IN THIS CHAPTER, I COVER ROUGHLY TWO SUBJECT AREAS, U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War and terrorism, reflecting the foreign-policy issues that preoccupied Eqbal. His writings on these subjects broke with the paradigms of the day, yet they stand the test of time and remain pertinent.
U.S. Foreign Policy
As the United States went down to defeat in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger, the architect of U.S. foreign policy under President Richard M. Nixon, changed the direction of American involvement overseas. The war had cost hundreds of billions of dollars and had overextended U.S. abilities to intervene abroad with flexibility. Political support for future direct U.S. troop interventions had momentarily evaporated. Kissinger applied the program of Vietnamization (arming the Vietnamese allies of the United States to fight American enemies locally) throughout the world. He convinced President Nixon to supply weapons and money to national armies to fight Communist and radical nationalist insurgents everywhere. Eqbal was among the first to point out the scope of this transformation in U.S. foreign policy and its new implications.
Eqbal did not mince his words regarding either Nixon or Kissinger. He disliked them. “Richard Milhaus,” he wrote in 1994, “was a devious, venal, and violent man. He began his political career as a witch hunter…. His career was built on red baiting and image making…. To Stephen Ambrose, historian of the cold war, Nixon ‘was a McCarthyite before McCarthy.’ He appealed to the dark side of the American psyche [and]…fed…on…the paranoid style in American politics…. He lied, manipulated, cheated, played dirty tricks, broke laws, obstructed justice.”
1Kissinger played a prominent role in U.S. foreign policy between 1969 and 1977 and continued, reinforced, and established U.S. alliances with the world’s worst dictators, including Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, and the shah of Iran, as well as with right-wing military regimes in Greece and Turkey and with Israel increasingly after its decisive victory over the Arabs in 1967. The large Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories were denied their basic rights. The United States also established relationships with a series of dictators in Latin America, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and elsewhere. Eqbal saw a new pattern emerging whereby through military aid the United States was shoring up dictators and right-wing regimes everywhere. When all of the dictators and militaristic governments that the United States supported fell like a house of cards by the 1980s, Eqbal wondered in amazement how Kissinger with such a flawed global policy still remained a prized consultant of U.S. Republican presidents and corporate executives.
At the moment that his trial in the United States was about to take place in 1971, Eqbal published an important article on revolutionary warfare and counterinsurgency, which warned about the ways that organized attempts to eradicate revolutions overseas eroded democratic institutions at home:
The pursuit of counterrevolutionary foreign policy…enhances the power of the secret services of government over which parliamentary institutions can exercise little or no control and whose activities public organs (press, political parties, etc.) are normally not able to report and censure. The expanded role of the CIA and of the armed forces’ special branches are examples. As their activities and influence increase, such agencies not only circumvent representative institutions but even begin to infiltrate and corrupt civilian life…. In order to overcome the checks of parliamentary institutions and public opinion, a government involved in counterinsurgency seeks ways to reduce its accountability to representative bodies and to bypass pressures of public opinion. A…favorite ploy is to employ puppet armies and experts to subvert foreign governments and fight wars by proxy…. Failure to defeat revolutionaries in protracted war alienates participants in counterinsurgency against the democratic values and institutions of their own country. The war is eventually seen as being lost at home rather than in the field…and democratic institutions increasingly appear as unworkable in revolutionary settings…. The divisions and disillusionments that follow involvements in counterrevolution ultimately reduce the legitimacy of existing institutions, inspire opposition to or contempt for them, and weaken the will to resist their corruption or destruction.
Above all, involvement in counterinsurgency politicizes the military and encourages its intrusion into civilian life.
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Early Confusion over the Issue of Terrorism
In a poignant analysis of the phenomenon of global terrorism, Eqbal had original, multipronged views. Regarding the Irangate affair in the mid1980s, when President Ronald Reagan allowed Israel to arm Iran with U.S.-made weapons and the United States tried to placate and reach out to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini despite Iran’s status as a terrorist state, Eqbal already sensed a fundamental shift taking place in U.S. policy. With the onset of the decline of the Soviet Union as a world power, he saw U.S. leaders scurrying for a new overarching issue—this time antiterrorism—that would provide a new integrating principle of foreign policy in the same way that fear of the Soviet Union and the Cold War had effectively done since 1945. He recognized the beginning of the shift before other commentators did and pointed out the new principle’s weakness at that specific point in time.
The brief U.S. embrace of Khomeini brought to the surface major contradictions in U.S. foreign policy. Since 1979, the United States had denounced Iran as a terrorist state, but by 1985 it began opening contacts with that same state. The American public could only be confused. For an integrative ideology on which the United States could base its foreign policy to be successful, there had to be continuous fear within the U.S. public, Eqbal argued. Also, policy makers had to be consistent and not contradict themselves. Terrorists and terrorist states had to incarnate evil and could not become parties to negotiations and arms transfers, lest the American public become confused and question the very rationale of their country’s foreign policy.
3Therefore, long before September 11, 2001, Eqbal had begun analyzing the emerging U.S. foreign policy built around antiterrorism, as discussed in the introduction.
4 His ideas reflect the views of a critical outsider because they broke with the liberal consensus on the subject. Most liberal and conservative commentators viewed terrorism as irrational and terrorists as mad people intent on doing what they perceived to be God’s will. Another problem arises, said Eqbal, when terrorist experts and Western officials do not bother to probe the issue of causation; for most of them, he thought, the phenomenon seems to have grown without identifiable causes. Some viewed terrorism as a manifestation of what Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington called the “clash of civilizations.”
5Varieties of Terrorism
Eqbal’s analysis revolved around four major points: (1) problems with the concept of terrorism; (2) the varieties of terrorism; (3) reasons terrorists act; and (4) what to do about terrorism. He identified five types of terrorism: state, religious, criminal, political, and oppositional—all deserving careful definitions and differentiation. He derided U.S. policy makers for bolstering the international radical Muslim movements by funding, arming, and training their members. As pointed out in the introduction, he predicted that these policies would have a spill-over effect, boomerang to haunt the larger Muslim world, and contribute to the escalating levels of violence there. Russia, the United States, and western Europe would pay the price as well, he argued starting in the late 1980s. He condemned Pakistan’s military secret services for acting as surrogates for the United States by funding, arming, and training first the mujahideen and later the Taliban, who ultimately conquered Afghanistan from Pakistani bases using sophisticated U.S. weapons.
6Because the world economy and other areas of existence were increasingly global in scope, Eqbal was not surprised that terrorism too had become a global enterprise. At the same time, he pointed out that most nonstate terrorists had no revolutionary ideology but rather tended to look back to an often embellished, sometimes fictitious, glorious past, which they transformed into an idealistic vision for the future.
To the embarrassment of established states, Eqbal stressed that state-sponsored terrorism had flourished under the world order promoted in the 1970s and 1980s by the United States and western European states. These states had backed fascistic regimes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, making their leaders heavily armed allies and in the process “committ[ing] a huge amount of terrorist violence.”
7Eqbal did what most other commentators failed to do: he identified some of the causes of nonstate terrorism. First, terrorists needed to be heard, a characteristic of powerless people. Second, their acts were expressions of anger and helplessness. Third, they often felt betrayed (as Osama bin Laden did when America abandoned the U.S.-trained jihadists after the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, as explained in the introduction), a phenomenon tied to a tribal ethic of revenge.
8Eqbal raised finally the question, What can be done about terrorism? First, he advised, avoid double standards and condemn all terrorism, including that of allies and states. Second, concentrate on causes of terrorism and help ameliorate conditions, thereby removing those causes. Third, avoid military solutions because terrorism is a political problem. He argued that “military solutions cause more problems than they solve.”
9 Fourth, the great powers should strengthen the framework of international law. In other words, they should treat terrorist acts as rational behavior subject to rational solutions.
U.S. Policy and Antiterrorism
Understanding that antiterrorism had become the paradigm of U.S. foreign policy, Eqbal was worried that “a single power [the United States] dominates the world militarily and dominates international institutions of peacekeeping and law without countervailing forces.” Because of that domination, the weak and the poor are more vulnerable now, he thought, than during the Cold War. For that reason, he considered the present period, at the end of the twentieth century and beyond, to be much worse than the Cold War period.
10 Because there are no longer checks and balances in place within the international system, the present time is more dangerous for those who are poor and weak.
11Eqbal did not view U.S. power as a permanent phenomenon, though. First, he said, its economic capabilities do not match its military might. Second, the American public does not share the U.S. ruling class’s will to dominate. To dominate in the world, a ruling power has to have an excess of morality, and its rulers have to set examples of uprightness. Without that, rulers cannot commit excesses throughout the rest of the world. Clinton and his shenanigans in the White House would not have been tolerated at the height of the British Empire, Eqbal argued. Americans continuing to like the president, allowing him to stay in power, and even resurrecting his reputation after the sex scandal passed demonstrate that they are not a people with a will to rule over the world.
12 Also, the U.S. population does not want to pay the price in American lives lost to maintain its dominance in the world. It enters wars reluctantly, and since the Vietnam War opponents of intervention have been able to mobilize millions against such policies. As noted earlier, President Ronald Reagan committed U.S. soldiers and organized an international jihadist crusade to help Afghanistan defeat Soviet troops there in the 1980s. Once that was done, the United States lost interest in Afghanistan, creating a power vacuum that the radical Taliban, allied with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, filled. They took over the country, only to provoke a new intervention of U.S. troops to neutralize or eliminate radical Muslims there. The new Afghan government, approved by the Americans and led by President Hamid Karzai (b. 1957), had little real power beyond the capital Kabul and proved to be extremely corrupt, giving the Taliban a chance to regroup and challenge the state for control of large areas of the country.
13 President George W. Bush, erroneously claiming that Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime possessed weapons of mass destruction, orchestrated an invasion of Iraq, with some North Atlantic Treaty Organization support, starting on March 20, 2003. Western troops overturned the state and three years later executed the dictator. Shiites, with close ties to Iran and the majority of the population emerged as the dominant political force in the country and lorded over the once dominant Sunni population. Once again, the U.S. public pressured the president to withdraw U.S. troops, which President Barack Obama did in 2013, leaving a precarious situation wherein sectarian violence has spread.
Eqbal described the early stages of this same process as it had occurred under President Bill Clinton—the imperial presidency thriving amid a great deal of “muck”—and revealed how “deeply flawed” American democracy is. The United States, he argued,
exercises power abroad, often in an arbitrary fashion, frequently in criminal ways that have devastating effects on people’s lives and future. It does so without accountability, at home or abroad. Even officially acknowledged crimes of the American government and officials routinely go unremarked and unpunished. Thus in the last five decades not one president nor one of his high officials has been censured by the congress, convicted by the courts, or investigated by an independent counsel for the myriad crimes they have committed against individuals and peoples abroad. Some of these are officially acknowledged crimes, among which are the multiple attempts to kill Fidel Castro, the targeted killing of some 10,000 Vietnamese under the Phoenix Program, the participation in the overthrow of elected governments such as those of Arbenz [in Guatemala], Mossadegh [in Iran], and Allende [in Chile], and the waging of secret wars that caused the destruction of Laos and Cambodia. All of these were illegal acts, none was carried out with congressional consent, and none was a subject of inquiry and censure. It is this fact which renders the American a narrow and sectarian democracy unworthy, still, of universal respect.
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Eqbal’s anti-imperialism did not abate with age but rather became more focused and fierce. He did not mince his words, spoke what he felt and saw, and in return gained the respect of a wide readership outside of the United States who appreciated his forthrightness.