Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam [Paperback]

In this stunning book, historian Mark Curtis details the British state's collusion with Islamic terrorists and their state sponsors.

Britain is allied with the two major sponsors of Islamist terrorism, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia funded Al Qa'ida and Pakistan funded the 7/7 bombers. As the interim report of the 9/11 Commission said, "Pakistan, not Iraq, was a patron of terrorism."

Britain was the second largest investor in Pakistan, which received Britain's third largest aid programme in Asia. By 2001, 900 British citizens were visiting Kashmir for military training every year.

London is a base for many jihadist groups including Algeria's Armed Islamic Group, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and Osama bin Laden's front, the Advice and Reformation Committee. After 9/11, the Terrorism Act made it an offence to send someone abroad for terrorist training, yet Abu Hamza wasn't touched for years.

In 2004, MI5 heard the London bombers `talking about jihadi activity in Pakistan and support for the Taliban', but as they weren't talking about terrorist attacks in Britain, MI5 left them alone. Britain, like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, tries to get its own terrorists to attack only targets abroad.

In April 2005, three months before the London bombings, the Joint Intelligence Committee said that the war in Iraq `has exacerbated the threat from international terrorism'. The bombings stemmed from the terrorist bases set up by the Pakistani state, backed by the British state. British governments accuse Iran of what Saudi Arabia and Pakistan do - backing and training terrorists.

The war in Afghanistan in the 1980s was Britain's biggest covert operation since 1945. Britain's support for, and arms supplies to, the mujehadin started months before the Soviet intervention. Thatcher praised the mujehadin as `genuine freedom fighters'. The SAS trained the mujehadin and SAS units were involved in operations. The CIA, MI6 and Pakistan's ISI jointly raided into Soviet Central Asia.

Saudi Arabia has spent $50 billion on promoting Wahhabism, its extremist version of Islam, building 1,500 mosques and 2,200 madrassas across the world. The Saudi state is the world's leading source of funds for Al Qa'ida and other jihadists; it has been the major sponsor of terrorism for the last 30 years, and it provided 45 per cent of the foreign fighters in Iraq.

Britain, the USA, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey and Iran all illegally sent arms to Bosnia, in breach of the UN embargo. Britain helped 4,000 Islamist militants to travel to Bosnia. British-born jihadists fought in Bosnia and Kosovo: 3,000 passed through Al Qa'ida training camps in the 1990s.

In 1998, Britain, the USA and the EU all denounced the Kosovo Liberation Army's terrorism, its heroin-trafficking and connections with Al Qa'ida and Osama bin Laden; by March 1999, the KLA was NATO's ground force there. Also in 1998, Britain started arming and training KLA fighters, violating UN Resolution 1160, which banned arming and training any forces in Yugoslavia.

A NATO report of August 2009 on the Afghan war said, "the overall situation is deteriorating"; NATO forces face a `resilient and growing insurgency' and admitted that NATO forces are causing `unnecessary collateral damage'.

While claiming to support Islamic moderates, the British state has backed Islamic extremists - the Saudi Arabian and Pakistani states, the Muslim Brotherhood, the KLA, the mujehadin. The British state backs these Islamists against democrats, nationalists, secularists and supporters of women's rights, as its proxy fighters against secular nationalism and socialism.

Added 21/9/12.
In this very useful new edition of Curtis' hugely informative book, he shows that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are the major state sponsors of Islamist terrorism. Al-Qaeda was largely created by Saudi Arabia. The 7/7 bombers were largely created by Pakistan - which is now more of a threat than Al-Qaeda.

These two states are allies of both the USA and Britain. This is largely why the USA and Britain bombed Kabul and Baghdad, not Islamabad and Riyadh.

Curtis points out that in March and April 2011, NATO flew 2,800 sorties and destroyed a third of Gaddafi's military assets. Qatar provided $400 million support to the Libyan rebels. There were an estimated 1,000 jihadists fighting in Libya - how many are there now in Syria?

Curtis concludes, "Britain's foreign policy-making system is far removed from promoting the national interest. Rather, Whitehall's secret affairs with radical Islam have increased the terrorist threat to Britain and the world; a distinctly immoral aspect of foreign policy has made Britain, the Middle East and much of the rest of the world more insecure."

The thousands of pieces of evidence that Curtis has amassed and structured into this remarkably coherent book, present a convincing picture of a country that has been (and continues to be) put at risk through the machinations of unseen and unaccountable people working for secret organisations, whose motives and strategies are as opaque as they are questionable. Yet, even if their purposes remain opaque, there has been an remarkable consistency in the nature of their plottings over the century since the break-up of the Turkish Ottoman empire and the establishment of the nations of the Middle East that were created largely by the British in pursuit of a "divide and rule" policy designed to retain control over the oil wealth in the region.

Curtis presents clear evidence that throughout its post-colonial history, beginning even as far back as the 1920s, British governments and Civil Service have exploited Islam and Islamic fundamentalism for its own (obscure) purposes - from the establishment of the Saudi kingdom; the division of India in 1948 to create the strategically useful Muslim state of Pakistan; to the support of the Muslim Brotherhood during Nasser's control over Egypt; to the backing of both sides during the Israeli-Palestinian wars; to the active support of terrorists (including Bin Laden) during the Afghan-Russian war; to the support of KLA and other terrorists during the Bosnian and Kosovan wars. Even after the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks, Britain continued to harbour known terrorists on its shores, giving them a safe-haven from American, French and other prosecutors.

The other consistency in the story is that like the US in its terror campaigns against democratically elected popularist and nationalistic governments in Central and South America, Britain has consistently given support to brutal dictatorships in the Middle East and Asia and actively suppressed nationalist parties and organizations, and undermined popularly elected governments, at the cost of many hundreds of thousand (or, more likely, millions) of innocent lives. Presumably Britain's elite continues to pursue such policies, but since the secret services who mastermind such activities, do not publicise what they are doing or planning, and since British governments of every ilk seem to acquiesce unquestioningly in whatever MI6 and MI5 do in the name of "public service", it is unlikely that we will ever know what has been going on until it is too late.

Curtis deserves the greatest credit for piecing together this immensely complex jigsaw of evidence. He also deserves credit for his bravery in publishing his findings. It's hard to imagine that there are not many people both within the British secret agencies and amongst the multitude of terrorist groups that he names, who would like to see him silenced. I urge everyone to read this book. It's not a pleasant read, but it's an essential one.

I must now go on to read his earlier book (Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy: Britain's Real Role in the World) to which he makes reference at several critical junctures in this more recent book.

This is a very informative book on the true relationship between Britain and Islamist. In a sense it takes the lid off the 'Secret Affair' between the British state and Islamist and reveals why this geo-political relationship exists. And how Britain has attempted to use extreme Islamists to her advantage.

Mark Curtis is one of only a few British dissidents in the UK who focuses on British foreign policy per se. He is not one of these Chomsky regurgitators, who simply focuses on what America is getting upto. Curtis brings dissent back to us.

If you are looking for something truely beyond the headlines,'BBC impartiality' and formuliac American-obsessed dissent, then this book is certainly the starting point.