by William H. Thornton

The end of the Cold War found the U.S. and its NATO allies unprepared for the geocultural realities they met in Eurasia. As in the Middle East, Islam was bound to play a central role here, but the American concept of church/state division and the European concept of secular modernity put Western analysts at a loss where Islamism (the cultural politics of Islam) was concerned. Americans were especially in a fog in their effort to supplant Russian influence in the newly independent nations of Central Asia, where an Islamic renaissance had been in progress long before the Soviet collapse. Although all the ex-Soviet republics are officially secular, Islam is at once a key to legitimacy and a linchpin of resistance throughout the region. U.S. policy makers tend either to ignore this religious factor or, when that becomes impossible, to treat it as a cultural atavism in need of repair. That bias obscures the most crucial cultural fact of current Eurasian politics: that insofar as civil Islam (a moderate form that welcomes democracy but contests the culturally invasive commercialization that is synonymous with current “globalization”) is the worst enemy of uncivil Islam, Washington’s broad-spectrum “war on terrorism” sets in motion a vicious circle whereby aid to dictatorial regimes pushes moderate Islamists into the extremist camp, which in turn becomes a pretext for more aid...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Thornton1106.htm