Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism

When given the choice of a number of books to read for a class on the law of war and terror, I chose this one, and I was not disappointed. Primarily concerned with US action in Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban and later Osama bin Laden in the mire left by the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.Cooley has an incredible amount of information and relies on interviews he conducted with key players over the last 30 years. He sees the rise of terror in that state as largely a result of the unchecked flow of weapons and money to the mujaheddin from the United States to support the guerrilla war against the Soviets. With the exodus of Soviet tanks from Afghanistan, the US left also, closing, almost overnight, intelligence operations and diplomatic presence. The result was a disastrous civil war between warlords and religious fanatics that allowed the rise of the Taliban.Citing the US as a culprit in the quagmire, a significant amount of responsibility is placed on the actions of the Pakistani intelligence services. Controlled by religious ideologues, the Pakistani intelligence services operated nearly autonomously from other Pakistani government branches, and often in opposition to stated policy. It's ostensible purpose was create a religiously friendly state on Pakistan's western border so as to take weight off of pressure created by the often contentious, and occasionally violent, relationship with India on it's other side.Eventually, it leads to the exportation of the "holy warriors" around the world, and followed later by opium as a cash crop supporting the somewhat outcast Taliban government.In short, a must read.The book suffers from a lack of editing and a somewhat choppy organization. However, the sheer volume of information easily makes the difficulty following the reading well worth the challenge.

This book should be read by everyone who wants to understand Afghanistan and what US policy should be regarding the current civil war going on in that country. The new edition was published in 2000. If more had read it then we might have been able to head off the 9/11/2001 attack. What a mess we have made in that country, and in the world, as the Guerrillas that we armed and trained to defeat the Soviets in the 1979-89, became the core of the terrorists that have terrorised the world ever since.

This is a comprehensive and detailed account of the Islamic rebellion against the West. John K. Cooley's reports reach many different countries including Afghanistan, the West Bank, Egypt and Algeria and certainly the United States, but as you assemble them in your mind, there emerges, like in a mosaic, the history and compelling forces of the clash of Islam with the Christian West. It began perhaps in 1928, when the Moslem Brotherhood was founded in Egypt and soon reached its first peak at the time of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. From the beginning, it was a hostile reaction, the response of the Islamic civilization, awakening from long dormancy, to the clash with the intrusive, advanced, imperialistic and alien Western world. It was their retreat into the protective castle of what was good and eternal in their history, their God, their Prophet and His ancient law. Their level of belligerence had reached a level high enough in 1979 to bring about the power grab of Khomeini and the Iran hostage crisis, but these were promptly compounded, in a seminal and cataclysmic way, by the Soviet invasion into Moslem Afghanistan. At that point, Islam declared all-out war on atheistic Russia and the pagan West, as the mujahedin arrived in Afghanistan from many Arab countries. It was a pivotal event, because the same mujahedin fighters, after achieving victory, returned to Egypt, Palestine, Algeria, Bosnia and elsewhere, carrying with them their newly learned martial skills and fanatical religious ideology, in order to light the torch of jihad in their home countries.There was a long row of aftershocks after the outbreak of the Afghan Jihad. Anwar Sadat paid for his peace mission with Israel in his assassination in 1981. Hezbollah bombed the US Marine Barracks and Beirut Embassy in 1982 and 1984. Abu Yassaf began his Islamic resistance work on the island of Mindanao. The civil war between the Islamic Salvation Front and the Algerian government forces raged from 1994 to 1996. US installations in Saudi Arabia were bombed in 1995 and 1996, and so it went on to the more recent armed attacks and exchanges we all know.The author goes into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, itself the earliest and most offensive crisis in Moslem conscienceless, only after the HAMAS organization was formed at the end of the Afghan war. Perhaps this was, because up until then the Palestinian guerilla war, raging for decades, was still chiefly a secular and territorial conflict, whereas with HAMAS it was one waged by religious fundamentalists, who refused to cooperate with Arafat's PLO. For those who look for an in-depth and factual textbook about this ongoing clash of civilizations, its origins, motives and complications, Unholy Wars is an excellent choice.

For anyone who wants to understand the deep background to political Islam, the attrocities of 9/11 and beyond, along with the current tensions in Pakistan and the ongoing war in Afghanistan - this book is compelling. As other reviewers have stated, John Cooley goes into great and convincing detail to explain America's role in creating and sustaining an anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan back in the 1980s (the moujahidin)which later morphed into the al-Qaeda and Taliban networks that the USA and Britain now regard as Public Enemy number 1. This book was actually published a year before 9/11 and is both convincingly detailed and astonishingly precient; it contains 2 helpful maps and an introduction that warns against the dangers of replacing soviet communism with Islam as the "Satanic foe" that the west feels it must defeat. Excellent.