Steve Coll Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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What you're describing had important global implications, as we came to see later. There is a sense here that none of the actors, especially the United States, understood religion and the forces of religion, and the powder-keg that we were lighting a match to. Talk a little about that, because it seems that we didn't get it. Casey didn't get it; he thought that there could be a global alliance between "Christian soldiers" -- well, that's an overstatement, but between forces of Christianity and the forces of Islam.
Well, I think he really did believe. We have to take ourselves back to the Cold War period where the overarching dominant challenge was containment and ultimately the pursuit of the defeat of the Soviet Union and its ideology. As the United States looked for allies, particularly in the developing world, in that effort, one of its most powerful sources of alliance was the perception, especially in the Islamic world, that the Soviet Union was atheistic, hostile to organized religion -- and in fact, it was. It repressed churches and mosques on its own soil and promoted ideologies that were overtly hostile to religious belief and cultural religious practices.
So, the United States was both, in someone like Casey, led by a believer, but also tactically looking for believers as partners. Casey did conceive, out of his own personal religious conviction but also out of his sense as a global tactician, that there was an alliance of believers that could check the potential of Soviet expansionism through political faith. He cultivated that alliance explicitly, particularly with the Saudis -- a society where as a practicing and devout Catholic he was not really welcome by official Saudi ideology. Nonetheless he found a way to say to the Saudi leadership, "Look, we're both believers and we share a common interest against this unbelieving hegemonic power, so let's work together."
He wasn't alone in this. The Israelis initially cultivated Hamas as an alternative to the more potent secular leftist Palestinian Liberation Organization. It was a fashionable tactic toward the end of the Cold War to cultivate religiously motivated groups, especially after the Iranian revolution in 1979, as a way to check what was seen as the larger and more dangerous power of secular left governments and organizations.
The Saudis's ideas about religion began to have global impact because of these links that were established, because the Saudis were the secondary funder of all of our operations against the Soviets. They matched the money that we put in.
They did. This policy of the Saudis is rooted in their own historical, political, religious traditions as a deeply devout society, [as it] has been for three centuries. But the political uses of this faith and the export of this ideology is a more recent phenomenon. It began in the same vein as in our earlier discussion when King Faisal in the 1970s was looking for a way to check the appeal of Nassarism and Arab nationalism, and he saw political religion as a way that he could protect Saudi Arabia from Nassarism and from Ba'athism. He began to develop institutions like the Muslim World League and the International Islamic Relief Organization that are now sort of seen as terrorist charities. These have roots in his struggle with Nassarism in the sixties and seventies.
Once the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and began to partner with the CIA, he began to work in an even more practical way by writing huge checks every year to match the covert allocations of the U.S. Congress to the Afghan resistance. And in addition to these sums, which by the mid- to late-1970s totaled $500 million a year each, for a total contribution of near a billion dollars -- by that time, the Saudi government was also, in addition to that money, running their own unilateral contributions to the Afghan resistance and promoting radical wings, including groups in and around al Qaeda. One former CIA station chief in Islamabad, a guy named Milt Bearden who was there between '86 and '89, has publicly estimated that the amount of Saudi money reaching the frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan where bin Laden was working, by the late eighties, was $25 million a month.
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