http://www.salam.org/policy/bombing-reasons.html
Economic Reasons Behind Bombings
By William O. Beeman, Brown University
Americans must sooner or later face the fact that the bombings
of our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were brought about in part
by the muddled actions of our own government.
The story is worthy of a Tom Clancy novel. It is an open
secret throughout the Middle East that the United States,
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have been supporting the fundamentalist
Taliban in its war for control of Afghanistan for some time. The
United States has never openly acknowledged this connection,
although it has been confirmed by intelligence sources and
charitable institutions in Pakistan.
In U.S. rhetoric regarding the Middle East, the Taliban would
seem to be strange political partners of America. It is a brutal
fundamentalist group that has promulgated a cultural
scorched-earth policy for its nation. It has committed
extensively documented atrocities against enemies and its own
citizens. So why would the United States support it?
Middle Easterners easily understand the answer. The ancient
proverb goes: ``The enemy of my enemy is my friend.'' In
Afghanistan, the dominant ethnic groups are the Pushtuns, who
spill over the border into Pakistan, and the Tajiks, whose
language is a form of Persian.
The Pushtun Taliban have virtually eliminated their Tajik
opposition, which had been heavily supported by Iran. The United
States as an enemy of Iran must be a friend of the Taliban.
This still does not fully explain why the United States would
support such a group, or why Pakistan, itself a fundamentalist
Islamic state, would risk the wrath of Tehran's religious
government. The answer to this part of the question has nothing
to do with religion or ethnicity - only with the economics of
oil.
To the north of Afghanistan is one of the wealthiest oil
fields in the world - on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, in
some of the new republics of the former Soviet Union. American
oil companies are involved in an oil boom larger than any in the
last 40 years in this region.
Untold wealth is at stake, dependent on getting the oil out of
the landlocked region through a warm-water port. The simplest and
cheapest route is through Iran. It is the route favored by all
oil companies, because it involves building a short pipeline and
transshipping the oil through the existing Iranian petroleum
network.
The U.S. government has such massive antipathy to Iran that it
is willing to do anything to prevent this from happening. One
alternate route would be through Afghanistan and Pakistan. The
difficulty is in securing the agreement of the powers that be in
Afghanistan. From the U.S. standpoint, the only way to deny Iran
everything is for the anti-Iranian Taliban to win in Afghanistan
and to agree to the pipeline through their territory. The
Pakistanis, who would also benefit from this arrangement, are
willing to defy the Iranians for a share of the pot.
Enter Osama bin Laden, a sworn enemy of the United States
living in Afghanistan. His forces could see that the Taliban
would eventually end up in the American camp if things proceeded
as they had been.
His bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa (since there were
none in Afghanistan) was accompanied by a message for Americans
to get out of ``Islamic countries.'' By this, he meant
specifically Afghanistan.
The American response was to bomb bin Laden's outposts while
carefully noting that his forces were ``not supported by any
state.'' This latter statement was an attempt to rescue the
Taliban relationship, while at the same time giving the Taliban
leaders the message that they must ditch bin Laden. For good
measure, American missiles also took out a factory in Sudan - a
smokescreen for the real target of their action.
Now matters are really in a mess. Iran has actually issued a
statement supportive of the U.S. actions. The Taliban are angry,
and American citizens across the globe are now the targets of the
most fanatical of Islamic militants. The United States may even
lose the pipeline as a result of this tinkering.
Every time the United States has attempted one of these slick
back-door deals, American citizens got burned. What our
foreign-policy community never seems to learn is that religion
and ideology are as strong a motivating force in this region as
money or guns. We underestimate these factors every time.
William O. Beeman is a Brown University anthropologist
specializing in the Middle East. The piece first ran in The
Providence Journal and was distributed by Knight
Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
