HISTORY REPEATS AS U.S. FINDS UNLIKELY ALLIES

If politics makes strange bedfellows, foreign policy sometimes means
sleeping with the devil.

And that's what the United States did when it allied itself with Osama bin
Laden and other Islamic militants in the 1980s.

The United States helped build some of the terrorist facilities it is now
destroying in Afghanistan. The Central Intelligence Agency trained Islamic
militants on the use of explosives and the concept of "strategic sabotage"
- -- picking targets with a symbolic significance.

Altogether, the United States poured an estimated $3 billion in arms,
training and financial support to mujahedeen guerrillas in efforts to drive
the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.

Thousands of those trained by the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence agency
ISI were Islamic radicals recruited from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt,
China, the Philippines and the Chechnya republic in the Soviet Union.

"The Islamic fundamentalists would not be in power in Afghanistan if not
for U.S. intervention," said William Blum, author of Killing Hope: U.S.
Military and CIA Interventions since World War II. "The CIA orchestrated
the symphony. They brought in warriors from over a dozen Muslim countries
who were trained and armed."

Blum contends that the United States was so blinded by its obsession to
bring down the Soviet Union that it ignored the anti-Western ideology of
Islamic militants such as bin Laden.

Alliance has links to drugs

Today, some of the same criticism is being leveled at the United States for
its support of the Northern Alliance, which has a history of human-rights
abuses and drug smuggling. In its full-throttle pursuit of terrorists, the
United States once again finds itself allied with mujahedeen of ill repute
- -- just as it was 20 years ago in the Afghan-Soviet war.

At the time, the Reagan administration saw its role in Afghanistan as an
opportunity to bleed the Soviet Union's economy through a prolonged, costly
war against the Afghan rebels. America's financial and military support of
the mujahedeen was justified at the time as a cost-effective way to defeat
the communists in the "last battlefield of the Cold War."

Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah defended the strategy recently when he
said, "It was worth it. Those were very important, pivotal matters that
played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union."

The United States' support included supplying the mujahedeen with an
estimated 1,000 Stinger missiles -- the same mobile, highly accurate
missiles the Taliban forces can use to target American tanks, helicopters
and low-flying air-fueling tankers.

Arming militant Islamic rebels was a calculated risk the United States took
in the 1980s with unforeseen consequences in the 21st century, experts said.

"We clearly understood that once we teach people certain things, there
might be some blowback -- not to the United States but to the nations from
which these militants came," said Roger Handburg, an authority on terrorism
and foreign policy at the University of Central Florida.

"Blowback" is a CIA term for an agent, or operation, that backfires on its
creator. Critics of America's involvement in Afghanistan during the Soviet
occupation contend that the Taliban and bin Laden are the personification
of blowback.

Others, however, argue that nothing about bin Laden in the 1980s suggested
his future occupation as an international terrorist.

"In no sense was the United States involved in blowback," said Harvey
Kushner, author of Terrorism in America. "We did what we had to do to bring
the Soviet Union to its knees."

And that meant enlisting the help of warlords, drug lords and Islamic
mercenaries such as bin Laden: "In the real world of international
relations, this is what you have to do," Kushner said. "The enemy of my
enemy is my friend. That's how we viewed the mujahedeen, and that's how we
view the Northern Alliance now."

The United States was aware of rogue agents among the Soviet opposition.

Chief among them was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a known drug smuggler and good
friend of bin Laden's with anti-American sentiments. In the 1970s,
Hekmatyar made headlines for throwing acid in the faces of Afghan women who
failed to wear veils.

According to some reports, the vehicles and Tennessee mules supplied by the
CIA to ship arms into Afghanistan were used by Hekmatyar and other drug
lords to transport opium and heroin out of the country.

"You couldn't find anybody in Washington who thought we should trust this
guy, but he was Pakistan's favorite," said Teresita Schaffer, director of
South Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington, D.C.

Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, was an agent-in-good-standing from
Saudi Arabia, one of our staunchest allies in the Middle East. A member of
a prominent Saudi family, bin Laden counted Prince Turki ben Faisal al-Saud
of the Saudi royal family as one of his strongest supporters.

Wealthy and benevolent, bin Laden gave money to Afghan widows and orphans
and built roads and hospitals for those fighting the Soviets. Those were
good enough credentials for the U.S. government when it went looking for
allies against the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan.

U.S. helped build camps

The CIA even helped bin Laden with the construction of facilities at Zhawar
Kili al-Badr. Later identified as a "terrorist university," those
facilities were bombed by the Clinton administration in 1998 in retaliation
for the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed
224 people.

Bin Laden and his partner in terrorism, Egyptian surgeon Ayman al- Zawahri,
were indicted in New York for those bombings.

Now, those same terrorist facilities in Afghanistan are again targets of
the bombing raids ordered by President Bush.

Although bin Laden's opposition to the United States dates back to the
peace treaty between Israel and Egypt orchestrated by President Carter in
1979, it wasn't until the Gulf War in 1991 that bin Laden turned to
terrorism against the United States for stationing American troops in Saudi
Arabia and imposing what he saw as a corrupt Western lifestyle on Islam.

"At the time the Afghan-Soviet war was going on, he was not saying anything
that gave any indication he was going to be the person he is today," said
Saiful-Islam Abdul-Ahad, an authority on Afghanistan at the University of
Central Florida.

If the United States didn't see the change in bin Laden, it also failed to
recognize the agendas of the militant Islamics in the mujahedeen and their
Pakistani sponsors.

"The United States had its interests and its perspective with very little
awareness of how it might be used by the radical Islamics," said Robert L.
Canfield, professor of sociocultural anthropology at Washington University
in St. Louis. "We didn't realize we were creating a cohort of zealous young
men from all over the world."

Pakistan at the time was ruled by strongman Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, who envisioned
his nation becoming the key player in the Middle East by helping create
fundamentalist Islamic regimes in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Iran
and Turkey. Before his death in a plane crash in 1988, Zia hoped to
accomplish that goal by attracting and training Muslim extremists who would
then return to their homelands as Islamic rebels.

Today, Muslim terrorists who trained in Afghanistan are operating in the
Philippines, China, Chechnya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other countries.
President Bush said that cells of bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist
organization now exist in 68 nations -- including the United States.

Among those who learned the terrorism trade in Afghanistan are the Abu
Sayyaf extremists who have kidnapped Sanford-based New Tribes missionaries
in the Philippines. Three of the kidnapped missionaries are presumed dead
while two others are still being held hostage.

Selig Harrison, a terrorism expert at The Century Foundation in Washington,
D.C., contends that the CIA made a historic mistake by supporting the
Islamic extremists recruited to fight the jihad against the Soviets in
Afghanistan.

"I warned them that we were creating a monster," Harrison said at a
conference on terrorism in March.

Alliances change quickly

But in the Middle East, where alliances shift as quickly as the desert
dunes, it's often hard to tell the good guys from the bad, the heroes from
the villains.

In the topsy-turvy world of Middle Eastern politics, friends and enemies
are often one and the same.

During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, bin Laden was allied with
Ahmed Shah Massood, a leader of the Northern Alliance that is now battling
the Taliban for control of Afghanistan.

On Sept. 9, two days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, suicide bombers posing as Arab journalists killed Massood. The
CIA thinks bin Laden's organization was behind the assassination.

In its western provinces, China is fighting Islamic rebels it helped arm
and train to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Russia itself is now providing arms to the Northern Alliance -- the same
mujahedeen warriors who helped drive them from Afghanistan.

And the United States, in its global effort to root out terrorism, has
enlisted the support of Sudan -- a former home base for bin Laden and one
of seven nations on the State Department's state-sponsored terrorism list.

Once again, the United States finds itself involved in Afghanistan with an
unholy alliance of friends and foes.

"We were happy to have anyone who was against the Soviets, just as we are
happy to have anyone who helps us fight Osama bin Laden," said Louise K.
Davidson-Schmich, a foreign-policy expert at the University of Miami.

If the U.S. forces oust the Taliban, Davidson-Schmich said, its leaders
must ask: "Who do we want in there?

"We can't delude ourselves that the Northern Alliance will be a nice,
pro-West democratic regime."