant Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side was political Islam, which America considered an unqualified ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Thus, the United States supported the Sarekat-i-Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, the Jamaat-i-Islaami against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, and the Society of Muslim Brothers against Nasser in Egypt.... Israeli intelligence allowed Hamas top operate unhindered during the first intifada--letting it open a university and bank accounts and even possibly ehelping it with funding--only to confront a stronger Hamas as the organizer of the second intifada.
(126-127): 'literally days after the Soviet invasion, Carter was on the telephone with Zia offering him hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid in exchange for cooperation in helping rebels.' Zia held out for more, and the Carter-Zia relationship remained lukewarm. The real warming came with the Reagan administration, which offered Pakistan 'a huge, six-year economic and military aid package which elevated Pakistan to the third largest recipient of US foreign aid'--after Israel and Egypt.
(127-128): Historically, the tradition of 'lesser jihad' itself comprises two different--and conflicting--notions. The first is that of a just war against occupiers, whether nonbelievers or believers. There were four such just wars: Saladin's jihad against the Crusaders in the twelfth century, the Sufi jihad against enslaving aristocracies in West Africa in the seventeenth century, the Wahabi jihad against Ottoman colonizers in the Arabian peninsula in the eighteenth century, and the Mahdi's anticolonial struggle against the combination of Turko-Egyptian and British power in late nineteenth century Sudan... The second, conflicting, tradition is that of a permanent jiad against doctrinal tendencies in Islam officially considered 'heretic.' This is a tradition with little historical depth in Islam.... [T[he notion of a standing jihad--a state institution in defense of state interests--is identified less with historical Islam than with the later history of the House of Saud and the state of Saudi Arabia.
(128): The Afghan jihad was in reality an American jihad, but it became that fully only with Reagan's second term in office. In March 1985, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166, authorizing 'stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal.' The redefined war was taken over by CIA chief William Casey, who undertook three significant measures in 1986. The first was to convince Congress to step up American involvement by providing the mujahideen with American advissers and American-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The second was to expand the Islamic guerilla war from Afghanistan into the Soviet republics of Tajikisan and Uzbekistan, a decision reversed when the Soviet Union threatened to attack Pakistan in retaliation. The thrid was to step up the recruitment of radical Islamists from around the world to come train in Pakistan and fight alongside the mujahideen.
(131): Beyond the front-line proxy states and their intelligence agencies, increasingly the intermediaries were private institutions, both religious and secular. The overall effect was progressively to privatize the war on an international basis. From this dynamic emerged the forces that carried out the operation we know as 9/11.
(132): The numbers recruited and trained were impressive by any reckoning: the estimate of foreign radicals 'directly influenced by the Afghan jihad' is upwards of one hundred thousand.
(133): Though Osama bin Laden had been a student of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the first Afghan-Arab gatekeeper of the jihad in the mid-eighties, a break between Azzam and bin Laden came twoards the end of the Afghan jihad. The parting of the ways was the result of a disagreement in 1989 over the future of the jihad: bin Laden 'envisioned an all-Arab legion, which eventually could be used to wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt,' whereas Azzam 'strongly opposed making war against fellow Muslims.' Soon after, Azzam and two of his sons were blown up by a car bomb as they were driving to a mosque in Peshawar. A meeting was held toward the end of 1989 in the town of Khost to decide on the future of the jihad... [A] new organization was created in the meeting[:]... al-Qaeda, 'the Base.'

(134): [T]he Tablighi Jamaat, with headquarters in Pakistan and branches all over the world, [was] founded in 1926 by a Muslim scholar, Maulana Mohammad Ilyas, to 'purify' borderline Muslims 'who had retained many of the customs and religious practices from their Hindu past.

europe at the world bank:
For far too long European governments have supported policies at the Bank that their domestic constituencies wouldn't tolerate for one second if a foreign bureaucracy imposed them at home. Would social democrats in Denmark tolerate that the World Bank impose on them "education reforms" like the school fees that have blocked access to primary education in Africa? Would Labor Party activists in Britain tolerate that the World Bank impose on them "health sector reforms" like clinic fees blocking access to prenatal care? Would European social democrats have tolerated that the World Bank impose on them the corrupt privatization of the water utility in Bolivia, the corrupt privatization of public pensions in Chile and Argentina, the destruction of Mozambique's cashew nut processing industry, the "labor sector reforms" that undermined the right to organize?

two articles on mozambique:
(first, in defense of the economic order:)
Mozambique is one of the world's poorest countries. It's also an African success story. Here, such things are relative. To the immediate west, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe misrules his country toward calamity. Nigeria, Ivory Coast and others are beset by civil conflict and corruption. But Mozambique, scarred by 16 years of civil war and Soviet-style economics, turned itself in the right direction on its own. Optimism, however guarded, and Africa do sometimes go together.
(...) But hyperinflation and a stagnant economy forced leaders of the neo-Marxist liberation movement, Frelimo, to shift their approach. Starting in the early 1990s, the ruling party cut subsidies, opened to outside investment, privatized firms nationalized after independence in 1975 and got a grip on borrowing and the budget. An independent central bank brought inflation into single digits. According to the World Economic Forum's competitiveness index, Mozambique has reformed more than any sub-Saharan African country.
(...) The payoff is the highest average growth rate, at 8% over the last decade, among the continent's non-oil exporters. GDP per capita is a still tiny $320, but that's compared with $178 in 1992. Since 1997, poverty rates decreased more in rural areas (from 71% to 55%) than in urban (62% to 52%), according to the World Bank. Child mortality has declined to 152 per 1,000 live births from 235. And primary-school enrollment has risen to 71% from 43%. Once a leading recipient of food aid, Mozambique now exports maize, with 5.6% average yearly growth in farming in the last 15 years. Banks, telecom and tourist firms, many from neighboring South Africa, have come in.
(...) But neighbors in similar straits haven't put in place Mozambique's fixes. Inflation in Zimbabwe is 1,700%; nearby Malawi and Zambia, their economies distorted by subsidies on commodities, are growing haphazardly. "You need political will" to get it right, says Mr. Baxter. "Starting from a low base" or "being a former colony" -- oft-heard excuses for Africa -- has little impact on economic performance. What matters, as regional dynamo Botswana also shows, is governance.
(...) Erratic "Uncle Bob," as his deferential neighbors call Zimbabwe's 83-year-old Robert Mugabe, is a useful reminder that local politicians pose the gravest threat to Africa's future.
(...) In the meantime, having done the so-called first generation of market reforms, the government is dragging its feet on legalizing land ownership, fighting corruption and loosening a restrictive labor code to bring in more investment. "Now they're stuck," says Mr. Lima. "There is a strong socialist background here. If we want to perform, we need to be different."
(second, in response:)
(...) Africa observers often single out a storyline from one country - sometimes it's cheery, sometimes not - in order to apply lessons to the whole continent. But I'm having trouble seeing what Kaminski and others see.
(...) Kaminski's paean to private enterprise leaves me particularly cold. Because Mozambique's development is heavily concentrated in the southern capital, the vast majority of the country sees few of the benefits of growth. And much of the economic improvement over the last 15 years can simply be chalked up to the peace dividend. When hostilities ended - with one million dead - Mozambique had nowhere to go but up. The country currently ranks tenth from the bottom on the UN's Human Development Index (just ahead of Burundi, and well behind Rwanda). It used to rank as the very poorest country in the world. So, yes, I guess things could be worse.
(...) But, most importantly, all this talk about privatization and foreign investment is very much beside the point. As Kaminski concedes, one in six Mozambican adults is infected with HIV. "Appreciating the change for the better takes some imagination," he writes. But you cannot speak of "the change for the better" unless the discussion starts with HIV. It's the only yardstick that matters in Mozambique, and in the rest of southern Africa as well. Some 37,000 Mozambican children contracted HIV in 2006, a jump of 60% over six years before. Nearly four of every 10 adults in Beira, the country's second largest city, are HIV-positive. Those are apocalyptic figures, however creative your thinking.
(...) The luxury building is full of foreigners here on business; the more posh of the country's two shopping malls is on the ground floor. It looks as if the land where the Four Seasons stood will be developed in much the same way, except that Part of the site will be set aside for a new American embassy. I have yet to meet a Mozambican who cares that the hotel is gone or about what will take its place.