Terry Glavin says:
During the Cold War, while the Soviets were pumping out Third World revolutionaries from Patrice Lamumba University in Moscow and the CIA was graduating uniformed gangsters from Chile, Argentina and Guatemala out of its School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, the advance guard of a third imperial legion was emerging from Cairo. Among the hundreds of Islamist intellectuals born from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood back in the 1960s, few were as bright and as promising as the young Afghan scholar, Burhanuddin Rabbani.
Assassinated Tuesday at his heavily fortified compound in Kabul, Rabbani, 71, was a man chastened by the horrors the global triad of cold, hot and holy war had unleashed upon Afghanistan. He was acutely aware of the misery that the grand doctrines of his youth had visited upon his fellow Afghans. Jihadism of the book was one thing, Rabbani had come to know. In the real world, Islamism had failed utterly in its mission to reverse the centuries of humiliation and squalor afflicting Muslim societies. Its fanaticism was insatiable, the depths of its savagery unfathomable, and in the end, the cannibalism of jihad came for Rabbani in the form of an assassin with a bomb in his turban.
Few men witnessed the gallows-march of Islamist history from such an advantageous perch as Rabbani occupied. During the 1980s, he was the nominal leader of the U.S.-funded, Pakistani-organized branch of the mujahedeen alliance that waged war against the Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan. During the early years of the 1990s, he served as the Jamiat-e Islami president of a proto-democratic Afghan state, only to be abandoned by his former American allies while Tehran, Islamabad and Riyadh armed and funded proxy armies to suffocate Afghan democracy in its cradle and turn the country into a slaughterhouse.
