Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani

illustrate different sides of the same culturalist argument, which downplays the political encounter that I think is central to understanding political terrorism.
    To distinguish cultural from political Islam, I shall place political Islam in the context of the the Cold War. My aim is to question the widely held presumption—even among critics of Culture Talk—that extremist religious tendencies can be equated with political terrorism. Terrorism is not a necessary effect of religioustendencies, whether fundamentalist or secular. Rather, terrorism is born of a political encounter. When it harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, terrorism needs to be understood as a modern political movement at the service of a modern power. As such, the genesis of the form of political terrorism responsible for the tragedy of 9/11 can be traced to the late Cold War.

Chapter Two
T HE C OLD W AR A FTER I NDOCHINA
    I was a young lecturer at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania in 1975. It was a momentous year in the decolonization of the world as we knew it: 1975 was the year of the American defeat in Indochina, and of the collapse of Portuguese rule in the colonies of Mozambique, Angola, and Portuguese Guinea, the last European empire in Africa. In retrospect, it was the year that the focal point of the Cold War shifted from Southeast Asia to southern Africa. The strategic question was this: Who would pick up the pieces of the Portuguese empire in Africa, the United States or the Soviet Union? With a shift in the focal point of the Cold War, there was a corresponding shift in U.S. strategy. Two major influences, each a lesson from the war in Indochina, informed that shift. One was drawn by the president of the United States, the second by Congress. The executive lesson was summed up as the Nixon Doctrine; the legislative lesson was passed as the Clark Amendment.
    Two Contrasting Paradigms: Laos and Vietnam
    The Nixon Doctrine held that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars.” It summed up the lesson of more than a decade of U.S. involvement in Indochina. More specifically, it weighed the Vietnam debacle against the conduct of relatively successful proxy wars in Laos. The contrast could not have been sharper. With a free hand in Vietnam, the United States had decided to wage the war in a more traditional fashion, introducing hundreds of thousands of troops to fight a ground war against local Communist guerrillas. But when it came to Laos, the United States found its hands tied by a 1962 treaty with Moscow, which disallowed the introduction of ground troops in that country, and was forced to improvise.
    The Vietnam War began in 1964 when the Johnson administration claimed that two U.S. destroyers had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedoes in the Gulf of Tonkin. As the media painted a picture of national humiliation and demanded a response, President Johnson launched reprisal bombings against North Vietnam. He called on Congress to pass a resolution that would allow him to send U.S. ground troops to Vietnam. Later, the crews of the destroyers said the attack stories had been fabricated. A joint resolution of both houses of Congress, passed soon after the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1964, gave the president the endorsement needed in Vietnam. Armed with war powers that amounted to a blank check, President Johnson and his advisers took to a rapid “Americanization” of the war. In the course of a year, 1964, the number of U.S. “military advisers” increased from sixteen thousand to twenty-three thousand men. With still no discernible progress, the United States ordered sustained bombing of North Vietnam—Operation Rolling Thunder—in the expectation that the destruction of power plants and industrial facilities wouldforce the north to surrender. When this failed to produce the expected results, Johnson decided to commit enough combat troops to take over the running of the counterinsurgency war from the South