“In the course of the Cold War, the US promoted Islamic fundamentalism aς a weapon of anti-communism against the trend of modernist Islam, which is for the establishment and development of a secular democratic state, allowing communist parties to exist and staying neutral between the US and Soviet Union.”
It is not surprising if many people wonder immediately why the Al Qaeda headed by Osama bin Laden carried out the 9-11 attacks despite the previous fact that it had been developed and assisted by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to embed itself among the Taliban in order to fight the Soviet social-imperialists when these invaded and occupied Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.
At this point, it is necessary to explain the complicated history and complicated relations between US imperialism and the Islamic fundamentalists. They can easily agree on anti-communism but they retain their respective obsessions and contempt for each other. The Islamic fundamentalists like Al Qaeda are acutely aware that US imperialism is merely using them for its own hegemonic purposes but that they in turn can use it and attack it upon their own judgment.
The CIA has encouraged criminal jihadist groups to harp on the line of Islamic fundamentalism such as establishing a theocracy and the primacy of Islamic law, hating communists, atheists and non-Islamic believers and being extremely intolerant of or violent against those who espouse and exercise the freedom of thought and belief and the equal rights of women in opposition to the fine tradition of modernist Islam which is anti-colonial and anti-imperialist and which respects and allows the revolutionary united front of the Islamic believers with the bourgeois nationalists and communists and the establishment and development of a modern secular and democratic state.
In the course of the Cold War, the US promoted Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon of anti-communism against the trend of modernist Islam, which is for the establishment and development of a secular democratic state, allowing communist parties to exist and staying neutral between the US and Soviet Union. For example, the US succeeded in using the ultra-reactionary Islamic groups like Masjumi to stir up regional rebellions in Indonesia against the Sukarno government, destroy the NASAKOM united front of nationalists, religious believers, socialists and communists and cause the massacre of millions of Indonesians in 1965-67.
In combination with the Israeli Zionists, the US imperialists have also used in their interest the Sunni-Shia divide or the Arab-Persian divide as when they used the Saddam regime to attack Iran when it nationalized US oil and other enterprises. More relevant to our current topic, we must recall that the US assisted and used the mujahedin, the Taliban and Al Qaeda to oppose the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. But the Al Qaeda never forgot that the US was always acting in its own interest as an imperialist superpower and as spearhead of the “evil crusade against Islam”.