Following the introduction to this series, the present article examines the historical context leading to the American unipolar crusade of the 1990s and beyond. It focuses on key regions and events of the late Cold War period that shaped political, social, and military dynamics in southwest Asia and northeast Africa. As noted in the introduction, this series examines the legacy of American influence in eight Muslim countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Our historical outline begins with the Afghanistan and Pakistan region, highlighting the interplay of American and Soviet influence, regional rivalries, and the rise of Islamist militancy as a significant force. From there we move to the Fertile Crescent and Levant, emphasizing the role of American support for Israel, the effects of the Gulf War, and the deepening divisions within the Arab world. Finally, we examine Libya and Sudan, tracing their ideological shifts, regional interventions, and internal conflicts, alongside the roles of Somalia and Yemen in the Cold War’s shifting alliances and subsequent fragmentation.

By outlining these interconnected developments up to the early 1990s, we set the stage for understanding how these historical dynamics paved the way for the securitization and pathologization of the Muslim world under the unipolar American order.

 

Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir in the Late Cold War

The downfall of the Soviet Union saw a wave of triumphalist self-congratulation throughout the West, even as “fundamentalist Islam” was fast replacing communism as the next bane on the horizon.¹ This was nowhere clearer than in Afghanistan, where a bloody occupation that drained Moscow of morale, legitimacy, and resources was primarily opposed by what may be described as Islamist forces.² The most notable contributions to this Afghan insurgency came from rival “fundamentalist” neighbors, military-ruled Pakistan and, to a lesser extent, clerical-ruled Iran. Having played such a major role in the Cold War’s outcome, they would subsequently pay for it when the triumphant West sought a new enemy, pathologizing Muslim grievances broadly and political Islam more specifically as a form of emasculated “Muslim rage.”³

Only a few years earlier, the United States had supported such “rage” directed against the Soviets. While the U.S. did provide significant backing to the Afghan insurgency against the Soviets, it would be inaccurate and an oversimplification to label the entire conflict an “American jihad,” as this denies the agency and independent motivations of the Afghan fighters.⁴ Washington fully backed Islamist militancy, supplying arms and funds to groups it vilified elsewhere. Figures like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdullah Azzam did not see themselves as Western agents, as their primary concern was resisting non-Muslim occupation of Muslim lands. While they fought the Soviet Union in 1980s Afghanistan, they or others from their circles later opposed the U.S. presence in the Arabian Peninsula and its occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Afghanistan and Pakistan had been a tertiary scene of the Cold War, their internal politics and mutual relations interplaying with American-Soviet competition.⁵ Since the loss of its eastern half into what became the modern Bangladeshi state after a war with India, Islamabad had been wary of ethnonationalist movements in its periphery. These, in turn, were enthusiastically supported by Afghanistan’s princely dictator, Daud Khan, after he seized power with communist support in 1973 from his cousin, monarch Mutawakkil Zahir Shah (r. 1933–73). A Pashtun ethnonationalist, Daud hoped to break off the Pashtun-majority northwest of Pakistan and affix it to Afghanistan. But because Pashtuns were generally integrated into Pakistan, with a measure of autonomy in the Waziristan region, Kabul found more success among Baloch ethnonationalists in the more marginalized southwest. In turn, Pakistan supported Afghan Islamists such as Hekmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani, who opposed Daud’s secularist politics.

Though Daud and his Pakistani counterpart Zulfikar Bhutto were sufficiently exhausted by this proxy conflict to attempt an entente, both were swept up and killed by coups. Zulfikar Bhutto was ousted by army commander Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in 1977 and later executed under highly disputed circumstances. Prior to Bhutto’s execution, Daud Khan had been killed in Kabul in 1978 by communist officers who were angered by his attempts to circumvent their authority. The ensuing regime brought in the communist Khalq party, whose first prime minister Hafeezullah Amin (r. 1978-79) emerged at the apex of a frequently bloody labyrinth of factionalism. 

The Amin regime’s attempt to force a communist revolution on Afghanistan, with a brutal assault on anything reminiscent of the old order, soon provoked a mass revolt. Much of the traditional clan elites were uprooted, much of the military defected, and thousands of Afghans took up arms, usually under the banner of Islam and more often than not to the benefit of the established Islamist opposition. This was, at the time, viewed with favor by Washington, whose hopes that the Soviets would be drawn into a quagmire came to fruition in December 1979.⁶ Alarmed at its client’s quandary, Moscow tried to “rescue the revolution” by invading Afghanistan, killing Amin, and installing Babrak Karmal—leader of the rival Parcham—at the head of an uneasy communist coalition with the remaining Khalqis.

Internationally, the Soviet invasion provoked uproar, whipped up predominantly by the United States. Regionally, it enabled Pakistan’s dictator, Zia ul-Haq, to establish himself as a key sponsor of the Afghan mujahideen. This ended foreign isolation over his coup and top-down “Islamizing” policy—a policy that sought legitimacy for the military regime by riding the tiger of Islamist politics then already nascent in Pakistan. Furthermore, it enabled him to pursue broader Pakistani interests inherited from Bhutto, including an embryonic nuclear programme to which a hitherto hostile Washington now turned a blind eye. 

A vastly expanded Pakistani intelligence liaised with and controlled supplies to most of the frequently bickering mujahideen leaders based in Peshawar. Eventually Hekmatyar, whose Hezb-e-Islami was the most disciplined and politically revolutionary party, emerged as a favored beneficiary. To a lesser extent, Iran also supplied assistance to insurgent groups, largely from minority Shias found in the Hazara highlands of central Afghanistan. Not until its war with Iraq was over would Iran assemble most of these fractious groups into the Wahdat coalition.

With the exception of Hezb-e-Islami, most mujahideen groups in Peshawar exercised little control over their field troops.⁷ Burhanuddin Rabbani’s similarly well-resourced Jamiat-e-Islami party, largely comprising non-Pashtun minorities, delegated operations to autonomous field commanders such as Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjshir valley and Ismail Khan in Herat. Massoud was particularly admired abroad for his reversals of several Soviet attacks on the Panjshir valley. Yet, after he unilaterally concluded a brief but controversial ceasefire with the Soviets and tried to form independent field coordination, Hekmatyar accused him of trying to form a regional fiefdom. 

In the war’s latter stages (1986–1992), the military autonomist Massoud and the party centralist Hekmatyar spent more energy fighting one another than the Soviets. Rarely did these quarrels have much to do with ideology: distinctions such as “fundamentalist” and “moderate” used by foreign observers for the insurgents were largely politicized and inconsistent. As a rule, most insurgents called for the downfall of the communists; some, notably Hezb and Jamiat, advocated a revolutionary Islamic state, whereas others advocated for the return of the monarchy, and still others adopted intermediate and shifting positions.⁸

Afghan intelligence chief Mohammad Najibullah showed sufficient cunning and ruthlessness that he was promoted in 1986 to replace the hapless Karmal by Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. With the Khalq-leaning army in disarray, Najibullah based his strategy in large part on hiring or buying off militias, including both communists and defected insurgents, under the euphemism of “reconciliation.” Militia leaders were given fiefdoms in return for counterinsurgency—most infamously Abdul-Rasheed Dostum in the north—leading one scholar to describe the resultant fragmentation as “statecide.”⁹ As one of the Parcham party’s few Pashtun leaders, Najibullah also tried to galvanize Pashtun and other Pakistani minoritarian dissent against Zia ul-Haq to exact a price for his support of the mujahideen.

Zia ul-Haq long evaded growing dissent against an interminably extended military rule that tired even much of his original support base. By the time he finally conceded to a non-party election, he had moved to clip the wings of any elected prime minister in a referendum linking his own presidential prerogative to the interests of Islam. Much of his attention was focused on preventing a return of the Bhuttos: Zulfikar’s vengeful sons, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, had been hired by Najibullah as rather clumsy insurgents, but their sister Benazir marshaled legal opposition to the regime. This gave the People’s Party she led—historically a putatively socialist platform, though dominated by landowners, including the Bhuttos themselves—a more liberal tinge that sold well in the West.¹⁰

The opposition to Zia ul-Haq rallied among secularist constituencies in Pakistani society: both liberals such as Benazir and ethnonationalists, against whom the regime tried to play off ethnic activists of other groups. Close to the Gulf states, the regime was also suspicious of Shia groups because of the influence of Iran, against whose loyalists the regime enabled the rise of increasingly sectarian Sunni groups as a counterweight. Coupled with the rising availability of weapons, such “divide-and-rule” tactics were a recipe for disaster. The 1985 election was followed by years of sectarian clashes between Sunni and Shia groups as well as even bloodier clashes between ethnonationalists of Sindhi and Muhajir backgrounds. Sindhi ethnonationalism tended to oppose the regime; Muhajir ethnonationalism—epitomized by Altaf Hussain’s strongly centralized and brutish Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM)—supported it. This turned Sindh, especially its metropolis Karachi, into an ethnic tinderbox.¹¹

One reason that Pakistan favored Hezb-e-Islami was its effective counterintelligence role against a Kabul that found room to exploit such dynamics. Another reason was HI’s support for operations against India—a cause well beyond Washington’s approval, but one in which Zia ul-Haq specialized. From the mid-1980s, when border clashes broke out in the Himalayan heights, Pakistani intelligence funneled support to various Indian dissidents, such as Sikh separatists whose brutal suppression by the Indian regime inflamed broader Sikh dissidence. Islamabad found more fertile ground for an Afghanistan-style insurgency in Indian-occupied Kashmir.

India had fought her first war against Pakistan over Kashmir, and indefinitely postponed a long-promised referendum over its status. Instead, New Delhi had manipulated Kashmiri politics to maintain the region as a fiefdom for its loyalists, most famously the Abdullah family. Islamabad had hitherto tended to clip the wings of Kashmiri militants, especially when—as in the 1970s—it felt it could not afford a standoff with India. Yet Zia ul-Haq provided generous support and by the late 1980s a full-scale insurgency was underway in the valley. By the early 1990s Hizbul-Mujahideen had taken the lead.¹²

With Gorbachev having signaled his intent to withdraw from Afghanistan and reform the Soviet system to Washington’s liking, the United States soon hurried to wrap up the conflict. The resultant 1988 Geneva Accord stipulated a Soviet withdrawal but did not bar their support for Najibullah. This came as an irritation to mujahideen leaders and Zia ul-Haq himself. Zia ul-Haq would not live to see the Soviet retreat in which he had played such a key role, since he was soon killed along with much of his coterie in a mysterious plane crash.¹³ His top civil and military lieutenants, Ghulam Ishaq in the presidency and Aslam Baig in the military, arranged an ensuing election that, to their dismay, saw a handy win for Benazir Bhutto.

Benazir’s first term illustrated the rifts between the establishment and her party, but also the fact that Washington—slowly but surely replacing communism with “Islamic fundamentalism” as its main nemesis—was eager to dismantle or contain “jihadi” elements in Pakistan. With American encouragement, Benazir pushed a détente with India and tried to stamp her control over the military establishment,¹⁴ in the process loosening their influence over the Afghan insurgent factions in Peshawar. These groups were already scrambling to form a “shadow government,” led by the militarily weak compromise candidate Sibghatullah Mujaddidi, in preparation for the communists’ downfall, but met a crushing defeat when they tried to capture Jalalabad immediately after the Soviet withdrawal in spring 1989.¹⁵

This gave Benazir a handy pretext to clip the wings of Pakistani intelligence, to the ire of both Ghulam Ishaq and much of the military. She survived a parliamentary coup, whipped up by parts of the military, in autumn 1989 only to be sacked by Ishaq the next summer. The next election, manipulated by the establishment,¹⁶ went to Punjab premier Nawaz Sharif, who would soon also fall out with his benefactors. One point of divergence was in the now chronically-violent Karachi, where Altaf Hussain’s militia had outlived its use and was targeted by successive regimes, even as the military preferred to crack down on other militias at large. Altaf fled to London in 1992 as the state encouraged a splinter in his group before targeting it under dubious accusations of separatism. Meanwhile, the Pakistani establishment came under subtle but sustained attack from its former American allies, with Islamabad’s nuclear proliferation a key target.¹⁷

In Afghanistan, Najibullah’s survival owed much to continuing Soviet support, including airstrikes and funds, as well as the increasingly frenetic competition between militias in a political landscape that his counterinsurgency had helped fragment. In 1990, Hekmatyar secretly allied with Khalqi defense minister Shahnawaz Tanai in a serious coup attempt, which was only repulsed by calling upon the services of Dostum’s militia. This episode further polarized the opposition: other mujahideen groups fumed that Hekmatyar, so prone to accusing others of treachery, had sided with communists to steal a march behind their backs. A pattern emerged whereby Hezb’s mujahideen rivals would side with Khalq’s communist rivals, Parcham, in various arenas through Afghanistan. Najibullah, meanwhile, tried to placate the Khalqis by emphasizing his Pashtun identity and centralizing power at the expense of the same militias on which he had relied.

This backfired spectacularly when, in early 1992, an irate Dostum sided with Massoud and swept over the north before advancing for Kabul. The disgruntled Parchamis in the capital quickly sided with Jamiat, expelling both Hezb and Khalq. In the wake of Najibullah’s narrow escape, the “shadow government” led by Mujaddidi nominally took over and Pakistan hurriedly mediated the Peshawar Accord. This called for a transition to elections, but Mujaddidi’s hesitation on this point antagonized both Hezb and Jamiat—the largest and most influential groups—who expelled him as Jamiat emir Burhanuddin Rabbani took over with Hezb commander Abdul-Sabur Farid as prime minister and Massoud as defense minister.

This Hezb-Jamiat coalition lasted a mere few weeks: accusing the “mujahideen” government of relying on communist veterans such as Dostum, Hekmatyar allied with Wahdat leader Abdul-Ali Mazari, who protested the government’s refusal to give a disproportionate quarter of parliamentary seats to the Shia minority. By autumn 1992, their attack on Kabul set off a vicious battle. As the capital burned, much of the fragmented Afghan periphery came under the control of disparate, often predatory, militias of both Muslim and communist background. In a West that had so benefited from the 1980s Afghan war, this mayhem was ubiquitously portrayed not as the fairly common outcome of post-war political fragmentation but, often with pomposity, as the inescapable result of “Islamic fundamentalism.”¹⁸

 

Iraq, Syria, and Palestine

Nowhere has American influence in the Muslim world been so obvious and bitterly resented as in the Fertile Crescent and Levant. It may have been the British and French empires that carved up the region between them, but for most of the past seventy years, the United States has provided unconditional and vital support to the neocolonial state of “Israel.” It is precisely mutual opposition to Israel which has traditionally been one of the few political issues with almost universal Muslim agreement. Furthermore, the United States’ drawn out wars with Iraq set off repercussions that continue to reverberate today.¹⁹

The loss of the Holy Land, first to Britain and then, through a mixture of cunning and brutality, to the Zionist movement, is perhaps the single most traumatic event of the 20th Century in the Muslim world.²⁰ The resulting delegitimization of prevalent regional governments contributed to political upheavals, with many purportedly “revolutionary” military coups that claimed to unite the Arab world, but which tended toward personalization and schism. While Cairo, which had a brief and unhappy union with Damascus, saw the most influential coup, it found rivals in the influential but fractious pan-Arab Baath party. The 1960s saw rival wings of the Baath seize power in both Baghdad and Damascus. As both dictatorships sought to stave off rivals, they entrenched themselves in heavily security-bound networks of kinship. In Iraq, it was a Tikriti clique around dictator Hasan Bakr and his forceful cousin Saddam Hussein who dominated the Baath; in Syria, it was defense minister Hafez al-Assad’s “neo-Baath” regime, which rested essentially on his section of the Alawite minority.²¹

Amid such infighting, it is not surprising that the Arab states lost the Sinai, West Bank, and Gaza Strip to Israel within a single crushing week in June 1967. But this failure provided room for Palestinian fighters to take center stage. Yasser Arafat, whose leading Fatah group was often hemmed in by leftist challengers, took over the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO was an umbrella coalition originally founded as a proxy for Cairo, but that now came firmly under the control of Palestinians who avoided committing to any particular suzerain. 

Israel confronted Palestinian activity in neighboring states by applying military and diplomatic pressure on these states, convincing the Jordanian monarchy in 1970–71 to expel Palestinian militants in a bloody stand-off.²² In an increasingly chaotic Lebanon, whose system of power-brokering communitarian elites had been creaking under both leftist and rightwing pressure, the Palestinians were seen as a force multiplier for both leftists and Muslims. Israeli raids and support to far-right Maronites helped usher in a bitter and devastating civil war.²³

Iraq had already been embroiled in a civil war in the 1960s against Kurdish insurgents of the Barzani and Talabani networks who operated in the northern Bashur region.²⁴ Efforts to resolve the conflict failed due competing ethnonationalist movements, infighting among the Kurdish militants themselves, and the disruptive influence of Iran’s monarchy—at that time Israel’s closest regional ally and a long-standing adversary of Iraq. With Kurds sidelined and often oppressed by the majoritarian regimes of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, neighboring rivals would periodically arm one another’s Kurdish dissidents.²⁵ 

In 1974–75, Tehran and Washington incited a Barzani revolt and, when it had outlived its use, abandoned it to the Baathists who displaced large numbers of Kurds in what amounted to ethnic cleansing. Like Baghdad, the neo-Baathists in Damascus would resort to brutal repression; unlike Baghdad, they saw their greatest threat in Syria’s Sunni majority, to whom they would frequently attach most Palestinian groups.

The rival Baathist regimes, along with Cairo, did briefly cooperate when they surprised Israel in the 1973 war. The war also saw oil-producing Muslim states, even historically pro-Western regimes such as Saudi Arabia, impose a blockade in a rare burst of collaboration. Yet barely had the guns fallen silent when these same regimes proceeded to fight over the spoils, courting American vassalage in a process dexterously manipulated by Henry Kissinger. Competing with Tehran, Riyadh took the momentous decision to trade oil in American dollars. In Cairo, Anwar Sadat had intended the 1973 attack essentially to signal his usefulness as a vassal to Washington, to whom he drew closer and closer until reaching a scandalous, American-brokered peace with Israel in 1979.²⁶

Preferring the Soviets and castigating Sadat, Hafez al-Assad nonetheless struck the Palestinians in Lebanon, purportedly to rescue the system from both the Palestinian-backed left and Israeli-backed right, and instead set off a thirty-year occupation. Yet this badly rebounded at home, where Sunni dissidents revolted against Assad. He now faced not only Palestinians, left-wingers, and right-wingers in Lebanon, but a largely Islamist revolt at home.²⁷ Using a minoritarian clique that had long dominated the neo-Baath, he crushed it with incredible savagery in 1982, just before Israel mounted a full-scale invasion of Lebanon. Making for Beirut, their brutal summer campaign briefly expelled Arafat and installed Bachir Gemayel, notorious leader of the far-right Kataeb Party. This victory was crowned when Gemayel’s lieutenant Elias Hobeika, under Israeli watch, attacked undefended Palestinian camps and butchered thousands of civilians.²⁸

This Israeli triumph was ephemeral: Syria’s confederates promptly assassinated their proxy Gemayel. International condemnation—even by the United States’ “moderate” Arab vassals—was so concerted that Washington decided to step in and save Tel Aviv’s face with their own deployment.²⁹ This began a direct American presence in the Muslim world that continues to this day. The American Central Command, then covering the Muslim-majority region of southwest Asia and northern Africa, was first established during this expedition. In Lebanon itself, American presence was briefer, ending after a bloody attack in October 1983, whose culprits were Shia militants who would soon coalesce with Iranian support into Hezbollah.³⁰ In contrast to the older Shia group Amal, backed by the less militant Syrians, Hezbollah fought the Israeli southern occupation along with Lebanese Sunnis and scattered Palestinian remnants.

The Palestinian leadership was more divided than ever in the mid-1980s, when Assad found an opportunity to rid himself of Arafat and immediately funded a major mutiny.³¹ This shared antipathy to Fatah was one reason that led Washington and Tel Aviv to tolerate the Syrian occupation of Lebanon as a more predictable alternative. Assad’s problems were instead internal—his brother Rifaat, who had led his crackdown on the Islamists, attempted a coup—and he now focused on consolidating influence. In the Lebanese arena, Syria manipulated various leaders and assassinated those they could not. One case of such manipulation was the co-optation of Kataeb commander Hobeika, which split the Lebanese far-right to which he belonged into pro-Israeli and pro-Syrian segments.³²

Such effective if cynical tactics prompted a variety of states to see Syria as a necessary manager for the Lebanese arena. These included Saudi monarch Fahd bin Abdul-Aziz, who assigned his Lebanese friend, tycoon Rafik Hariri, to organize a reconciliation in 1989. The Taif Accord of 1989 reconfigured the confessionalist Lebanese system to give the prime ministry and assembly more authority. This reflected a notable agreement between pro-American Riyadh and pro-Soviet Damascus, the latter as both beneficiary and guarantor. The major threat came from army commander Michel Aoun who, backed by the rival Baath regime in Iraq, mounted a bloody assault on the new government.

A far bloodier war had just ended in the Gulf, where the decade had been spent in an extremely costly contest between Iran and Iraq. Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary takeover and installation of a “vilayet-e-faqih” or clerical government in Tehran coincided with Saddam Hussein’s formal takeover in Iraq in 1979, inaugurated with a bloody internal purge of the Baath. Khomeini’s growing support among various Iraqi Shia dissidents, increasingly constrained under Baath rule, and destabilization attempts against Tehran preceded a massive Iraqi invasion of Iran in autumn 1980. Astonishingly, the Iranians managed to not only overcome internal turmoil but, using mass assaults to compensate for Iraqi technological superiority, comprehensively oust the Iraqi army by 1982.³³ Yet rather than drop the matter, in a fit of revolutionary fervor, Iran then invaded Iraq, in whose Gulf region most of the next six years of bloody stalemate would be fought. Though Khomeini would declare the war an “imposed war,” there is no doubt that he took advantage of it internally and played an aggressive role for most of its duration.³⁴

It was this war on their doorstep that prompted the region’s autocratic “Sunni” monarchies to set up the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and to support Saddam Hussein. The “Islamic Republic of Iran” provided a republican model of Islamic governance that threatened to severely undermine the plausibility of the Gulf states’—especially Saudi Arabia’s—claims to govern by Islam through monarchy. By contrast, Iraq’s secular and more predictably dictatorial republic, they could work with. 

Further, Khomeini’s takeover had emboldened many, mostly Shia, dissidents in the Gulf.³⁵ Iraq had already repressed the leading Shia Dawa group—roughly analogous to the Sunni Ikhwan, but far more confrontational toward the Baathists. The Iraqi Dawa had thus decamped to Iran, along with other Shia groups such as that of Baqir Hakim, who declared Khomeini his leader and aimed to repeat his model in Iraq. Iran’s burgeoning elite force—enlarged and emboldened by the Gulf war—also lent him a semi-autonomous military wing called Badr, which comprised a mixture of Shia activists and Iraqi army defectors.³⁶

Coupled with the links that these revolutionary networks had with groups in the Gulf, the region’s autocratic monarchies clamped down hard at home while supporting Iraq against Iran. By contrast, Tel Aviv, who still saw Iraq as the premier regional threat, backed Tehran. Faced with this discord between its Arab and Israeli vassals, Washington opted for a convenient but destructive compromise: openly arming Iraq and surreptitiously selling weapons to Iran until the scandal was revealed in 1987.³⁷

The 1980s Iran-Iraq war was an incredibly destructive affair, particularly among the Kurds. Since 1979, Iraq, aided by Jalal Talabani, had backed Iranian leftist Kurds against Khomeini. After the Iranian Kurds were decisively beaten and with Baghdad itself cracking down, Talabani repaired ties with Iran and revolted against Iraq. As Kurdish militants backed Iranian assaults in the north, the ethnic chauvinism of the Baathists turned on the populace. Saddam’s ruthless cousin and enforcer, Ali Majid, was sent north as governor-general for a vicious crackdown. Both sides had long used chemical weapons—supplied to Iraq in part by the United States—and in spring 1988 thousands of people were killed by gas at the frontline town of Halabja during a brutal crackdown on Kurds. Like Assad’s assault on Syrian Sunnis in 1982, this stunned the Kurdish opposition into momentary defeat, but more seriously destroyed any lingering support in Bashur for the regime. Twenty years earlier, Talabani, justifying his then-alliance with the Baathists, had pointed out that Kurdish rights in Iraq were superior to those of other countries. By the late 1980s the exact opposite was the case.

The bright spot in the 1980s came, unexpectedly, in occupied Palestine, in a widespread and overwhelmingly non-violent uprising, largely independent of the exiled and weakened Palestinian militant groups.³⁸ This “intifada” and a nakedly brutal Israeli response brought to the fore more forcefully than ever the idea of a Palestinian David versus an Israeli Goliath that Zionist apologia, particularly widespread in the United States, sought frantically to obfuscate. The uprising also provided a debut for a rival group, Hamas. 

The Islamist Ikhwan had once been at the forefront of opposition to Zionism, but years of repression by regional dictatorships and protection by pro-American monarchies had forced them to purely civilian activity, often losing defectors to Fatah. In the early 1980s, a more revolutionary inclined group called the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), led by pro-Iranian ideologue Fathi Shiqaqi, had dabbled in militancy but lacked the social base of Ikhwan-oriented Islamists. The foundation of Hamas marked a return to armed resistance for the Islamists and a far bigger challenge to Israel. This drew off social networks and Muslim organizing, often ideologically linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, that Israel had hitherto neglected with their focus on more militant groups like Fatah and PIJ.

Other developments in the early 1990s were dwarfed by the Gulf War. Iraq had long staked a claim to its tiny southern neighbor Kuwait, and when the Sabah monarchy refused to cancel Iraqi war debts, Saddam Hussein decided to annex it. He no doubt wanted to divert increasing unrest in his now massively enlarged but restless military, whence a few coup attempts had emerged since the war with Iran had ended. He was also likely influenced, even as he formally entered negotiations with Kuwait, by the nod and wink he received from the United States: he read the American ambassador April Glaspie’s noncommittal reaction as a green light. That stance changed almost as quickly as the sudden Iraqi invasion, launched in August 1990, that overran Kuwait in a week and threatened the major oil-producing American client, Saudi Arabia.

Overnight, Washington cast Saddam as the world’s premier aggressor, conveniently remembered his heretofore unremarked tyranny, and called for drastic action. To oust him, American President George H. W. Bush—an oilman and spymaster who cared very much about reserving Gulf oil for American use—assembled a coalition with such diverse Arab partners as Riyadh, Damascus, and Cairo. Unbound by Cold War partisanship, Bush proclaimed a “New World Order”—a label that soon became synonymous with the American domination that it was always designed to legitimize. Indeed, the United States blitzed Iraq with such speed that the coalition was purely ornamental—a testament to American supremacy in the rapidly developing unipolar world. The Gulf War was as much a show of American might as it was a defense of Kuwait.³⁹

Despite the swift reconquest of Kuwait, Washington abstained from ousting Saddam in spite of a widespread revolt in Iraq that had, in part, been triggered by an early public message from Bush. A shaken Baath rallied and crushed the largely Shia revolt in the south with pointed brutality,⁴⁰ but the United States hurried to protect Kurdish gains in the north with an aerial embargo. The northern Bashur region thus became an American protectorate where Iraqi dissidents sheltered alongside the two major Kurdish factions. These factions gained a new lease on life and became a cause celebre in the same West that had enabled their destruction at Saddam’s hands just three years earlier.⁴¹

The limits of Iraq’s position, and constraints on the Kurdish presence in Bashur, were made clear both by American aerial cover as well as by the start of what would become a series of Turkish incursions across the border to crush its own Karkeran, leftist Kurdish militants who had escaped to Bashur. The United States opted to impose punishing sanctions on Iraq in the hope that the ensuing misery would force an internal coup against Saddam. Meanwhile, international institutions essentially beholden to Washington also called for Iraq’s disarmament from major weapons programs. Over the course of the 1990s, the regime would outlast this policy at dreadful cost to Iraq’s populace.⁴²

The fallout between Washington and Baghdad had other swift repercussions. Saddam’s defeat essentially ended the challenge of his Lebanese beneficiary Michel Aoun, whom the Syrian army decisively routed in autumn 1990. This cemented Syria’s primacy in the Lebanese arena where the major political positions went to its vassals. Having cemented its primacy in the wider Middle East, Washington turned to “mediation”—essentially, Israeli damage control—on the Palestinian issue. Arafat’s unwise support for Iraq had brought him into the talks on decidedly unfavorable terms, which he nonetheless desperately accepted. The twin issues of isolating Iraq and trying to contain Palestinian militancy on terms favorable to Israel were the two pillars on which American foreign policy in this region would rest at the dawn of the unipolar period.

 

Libya and Sudan

In some ways, Libya and Sudan presented one of the more interesting dynamics of the late Cold War. Both countries had undergone military coups in 1969 led by leaders inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser. Yet, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Jafar Numairi of Sudan quickly became rivals due to Cold War politics and their different responses to regional issues, such as relations with Egypt and the war in Chad.

Both Libya and Sudan had been ruled by conservative elites linked to defanged religious groups before these coups. In the nineteenth century, the revivalist Sanousi order of North Africa and the self-styled Mahdia of East Africa had rallied opposition to European colonialists and their local vassals. However, by the mid-twentieth century, the families of both networks were reluctantly incorporated and assumed aristocratic power within borders established by the British.⁴³ 

The process had been more complicated in Sudan, partly because the Mahdi family had religious-political competition in the Khatmia order that favored union with Cairo. More seriously, however, the largely non-Muslim south of Sudan was long a target of both slavers and missionaries and would soon mount repeated attempts at secession from the north, where much of Sudan’s administration was concentrated on the Nile. This was an inverse of the situation in neighboring Chad, where the largely Muslim northlands that bordered Libya and Sudan had been neglected to the benefit of a largely non-Muslim south by colonial France. The 1960s saw Sudan fighting a secessionist “Anyanya” or snake-poison revolt in its south that was considerably backed by Christian institutions but also by Israel. By contrast in Chad, Israel joined with France in assisting the government against its largely Muslim northern insurgency.⁴⁴

In the early 1970s, Gaddafi famously marshaled Libya’s oil wealth to support various anticolonial and Muslim causes abroad. He was thus a major actor in the 1973 oil embargo, and managed to flip Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who had originally been backed by Israel against Sudan but promptly switched sides.⁴⁵ Gaddafi would also launch at least a half-dozen unification schemes with his neighbors, none of which came to fruition. His mark was felt especially in Chad, whose northern Aozou area Libya overran in the name of supporting the resistance.

Meanwhile, Jafar Numairi managed to draw the preeminent Sudanese insurgent, Joseph Lagu, into a peace that essentially bequeathed the south as Lagu’s personal fiefdom.⁴⁶ Southern discontent remained, however, because of cultural rifts, the north’s continuing preeminence, and because the Anyanya did not take kindly to the agreed-upon integration into the army of their former enemies. Mutinies, even between undisciplined southern units, were common and presaged a return to war. By now, though, Numairi’s principal concern was not southern rebels but the religious loyalists of former prime minister Sadiq al-Mahdi—great-grandson of Muhammad Ahmad, the self-styled Mahdi—who came perilously close to unseating the Sudanese dictator with Libyan support as relations between the neighbors strained.

The Libyan dictator had by now entrenched himself in a vague and morphing ruling philosophy described in a manifesto. Gaddafi’s philosophy and praxis owed less to the Islam, Arab nationalism, African nationalism, and socialism in whose name he claimed to speak and more to the purpose of maintaining power, for which his ideology would accordingly morph.⁴⁷ He claimed to liberate the masses by creating popular committees to displace the state. When coupled with internal dissent and various coup attempts, these committees instead served as an unaccountable shadow state increasingly run by his own loyalists, family, and clan. This eventually provoked serious unrest by a mixture of students, disgruntled officials, and the ulama, each of whom the dictator had displaced. In spite of a theoretical devolution to an assembly and handpicked cabinet, his grip on Libyan society tightened more and more. He soon earned notoriety for the brazen assassination of exiled dissidents who were dismissed as “stray dogs.”⁴⁸

In the late 1970s, Gaddafi shifted closer toward Moscow after having fallen out with the region’s pro-American states. To his indignation, these were soon joined by both Cairo under Anwar Sadat and Khartoum under Numairi. Numairi was the only Arab leader to endorse Sadat’s entente with Tel Aviv, and also imitated Sadat in trying to outflank and co-opt Islamist activists at home. The most influential of these was Hassan Turabi, a charismatic ideologue who led a revolutionary breakaway from the Ikhwan that sought an “Islamic revivalism” from the top-down. In contrast to other religiously oriented leaders, he set up a highly secretive, disciplined organization that attracted followers from students, bureaucrats, and military officers.⁴⁹ In contrast to his brother-in-law Sadiq Mahdi, Turabi espoused a radically internationalist and state-led Islamization. This project sought to transcend such parochial rifts as regional prejudices, ethnic affiliation, and sectarian influence,⁵⁰ and to support Muslim causes abroad, but, unlike Gaddafi, at least claimed adherence to classical Islamic doctrines.

Gaddafi, whose own brand of internationalism squarely targeted the Western bloc, had already mounted failed regional incursions against Sadat and in support of Idi Amin, but it was in Chad that he had the strongest influence.⁵¹ There, the military triumph of the various insurgents quickly gave way to infighting complicated by the intervention of foreign powers. Though most literature exceptionalized Libya, Tripoli was the most consistent of these states in opposing French-backed actors in Chad. Libya supported the new ruler Goukouni Ouaddai, a Toubou traditional leader with anticolonial leanings, against his mutinous prime minister, Hissein Habbre, a ruthless military adventurer who was instead supported by Khartoum, Cairo, Paris, and Washington. At Goukouni’s invitation, the Libyan army, led by Gaddafi’s cousin Hassan Ishkal, swept into Chad to fight off Habbre in 1980. But Ishkal’s own prejudice toward Chadian Arabs, together with regional hostility, prompted N’djamena to rescind the invitation. When the Libyan army withdrew, Habbre predictably ousted Goukouni and reinvented himself as an anti-Libyan patriot.⁵²

This came in a wider context in which the United States tried frantically to clip Gaddafi’s wings in the mid-1980s. When Libyan defectors led by former ambassador Mohamed Magarief narrowly failed to oust Gaddafi, the United States took on a more direct role by targeting the Libyan navy and, eventually, Gaddafi’s own compound in an historic bombardment. The Libyan dictator grew increasingly leery, even executing Ishkal on suspicions of a coup. Gaddafi was only forced to sue for peace after Hissein Habbre had thoroughly routed his army. In the process, Habbre captured corps commander Khalifa Haftar, who was in turn soon co-opted by American intelligence. The United States celebrated the result—disingenuously given Habbre’s own brutality and foreign vassalage—as a triumph of African authenticity against Arab imperialism.⁵³

By now, Sudan too had seen the return of a misleadingly labeled “Arab-African war” that would prove the longest in modern African history. After Numairi had increasingly tried to manipulate the south, a major mutiny broke out in 1983, led by several disaffected southern commanders. The most influential of these was the incredibly devious but charismatic John Garang. Disgruntled from the outset with the terms of peace a decade earlier, he took the regime’s heavy hand as a pretext to revolt. The official implementation a few months later of Sharia by Khartoum at the behest of Turabi gave Garang a pretext to paint his revolt as one of African secularism against dictatorial Arab Islam. Although his base was always southern, he gained northern followers and allies from dissidents against successive regimes. Too much literature, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, took Garang at his word, as he represented himself adroitly to different audiences.⁵⁴

Formerly a Marxist backed by Ethiopia’s Derg, Garang presented himself to African “revolutionaries” as a champion of African versus Arab interests; and to a secularist minority of northerners as a champion of liberation against religious reactionaries. But it was in courting American Christians, especially the booming evangelical industry, that he found the most decisive currency  as a self-proclaimed champion against Islam.⁵⁵ Garang’s case is especially relevant to our study as an early case, which would soon be replicated elsewhere, of former Marxists joining alliances against a new “Islamic threat.” Furthermore, his case is relevant because his arguments tended to be more bold in their employment of blatantly Islamophobic rhetoric. Thoughtful reconsiderations have challenged these portrayals decades later, but at the time they were accepted virtually without question.⁵⁶ 

The argument against Sudanese Sharia teetered on such points, especially since the vast majority of northern groups, not simply Turabi’s “revolutionary Islamists,” favored Sharia without imposing it on non-Muslims. Rather than Khartoum imposing Islamic law on non-Muslims, Garang’s vaunted “vision” aimed to strip Sharia from all the populations of Sudan, including the majority of Muslims who favored it. In a secularist-leaning foreign press, this point was almost always ignored in favor of glowing references to Garang’s purported cosmopolitanism.

Even under the best circumstances, the idea of a union was unpopular in the south. The north frequently relied on scorched-earth campaigns, and the methods used to implement Islamic law attracted early controversy even from Muslim sympathizers. After previous experiments in communism, socialism, and free market capitalism, Numairi had used Sharia more as a legitimizing attempt for an unpopular regime than anything substantive. He had gone as far as secretly collaborating with Israel shortly before his regime fell to a major uprising to which Turabi’s revolutionary-Islamists were late but important defectors.⁵⁷ However, this group was defeated in the 1986 election by a coalition of sectarian parties led by Sadiq Mahdi. Though the ensuing regime was by far the most democratic in Sudanese history, it was also the most fractious and unstable, leading to perennial indecision regarding the war in the south.

It was during this period that Khartoum began to recruit militias from the north-south frontier as shock troops in the south. These militias were given free rein to engage in plunder, massacre, and even slavery—a practice that had only ended on this frontier a few generations earlier and now returned as a by-product of counterinsurgency. Partly influenced by the neighboring war in Chad, where Libyan-backed militants increasingly appealed to Arab identity, many Arab militias would return home with weapons and impunity to compete with non-Arab neighbors for resources.⁵⁸

Darfur, Sudan’s western province, suffered ethnic conflict fuelled by the residue of both the war in the south and the war in neighboring Chad. Southern insurgents were no better than the northern marauders, led essentially not by a “Liberation Army” as much as a class of military adventurers whose forces so frequently indulged in murder and plunder. They often targeted entire rival communities in the same south they claimed to liberate, thus spending as much time at each other’s throats as they did against Khartoum.

The Sudanese army had not initiated, but did exploit such feuds, ironically backing outright Anyanya-type secessionists against Garang. Such cynical improvisation was made necessary by the vacillating indecision of Sadiq’s unstable regime, which wavered between peace and war. Soon, the far more organized Islamist revolutionaries around Turabi, having long infiltrated the army and roundly opposed to Garang, pounced in 1989 with a coup fronted by a military junta under Omar Bashir. Over the ensuing decade, Sudan would be unusual not only in this military-Islamist partnership, but in its particularly revolutionary brand and the significant influence that the Islamist clique, now styled Ingaz or Salvation, would wield over the military officers.

The generally Islamophobic tone of foreign criticism only increased against the Ingaz regime, which consolidated itself early on with fierce repression of real and imagined rivals, to a far greater extent than preceding regimes. They particularly focused on rooting out military dissidents, some linked to the small Sudanese wing of the Baath party, but even turned on Ingaz dissidents: thus, in 1991–92, the regime quickly repressed the insurgency’s attempt to expand into Darfur, in the process executing Ingaz defector Daoud Boulad, who had joined them.⁵⁹ When the southern “jihad” was expanded in spring 1992 to include the largely Muslim Nuba Mountains, whose rebels Khartoum dismissed as treacherous “hypocrites,” the regime also purged an alleged Nuba coup attempt led by Islamist veteran Abdel-Rahman Idris.

The Ingaz were, however, far more successful in stifling insecurity in such peripheries as Darfur, where they had a genuine constituency because of their claims to transcend parochialism. Likewise, this applied in the case of the “jihad” in the south, where they replaced unruly militias with more disciplined party militias. Though inevitably smeared as fanatics abroad, these militias mounted a decisive campaign that retook much lost ground in 1992. This followed a successful split, assiduously exploited by the regime’s agents, in the insurgent Liberation Army between the autocratic Garang and his erstwhile lieutenants. Most notoriously, Nuer commander Riek Machar broke away in 1991 and slaughtered thousands of Garang’s Dinka people.

The early 1990s also saw rare concord between Khartoum, Tripoli, and N’djamena. By 1990, Hissein Habbre had outlasted his Cold War usefulness as well as his internal alliances, enabling his disaffected army commander Idriss Deby to pounce from Darfur to dethrone him. This elimination of a shared enemy also warmed Gaddafi to his neighbors; he had recently overcome a number of scattered Islamist dissidents and likely thought that an alliance with Khartoum might contain them. This was a thaw that was very much needed because, after his opposition to the Gulf War, Libya was blamed for a string of 1980s terrorist attacks against Western targets and slapped with punishing sanctions by the United Nations. Thus, the dawn of the unipolar age saw both Libya and Sudan finding themselves squarely targeted, for different reasons, by the unipolar order and obedient international institutions.

 

Somalia, Yemen, and Ogaden in the Late Cold War

Separated by the Red Sea, both Somalia and the two Yemeni states spent much of the Cold War in unification attempts that ran aground against internal rifts and the reservations of their larger neighbors.⁶⁰ The 1960s had seen both North Yemen and South Yemen topple their governments in “revolutionary” wars. In Sanaa, a military coup had unseated the Zaidi imamate with considerable help from Cairo. It now came to be ruled by a shifting and mostly conservative coalition of highland clansmen and army officers. In Aden, the ouster of British colonial rule was soon followed by a Marxist coup in 1969 that attracted the opprobrium of its conservative neighbors on the Arabian Peninsula. Sanaa and Aden agreed at least officially on the need to unify, but not on the terms of that unity, and would fight several brief wars along a perennially unstable border. Meanwhile, since independence Somalia had sought to advance the interests of the sprawling Somali ethnic group in East Africa, whose members had been divided between Ethiopian, Kenyan, British, French, and Italian rule. Somalia’s own perennially unstable democratic regime was ousted in 1969 by army commander Siad Barre, whose regime lasted the entirety of the remaining Cold War.

The 1970s saw significant tumult in the Yemens, which alternated between negotiations for union and proxy warfare via each other’s dissidents.⁶¹ Amid a series of political assassinations and coups, two military leaders named Ali—Saleh and Nasir—took over rival governments in Sanaa and Aden in 1978. Saleh ruled Aden in coalition with the Hashidi confederation’s chieftain Abdullah Ahmar and fellow officer Ali Muhsin. Nasir had a more uneasy coalition with Abdul-Fattah Ismail, a Marxist ideologue from the north. 

Given Aden’s more revolutionary leanings and its more efficient state setup, it might have been expected that the South would win. Instead, South Yemen was plagued with chronic power struggles, often related to regional affiliations, that came to a crescendo in 1986 when Nasir tried to purge his rivals, murdering Abdul-Fattah to set off a month-long battle for Aden in which thousands were killed. Unexpectedly, Nasir’s Zumra faction was defeated and expelled, with the Tughma faction led by Ali Beidh taking over Aden. Yet as the Cold War shifted decisively away from the Eastern Bloc and Beidh ran out of friends, Aden was forced by 1990 to unite with Sanaa on terms that heavily favored the latter. Saleh, now ruler of both Yemens, was a pragmatic but cynical opportunist who might well have earned renown for his statesmanship had he not exploited Yemeni unity to reward his own patrimonial network and maintain his primacy by chronically playing off rival groups.

By contrast, Somaliweyn—Greater Somalia—never transpired: instead, by the end of the Cold War, Somalia itself had collapsed. The scene had looked very different in the 1970s, when Somali irredentists took heart from France’s withdrawal from what had become Djibouti. Likewise, they saw hope in the bloody power struggle underway in their archrival Ethiopia, whose rule of Ogaden was by all accounts widely resented by its native Somali populace. The Christian-nationalist Amhara monarchy in Addis Ababa had been overthrown by the communist Derg dictatorship, whose bloody “Red Terror” to consolidate power only strengthened centrifugal revolts in its Tigray, Eritrean, Oromo, and Somali regions.⁶² Shortly after Mengistu Hailemariam clawed his way to the top of the fractious Derg, Somalia sought to exploit this vulnerability and mounted a major campaign to capture Ogaden in 1977.

The subsequent war saw one of the more blatant and decisive shifts of the Cold War: Ethiopia had been a major Cold War ally of the United States, while Somalia had swung into the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc. Yet at a crucial moment in the middle of the war, the Soviets switched their support—along with intelligence on the Somali military—to the communist Derg regime in Ethiopia, while Washington switched to Mogadishu. The Soviet role, supplemented by Cuba in a repeat of their 1975 Angola collaboration, proved more effective and the Somali army was routed by 1978. So badly did this hit Barre’s legitimacy that he immediately had to quash a coup by officers of the Majerteen clan, whose leader Abdullahi Yusuf fled into Ethiopia to plot a revolt. Like Muammar Gaddafi, Siad Barre railed against the prevalent clanism in Somali society as part of a project for greater unity. However, when challenged, he increasingly fell back on his clan, and especially family, who monopolized key posts in a repressive state apparatus.⁶³

This inevitably alienated other Somali groups; the Isaq confederation that largely inhabited the northern Somaliland province—a region previously ruled by Britain that had only reluctantly entered union with Mogadishu—were particularly targeted. In the early 1980s, largely Isaq Somali defectors founded a slow-burning insurgency in the north while Ethiopia, assisted by Abdullahi Yusuf, briefly invaded Somalia. Regime survival hinged on increasingly cruel and wide-scale repression, in the meanwhile abandoning any pretenses to Somali irredentism.

A turning point came in 1988: Derg leader Mengistu Hailemariam, whose own insurgencies were spiraling out of control, agreed with Barre not to arm one another’s insurgents. The Somali army under Barre’s son-in-law Said Morgan then crushed the Isaq insurgency in the north in a scorched-earth campaign whose ferocity verged on the genocidal. Yet the regime only continued to cave: nepotism toward Barre’s family alienated the Ogaden clan, a key section of the Darod whose officers, led by defense minister Aden Gabyow and military spymaster Omar Jess, mutinied in 1989. Much of the powerful Hawiye confederation, which had a major role in the capital, also joined in revolt: notable figures included former merchants Ali Mahdi, Mohamed Qanyare, and Osman Attow, and Barre’s former army rival Farah Aidid, who became top military commander.

The early 1990s were a period of major tumult in the Horn of Africa, as both the Ethiopian and Somali regimes collapsed against insurgents. In Ethiopia, Hailemariam fell to federalist insurgents led by the Tigray commander Meles Zenawi and Eritrean commander Issayas Afwerki in relatively short order. In Somalia, Siad Barre’s downfall was a protracted affair because most of the militants involved soon fragmented along regional, clan, and factional lines. The major exception was Somaliland, where the largely Isaq insurgency took control of Hargeysa in relatively short order, helped by the mediation of clan elders that helped contain internal rifts.⁶⁴ By contrast, both the state and opposition were already fraying in the remainder of Somalia by the time that Barre was forced to flee the capital in the winter of 1991.

The mayhem was compounded by the insurgents’ summary assault in Mogadishu not only on Barre’s loyalists but often on the Darod confederation at large. As a result, former Darod dissidents, such as long-imprisoned former defense minister Omar Masale, saw little option but to side with Barre as he attempted to recapture Mogadishu. In the process, western Somalia, largely inhabited by a long-marginalized Rahanweyn confederation, suffered the effects of scorched-earth warfare and famine. In Mogadishu, the confrontational Aidid fell out with Mahdi, who was recognized by much of the international community as rightful ruler. However, he had little control in the capital where bitter fighting soon erupted between their followers.

Marked as it was with extreme factionalism and a generally poor control of militiamen, Somalia is often described as the archetypal “failed state.”⁶⁵ This viewpoint often bypasses the key fact that many of the rival militias were led by well-connected veterans of the same state institutions: former ministers, army and security commanders, and bureaucrats gathered their personal networks in a myriad of militias that could mobilize along the lines—but were rarely confined by the traditional norms and restraints—of clan. The war was various remnants of the former state competing over the spoils with militias who were so loosely controlled that they fragmented periodically. This was compounded by the interference of neighbouring states, particularly Ethiopia whose government was already trying to control its Somali opposition in Ogaden and was determined to exert influence in Somalia as a result.⁶⁶

Purportedly a humanitarian mission of the multilateral type meant to mark the post-Cold War order, the 1992 United Nations mission to relieve the Somalia crisis soon became a corollary of the United States’ attempt to flex its muscle. With the encouragement of secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Washington quickly inserted itself at the helm of the mission. Its increasing obeisance to American whims provoked its first leaders, envoy Mohamed Sahnoun of Algeria and commander Imtiaz Shaheen of Pakistan, to resign in disgust.⁶⁷ The United States led an international coterie of obedient contingents, who generally had little knowledge of Somalia’s landscape and less interest. 

Dissidence against this mission was painted as dissidence against the multilateral order itself, even as that order clearly swung toward the unipolar state. The point, as Shaheen had noted, was not so much to relieve Somalia’s plight as to demonstrate and test Washington’s leading role. American soldiers—as well as those from Belgium and Canada—soon distinguished themselves with a gung-ho ruthlessness that sat uneasily with the mission’s stated humanitarian aims and only exacerbated the division of the Somali landscape. In this regard, this multilateral “humanitarian” mission was, like the recent Gulf War, a cover for American hegemony.

 

Conclusion

The dawn of the 1990s saw a very different world to the collapsing Cold War order. In this new order, the Muslim-majority region of southwest Asia and northeast Africa steadily replaced the Soviets as the primary focus of Western attention and pathologization. The United States had been involved militarily in Lebanon and Libya, not to mention its key indirect role in other countries such as Afghanistan, for years. However, the heady downfall of their communist archrival produced a self-congratulatory myopia—perhaps most famously expressed in the “End of History” paradigm.⁶⁸ This gave way to apprehensions that the Muslim world, where conflict and particularly opposition to the cosseted American client in Israel continued apace, might not conform entirely to an international liberal utopia. 

In some cases, as in the “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, this paranoia developed from an illiberal, civilizational critique of Islam. More often, however, it developed from a condescending bewilderment that Muslims did not join Eastern Europeans in embracing the benefits of a liberal world order. The broader “Islamic awakening” in the region, coupled with practical hard power in such countries as Sudan and Pakistan, combined to make public and political manifestations of Islam an emerging enemy. This was so even as that nascent “awakening” encountered major practical challenges that led one contemporary observer to, perhaps prematurely, declare its failure.⁶⁹ When coupled with preexistent hostility toward non-Islamist but anti-American regimes in Iraq and Libya, the result was an increased call for interventionism and “muscular liberalism” in the region to rid it of both autocrats and their Islamist opponents. The stage for a unipolar crusade had been set.

 

Suggested citation: 

Ibrahim Moiz, “The Road to the Unipolar Crusade: A Historical Overview,” Ummatics, Apr 30, 2025, https://ummatics.org/unipolar-crusade-history. 

 

1. Mahmood Mamdani; Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Doubleday, 2005); John Feffer, Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012); Beverley Milton-Edwards, Islamic Fundamentalism since 1945, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 92.
2. The term “Islamism” is contentious, often used pejoratively for Muslims at large or for “extremists.” I use in reference to any political Muslim party that calls for their politics and public policy to be based on the principles and normatively understood application of Islam as part of a broader Muslim Umma. This definition rules out both liberal Muslims but also sectarian and millenarian groups.
3. Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic, September 1990, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1990/09/the-roots-of-muslim-rage/304643/.
4. Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. In contrast to, for example, contemporaneous anti-leftist militants backed by the United States in such theaters as Nicaragua, Washington at no point controlled the logistics or the military operations of the Afghan insurgents. Even Pakistan, which positioned itself more adeptly in this role, was never able to fully control the forces of a war with very strong local characteristics.
5. The following section draws largely from the first chapter of my recent book, The True Story of the Taliban: Emirate and Insurgency, 1994–2021 (Selangor: The Other Press, 2024).
6. Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 20089), 152.
7. Abdulkader H. Sinno, Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
8. Moiz, The True Story of the Taliban, 10–12.
9. Antonio Giustozzi, Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan (London: Hurst, 2009).
10. Kalim Bahadur, Democracy in Pakistan: Crises and Conflicts (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 1998).
11. The Jamaat-e-Islami party, to which Zia ul-Haq had traditionally been close and which was favored for large periods of his rule, later argued that his regime had set up Muhajir ethnonationalists as a counterweight after Jamaat objected to his prolonged rule. See Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama’at-i-Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 201–205. Nichola Khan’s Mohajir Militancy in Pakistan: Violence and Transformation in the Karachi Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2010) also points out that Zia ul-Haq’s policies in support of the Afghanistan insurgency were seen as strengthening Pashtuns, with whom Muhajir ethnonationalists would increasingly clash in Karachi. It is truer to say that Zia ul-Haq had tolerated both the Islamists and Muhajir ethnonationalists in Sindh as counterweights to the People’s Party, but never managed to control either.
12. On Kashmir, see Christopher Snedden, Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris (London: Hurst, 2015); Shahla Hussain, Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); and Humra Qureshi, Kashmir: The Untold Story (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004).
13. There were countless plausible suspects in the crash. One rumor blames the Americans themselves for whom Zia ul-Haq had outlived his use. The Americans’ close relations to Zia ul-Haq’s most ardent critic, Benazir Bhutto, also raised these suspicions. But the Pakistani dictator had made many other enemies, and it is also possible that the crash was a genuine accident. On his increased divergence with the Americans, see Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), 196.
14. Hans Kiessling; Faith, Unity, Discipline: The Inter-Service-Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan (London: Hurst, 2016), 77–87.
15. Moiz, The True Story of the Taliban, 19.
16. Kiessling, Faith, Unity, Discipline, 118–123.
17. It should be noted that much of this hostility came not from the American presidency but from parliamentary pressure. Most notably, an act censuring support to Pakistan that had first been mulled in 1985 but came into full force in 1990, barring aid to Pakistan for its nuclear proliferation. This was one of several collisions between Pakistan and the United States in the early 1990s.
18. See, for example, Peter Tomsen, in The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failure of Great Powers (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011). This pattern is common among observers who frequently square the circle of their reliance on mujahideen and distaste for jihad by exceptionalizing Massoud as the one good commander in the jihad, and Hekmatyar in particular as his villainous foil. See, for instance, American intelligence veteran and Afghanistan advisor Bruce Riedel’s What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979-89 (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2014); and Peter Bergen’s Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: Touchstone, 2002).
19. On British colonialism in the region, see David Fromkin, A Peace to End all Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1989); Walter Reid, Empire of Sand: How Britain Made the Middle East (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2011); and Roger Hardy, The Poisoned Well: Empire and its Legacy in the Middle East (London: Hurst, 2018). On the shift to American hegemony, see Lloyd Gardner’s Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II (Portland: New Press, 2009); William Olson’s US Strategic Interests in the Gulf (Westview Press, 1987); and Marc O’Reilly’s Unexceptional: America’s Empire in the Persian Gulf (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008).
20. On this, see Lila Parsons’ historical biography of an early Arab commander, The Commander: Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the Fight of Arab Independence, 1914–1948 (London: Saqi Books, 2017); Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, Nakba: 1948, Palestine, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–51 (London: Macmillan Press, 1988).
21. The best work on this pan-Arabist factional struggle is Malik Mufti’s Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). There is an abundance of material on the Iraqi Baath, of highly varying quality; Peter and Marion Sluglett’s Iraq since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1990) is among the better works. On their Syrian rivals, see Eyal Ziser’s Asad’s Legacy: Syria in Transition (London: Hurst, 2001).
22. Ibrahim Moiz, “Black September in Jordan: An Overview of the 1970 War,” The Truth International, October 12, 2020, 34–35, https://thetruthinternational.com/international/black-september-in-jordan-an-overview-ofthe-1970-war/.
23. Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990).
24. Bashur is a common Kurdish phrase for “South” Kurdistan, meaning northern Iraq; Rojava, or West Kurdistan, is in northeast Syria; Rojhelat or “East” Kurdistan is in western Iran; and Bakur or “North” Kurdistan is in southeast Turkey.
25. Johan Franzen, Pride and Power: A Modern History of Iraq (London: Hurst, 2021); Nader Entessar, Kurdish Politics in the Middle East (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992); Ibrahim Moiz, “Iraq’s Military Regimes, 1958-68: The Bumptious Barracks of Baghdad,” layyin1137, July 31, 2018, https://layyin1137.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/iraqs-military-regimes-1958-68-the-bumptious-barracks-of-baghdad/.
26. On the Iranian-Saudi rivalry, see Andrew Cooper, Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
27. Line Khatib, Islamic Revivalism in Syria: The Rise and Fall of Ba’thist Secularism (New York: Routledge, 2011); Hrair Dekmejian, Islam in Revolution: Fundamentalism in the Arab World (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985).
28. Jonathan Randal, Going all the Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers, and American Bunglers (New York: Viking Press, 1983); Ibrahim Moiz, “Remembering the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians in Lebanon,” Ayaan Institute, October 3, 2022, https://ayaaninstitute.com/opinion/comment/remembering-the-sabra-and-shatila-massacre-of-palestinians-in-lebanon/.
29. Patrick Sloyan, When Reagan sent in the Marines: The Invasion of Lebanon (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2019).
30. Jubin Goodarzi, Syria and Iran: Diplomatic Alliance and Power Politics in the Middle East (London: IB Tauris, 2009).
31. Eric Rouleau, “The Mutiny Against Arafat,” Middle East Report 119 (November/December 1983).
32. 1] Andrew Arsan, Lebanon: A Country in Fragments (London: Hurst, 2018); Charles Glass, Tribes with Flags: Adventures and Kidnap in Greater Syria (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990).
33. Ibrahim Moiz, “Iran in the 1980s: Entrenchment of a Peculiar Revolutionary Regime,” Inside Arabia, September 7, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210907203414/https://insidearabia.com/iran-in-the-1980s-entrenchment-of-a-peculiar-revolutionary-regime/.
34. On this first Gulf war, see Ibrahim al-Marashi and Sammy Salama, Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Sepehr Zabih, The Iranian Military in Revolution and War (New York: Routledge, 1988).
35. Kristian Ullrichsen, “The Gulf States and the Iran-Iraq War: Cooperation and Confusion,”, in The Iran-Iraq War: New International Perspectives, ed. Nigel Ashton and Bryan Gibson (New York: Routledge, 2013), 109–124.
36. Maria Fantappie, “Men of Dawa: How the Personalities of One Party Shaped Iraq’s New Politics,” The Century Foundation, June 26, 2023, https://tcf.org/content/report/men-of-dawa-how-the-personalities-of-one-party-shaped-iraqs-new-politics/; Thomas Renahan, The Struggle for Iraq: A View from the Ground Up (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).
37. Samuel Segev, The Iranian Triangle: The Untold Story of Israel’s Role in the Iran-Contra Affair, tr. Haim Watzman (New York: Free Press, 1988); Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
38. Mary King, A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (New York: Nation Books, 2007); Azzam Tamimi, Hamas: Unwritten Chapters (London: Hurst, 2009).
39. Vijay Prashad, The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016), 10; Noam Chomsky, World Orders, Old and New (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 8–11.
40. Faleh Abdul-Jabar, “Why the Uprisings Failed,” Middle East Report 176 (May/June 1992). The regime also added insult to injury when the enduringly quietist Shia marja, Abul-Qasim Khoui, was roughly forced to denounce the revolt.
41. Baath crimes against the Kurds were often used to justify the collective punishment of Iraq by the same United States that had facilitated these crimes through the supply of arms. On Bashur in this period, see Sheri Laizer, Martyrs, Traitors, and Patriots: Kurdistan after the Gulf War (London: Zed Books, 1996) and Gareth Stansfield, Iraqi Kurdistan: Political Development and Emergent Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2003).
42. Consummate Washington bureaucrat Robert Gates, then serving as deputy security advisor to Bush, put bluntly that sanctions would punish Iraqis for being tyrannized by Saddam: “Iraqis will pay the price while he remains in power. All possible sanctions will be maintained until he is gone.” Jeremy Hardy, “Degraded Policy,” The Guardian, November 18, 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/nov/18/iraq.comment.
43. On the cooptation of the Sudanese religious order, see Tim Niblock, Class and Power in Sudan (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987), 172. On that of the once-militant Sanousis, whose leadership wanted to cut losses after a series of major wars, see Ali Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization, and Resistance (New York: State University of New York, 2011), 122.
44. Scopas S. Poggo, The First Sudanese Civil War: Africans, Arabs, and Israelis in the Southern Sudan, 1955–1972 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
45. Onek Adyanga, Modes of Imperial Control of Africa: A case study of Uganda, 1890-1990 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 183.
46. Abel Alier, who mediated Numairi’s peace with Lagu and later competed with the latter, wrote a telling memoir of the period entitled Southern Sudan: Too Many Agreements Dishonored (Ithaca: Ithaca Press, 1992).
47. Dirk J. Vandewalle, Libya: Oil and State-Building (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
48. Luis Martinez, The Libyan Paradox (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 95–102; Alison Pargeter, Libya: The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
49. For appraisals of Turabi, see Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Turabi’s Revolution: Islam and Power in Sudan (London: Grey Seal Books, 1991); Abdullahi A. Gallab, The First Islamist Republic: Development and Disintegration of Islamism in the Sudan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); and W. J. Berridge, Hasan al-Turabi: Islamist Politics and Democracy in Sudan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
50. Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 193–97, gives an overview of this particularly revolutionary trend within Islamism. He is among several specialists to note that, contrary to polemical portrayals, Turabi’s faction attained widespread support among ethnic minorities because of their castigation of ethnic supremacy. “Islam is our father and mother” was a common phrase, as was the Ikhwani refrain of inter-Muslim relations being bound by the shahada.
51. On the Chad war, I have relied heavily on Robert Buijtenhuijs, Le Frolinat et les guerres civiles du Tchad (1977–1984): la révolution introuvable (Paris: Karthala, 1987); Sam C. Nolutshungu, Limits of Anarchy: Intervention and State Formation in Chad (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); and Nathaniel K. Powell, France’s Wars in Chad: Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
52. This occurred with virtually no action by the regional peacekeepers whom Goukouni had invited to displace the Libyan army. On these peacekeepers, largely assembled by Nigeria, who opposed both Libyan and French designs on Chad, see Terry M. Mays, Africa’s First Peacekeeping Operation: The OAU in Chad, 1981–-1982 (Westport: Praeger, 2002).
53. On this, see Sam Nolutshungu, Limits of Anarchy.
54. On the frequently Islamophobic (often poorly disguised as merely anti-Islamist) tone of this virtual genre of literature on Sudan, see Ibrahim Moiz, “1990s Sudan and a Modern Crusade,” layyin1137, October 23, 2024; https://layyin1137.wordpress.com/2024/10/23/1990s-sudan-and-a-modern-crusade/. Chronic offenders, whose criticisms of Khartoum went well beyond valid criticism and into attacks on Islam, include former American aid officials Millard Burr and Andrew Natsios; colonial nostalgist Robert Collins; and defected Sudanese foreign minister Mansour Khalid. Richard Cockett, whose own Sudan: The Failure and Division of an African State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) relies in part on the same framework, notes that much activism against Sudan was motivated by rightwing evangelical circles—often the same circles that balked at black activism within the United States. In their telling, abuses were frequently exaggerated beyond all proportion and usually prefixed with reference to an “Islamic” regime, with the none-too-subtle implication that it was political Islam itself that was responsible for crimes.
55. Cockett, Sudan, 154, notes that Garang harnessed American evangelical support by describing their faith as a “wall against Islamization.” This took place while American politicians described their criticism of Khartoum in terms of a supposedly neutral standard of “human rights.” This is exemplified by Ambassador Donald Petterson, a notable supporter of the insurgency, in his memoir Inside Sudan: Political Islam, Conflict, and Catastrophe (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Turabi shrewdly noted Garang’s ability to condemn Khartoum in different ways to different audiences. See Gallab, The First Islamist Republic, 115.
56. Sharath Srinavasan, When Peace Kills Politics: International Interventions and Unending Wars in the Sudans (London: Hurst, 2021).
57. W. J. Berridge, Civil Uprisings in Modern Sudan: The “Khartoum Springs” of 1964 and 1985 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
58. Some observers put the blame for ethnic conflict in Darfur squarely on the spillover from Chad. Ali Haggar, “The Origins and Organization of the Janjawiid in Darfur,” in War in Darfur and the Search for Peace, ed. Alex de Waal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 113–39.
59. Boulad framed his defection in terms of ethnic justice, claiming that, as a Fur, he was overlooked in favor of Arabs in spite of Islamist rhetoric. This is curious given that his first port of call after defection was the more pointedly Arab party of Jafar Numairi. At the time, however, it was largely fellow non-Arabs in Darfur who helped quell Boulad’s revolt.
60. On the atrophy of these unification attempts, see Ibrahim Moiz, “The Roots of Regional Wars,” Ummatics, December 1, 2022, https://ummatics.org/the-roots-of-regional-wars/.
61. On South Yemen, see Noel Brehony, Yemen Divided: The Story of a Failed State in South Arabia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); and Fred Halliday, Revolution and Foreign Policy: The case of South Yemen 1967–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). On North Yemen, see Isa Blumi, Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us About the World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); and Paul Dresch, A History of Modern Yemen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
62. Michael Woldemariam, Insurgent Fragmentation in the Horn of Africa: Rebellion and its Discontents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 79; Abdisalam Issa-Salwe, The Cold War Fallout: Boundary and Conflict in the Horn of Africa (Leicester: Looh Press Ltd, 2022).
63. Lidwien Kapteijns, Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991 (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 78–79. Issa-Salwe’s The Cold War Fallout draws a line from colonial rule to the breakdown of authority.
64. Much literature on Somaliland has consequently been favorable, such as Michael Walls’ A Somali Nation-State: History, Culture, and Somaliland’s Political Transition (Pisa: Ponte Invisible, 2014); Marleen Renders’ Consider Somaliland: State-Building with Traditional Leaders and Institutions (Leiden: Brill, 2012); and Mark Bradbury’s Becoming Somaliland (London: Progressio, 2008).
65. Among countless examples, see Brian Hesse, Somalia: State Collapse, Terrorism, and Piracy (New York: Routledge, 2011); Robert I. Rotberg, When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Shaul Shay, Somalia: Between Jihad and Restoration (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008).
66. Afyare Elmi, Understanding the Somalia Conflagration: Identity, Islam and Peacebuilding (London: Pluto Press, 2010).
67. Sahnoun opposed what he saw as the United Nations’ incompetence and lack of grassroots nous, while Shaheen criticized American exploitation thus, “This whole operation is a test case for future conflict resolution. It’s as if [the United States] had a vaccine they wanted to test. Now they have found an animal to test it on.” Mark Huband, The Skull Beneath the Skin: Africa after the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001), 294.
68. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
69. Olivier Roy, L’échec de l’islam politique (France: Le Seuil, 1992). See also my commentary on the various challenges that this new order brought in Ibrahim Moiz, “1992 and the Broken Promise of Islamic Internationalism,” Ayaan Institute, August 3, 2022, https://ayaaninstitute.com/expertise/analysis/1992-the-broken-promise-of-islamic-internationalism/.