The Americans were right when they said this would not be a television war. Not because special forces operate by stealth, nor because the Taliban allow only a few chosen journalists inside their territory, but because the real conflict is happening a thousand miles west of Afghanistan in a country that matters far more to America and Britain: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
In official statements, the Americans thank their Saudi friends for “intelligence co-operation” and for allegedly arresting terrorist suspects. But reality is gradually dawning – the roots of terrorism reach deep beneath the sands of Arabia. Only now are the Americans and British counting the cost of their long-standing policy to prop up the House of Saud. The bargain struck in the 1940s was simple: Saudi Arabia provided us with oil, and we promised to protect the kingdom against potentially belligerent neighbours, Iran and Iraq.
Defence contracts clinched the deal. Last year alone, Saudi Arabia imported more than US$7bn of weapons, mainly from American and British companies. But all the while, the Saudi regime has been exporting not only Wahhabism – its particularly restrictive brand of Islam – but also the tensions and contradictions of its repressive political system.
From a suburban house in Cricklewood, north-west London, Saad al-Fagih runs a one-man opposition to the Saudi royal family. The internet keeps him in constant contact with clerics and students back home, who – like the Saudi Osama Bin Laden – date their anger with the House of Saud from the Gulf war, when the infidel American troops were allowed on the same soil as the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
“There was a hot debate within the violent opposition circles between those who wanted to direct violence against the regime, and those who wished to bypass the client and attack the master,” al-Fagih says. “The latter saw that by attacking the puppeteer, the puppets would cease to function. It seems they won the debate.”
The Saudi royal family saw this outcome as a reprieve. It meant that dissatisfaction with their profligacy and corruption could be channelled towards the infidel Americans, while they would use the time to claw back their legitimacy under the banner of Islam. They developed an ambivalent policy. When five US servicemen were killed in a bomb attack in Riyadh in 1995, the Saudis co-operated with the FBI on the initial investigation, but then, before the Americans could conduct interrogations, executed four men who confessed. The suspicion is that they did not want the Americans to hear how widespread was opposition to the US presence, and to conclude that the regime was potentially unstable. They also turned a blind eye to fund-raising for charities that were fronts for Bin Laden and allowed clerics to preach virulent anti-Americanism.
Today, when the US demands that all nations declare themselves “for us or against us”, the Saudi royal family faces an impossible dilemma. Overt support for the Americans will widen the gap between the palace and the street. Most of the hijackers on 11 September were Saudis, and when the World Trade Center fell, Saudi youths sent each other text messages saying: “Congratulations!” But without American protection, the House of Saud is vulnerable to attack from inside and out.
Only now are the American and British governments picking through the archives to see how closely involved the Saudi government was in establishing the Tali-ban. When the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the west believed capitalism had overcome communism, but the Saudis, who had bankrolled the mujahedin fighters whom the CIA trained, saw it as a triumph for Islam.
The Americans pulled out of Afghanistan, but Saudi Arabia stayed. They exported thousands of Korans to the former Soviet states of central Asia, and began to fund Islamist groups that destabilised the emerging post-communist regimes. They poured money into the madrasas in Pakistan, where Afghan boys learnt the tenets of Wahhabism. And faced with a chaotic, divided mujahedin government in Kabul, as well as the threat of renewed Iranian and Russian influence in the region, they joined Pakistan to create the Taliban.
The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid tells how, in 1994 and 1995, the Taliban entertained Saudi princes on bustard hunts. “The Arab hunting parties flew in to Kandahar on huge transport planes bringing dozens of luxury Jeeps, many of which they left behind along with donations for their Taliban hosts,” he writes.
The Taliban used the money to buy weapons and, in 1996, stormed into Kabul in Jeeps. Without Saudi backing, the Taliban would never have ruled Afghanistan.
This is the regime that Britain and the US have sustained as their essential ally in the Middle East, to keep oil flowing and business booming. But it is turning out to be a bad bargain all round. In one internet chatroom, a Saudi man complains about the “special glue” that sticks the Saudi princes to their thrones. An influential mullah is reported in effect to have declared the royal family “infidels”.
The Americans cannot trust the Saudis to support US policy on terrorism, nor to provide stability in the Gulf. “The American relationship with the Saudis will never be the same again,” says one Arab diplomat.
Until 11 September, the US was clear who were its enemies in the Middle East – Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria. Maybe now it would do better to fear its friends.
Lindsey Hilsum is diplomatic correspondent for Channel 4 News
Content from our partners
Related
