Am currently reading this (started before the bombings!):
Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam
Jason Burke
Good book, strongly endorsed by Chomsky on the back (!), so far it seems an informed and fair view. It has made me realise how simplistic the predominant view of Islamic terrorism in our media really is, with their constant references to "al-Qaeda" operations while clearly having no idea what al-Qaeda is or what role it really plays.
Here's a relevant excerpt from ch14 "The Holy War Foundation":
So, what can we say about 'al-Qaeda', its structure, organization, personnel and operations between 1998 and September 2001? As ever, it is easier to say what it is not. As has become clear over the preceding three chapters, the idea that al-Qaeda is a coherent hierarchical terrorist group, with a single leader, a broadly uniform ideology and an ability to conceive and execute projects globally through well-disciplined cadres, sleepers and activists spread around the world is misplaced. Saying what 'al-Qaeda' was during the period, and thus what it is now, is far more difficult.
In my introduction, I defined several different al-Qaedas. We have seen all of these al-Qaedas over the last three chapters. There has been the hardcore, to my mind the only entity that warrants the label of 'al-Qaeda', even if they do not use it. In 2001, this was almost exclu- sively based in Afghanistan. Then there were men like Hambali, Abu Doha in London, Abu Abdullah al-Shami in Jordan and northern Iraq and al-Nashiri in the Yemen. All were long-term associates of bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and others, who accepted missions from them or acted as intermediaries and recruiters for others. They were 'associate members of al-Qaeda'. Along with people like Beghal, Ressam, Abu Hoshar, Khalim and others they acted as links between the 'al-Qaeda hardcore' and the rest of the vast, amorphous movement of modern radical Islam, with its myriad cells, domestic groups, 'groupuscules' and splinters, joining the 'network of networks' to the hardcore itself. Sometimes these networks were happy to be brought under bin Laden's umbrella. Often they had no interest in surrendering an element of their autonomy in return for access to funds or training, however much either was needed. Frequently other figures, such as Abu Qutada in London or ibn Khattab, the Jordanian-Saudi militant leader in Chechnya, or indeed the Pakistani or Indonesian government, were able to provide what was needed, whether it was fatwas, weapons or funds, without recourse to bin Laden and his close associates.
One thing that quickly becomes apparent, however, is the willing participation of those that bin Laden managed to co-opt. This mirrors the eagerness of volunteers, like al-Owhali, who overcame significant obstacles to make their way to the training camps where they remained for considerable periods, without compulsion. What is particularly striking is how, particularly when it came to terrorist attacks, it was more often al-Qaeda that was approached with ideas or plans for an attack than groups or individuals approached by al-Qaeda. Indeed, by the end of 2001, volunteers requesting martyrdom operations were being ticked off by senior aides of bin Laden if they did not come up with their own ideas for attacks. When Zuhair Hilal Mohammed al-Tubaiti, a Saudi who had made his way to the training camps in 2000, asked Ahmed al-Moula al-Billal, a member of the 'al-Qaeda hardcore', to be allowed to participate in an operation in which he would die, he was told, fairly abruptly, to go away and formulate a plan and submit it for approval like everyone else. Al-Tubaiti, and the men he recruited himself in Morocco and brought to the camps, are part of the third group of people who are so often lumped in under the label of 'al-Qaeda', those who are part of the huge groundswell of anger and resentment throughout the Islamic world which leads thousands of young men to set out in search of their own personal 'lesser' jihads each day.
Such men, as I have stressed a number of times, cannot be considered 'al-Qaeda'. Something that can be labelled 'al-Qaeda' did exist between 1996 and 2001. It was composed of a small number of experienced militants who were able to access resources of a scale and with an ease that was hitherto unknown in Islamic militancy, largely by virtue of their position in Afghanistan and the sympathy of so many wealthy, and not so wealthy, Muslims across the Islamic world, though particularly in the Gulf. This 'al-Qaeda' acted, as the name suggests, like a wealthy university disbursing research grants and assisting with facilities such as libraries or with teaching that can allow the ambitions of its pupils, particularly those star students who have attracted the attention of the chancellor or the senior lecturers, to be fulfilled. It is the Holy War Foundation.
Another model is venture capitalism. Individuals or small groups (companies) would approach the chief executive and board (bin Laden, Atef, et al.) with ideas that they believed were worth support. Of hundreds of such proposals, only a few were chosen. Some received a significant investment, others were merely given a small amount of cash. The firm's bank of experts were on hand to assist, sometimes travelling to do so. Other experts were stationed overseas, encouraging local businesses and picking ones that looked capable of turning a profit. A third model, familiar to anyone in the world of media, is of al-Qaeda as a newspaper or TV production or publishing house. Bin Laden and his associates acted as commissioning editors of films, books or newspaper articles. Freelancers approached, them with ideas that were sometimes funded and resourced but often rejected. Occasionally, old ideas were rehashed or the editor's own ideas were given to people whose own ideas had been rejected. Equally often, the approaches of the university, venture capitalist or commissioning editor were rejected as inappropriate, unwelcome or simply unnecessary. This is a complex and varied picture. There are, of course, hundreds of different universities, venture capitalists and TV production companies. Some have higher profiles than others and their reputations or media images may not accurately reflect the extent of the work they do. This picture may be less seductive than the image of the James Bond villain fomenting global mayhem from his secret headquarters, but it does have the virtue of being accurate.
5 comments:
Mostly agree - al-Qaeda is an idea, but it's not just an idea, so both military and political weapons must be used against it. And although bright sparks such as yourself "know this already", pay attention to how the term "al-Qaeda" is usually used on the news - to my mind, it's mostly used as a reference to a James-Bond-type-villain as decried in the excerpt.
The first step in the political war is to name the enemy properly (we've had this discussion before). Perhaps a start has been made:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/27/wterr27.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/07/27/ixnewstop.html
Don't mention war on terror, say Bush aides
Telegraph
27/07/2005
The "war on terror", the resonant catchphrase of the Bush administration for the past four years, is to be discreetly phased out in favour of more nuanced language, officials signalled yesterday. The rebranding is part of what America's critics will say is a long overdue acknowledgement by the Pentagon of the complexity of the challenge of combating al-Qa'eda. ... Officials are instead starting to favour the rather less snappy phrase "struggle against violent extremism" as the administration puts increased stress on longer term initiatives - diplomatic, economic and educational - to defeat terrorism.
Another Burke thread started here:
http://impdec.blogspot.com/2005/08/seven-ways-to-stop-terror.html
Have scanned some stuff in which I thought people might be interested in.
Here's a section on Afghanistan:
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p256
Allied troops had moved into Bagram within days of the fall of Kabul. During the spring of 2002, as the structures of the camp gradually grew more permanent, the aims of the military operations subtly changed too. At Tora Bora the objectives had been explicit: find, capture or kill bin Laden and as many of his men and his Taliban allies as possible. By May, American and British military planners were talking about 'denying' territory to the militants instead. Their job, they said, was to keep Afghanistan 'al-Qaeda free'. It was a tacit admission that most of the people they had wanted to catch had escaped. It was clear that hunting them was a job for which the hardware that had been assembled at Bagram was ill-suited,
The failure of the Marines to get a single confirmed 'kill' was understandable. The task they had been expected to complete was unrealistic. The professionalism of the soldiers themselves, and the achievements of the competent, popular and successful United Nations peacekeeping mission in Kabul, was forgotten. This was a pity because the war, though it tragically cost the lives of many civilians in Afghanistan, gave the country the best opportunity for several decades to build a peaceful and secure future. The foreign militants who were causing so much trouble and were so loathed by most Afghans were expelled, the Taliban, whose increasing radicalism outweighed the enhanced security they brought, were removed from power, and the interference of regional powers, notably Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, in the country's internal politics was, and at the time of writing still is, largely curtailed. Millions of refugees, exiled from their homes for up to twenty-five years, returned. In the autumn of 2001 I had been deeply concerned about the prospect of a ground war in Afghanistan, When, a year to the day after the start of the hostilities, I visited a girls' school in Jalalabad and saw hundreds of neatly uniformed pupils being taught under the trees in the playground because the classrooms were all full, I knew I had been wrong.
p258
One afternoon I drove out to Sangesar village, a dirt-poor cluster of mud buildings where Mullah Omar had been a preacher before forming the Taliban in 1994. Locals there told me they did not want the Taliban back. They just wanted someone who would build them a school, a clinic, roads and a water pump. They said they would support anyone who provided them.
And this is the problem. The amount of money contributed by Western powers, given the sums spent on fighting in Afghanistan in the last twenty years, has been miserly. In Kandahar, I visited several filthy wards in the dilapidated hospital that were full of malnourished children. Many were close to starvation. Out in the more rural areas, where no help was available, children were dying. That such hardship could persist two years after Afghanistan was invaded by the richest country the world has ever seen is appalling. Even if shame does not force action, then self-interest should. There is still a significant risk that the short-sighted abandonment of Afghanistan at the end of the 1980s will be repeated. Many Afghans are becoming angry at the slow pace of change, and this growing resentment has been exacerbated in some areas by the insensitive behaviour of American ground troops and the seeming inability of the US air force to distinguish civilians from combatants.
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Another scan from:
Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam
Jason Burke
This is the conclusion, pages 281 - 292:
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Analysis of the backgrounds of the thousands of individuals of whom the modern Islamic militant movement is composed is a fraught business. It is very difficult to impose any analytic order on the huge variety of different people involved, with their diverse motives, backgrounds, experience and culture. However, two broad groups can be distinguished.
The first can be termed 'intellectual activists'. These are men who can justify their attraction to radical Islam in relatively sophisticated terms. They share many common elements, particularly in regards to their backgrounds, with more moderate political Islamists. This group would include Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden himself, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Omar Saeed Sheikh, Abu Doha, Abu Qutada, arguably Mohammed Atta, and many others. Such men are drawn from the same social groups who were involved in the earliest Islamist movements of the colonial period. They dominated Islamic militant leadership cadres in the 1970s and 1980s as well as filling the ranks of more moderate organizations. They also share many common elements with radical political activists on both the left and the right. In fact, they don't just fit a particular model of Islamic activist over recent decades, they fit a model of revolutionary cadres over several centuries. There is no space here to look at the similarities in background between Egyptian Islamists in the 19705, Russian anarchists, Bolshevik activists and French revolutionaries of an earlier age but it is striking how often it is elements from the newly educated lower-middle classes who are most active. These are the people who are so often at the forefront of calling for change, even if change is justified by retrospective appeal to a nostalgically imagined 'just' golden age. They are men who are articulate, intelligent and relatively worldly. They have aspirations and experience profound resentments when those aspirations are frustrated. When their expectations cannot be met, they perceive it as an injustice. If there are no effective ways to resolve the problem within the bounds of state-sanctioned political or social activism then alternatives are sought. Radical Islamic militancy is one.
The concept of injustice is key. It is not absolute deprivation that causes resentment but, as many scholars have noted, deprivation following a period of aspiration-raising relative prosperity. In very general terms, and over the long term, the history of the Middle East and the Islamic world can be read in these terms. A lengthy period of international political and cultural dominance has left a legacy of expectation that is very much at odds with the region's current second-rank status. The recent economic success of East Asia, for example, is felt as wrong. It is not fair, right or just. The relative economic success of Jews is profoundly resented, as outgoing Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohammed made clear in a grossly antisemitic speech in November 2003, in which he queried why so few Jews could amass 'so much power' when such a large number of Muslims were so feeble by comparison.
This model of expectation, disappointment and perceived injustice works over a shorter timespan too. The expectations of the populations of many Middle Eastern countries were raised hugely as the Western imperialist system fell apart and the old regimes that had governed so incompetently and repressively were overthrown. Yet expectations of democracy and prosperity were swiftly disappointed. The number of militants whose fathers were involved in anti-colonial struggles is significant. So too is the number whose families unexpectedly suffered under the post-colonial regimes. Their sense of injustice is often deep.
And in the short term, aspirations have been raised in an unprecedented way both by the extension of education to so many and by the exposure of virtually everyone in the Islamic world to images of the West, with its apparent democracy, sexual opportunity and wealth. Again, the model of expectation, disappointment and perceived injustice fits the experience of millions of graduates, provincial immigrants to cities, doctors who drive cabs and ambitious civil engineers who teach basic arithmetic. It matches the experience of the ly-year-old Pakistani lower-middle-class youth torn between the mullah and MTV. If he accepts his desire to be part of the Westernized world he will have to address the fact that he will only ever enjoy an ersatz, inferior version of the 'Western' life of his equivalent in London or Los Angeles. His clothes will never be as up to date, his skin will never be the right colour, his chances of pre-marital sex will always be infinitesimally lower. An alternative of course is to reject the West and all it stands for in favour of the affirming, empowering certainties of radical Islam, which teaches him that he is no longer subordinate but merely denied what is rightfully his. In this the struggle going on in the mind of the 17-year-old mirrors that within wider Islamic society. The debate is over how to deal with modernity, how to match the West's advances without sacrificing personal, cultural, national or religious identity, how to reconcile Islam with the modern age. Most people, like our 17-year-old, try to reconcile the two. None of these processes are easy. All generate anger, energy and resentment and the potential for violent protest.
The second group of radical Muslim activists emerged at the end of the 19805 and has become increasingly dominant though the 1990s. They are less educated, more violent and follow a more debased, popularized form of Islam. They are more unthinkingly radical, bigoted and fanatical. Instead of being drawn from frustrated, aspirant groups within society they are more often drawn from its margins, from those who have few expectations to be disappointed. This was very clear in Algeria in the mid 19905, where the most violent groups among the GIA drew their recruits from the poorest and most brutalized elements in society, in Pakistan, where, in the same period, the various political Islamist groups found themselves forced to cede ground to the Deobandi medressa nexus, and in Kashmir, where the teachers and doctors who formed the leadership cadres of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen were forced aside by the semi-educated militants of the new Jihadi groups. The same is true in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and in much of southeast Asia. The Bali bombers were largely uneducated. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi comes from a modest background and used to run a video shop. The men who blew themselves up in Morocco in May 2003 were from the poorest stratum of society, marginalized men living in a marginalized slum community.
The shift can also be seen in the West. At the beginning of the 19908 most of the Islamic activists living in London, or 'Londonistan' as it was called by critics of the British government's liberal asylum policy, were highly politicized, educated and relatively moderate. By the end of the decade militants in the West included far more men like Richard Reid, a British petty criminal who tried to blow himself up on a transatlantic jet in December 2001, or Nizar Trabelsi, a former drug addict and refugee. These were poor, unemployed, angry people. The number of former convicts or asylum seekers among recently recruited Islamic militants is striking.
Significantly, British security officials charged with countering Islamic terror in the UK have made the monitoring of mosques frequented by young Afro-Caribbean first or second generation immigrants a priority. These two groups are not rigidly defined, and individual activists can show elements of both or neither. Men like bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and Abu Qutada have managed, despite their own relatively prosperous backgrounds, to assume leadership of the most violent, ill-educated, inarticulate militant elements. But, despite the flaws inherent in any broad-brushed approach, this analysis may help us understand why terrorists act as they do.
Modern Islamic terrorists are made, not born. There are various stages in that process of creation. The route to terrorism starts with a feeling that something is wrong that needs to be set right. This can be a real problem or merely a perceived injustice (or indeed both). The second stage is the feeling that the problem, whether cosmic or purely personal, cannot be solved without recourse to a mode of action or activism beyond those provided for by a given society's political or legal framework. The next stage changes the individual from being an activist, even a militant, into a terrorist. It involves the acceptance of an ideology and the development of a worldview that allows the powerful social barriers that stop most people from committing acts of violence to be overcome. It means that individuals feel compelled to do appalling things. If volunteers are to be diverted from terrorism it is this process that we need to counter.
The root causes of modern Islamic militancy are the myriad reasons for the grievances that are the first step on the road to terrorism. It is not a question of absolute deprivation but of how deprivation is perceived. Yet social and economic problems, though the link to terrorism is indirect, are critical as a pre-condition. Such problems are growing more, not less, widespread and profound throughout the Islamic world. The economies of nations from Morocco to Indonesia are in an appalling state. Population growth may now be slowing but more than half of all Pakistanis and Iranians are under 20 years old. Egypt's population is still predicted to grow by a quarter between 2000 and 2015. Saudi Arabia's is likely to rise by more than 50 per cent in the next ten years.
Unemployment, particularly among important groups such as graduates, is acute, and real wages are stagnant. Growth in the Middle East during the 1990s has been under 1 per cent. For hundreds of millions of people in the Islamic world, housing and sanitation are grossly inadequate. Many cities are on their way to joining 'failed states' as locations of endemic anarchy, violence and alienation. Everywhere, the gulf between rich and poor is increasing.
But these problems alone do not cause terrorism. If individuals have faith in a political system, a belief that they can change their lives through activism that is sanctioned by the state or understand and accept the reasons for their hardships, they are unlikely to turn to militancy. But there is little reason to be optimistic about the possible development of alternatives that might divert the angry and alienated from radical Islam in the near future. Only in a few small Gulf states has there been any genuine move towards reform in recent years. In Saudi Arabia, though the worst of the radical preachers have been reined in, religious collections at mosques stopped and the possibility of local elections raised, genuine political reform is still unlikely. The fundamental compact between the house of al-Saud and the Wahhabi ulema remains strong. Nor does it look like there will be any genuinely significant reform in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Jordan or the central Asian republics soon. One of the reasons for the evolution of more radical, debased and violent forms of protest is the tendency of governments in the Middle East and elsewhere to repress moderate movements. Because they are scared of radical Islam taking power, the regimes block democratic reform. Because there is no reform, radical Islam grows in support. As national Islamic movements, moderate or violent, are crushed or fail, anger is channelled into the symbolic realm and into the international, cosmic language of bin Laden and his associates.
And this is the biggest threat of all. This is the crucial third stage that turns an angry and frustrated young man into a terrorist. This is the moment when an individual begins to conceive of doing something more than shouting slogans or waving banners. And it is here that the newly dominant, globalized 'al-Qaeda', defined as a universally transportable, universally applicable ideology and worldview, is so important. To overcome the behavioural norms that restrain most balanced citizens in any society from acts of appalling brutality, particularly against those usually consideted civilians, a powerful legitimizing discourse is needed. The ideologues of modern 'Jihadi Salafi' Islamic radicalism, with their vision of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, belief and unbelief, the true faith and its opponents, provide one.
Didar, the Kurdish suicide bomber, spoke of how the lessons he received from his prayer leader at the mosque in Arbil helped him understand why 'things were not right in the world'. Pakistani militants told me in late 2003 of how accepting the radical Islamic worldview was like receiving a revelation. Suddenly, they said, they comprehended why all the 'bad things happened'. Radical Islam provides a remedy, too. The militants I interviewed said they understood what steps they must take as well as what was wrong. The real power of bin Laden's discourse is that, like Marxism, it explains a personal experience by reference to a convincing general theory and then provides a comprehensible programme of action. By explaining 'injustice' it justifies the most appalling actions.
The situation is far worse than when bin Laden began to come to prominence. This legitimizing discourse, the critical element that converts an angry young man into a human bomb, is now everywhere. You will hear it in a mosque, on the internet, from your friends, in a newspaper. You do not have to travel to Afghanistan to complete the radicalizing process, yon can do it in your front room, in an Islamic centre, in a park. The spread of suicide bombings to places such as Kashmir, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, where, only a few years ago, such tactics would have been alien and incomprehensible, shows how pervasive the 'Jihadi Salafist', 'al-Qaedaist' worldview and the style of activism it inspires has now become. For an increasing number of people it explains everything. It works.
In the West we often ask, 'What do they want?' The question itself implies a number of things: our own willingness to understand legitimate grievances as well as a hope that, by addressing them, a resolution of the current situation can be found. Both are laudable aims. But the question also implies a single 'they'. This book has been largely devoted to showing why this may be a mistake. Modern Islamic militancy is a diverse and complex phenomenon. The values and ideas, the 'wants', of militants are very varied. There is no single 'they'.
Algerian bombers have motives that are very different from Chechens'. The men - and possibly women - who blew themselves up in March 2004 during an unprecedented wave of violence in Uzbekistan were not acting for the same reasons that inspired a dozen Turks to attack British-linked targets in Istanbul five months previously. Rarnzi Yousef, who tried to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993, was driven more by an egotistical lust for notoriety than by religious fervour. Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 11 September hijackers who succeeded where Yousef failed, acted because he felt, with absolute certainty, that he had no other option but to wage a violent jihad. One of the men who organized the bombing of a nightclub in Bali in October 2001, Imam Samudra, said that he had been disgusted by the 'dirty adulterous behaviour of the [whites]' he saw there. Another said he was angered by the US-led war in Afghanistan. The Madrid bombers chose not to kill themselves, unlike previous militants more closely linked to the 'al-Qaeda hardcore', who see the deaths of bombers as an integral part of the message sent by attacks. Recent strikes by Islamic militants in Iraq, whether by suicide bombers or not, are different again. Though they are cleverly aimed at achieving short-term tactical gains - by impeding the formation of an Iraqi police force able to maintain law and order, for example - they also make a far bigger statement about the vulnerability of the West and America's inability to protect its allies, at the same time as demonstrating the sheer faith of the bombers themselves. The latter, as discussed in Chapter Two, is important both to frighten the 'unbelievers' and to shame those Muslims who live their lives by values that are far removed from those of the fanatics into greater religious observance.
To understand this seemingly endless variety we have first to redraft our question. 'What do they want?' implies a very Western concept of acting merely to achieve specific goals. Instead we should be asking, 'Why do they feel that they have to act in the way that they do?' The answer is that all the militants are acting because, from their twisted standpoint, they believe they have no choice.
All the militants explain their own personal, local experiences by reference to one greater truth - that Islam is under attack. In every statement they make one can see this mix of the general and the specific. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, a Saudi and an Egyptian respectively, blame the problems of their native countries on the kufr powers who back the local regimes. Imam Samudra, the Bali bomber, saw the nightclubs of Bali, from which, as a local, he was banned, as part of a cultural assault mounted by the West against the Islamic world. In Kashmir, locals speak of their repression as part of a global campaign against Muslims, In Chechnya, militants see the war with Russia as a manifestation of the same push to eliminate Islam. In March 2004 a threat from a previously unknown group promised violence in France and listed the banning of the veil from schools in the country alongside continuing American support for Israel, the war in Iraq and the killing of civilians in Afghanistan as evidence that the West has never abandoned the project of the Crusades. The ousting of Saddam Hussein is widely seen throughout the Islamic world as a strategic move to secure oil - Allah's gift to the Muslims - and protect Israel. This perception that a belligerent West is set on the humiliation, division and eventual conquest of the Islamic world is as much a root cause of Muslim violence as relative poverty or government repression. The militants believe they are fighting a last-ditch battle for the survival of their society, culture, religion and way of life. They believe that the Crusades never ended and that they are now fighting in a desperate war of self-defence. They understand, as we in the West also believe, that self-defence can justify using all sorts of tactics that might be frowned on in other circumstances. They believe, as we think too, that they are fighting to preserve their lives, societies and culture.
But from where does this perception spring? Why do they blame us? For good reasons and bad. It is true that the history of Western intervention in the Islamic world over the last three centuries has not been happy. It is also true, as centuries of antisemitism have shown, that humans naturally seek to blame 'the other'. However, there is a more existential, more irrational reason for seeing the West as an aggressor. The militants need to find an explanation for the parlous state of the Middle East. If Islam is the perfect social system, their logic runs, then something else must be to blame for the second-rate status, economically, militarily, politically, of the umma. The most obvious answer is that the fault lies with the West and with those Muslims who fail to practise their religion with sufficient discipline and devotion. The bombs are designed to restore the pride of Muslims worldwide, to shame and inspire 'faithless' Muslims into greater observance and, by weakening the 'Crusaders' and their local allies and proxies, to hasten the eventual return to the golden age of a thousand years ago, when the lands of Islam were the world's leading power.
The cosmic nature of the aims of the militants make them very difficult to counter. Dialogue with hardcore radicals is virtually impossible. So the only way we will ensure a future without fear and uncertainty is by halting the spread of the militants' twisted worldview and stemming the production of new radical volunteers. We need to strip away the legitimacy that allows the militants to operate. We need to understand why their warped vision is so attractive to so many and then work to counter its evident power. Propaganda works when it fits with people's sense of what is true. Bin Laden's campaign to convince the world's Muslims that his cause is just is successful so often because there is so much resentment and anger already extant. What motivated thousands of volunteers to travel to Afghanistan still exists, even if the training camps are now defunct. Few in the West remember that the sacking of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols provoked a wave of rigorous conservative reformism epitomized by ibn Taimiya, the hardline jurist so often quoted by bin Laden. He bemoaned the weakness and lassitude of the umma and called on Muslims to rise up in defence of their religion, culture and society. Many answered his call then. Many are likely to answer that of his latter-day counterparts.
At the beginning of this book I outlined the various meanings of 'al-Qaeda'. It could mean, I said, a vanguard, a base or a maxim, precept, rule or methodology. In the fifteen years since the end of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, modern Islamic militancy has run through three phases, each of which corresponds to one of those meanings. In the first phase, from around 1989 to around 1996, hundreds of activists who had been involved in the war against the Soviets or were fighting local struggles against regimes in the Middle East worked, often independently, at radicalizing and mobilizing those who had hitherto shunned extremism. These activists saw themselves as 'the vanguard' - 'al-qaeda al-sulbah' - and saw their role as enlightening and then leading the masses into war and into a just society. Their preferred propaganda weapon was spectacular violence. From 1996 to 2001, much of this vanguard came together in Afghanistan, where an unprecedented terrorist infrastructure was available. Though many remained independent, a large number became associated with bin Laden, who by the autumn of 1998 had the highest profile of all the alumni of the war against the Soviets. Using that profile, and helped by historical circumstances that pushed the Taliban closer to the foreign Jihadis, bin Laden was able to create something that approximated 'the base', the second understanding of 'al-Qaeda' that I mentioned in my first chapter. Then came 11 September and the subsequent campaign which destroyed that base. The second phase came to an end. We are now in the third phase, where 'al-Qaeda', neither a vanguard nor a base, is instead accurately characterized by the third translation I outlined: the methodology, the maxim, the precept, the rule, the way of seeing the world. The 'hardcore' is scattered, the 'network of networks' broken up. All that remains is the idea of 'al-Qaeda'. You are a member of al-Qaeda if you say you are.
Our societies are open societies. Armouring ourselves may seem useful in the short term, comforting in the mid term, but is, in the long term, impossible. We need to think again about our approach. We need to remember that every time force is used it provides more evidence of a 'clash of civilizations' and a 'cosmic struggle' and thus aids the militants in their effort to radicalize and mobilize. By strengthening the warped vision of the world that is becoming so prevalent, every use of force is another small victory for bin Laden and those like him.
Of course the 'war on terror' should have a military component. It is easy to underestimate the sheer efficacy of military power in achieving specific immediate goals. Hardened militants cannot be rehabilitated and need to be made to cease their activities, through legal processes or otherwise. But if we are to win the battle against terrorism our strategies must be made broader and more sophisticated. We must eliminate our enemies without creating new ones. Military power must be only one tool among many, and a tool that is only rarely, and reluctantly, used. Currently, military power is the default, the weapon of choice. In fact the greatest weapon available in the war on terrorism is the courage, decency, humour and integrity of the vast proportion of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. It is this that is restricting the spread of 'al-Qaeda' and its warped worldview, not the activities of counter-terrorist experts or the military strategists. It is this that, as Islamic terrorism grows more and more fragmented, we need most. Without it we are lost. There is indeed a battle between the West and men like bin Laden. But it is not a battle for global supremacy. It is a battle for hearts and minds. And it is a battle we, and our allies in the Muslim world, are losing.
I have tried to explain the nature of modern Islamic terrorism and examine some of its root causes. All are the result of historical processes, none are inevitable, and all can be acted on by well-judged, properly executed policies. The causes of terrorism must be addressed; moderate Muslim leaders must be engaged and supported; it must be recognized that genuinely authentic and appropriate governments in the Islamic world will include a strong representation of Islamists; the spread of hardline strands of Islam at the expense of tolerant, pluralistic strains must be rolled back; repressive governments must be made to reform; a huge campaign must be launched to convince the Muslim world that the West is not a belligerent foe but a partner in mutual prosperity; every policy in every sphere must be weighed carefully and its adverse impact on the youthful populations of the Islamic world considered. Long-term success in the war on terror will depend on successfully countering the growing sympathy for the militants. An important first step will be a single, substantial paradigmatic shift in the way the threat facing us all is currently understood and addressed. The threat is not from one man or one organization.
All terrorist violence, 'Islamic' or otherwise, is unjustifiable, unforgivable, cowardly and contemptible. But just because we condemn does not mean we should not strive to comprehend. We need to keep asking, 'Why?'
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Osama Bin Laden's dreams denied by US might
By Michael Burleigh
Telegraph
11/09/2007
...
Despite the $50 million reward for information leading to bin Laden's capture, he is still at large, somewhere in the greater Palermo of Pakistan's lawless tribal areas. Experts say he has paid off the turbaned Don Corleones while he moves around within concentric rings of security, including men equipped with shoulder-launched missiles and a personal executioner to deliver the coup de grâce if things look really sticky.
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Bin Laden has been hard at work reading in his years of enforced isolation. In his speech he frequently refers to the outpourings of the US Leftist Noam Chomsky, to the effect that Western democracy is a sham masking the amoral ruthlessness of major corporations.
Having designated them as "the real tyrannical terrorists", bin Laden attacks the impact of corporate "globalisation" upon Africa and the planet's climate. He even spares a thought for home-owners struggling to pay sub-prime mortgages, contrasting their plight with those fortunates who only pay Islamic zakat at 2.5 per cent. This is prefatory to a general injunction for us all to convert to Islam, described as a most tolerant creed, his "evidence" being that Muslims did not carry out the Holocaust, while Jews and Christians allegedly live harmoniously in Islamic countries.
It is tempting to dismiss these cosmic ruminations and historical lies as the irrelevant maunderings of a man who cannot use either the internet or a mobile phone, and whose once prodigious wealth has been spent or is frozen. They seem curiously detached from al-Qa'eda's usual tones, more like an appeal to leading Western Leftists.
Perhaps this is having some effect: two of the recent suspects detained on the cusp of a terrorist attack were young German converts to Islam, who a generation ago might have joined a Baader-Meinhof gang whose moralising posturings against corporations are indistinguishable from bin Laden's.
Although bin Laden speaks with airy self-assurance, the reality of al-Qa'eda is much more mixed than on September 11, 2001, when 19 men wrong-footed a hyper-power. Several key supporters have been captured or killed, with the Egyptian evil genius Ayman al Zawahiri narrowly evading death this year when a US bomb hit an Afghan house to which he had been located.
Attempts to carry out major attacks in western Europe have been thwarted by diligent, intelligence-led police work as we saw last week in Germany, or the terrorists' lack of competence, as happened in Britain on July 21, 2005.
We must be under no illusion: al-Qa'eda and its affiliates will be constantly looking for Western weak points, or seeking to use indigenous converts or Muslim "clean skins" who appear on no early-warning monitoring systems. Perhaps European states will be wise enough to investigate schemes adopted in Indonesia or Saudi Arabia to catch young men at the earliest stages of radicalisation - say when they access a particular internet site - so as to move in with programmes designed to halt their slide into jihadist violence.
Further afield, in the past few days, al-Qa'eda of the Islamic Maghreb murdered 37 young Algerian coastguards at their morning flag-raising ceremony, while a further 20 perished when a bomb exploded in a crowd gathering at Bitna to welcome Algeria's president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the presumed target.
Elsewhere, a low-key US presence in Djibouti has severely cramped the style of al-Qa'eda in the Horn of Africa, in operations that have received Ethiopian, Kenyan and Yemeni assistance. In Iraq, Sunni tribes have begun to have grave doubts about the foreign jihadists, helping the US military to destroy them. Even Sunni insurgents have realised that there is no future with people who shoot children for playing with American-donated footballs or who hack off the fingers of smokers. Moreover, the US "surge" has diminished the number of car bomb attacks.
Although the deaths of 400 Yazidi are regrettable, that this attack on a remote sect was all that al-Qa'eda in Iraq could mount to discredit the surge is indicative of its strategic weakness.
The only major cloud on this horizon is, as Con Coughlin has reported, intimations that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard may be building up the experienced Egyptian al-Qa'eda terrorist Saif-al-Adel, who has been based in Teheran since 2001, priming the organisation for a possible terrorist response to any military action that the West may be contemplating to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons programme.
Al-Qa'eda's long-term aims have not changed, namely the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate on the ruins of existing states some time before 2020, if informed Arab commentators are to be credited. This will then wage the final apocalyptic battle against the West. In those terms, al-Qa'eda has singularly failed, since it has not succeeded in toppling a single Middle Eastern, North Africa or Asian regime, while the US has forces positioned not only to combat terrorists in Afghanistan or Iraq, but which significantly influence decision making in the wider neighbourhoods, too. No wonder bin Laden's thoughts are turning to the droughts, rains and polar icecaps, since there is little to console him in the world of men.
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