Jihad, unintended.

• Author: Simes, Dimitri K.
• Position: The Realist

HOW PRESIDENT Bush and his team handle the three remaining years of his tenure in office--especially their efforts to deal with the interrelated problems of terrorism, proliferation and the war in Iraq--will have a major impact not only on his legacy but, more importantly, on American security. Whether a distracted White House can undertake a hardheaded assessment of these problems, give them the priority they deserve, and find ways to work more effectively with others, especially other major powers, remains to be seen.

Regrettably, this administration and recent administrations of both parties have fallen far short in dealing with the danger of extremist terror. In fact, as most Americans would be shocked to learn, the United States played a major role in unleashing the global Islamic jihad now focused on our country. Surely no American policymaker ever sought a radical Islamist assault on the United States--yet several successive administrations undertook multiple policy sins of both commission and omission that helped the jihad to become established, to gain momentum, and finally to flourish virtually unopposed until it hit New York and Washington.

Still, instead of learning from past mistakes, we seem hell-bent on celebrating them. Some of the current administration's most vocal critics conveniently disregard their own responsibility for the emergence of the anti-American jihad. Worse, they press for policies that increase American vulnerabilities at a time when terrorists are trying to acquire nuclear weapons.

Many realize that Al-Qaeda grew in part from the mujaheddin Washington armed and supported to drive out the Soviet Union after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. But few are aware of the full impact of U.S. decisions at key points both before and after the Soviet intervention--decisions taken by several successive U.S. administrations--that unintentionally breathed life into this Frankenstein monster.

ACCORDING TO former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, now one of the most acerbic critics of President Bush's handling of both Iraq and radical Islam, the Carter Administration authorized a covert CIA operation, notwithstanding an expectation that it would provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In an interview in Le Nouvd Observateur in 1998, Brzezinski said that clandestine U.S. involvement in Afghanistan began months before the Soviet invasion; in fact, he added, he wrote a note to President Carter predicting that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." As Brzezinski put it, "we didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would." And even in hindsight, Brzezinski thought "that secret operation was an excellent idea", because "it had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap" and exploited "the opportunity of giving the USSR its...