Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (12 page)

Even before the Clark Amendment was repealed, the United States did understand the high political cost of supporting terrorism openly; it thus continued covert—alongside overt—support to terrorist and prototerrorist movements. An example during Reagan’s second term was the provision of $13 million’s worth of “humanitarian aid” to Unita, followed by another $15 million in “military assistance.” Because South African assistance to Unita dried up following the end of apartheid and the internal Angolan settlement in May 1991—and in spite of the fact that the Cold War was over—the United States stepped up assistance to Unita. The hope was that a combination of terrorism and political organization would deliver a political victory in Angola, as it had in Nicaragua, where the counterrevolutionary coalition had triumphed at the polls. The logic was simple: if only the level of collateral damage could be made unacceptably high, the people would surely vote the terrorists into power as the price of peace.

By any reckoning, the cost of terrorism in southern Africa was high. A State Department consultant who interviewed refugees and displaced persons concluded that Renamo was responsible for 95 percent of the instances of civilian abuse in the war in Mozambique, including the murder of as many as ten thousand civilians. A 1989 United Nations study estimated that Mozambique suffered an economic loss of approximately $15 billion between 1980 and 1988, a figure five and a half times its 1988 GDP. When it came to Angola, Africa Watch researchers documented Unita strategies aimed at starving civilians in government-held areas, through a combination of direct attacks, kidnappings, and planting land mines on paths used by peasants. The extensive use of land mines put Angola—alongside Afghanistan and Cambodia—in the ranks of the most mined countries in the world, with amputees conservatively estimated at more than fifteen thousand. UNICEF calculated that 331,000 civilians died of causes directly or indirectly related to the war. And the UN estimated the total loss to the Angolan economy from 1980 to 1988 at $30 billion, six times the country’s 1988 GDP.

Political terror had brought a kind of war never before 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-gang them into recruits. Terrorism distinguished itself from guerrilla struggle by making civilians its preferred target. If left-wing guerrillas 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.

“Constructive Engagement”

America’s role when it came to perpetuating the reign of terror that Renamo unleashed in Mozambique and that Unita periodically resorted to in Angola was one of political support. We have seen that the United States openly backed Unita but was careful never to associate itself with Renamo. The State Department even documented and denounced acts of terror by Renamo. The United States did, however, warmly support the South African regime, which directly nurtured Renamo, Africa’s first genuine terrorist movement, from birth to maturity. The Reagan administration called that embrace “constructive engagement,” a term coined by then assistant secretary of state for Africa, Chester Crocker. Without American political support, the South African government could not have continued to prop up a terrorist movement in a newly independent African country for more than a decade and done so with impunity.

The point of constructive engagement was to bring South Africa out of political isolation so as to better tap its military potential in the war against militant—and pro-Soviet—nationalism. The salvage operation began at the government level, with South African being rehabilitated in those multilateral institutions outside the Soviet orbit and under U.S. tutelage. As a curtain-raiser, in 1982 the United States urged the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to grant South Africa $1.1 billion in credit, an amount that William Minter notes happened to be equal to the increase in South African military expenditure from 1980 to 1982. In an effort to bolster public support for constructive engagement, the South African government made numerous soft investments in the U.S. media, which were ultimately exposed; the case came to be known as Muldergate, after the apartheid regime’s minister of information,
Cornelius Mulder. Muldergate included investigation of assorted South African government investments in 160 to 180 secret media projects, including in the
Washington Times
, owned by the Unification Church; the
Sacramento Union;
UPITN, “the second largest newsfilm producer and distributor in the world … jointly owned by United Press International and Independent Television News of Britain”; and “the politically well-connected” public relations firm of Sydney S. Baron and Company. Muldergate projects also provided direct benefits to leading conservative individuals and organizations, such as Christian-right “ministries.” In 1986, U.S. evangelical broadcasters “began a pro-South Africa publicity campaign, in collaboration with the South African government.” No less a personality of the Far Right than Jerry Falwell spoke publicly on behalf of South African president P. W. Botha and pledged to work to defeat a proposed sanctions bill.

Constructive engagement made for an overall policy context that shaped relations between the United States, apartheid South Africa, Unita, and Renamo. Though the relationship between patron and proxy was always unequal, it was never wholly one-sided. The U.S. endorsement enabled South Africa to act with impunity, but the South African government also used the relationship strategically. It continued to take initiatives that would consolidate relations with the right wing in and out of government. The same was true of Unita in its relations with South Africa and the United States and, to a lesser extent, of Renamo. In effect, constructive engagement recast South African regional policy through a sophisticated blend of covert and overt operations: in Mozambique, for example, South Africa combined an official peace accord—the 1984 Nkomati Agreement—with continued clandestine material support for Renamo terrorism. Less than a year after Nkomati, Mozambican forces captured a set of diaries belonging to a member
of the Renamo leadership; the Vaz Diaries detailed continued South African Defense Forces support for Renamo.

Constructive engagement clearly delayed political reform in South Africa by at least a decade. Before the United States encouraged South Africa to intervene in Angola, South Africa’s own version of détente with independent Africa had come a long way. Prime Minister John Vorster explained the new strategy to
Le Monde:
“Domestic politics must not obstruct international cooperation.” Pretoria’s initial response to the approach of independence in Mozambique was not to withdraw into a tight defensive circle, which Boer settlers called the laager, but to open up to the possibility of regional reform. Instead of yet again increasing its support to Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI)—which had hitherto included the presence of “about two thousand” South African policemen in Rhodesia from 1967 to 1975—Pretoria prepared for a transition to majority rule in the former British colony. “South Africa, in search of détente with Black Africa, is prepared to ditch us,” the head of Rhodesian intelligence wrote in his diary on December 1, 1974.

The era of constructive engagement coincided in South Africa with a period of rising popular resistance in the decade that followed the 1976 Soweto uprising. Yet the partnership with the United States reinforced those in South African ruling circles who gave priority to fighting the Cold War. As voices calling for internal reform were marginalized domestically and were ignored internationally, the South African military tightened its hold over governmental processes and shifted its regional policy from détente to “total onslaught.” The militarization of the apartheid regime and its regional policy is amply detailed in the five-volume report of the postapartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The regional shift from accommodation to aggression echoed a
similar global shift in the policy of the Reagan administration, from “containment” to “rollback.”

It goes without saying that the Cold War was fought by two superpowers, and both subordinated local interests and consequences to global strategic considerations, but here I am only concerned with the United States. My limited purpose is to illuminate the ways in which the United States embraced terror as it prepared to wage the Cold War to a finish.

The United States and Low-Intensity Conflict

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 U.S. war strategy. It was, first of all, a recognition that the dominant threat to U.S. strategic interests came not directly from Soviet troop concentrations in Europe, but indirectly from Third World insurgencies, which Washington thought were Soviet proxies. “Given the proposition that low-intensity conflict is our most likely form of involvement in the Third World,” Colonel John D. Waghelstein, former head of the U.S. military group in El Salvador and a leading proponent of LIC, wrote in
Military Review
, “it appears that the army is still preparing for the wrong war by emphasizing the Soviet threat on the plains of Europe.” Second, LIC signaled a determination to move from a defensive posture of “deterrence” to an offensive one. The five years that followed defeat in Vietnam were marked by a string of ideological defeats in at least a dozen other countries, including Angola, Mozambique, Iran, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Grenada.

The essence of the Reagan doctrine was “rollback.” Instead of coexistence or containment, it advocated a determined, sustained,
and aggressive bid to reverse defeats in the Third World. The rallying cry came in 1980 from a Republican group called the Committee of Santa Fe. Observing that “containment of the Soviet Union is not enough,” it concluded: “It is time to sound a clarion call for freedom, dignity and national self-interest which will echo the spirit of the people of the United States. Either a Pax Sovietica or a world-wide counter-projection of American power is in the offing. The hour of decision can no longer be postponed.”

The intellectual argument for rollback, one that made it respectable in polite circles, came from the neoconservative academic Jeanne Kirkpatrick, first in an article titled “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” and then in a book by the same name. Kirkpatrick’s argument connected Soviet global expansion with Third World revolutions in a causal relationship. Third World revolutions, she claimed, are illegitimate since they are the products of Soviet expansion rather than of local historical forces fighting repressive dictatorships. Kirkpatrick then drew a distinction between two kinds of dictatorships, left-wing (“totalitarian”) and right-wing (“authoritarian”). The difference, she argued, was that totalitarian dictatorships are incapable of reforming from within and so have to be overthrown forcibly from without, whereas authoritarian dictatorships are open to internal reform, which can be tapped through constructive engagement. The intellectual importance of Kirkpatrick’s argument cannot be exaggerated. By giving a rationale for why it is fine to make friends with right-wing dictators while doing everything to overthrow left-wing governments, she solved the moral problem associated with rollback.

After Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the new secretary of state, Alexander Haig, declared, “The escalating setback to our interests abroad, and the so-called wars of national liberation, are putting in jeopardy our ability to influence world events.” When
reelected in 1984, Reagan confirmed in his speech to the nation: “The tide of Soviet Communism can be reversed. All it takes is the will and the resources to get the job done.”

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. In his 1985 State of the Union address, President Reagan boldly pledged to assist anti-Communist forces fighting pro-Soviet governments, “on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua.” Covert LIC operations were to be carried out by specially trained Special Operations Forces. The SOF annual budget had fallen from a peak of more than $1 billion during the heyday of the Vietnam War to a low of less than $100 million in fiscal year 1975. Under Reagan, there was an unprecedented peacetime expansion of the SOF budget, reaching about $1.5 billion in fiscal-year 1986, with even higher projections for the following years. SOF funds had a distinct advantage over those for CIA covert operations: “The Pentagon is not required to report details of the SOF’s activities to Congress.”

A series of developments in 1985-1986 formalized the shift to LIC as the main military strategy. Beginning with the establishment of a Joint (Army/Air Force) Low-Intensity Conflict Project (JLIC) in 1985, it led to a 1986 publication of a thousand-page report on concepts, strategy, guidelines, and application in the Third World. That same year, 1986, the Pentagon held its first conference on low-intensity warfare and established the Army/Air Force Center for Low-Intensity Conflict, both to “elevate awareness” and to “improve the Army/Air Force posture for engaging in low-intensity conflict.” This double reformulation of U.S. policy—defining the
Third World as the core battlefield and moving to the offensive—became widely known as the Reagan Doctrine. With it began an idealization—and
ideologization
—of counterrevolutionary forces and their choice weapon, terror. This was particularly so with regard to the contras in Nicaragua, Unita in Angola, and the mujahideen in Afghanistan. These forces, Secretary of State George Shultz declared in a major address in 1985, are part of a “democratic revolution” that is “sweeping the world today.”