Afghanistan’s Karzai Asks: Did the War on Terror Encourage Radical Islam?

Afghan President Hamid Karzai (File photo: Getty)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai had some tough questions for the U.S. government during a speech over the weekend where he asked if the U.S.-led war on terror holds some of the blame for encouraging radical Islam. He further said that the West – as led by the U.S. - has to “explain itself to the Muslim world."

Karzai made the statements during the US-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, an event sponsored by the Brookings Institution.

AFP reports:

Addressing a forum on relations between the US and the Muslim world in Doha, Karzai declared: "The war on terror as it began in 2001 and moved forward until today has not been a happy one."

"Have we succeeded in the war on terror?" he went on.

"Did we address the sanctuaries of terrorism? And by waging this war on terrorism, have we brought less radicalism to the Muslim world, or caused more radicalism?"

The leader of Afghanistan who took office in 2001 after the U.S.-led coalition unseated the Taliban said: "Today, the Muslim world is in turmoil from Pakistan up to Nigeria."

"In my view, the West as led by the US needs to explain itself to the Muslim world,” Karzai added.

"If things have gone wrong, action must be taken to correct...," Karzai said.

He conceded that the Muslim world could also stand to “correct” itself. "In my view, there is much that we Muslims have to correct in our societies and governments, by showing more tolerance towards the rest of the world and other religions ... but there is also a great deal of explanation to be done by the US and our Western friends," Karzai said as transcribed by AFP.

Others have suggested the American effort against Islamic extremists holds the blame for terrorist attacks, though Karzai’s words did not appear to go quite that far.

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who exposed the widespread NSA surveillance, has presented a similar reasoning behind terrorist attacks. For this, he has been taken to task by the blog CiF Watch which monitors what it says is anti-Israel writing at the British newspaper Guardian and its ‘Comment is Free’ blog.

CiF Watch points to Greenwald’s April 24 column entitled “The same motive for anti-US 'terrorism' is cited over and over: Ignoring the role played by US actions is dangerously self-flattering and self-delusional.”

Greenwald wrote, “In the last several years, there have been four other serious attempted or successful attacks on US soil by Muslims, and in every case, they emphatically all say the same thing: that they were motivated by the continuous, horrific violence brought by the US and its allies to the Muslim world – violence which routinely kills and oppresses innocent men, women and children.”

Also in April, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice blasted UN official Richard Falk for blaming U.S. foreign policy for motivating the Boston Marathon bombers.

She wrote on her Twitter feed: “Outraged by Richard Falk’s highly offensive Boston comments. Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN. Past time for him to go.”

Falk, a Special Rapporteur with the UN Human Rights Council, had written that “the American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.”

“The United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks, and these may yet happen, especially if there is no disposition to rethink U.S. relations to others in the world, starting with the Middle East,” Falk wrote.