The United States has betrayed its moral stature as well as its long-term national interests by blindly backing the Saudi Arabian regime and its fundamentalist Sunni allies in their war of aggression against Shi’a Moslems, liberal and moderate Sunnis and Sufis and the Middle East’s Christian minorities. Almost every major Islamic terrorist attack over the past two decades, from Sept. 11 to the genocidal atrocities of ISIS, can be traced directly back to fundamentalist Sunni money-men.
I am speaking from personal experience: During decades of living and working in Afghanistan and a year with the U.S. Army’s Civil Affairs troops in Baghdad, I lost at least 10 close personal friends, including American military personnel and aid workers, liberal pro-Western Afghan intellectuals and members of the Shi’a minority group in Afghanistan, to assassins, suicide bombers and death squads paid and organized by our Gulf Sunni “allies”; in no case did the U.S. government raise a peep of protest, and American journalists remained conspicuously silent.
Last year, Saudi Arabia was the world’s largest purchaser of military hardware, most of it bought from U.S. contractors. Today, those same weapons are being used to kill Shi’as as well as innocent Sunni civilian bystanders in Yemen, Bahrein and elsewhere. The regime in Riyadh talks loudly of its war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but in reality, it is backing both ISIS and its opponents in a cynical game whose ultimate aim is extending Sunni extremism across the Middle East and beyond. One high-up Saudi official recently declared his country’s ambition to annihilate the tens of millions of Shi’a Moslems in the region; no one in the American government or media uttered a word of protest.
The ugly truth of the matter is this: Our foreign policy in the Moslem world is written in dollar signs, in the form of the huge profits “earned” by our military-industrial complex and energy industries. Human rights, democracy, the vision of America as a bright example to the rest of the world count for nothing. My own moment of truth came in the winter of 1984, in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar. Until then, I had believed we were backing the mujahedin freedom fighters against the invading Soviets because we truly believed in the Afghans’ right to independence. Then, the same night I returned from the fighting front in the snowy mountains of eastern Afghanistan, an assassin gunned down my dear friend Professor Syed Majrooh, who ran the press office for the Afghan resistance. I had naively believed that the professor was under the protection of the U.S. government, who shared his belief in a post-war Afghanistan that was democratic, peaceful, with secular Western values.
Later, I learned that his killer was a member of the radically sectarian anti-Western guerrilla party headed by the odious Heckmatyar Gulbuddin, favorites of both the Saudis and the Pakistani military and, coincidentally, recipients of the lion’s share of U.S. military aid, despite the fact they spent more time battling moderate resistance forces and killing Western aid workers and reporters than they did fighting the Soviets. They continued to be the favorites of the policymakers in Washington and the CIA, even after Professor Majrooh’s death. I will never forget arriving at the profesor’s office minutes after his death. The front gate and wall were soaked with his blood; I had been scheduled to meet him that same evening but was too exhausted from my journey and put it off till the next morning.
I am sure the Saudis, Pakistanis and their Afghan terrorist puppets were pleased with their night’s work, and if their tennis-playing, martini-quaffing CIA friends in Islamabad cared, they never said a word. I guess it was just the price of doing business in modern America; what was a poor little country like Afghanistan worth, anyway? Like the victims of today, the U.S. service personnel and aid workers killed by our so-called allies, and the vast majority of moderate Moslems who still reject terrorism and somehow have faith in human rights and progress and find themselves betrayed by those they placed their faith in.
My friend Professor Majrooh was expendable: a nobody in the eyes of the Realpolitik claque inside the Beltway and beyond. I may be foolish, an out-of-date innocent, but I can’t help thinking it is all very, very sad; and I will never forget those dead friends, or forgive those who betrayed them and everything our country once stood for.
Rob Schultheis has traveled in Afghanistan and Pakistan on and off since 1972, most of the time as a reporter and human-rights investigator. He is the author of Night Letters: Inside Wartime Afghanistan and Hunting Bin Laden, as well as articles for Time Magazine, The New York Times and other publications. He spent nine months embedded with a six member U.S. Army Civil Affairs team in Baghdad, recorded in a third book, Waging Peace. He lives in Telluride. Reach him at robschultheis1@gmail.com.
