THE TIDE TURNS 347
For years, they had been describing a world bifurcated between Dar al-
Islam and Dar al-Harb. For years they had been predicting an apocalyptic
showdown between good and evil, God and Satan, a great global battle to
resolve all the contradictions and melt all factions into a single world,
Medina universalized.
For the West, the end of the Cold War meant Afghanistan could be
abandoned. There was nothing left to do there. The United States and its
western European allies had pumped billions of dollars worth of arms and
money into the country, but now they disengaged entirely, rejecting propos-
als from several sources that they sponsor some sort of conference, broker
some sort of peace, help cobble together some sort of political process to
help the country find its way back to civil order. CIA station chief Milton
Bearden explained the reason for this sudden disengagement succinctly: "No
one gives a shit about Afghanistan." The tribal armies that had battled the
Soviets fell to quarrelling over the country they had won with the arms they
had scored. The Soviets had already destroyed the Afghan countryside. Now,
the civil war among the various guerilla armies destroyed the cities. Foreign
jihadists who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s swarmed back to
make the rubble their base of operations for a war against the West.
Step one was erecting in Afghanistan a pure version of the community
they envisioned, one in which every man, woman, and child lived exactly
according to the letter of God's law as they understood it or suffered the
punishment. For this reason, jihadists, sponsored by Wahhabi money from
Saudi sources, helped develop the Taliban, a party of primitive ideologues
that emerged out of the refugee camps in that tribal belt that vaguely sep-
arates Afghanistan from Pakistan.
And eventually, some subset of the militant Jihadists holed up in the
carcass of Afghanistan crafted a scheme to fly hijacked airliners into the
World Trade Center in New York and Pentagon headquarters in Washing-
ton, D.C.
On that day, September 11, 2001, two world histories crashed to-
gether, and out of it came one certainty: Fukiyama was mistaken. History
was not over.