United States–Al-Qaeda Relations

United States–Al-Qaeda relations, as reconstructed by Noam Chomsky, are not a simple story of an external enemy confronting an uninvolved power. He traces the network associated with Osama bin Laden to the armed forces recruited, trained, and supported by the United States and its partners in the 1980s, then follows the reversal by which fighters once mobilized against Soviet forces came to oppose American deployments. After the September 11 attacks, he argues, that history was obscured by the personification of the enemy and a response whose purposes extended beyond disrupting terrorism.

Origins in the Afghan War

Chomsky locates the relationship’s formative phase in the covert campaign organized around the war in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the CIA worked with Pakistan’s services and those of other countries, including Saudi Arabia and Britain, to recruit, train, and arm some of the most extreme Islamist militants available for a holy war against Russian forces. He stresses that many of those later called “Afghans” were not from Afghanistan; Osama bin Laden was among them.

He gives the network a longer and politically contested prehistory. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, covert support for the mujahideen began in 1979, before Soviet forces entered Afghanistan. Brzezinski later described the strategy as an effort to draw the Russians into what he called the “Afghan trap”; six months later, Soviet forces entered to support the Afghan government. Chomsky reports that the United States and its allies assembled a mercenary army that may have numbered one hundred thousand or more, recruiting from militant circles across many countries. The scale and recruitment of this force, he argues, matter to understanding the later network: it was not simply a locally rooted Afghan formation.

The campaign was not limited to the battlefield in Afghanistan. Chomsky says Osama bin Laden joined the forces during the 1980s and became involved in financial networks that probably continued to exist. He also cites other violent episodes involving elements that relied on the same groups: the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who had played a decisive role in their establishment, and a 1983 suicide attack that may have been connected to the same forces and helped precipitate the American withdrawal from Lebanon. These episodes complicate any account in which the network’s later violence appears only after its original sponsors had left the scene.

Victory, Reversal, and the Network’s New Enemies

In 1989, the forces won their holy war in Afghanistan and drove out the Soviet occupiers. Chomsky describes the subsequent reversal in terms of American military presence in Saudi Arabia. Once that presence became permanent, bin Laden and his associates treated it as comparable to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and turned their weapons against the United States. Chomsky notes that the reversal had a precedent: American forces in Lebanon had already become a target in 1983.

The United States was not, in this account, the network’s only or principal regional enemy. Chomsky identifies Saudi Arabia and Egypt as its main adversaries, and describes the group’s stated objectives as overthrowing governments it regarded as non-Islamic in those countries and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. He also follows the militants beyond Afghanistan: after that war, fighters turned their attention to places such as Chechnya and Bosnia, where Chomsky says they received at least tacit American support and a welcome from local governments. In Bosnia, many Islamic volunteers obtained citizenship in recognition of their military service.

This history underlies Chomsky’s distinction between direct and indirect responsibility. He does not say that the September 11 attacks were a direct consequence of American policy; he calls the indirect connection clear. He argues that the attackers probably came from a terrorist network whose roots lay in the mercenary armies organized, trained, and armed by the CIA, Egypt, Pakistan, French intelligence, Saudi funding, and other participants. The network’s origins, he emphasizes, are murky in important respects, but its connection to the earlier forces is central to his account.

From Proxy Forces to a Transnational Threat

Chomsky portrays the postwar network as dispersed rather than as a neatly bounded organization. In his view, it is difficult to penetrate because it is decentralized, lacks a clear hierarchy, and extends across much of the world. He cautions that Osama bin Laden’s personal responsibility for particular acts is not necessary to the broader argument: the network he helped lead, formed from forces that the United States and its allies had supported when useful to their own interests, was very likely implicated. Focusing on bin Laden as the embodiment of evil, he argues, is easier than tracing the origins of the crimes or examining the part played by earlier policy.

The account describes the groups’ later activity as geographically wide-ranging. Chomsky cites the 1997 killing of sixty tourists in Egypt, which dealt a severe blow to the local tourism industry, and says the groups had operated for years across North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, western China, Southeast Asia, and the United States. He links this spread to the wars at the end of the 1980s and, following Brzezinski’s account, to the earlier strategy of drawing Soviet forces into Afghanistan. He also points to a broader recruitment environment: despair, anger, and frustration, shared by people across differences of wealth and religious outlook, could generate sympathy for parts of the militants’ message even among those who feared or despised them.

Chomsky therefore treats the relationship as one of unintended consequence as well as sponsorship. A force built for a particular strategic purpose did not remain confined to that purpose; after victory in Afghanistan and a shift in the targets it considered occupiers or illegitimate governments, it became a threat to former sponsors and to other regional powers. The pattern, in his telling, is not a simple chain of command from Washington to later attacks, but a history in which recruitment, weapons, financial networks, and regional conflicts outlasted the original alliance.

The Post-September 11 Response

Chomsky disputes the description of the ensuing campaign as a “war against terrorism” if terrorism is not actually its target. He argues that official American definitions of terrorism resemble the definitions of low-intensity warfare, which he describes as an official United States doctrine: coercive means directed against civilian populations for political, religious, or other purposes. On that basis, he contends that applying a consistent definition would also expose state violence by powerful countries, a comparison that the familiar political language of counterterrorism tends to exclude.

He connects the post-September 11 response to a wider political agenda. Chomsky says the American government would seek to use the crisis to advance militarization, including missile defense and the militarization of space; weaken social-democratic programs; divert attention from globalization’s harms and from environmental and health-care concerns; shift still more wealth toward a small number of people; and suppress public debate and dissent. He also warns that a massive military assault on Muslim populations would answer the wishes of bin Laden and his associates by deepening the cycle of violence. The risk, as he frames it, is that retaliation would produce further suffering both abroad and in the United States and Europe.

His account places the military response within a strategic geography of energy and access. The principal reserves of energy, he says, are concentrated in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, with substantial resources in Central Asia as well. Afghanistan itself is a lesser piece on that strategic board, but pipelines across it had long been discussed as a means of strengthening American influence over Central Asian resources. Before the war in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia was the most secure American base serving the Gulf; the establishment of major bases in Central Asia, which Chomsky identifies as a first, would improve the ability to intervene and help secure control of regional resources. He presents that interpretation as an analysis of strategic purpose, not as a claim based on access to confidential planning documents.

Chomsky further argues that the coalition formed after the attacks did not necessarily represent a change in American policy. He recalls the Clinton administration’s 1993 formulation that the United States would act multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary, a position later reiterated by Ambassador Madeleine Albright and Defense Secretary William Cohen. The stated interests included access to key markets, energy sources, and strategic resources. In his view, the need for a coalition might soften official rhetoric, but coalition members were expected to support American policy quietly rather than participate in its direction; Washington retained the right to act as it chose and avoided relying on international institutions where the law would require them.

Political Uses and Limits of the Relationship

The post-attack framework, Chomsky argues, helped extend military power abroad and repressive authority at home. He says governments including Russia, China, and Turkey used the attacks to intensify or legitimize severe policies, while Israel saw room for increased force against Palestinians with stronger American backing. In the United States, he describes measures presented as counterterrorism as a way to discipline the public and advance policies opposed by much of the population, serving what he characterizes as the narrow interests of large corporations with influence over the Bush administration.

He points to the establishment of major American military bases in Central Asia as a lasting consequence. These bases, in his analysis, supported a contemporary “Great Game” over regional resources and complemented a network of installations surrounding the Gulf’s energy reserves, stretching from the Pacific to the Azores. The strategic argument is reinforced by his account of the administration’s conception of the new campaign as an opportunity to consolidate an already overwhelming military advantage and demonstrate global dominance. Chomsky recounts that, during Prince Abdullah’s visit to the United States, the Saudi prince pressed the administration to heed Arab reactions to American support for Israeli repression. He says American officials answered that they did not concern themselves with what he or other Arabs thought, and he cites press accounts in which officials framed the Afghanistan operation as a demonstration of American capacity and firmness.

The same logic, Chomsky suggests, appeared in the 1999 bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton explained in terms of preserving NATO’s credibility. He interprets such demonstrations as efforts to show what the United States could do to states that failed to follow its rules. He presents the proposed strategic meaning of the Afghanistan bombing cautiously: without confidential documents, he says it is reasonable to imagine that such consequences had been calculated and that warning the world was a principal aim. That qualification matters to his analysis: the argument links observable deployments and public statements to a strategic reading, while acknowledging that the underlying deliberations are not directly documented.

The relation between the United States and the network thus remains, in Chomsky’s account, both historical and politically contested. The earlier alliance helped create and arm forces that later turned against American deployments; the subsequent campaign was then used, he argues, to justify expanded military reach and domestic controls, while the conditions that had helped make militant recruitment possible remained unresolved. His conclusion is not that every later act can be reduced to a single American decision, but that neither the network’s origins nor the uses made of the crisis can be understood by treating the United States as a detached observer.