Islamic fundamentalism result of jihadi culture promoted by US' says former diplomat

A former Indian diplomat today attributed the rise of Islamic fundamentalism to the fall-out of the "jihadi culture of the 1980s actively promoted by the United States" for confronting the Soviets in Afghanistan. "It is on record that when the Islamic Jihadists led by Osama Bin Laden led the onslaught against the Soviet occupied Afghanistan in the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan of USA had publicly lauded their roles," said Talmiz Ahmad, the former Indian Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. He was delivering a lecture on 'Political Islam and Jihad' organized by the Department of West Asian and North African Studies, Aligarh Muslim University here. He said, "We are reaping the harvest of the USA's disastrous policies in Palestine, and later in Afghanistan, Iraq and finally Syria". Talmiz said that the situation had turned the full circle today but it appears that the USA and the Western powers have not learnt their lessons from the debacle of the last quarter of a century and are continuing with their old policy of meddling in the affairs of the West Asian countries and are going out of their way to protect despotic regimes. "Islamic fundamentalism is basically the result of the failure of the Muslim societies to maintain their dignity vis-a-vis the West," he added. The humiliating defeats suffered by the Arabs after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 on territories which they had ruled for nearly two thousand years, followed by a similar defeat in 1967 had "deeply wounded Islamic society" which was compounded by their failure to assimilate the 20th century cultural advances of the Western world, he said. Talmiz said that the time is ripe for all Asian powers including India, China and Japan to join hands and work out a common policy which protects their own national interests instead of falling victim to the West's disastrous policies in the Middle East. The former diplomat said Indian mainstream media was largely ignorant of fine nuances of different movements and religious and ethnic groups currently operating in the Middle East. He said that one fundamental factor which has to be understood was the underlying hostility which today prevails in the Middle East against the Western powers. Talmiz, also former Director General, Indian Council of World Affairs, has authored a number of books on the geo- politics of the West Asian countries.