When US Aided Insurgents, Did It Breed Future Terrorists?

Arguing against popular belief, Mahmood Mamdani, a prominent Uganda-born political scientist at Columbia University, asserts that terrorism has little to do with Islamic culture; rather, it is an outgrowth of American Cold War strategies. In this article on the New York Times, the author attempts to probe into Mamdani's thesis through other scholars' positions as well as Mamdani's own life experience. According to Mamdani, during the final years of the Cold War, the US fostered proto-terrorist groups in Latin America, Africa and Central Asia. After Vietnam, the American government became reluctant to go into direct conflict with Communist governments in different countries; therefore, it started sponsoring local insurgent groups to help overturn Communism. For instance, says Mamdani, the US supported the Contras in Nicaragua and then created a pan-Islamic front to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, both to become part of the international "privatized and ideologically stateless resistance force." This argument, however, is not accepted by all. One scholar says it is wrong to attribute terrorism to only religion as it is to blame it on international politics alone. Relating to the recent history of Rwanda, Uganda, as well as other African states with conflicts that often times turned into terrorism, Mamdani suggests that the rest of the world refer more to the African experience and learn from it. – YaleGlobal