Today is the tenth anniversary of the war on Afghan jihadists. Exactly 10 years ago, the United States and its allies declared war on a Taliban government for failing to deliver up al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Ladin to American justice.
Allow me to use less reverential words. We civilised Westerners decided we’d had enough of barbarians flying planes into our skyscrapers, killing thousands of our civilians. And hence we sent our own planes to drop huge bombs on their villages and towns.
Australia was and remains part of that allied force. A number of Australian troops have died, but the closest thing we’ve had to an Afghan invasion of Australia is a few hundred fishing vessels carrying desperate Afghans from Indonesia.
It’s all so ironic. But for those of us born before the mid-80’s, the ironies don’t end there.
The Allies were fighting a set of Taliban militias led by people who, hardly two decades previously, had fought on our behalf. Mulla Omar, the head of the Taliban, was a former fighter for the Hizb-i-Islami, an Afghan faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and one of many factions the West and its allies backed in pro-Western Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union.
I spent my late primary and entire secondary school years caught up in this Western anti-Soviet jihadi consensus. I was in Year 9 when I became addicted to Rose Tattoo’s powerful anthem I Wish. Here’s what lead singer Angry Anderson had to say about the Afghan jihad.
I wish I was a hero
Fighting for the rights of man
Wish I was a tribesman in
In the hills of Afghanistan
I wish I was a soldier
Fighting for the peace …
Fighting insanity, inhumanity.
In July last year, ABC Radio National religious broadcaster Rachael Kohn introduced me on a program as 'a former jihad enthusiast'. Somehow I doubt Angry Anderson and I were alone in regarding the Afghan jihadists as warriors for peace or a war on insanity and inhumanity. In those days, no one spoke of jihad as a euphemism for terrorism or suicide bombing. The only religious extremists on the radar were the Libyan-backed IRA and the Iranians led by Ayatollah Khomeini. But the Afghans were heroes.
The war on the Soviets during the 1980s was a conservative jihad, supported by just about anyone who wasn’t a communist and loudly and proudly promoted by the political Right. Indeed, it was assumed that anyone who opposed the Afghan jihad was a communist or a fellow traveller.
The late President Reagan, perhaps the biggest jihadist of his time, welcomed Afghan militia leaders to the White House. Imagine what would happen today to men in turbans and sporting big beards if they came anywhere near the White House.
Afghan jihadist representatives openly raised funds in Western capitals. A former Afghan ambassador to Australia was spreading the message of jihad in mosques and churches and public gatherings and on TV and radio (and no doubt Liberal and National Party branch meetings) across the country. Jihadi texts which are today banned as terror tracts were then being printed and distributed in Western cities.
The Soviet troops behaved insanely in Afghanistan. Soviet military tactics involved attacks on civilians, especially children. Entire Afghan villages were destroyed. A corrupt puppet government was installed by Moscow. Millions of Afghans poured into Pakistan and Iran. The region was transformed. Human rights actually meant something in the West. Or maybe I was too young to remember Vietnam.
The man who worked behind the scenes to bring this jihad to the centre of world attention was a congressman who represented the second district of east Texas in the US House of Representatives from 1973 to 1996. As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Wilson helped secure huge sums of money for the various Afghan factions collectively known as mujahideen, a term which in those days was used to mean 'freedom fighters'.
Men like Charlie Wilson funded and fostered not merely the military but also the ideological side of this war. Communism was presented as anti-religion. Islam and Christianity were allies in the fight for freedom. Those conservatives who so often today demonise Islam were back then the biggest jihadists.
Wilson also warned his anti-communist allies of what could happen if they ignored Afghanistan after the Soviets defeat. He tried in vain to convince his colleagues in Congress and the President that the US now needed to rescue and repair Afghanistan in much the same way as it did Western Europe after the Second World War. They ignored his pleas. 'These things happened and they changed the world,' Wilson remarked, 'Then we f-cked up the end game'.
And young Australians are risking – and in some cases giving – their lives to clean up the mess Wilson insisted America needed to do back over two decades ago.
Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney based lawyer and blogger.