On Unintended Consequences

What's the real story behind 9/11?

"File:Osama bin Laden portrait.jpg" by Hamid Mir is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Karl Popper, the great liberal thinker, was also one of the first philosophers to grapple with conspiracy theories. In 1972, he wrote that conspiracy theories grow out of older beliefs that everything was planned by the gods. If we abandon a belief in God, some people come to see “various powerful men and groups—sinister pressure groups” as being the puppet masters and script writers.

However, Popper thought that a conspiratorial approach misses one of the great truths of the social sciences: “It is one of the striking things about social life that nothing ever comes off as intended. Things always turn out a little bit differently. We hardly ever produce in social life precisely the effect that we wish to produce, and we usually get things that we do not want into the bargain.”

This week’s column will begin with a look at two unintended consequences in the Islamic world and how they compounded each other, followed by a quick look at more examples from the Middle East, the UK and Danish international waters.

The first unintended consequence began to unfold in 1979, just seven years after Popper published his insightful views on conspiracy theories. Although Afghanistan was mostly neutral throughout the Cold War, it gradually pulled closer to India and the Soviet Union as the Americans increasingly backed Pakistan.

In 1978, a Marxist-Leninist party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), overthrew the government and established a one-party system. Thousands of people were executed as it tried to abolish traditional practices, but people throughout the country revolted. The Soviet Union gradually began to intervene to help the PDPA throughout 1979, leading to a full invasion by the end of the year.

Islamists began to organize a resistence movement. This called themselves the mujahideen, which is based on the Arabic word jihad, which means struggling for a noble cause. The West saw the potential for a proxy war, defined by the dictionary as a war fought by smaller countries on behalf of larger countries. The rebels were backed by the US, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and the UK, who all wanted to stop the Soviet advance. The US and the UK wanted to do so without triggering a full-scale confrontation between the capitalist and communist worlds.

It would be a mistake to see the mujahideen as a unified movement. They were divided both ideologically and ethnically and individual rivalries between warlords were common. However, the fighters were effective and the Soviet Union’s armies ran out of steam in Afghanistan’s mountains.

By 1987, Soviet leaders said the communist regime would start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. The retreat took place over 1988 and 1989 as the Soviet empire gradually crumbled. The US, which had achieved its goal of stopping the Soviet advance without entering a nuclear war with its communist rival, gradually withdrew from its proxies in Afghanistan.

We now come to the first unintendend consequence. Following the Soviet withdrawal and declining interest from the West, Afghanistan collapsed into a brutal civil war. The Taliban - the students or seekers - began to emerge by 1994 and quickly won power from the mujahideen warlords. By 1996, the Taliban controlled around three-quarters of the country. The new rulers enforced a strict interpretation of traditional Islamic law.

Shortly after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, another invasion shook the world. In 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. This was the second time he had invaded a neighbouring country. In 1980, he had invaded Iran, leading to a bloody eight-year war. Unlike Iran, Kuwait was no match for Iraq. Most of its military was over-run within two days.

Following the invasion of Kuwait, the Iraqi army came within easy striking distance of major oil fields in Saudi Arabia. The US and other Western countries were concerned that if the Iraqi army pressed onward, it would be able to hold the world to hostage by controlling oil prices. By 1991, the US had put together an international coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait.

Enter Osama bin Laden. He was a rich Saudi Arabia-based Islamist with family roots in Yemen. He joined the mujahideen in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1979 and helped raise funds for Islamist fighters in the region. He secretly formed al-Qaeda in 1988 and returned to Saudi Arabia in triumph in 1989 after the Soviet withdrawal.

In 1990, bin Laden was horrified by the idea of American troops coming to Saudi Arabia. He interpreted Islamic scripture as banning non-Muslims from “the land of the two holy mosques.” He tried and failed to persuade the Saudi ulama to condemn the presence of Western troops on what he regarded as sacred soil.

In 1991, the same year as the Gulf War, the Saudi government expelled bin Laden from the country. He moved to Sudan, an African country with a Muslim majority, but a few years later he moved back to Afghanistan. In 1996, he declared war on the US from his new base and began to plot terrorist attacks against US interests. His organization bombed US embassies in 1998 and attacked two US warships in 2000, one unsuccessfully and one successfully.

Bin Laden’s anger at the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia is the second unintended consequence in our tale. When bin Laden moved to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, both unintended consequences compounded each other.

We all know what happened on 11th September 2001 (9/11). Nineteen hijackers (15 of them from Saudi Arabia) took control of four commercial flights. The four pilots had all been trained by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. They crashed two planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York and a third plane into the Pentagon in Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in a field following a passenger revolt. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. Bin Laden formally took responsibility for the attacks in 2004 and was killed in Pakistan by US special forces in 2011.

We have already seen that conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy (JFK) only make sense if we play down the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald. Likewise, conspiracy theories about 9/11 only make begin to make sense if we completely ignore any discussion of bin Laden, his ideology, his declaration of war against the US, his track record as a terrorist between 1998 and 2000 and his statement taking responsibility for the attacks, not to mention his terrorism training camps in Afghanistan.

Why do some people feel the need to do this? The answer has much to do with psychology: Our brains are wired to make us see patterns in randomness and we like to see big explanations of big events. Unintended consequences triggering violent acts by obscure radicals can feel somewhat emotionally unsatisfying to many.

Also, posing as an expert is more fun than actually doing the homework. Who wants to put on a white belt, admit complete ignorance about Islamism and do some heavy-duty reading about people in far-off lands with names that are hard to pronounce if you don’t speak Arabic? Just adopt a questionable methodology and then claim to be a self-taught expert! If anyone questions your competence, you can always throw in some nonsense about holograms. As an added bonus, many of the 9/11 conspiracy theories are also tainted by antisemitism.

Conspiracy theories can also be good for business, as many conspiracy entrepreneurs and con artists have realized. Authoritarian governments are particularly keen to encourage this kind of speculation, particularly among voters in the West. Regular readers will be unsurprised to realize that Russian propaganda has been amplifying 9/11 conspiracy theories for many years.

Connoisseurs of unintented consequences can see many more in the West’s confrontations with the Islamic world from 2001. Just consider how George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was quick and efficient, while the occupation was truly catastrophic. Bush’s successor Barack Obama pressed ahead with a troop withdrawal from a dysfunctional country before any healthy institutions had taken root.

This combination of sowing the seeds of chaos and leaving too soon afterwards created the perfect circumstances for al-Qaeda veterans to seize territory in Iraq and nearby Syria and create a so-called Islamic State. ISIS then encouraged Islamists in the West to commit terrorist acts in its name before being outgunned in Iraq and Syria by its many enemies over several years.

Hedgehogs run riot

More recently, we have seen the power of unintended consequences in the UK over the last week and a half. In her campaign to become Conservative leader, Prime Minister Liz Truss made lots of speeches about the importance of economic growth. On the fact of it, this is quite sensible. Unfortunately, Truss and her Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng are both hedgehogs. Prioritizing growth might be a sensible idea in most scenarios, but not when your independent central bank is battling inflation. It is roughly equivalent to stamping on the accelerator and the brake at the same time.

To make matters worse, Truss and Kwarteng’s chosen policies to foster growth were actually old-fashioned “trickle-down economics,” which isn’t quite the same as policies designed to nurture investment. This approach - called “voodoo economics” or Reagonomics in the 1980s - is based on unfunded tax cuts for the richest people in society. Of course, budget deficits (the equivalent of an overdraft for a government) act as a warning signal for investors, who often engage in capital flight when they sense fiscal irresponsibility by elected officials.

Smart commentators like Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times (link behind a paywall) have pointed out that Truss and Kwarteng’s big mistake was to fail to realize that Reagonomics was only able to work in the US in the 1980s because of “near-limitless demand” for US sovereign debt. This was due to the dollar’s status as a reserve currency. “Reaganism without the dollar,” however, is doomed for failure, he argues.

Why didn’t Truss and Kwarteng pay heed to economists? Or even the clear warnings about the dangers of the proposals over the summer from Truss’s leadership rival Rishi Sunak? Both Truss and Kwarteng are ardent supporters of Brexit. The campaign for the UK to leave the EU was characterized by its dismissal of experts, who overwhelmingly warned that it would be a terrible policy. After so many years in an unreflective and amateurish culture, Truss and Kwarteng decided to push ahead with a poorly designed policy, ignoring warnings from those pesky economists.

As a result, unintended (but not unexpected) consequences piled on top of unintended (and increasingly unpredictable) consequences. The pound crashed to record lows. Yields on government bonds (gilts) soared as prices crashed. Pension funds found this ruined their financial positions, risking a potentially catastrophic market failure. The Bank of England had to step in to buy gilts, which is an inflationary measure, at a time that it was meant to be fighting inflation. Truss and Kwarteng failed to change course or craft any appealing narratives.

Of course, conspiracy theorists will probably see some strange design in all the chaos rather than raging incompetence and groupthink. I would bet against this interpretation and I would urge you to do the same. If you want a good rule of thumb to understand the news, unintended consequences tend to be the best starting position for your research.

Let’s conclude this week’s column with a look at the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline in Swedish and Danish international waters this week, triggering an environmental disaster. The attack happened shortly after the tide of the war in Ukraine seemed to be turning, with the Ukrainian army winning back territory while Russian men tried to escape conscription. Could these Ukrainian victories have triggered to unintended consequences?

Conspiracy theorists were quick to point to the US as the culprit, while more serious commentators thought it was much more likely to be Russia. The conspiratorial explanation is very strange. Why would America attack an ally when its strategy in Ukraine was beginning to yield results? Why are Russian propaganda channels amplifying this speculation?

Like the speculation about 9/11 and JFK, conspiracy theories about the US bombing its allies only really work if we ignore the gorilla in the room. Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine strategy is based on getting access to a warm-water port in Crimea and expanding the Russian border to make it defensible, with a bit of nationalist guff to justify it all. The plan hinges on a cold and uncomfortable winter in Europe. He thinks the continent’s population is weak and soft; and will demand a settlement on Ukraine if the cold gets too disagreeable. In this context, blowing up the pipeline makes perfect sense.

Of course, it is also possible that the attack could have been made by a rogue element within Putin’s regime with its own agenda. Right now, we don’t have enough information to make the call, even though Russia appears to be the prime suspect.

The theory of Russian responsibility is, of course, still unproven. If it is right, why plan a clandestine attack and then deny responsibility? Denmark is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), while Sweden is in talks to join. Predictably enough, NATO has threatened to retaliate for the sabotage. And Article 5 means an attack on one NATO member is an attack on every NATO member.

NATO has only had to invoke Article 5 once in its 73-year history. - after al Qaeda’s attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon on 9/11 . And that brings us full circle for today. The comments are open. See you next week!

Further Reading

The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong

The New Threat from Islamic Militancy by Jason Burke

Suspicious Minds by Rob Brotherton

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