How China Colluded with the West in the Rise of Osama Bin Laden

Letters

Vol. 22 No. 7 · 30 March 2000

From Myron Kaplan

In his review of John Cooley's Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (LRB, 2 March), Roger Hardy states: 'an incongruous member of the alliance was Israel, which helped arm and train the Muslim militants but was more successful than others in keeping its involvement secret.' According to Hardy, Israel, with China, America, America's key Arab allies and Pakistan, helped to create violent Islamic groups now waging wars in many parts of the world. Most previous claims of Israeli involvement were based on the subsequently refuted statements of an Israeli called Ari Ben-Menashe. An on-line search on Israel's involvement in Afghanistan turned up remarks from unnamed Pakistani intelligence sources and the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the pro-Soviet Afghanistan Government of the 1980s. Since none of these sources is dependable, can Hardy make known what evidence he has from reliable sources to support his claim?

Myron Kaplan
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America<br />Boston, Massachusetts

Vol. 22 No. 8 · 13 April 2000

From Roger Hardy

Myron Kaplan (Letters, 30 March) asks what evidence there is that Israel helped to arm and train the Afghan Mujahidin in the 1980s. Instead of trawling the Internet (the modern but lazy way of looking for information) he should go to a good library. Several of the standard works on the Afghan conflict of 1979-89 tell us that some of the weaponry captured by Israel in the course of the Arab-Israeli wars was recycled to the Mujahidin, via the CIA. See, for example, Barnett Rubin's The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (1995) and The Bear Trap by Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin (1992). The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz ran the story on 29 November 1984, citing the New York Times as its source. At the time, such activity fitted in naturally with Israeli co-operation with the CIA. The fuller context is provided by an Israeli academic, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, in The Israeli Connection (1987). But he, like the Ha'aretz journalist, was a whistle-blower and Kaplan may disapprove of him. In Unholy Wars John Cooley writes that there was 'possibly only a token Israeli role – which no Israeli government official would want to acknowledge, now that Islamists around the world have turned so strongly against the Jewish state and against the US-initiated Middle East peace negotiations'.

Roger Hardy
London N19

Vol. 22 No. 11 · 1 June 2000

From Myron Kaplan

I challenged Roger Hardy to substantiate his charge – in his review of John Cooley's Unholy Wars – that Israel 'helped arm and train' the Afghan Mujahidin. In his response (Letters, 13 April), Hardy muddies the water by offering no proof of his original charge but instead substantiating a radically different claim: that weaponry originally captured by Israel and turned over to the CIA was later recycled by the CIA to the Mujahidin. Hardy was also careless in his assumption that the online search I conducted was a 'trawling of the Internet', which he characterises as 'lazy'. The search was of the professional news database Nexis and in fact made no use of Internet search engines or even the Internet itself.

Myron Kaplan
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America<br />Boston, Massachusetts

Vol. 22 No. 13 · 6 July 2000

From Roger Hardy

Myron Kaplan tries hard (Letters, 1 June). But I did not say, as he alleges, that 'weaponry originally captured by Israel and turned over to the CIA was later recycled by the CIA to the Mujahidin.' That misleading little word 'later' implies that the recycling was a purely American matter and nothing to do with Israel. The sources I cited give us no reason to suppose any such thing. The true allegation and its Cold War context are clearly set out in one of the sources I mentioned, The Israeli Connection (1987) by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi:

The CIA and the Mossad have been collaborating on a scheme to deliver Soviet weapons (of which Israel has considerable stocks, captured in the Middle East over three decades) to groups that are fighting forces equipped with Soviet weapons … Five groups enjoying Soviet weapons delivered by Israel, and paid for by the CIA, are the Mujahidin in Afghanistan, the Contras in Central America, the Unita forces in Angola, the Habre forces in Chad, and the MNR forces in Mozambique.

There is no hint, here or anywhere else, that Israel and the CIA were acting independently of one another. Or is Kaplan seriously suggesting that the CIA led Mossad by the nose? Now there's a novel thought.

Roger Hardy
London N19

Vol. 22 No. 15 · 10 August 2000

From Timothy Stunt

Roger Jones (Letters, 6 July) is sure that Foucault knew that Cardano invented the universal joint because the French word for the device is cardan. Such confidence is misplaced. Many years ago a French-speaking garage owner in Switzerland was surprised at my ignorance of the word carter (the French word for 'sump' and 'crank-case'), which he claimed was 'un mot anglais'. In fact the word is derived from the name of an English inventor, John Harrison Carter, who died in 1903. For nearly thirty years I have been trying to find out about this engineer – but without success.

Timothy Stunt
Newtown, Connecticut