BANGKOK: The year is 1985. The Cold War between the world’s two superpowers is unknowingly at its climax. The Soviet Red Army is bogged down in a nasty guerrilla war after occupying Afghanistan five-years earlier.

“They were very ferocious-looking bearded men with turbans, looking like they came from another century,” recalled Pakistani scholar Eqbal Ahmad, speaking to a University of Colorado crowd in 1998.

“President (Ronald) Reagan received them in the White House. After receiving them, he spoke to the press. He pointed towards them and said, “These are the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers.”

“These were the Afghan mujahideen,” said Ahmad. “Mr bin Laden was only a few years ago, the moral equivalent of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.”

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda have become household names. But where did they come from, and why the murderous hatred for America?

About 5 per cent of the Al Qaeda network consists of Afghan guerrillas who defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan, says Professor Rohan Gunaratna from Singapore’s Institute of Strategic Studies.

“It is only the core leadership of Al Qaeda who fought the Soviets. Almost all fighters are trained by those who fought in the Soviet period,” said Gunaratna, author of “Inside Al Qaeda”.

According to Australian journalist John Pilger, former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski urged then-president Jimmy Carter to support the Afghan mujahideen, and he agreed by supplying $500 million in 1979.

“The goal was to lure Moscow ... into the ‘trap’ of Afghanistan,” writes Pilger in The Guardian. “For 17 years, Washington poured $4 billion into the pockets of some of the most brutal men on earth, with the overall aim of exhausting and ultimately destroying the Soviet Union in a futile war.”

A recruitment drive was launched throughout the Muslim world. Between 1986 and 1992, tens-of-thousands of militants were trained by the CIA and British MI6 in Pakistan, supported by its intelligence service, the ISI, reports Pilger.

“Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone, and continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn (from Afghanistan) in 1989.”

After defeating one of the world’s superpowers, the decision by the so-called “Arab Afghans” to stridently oppose the other occurred in 1990, after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

Osama bin Laden, back in his homeland Saudi Arabia after volunteering for jihad against the Soviets, offered to raise an army of Afghan war veterans to defend his country against Saddam’s forces.

According to Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, to bin Laden’s dismay Saudi King Fahd rebuffed his offer, and instead invited the US military into the Islamic world’s holiest land.

While Saudi Arabia had been an ally of the US since the 1930s, the stationing of American troops in the land of the two holy places — Makkah and Madina — was a desecration that Osama bin Laden and his cadres would not accept.

When the US military bases in Saudi Arabia became permanent after Saddam’s ouster from Kuwait in 1991, Al Qaeda was born. Osama and the Arab Afghan warriors — once US armed, trained and funded — were now described as “Islamic blowback” by the CIA. The holy war against America had begun.

On February 22, 1998, Osama issued an edict calling for attacks on all Americans, including civilians, and announced the creation of the “International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders”, in association with extremist groups from Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

“For over seven years, the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbours, and turning its bases ... into a spearhead through which to fight the neighbouring Muslim peoples,” the edict, translated by the Federation of American Scientists, said.

“The American imposes himself on everyone. Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington,” Osama warned later.

Al Qaeda demands all Americans, military and civilian, vacate the entire Muslim world. Osama also wants the US to halt its support for Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians.

Journalist and University of Michigan professor Lawrence Pintak says: “For the past two years, Americans — and their president — have been asking the question, ‘Why do they hate us?’ But they have not wanted to hear the answer, which lies, in part, in the blood-soaked soil of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

Osama bin Laden also views the treatment of Iraqi civilians as a crime against Islam, after the deadly imposition of economic sanctions during the 1990s.

“By the testimony of relief workers in Iraq, the American-led sanctions resulted in the death of more than one million Iraqi children. All of this is done in the name of American interests. We believe that the biggest thieves in the world and the terrorists are the Americans,” Osama says.

Leaders of the US-led “war on terror” see the conflict with Al Qaeda much differently.

“This enemy holds no territory, defends no population, is unconstrained by rules of warfare, and respects no law of morality,” US Vice President Dick Cheney says.

“Such an enemy cannot be deterred, contained, appeased, or negotiated with. It can only be destroyed, and that’s the business at hand.”

Before his death in 1999, Pakistani scholar Eqbal Ahmed — who met Osama bin Laden in the 1980s — had this to say about ‘Islamic blowback’, or what is now commonly known as Al Qaeda.

“The United States has sowed in the Middle East and in South Asia very poisonous seeds. An examination of why they were sown, what has grown, and how they should be reaped is needed. Missiles won’t solve the problem.”—dpa