Al-Qaeda (3 page)

Osama bin Laden was in Kandahar when the air strikes started.
¹
By early November he had moved up to Jalalabad. Shortly before the fall of the city bin Laden, his close aides and several hundred of his Arab followers moved up into the hills to its south. The area, known locally as the Milawa Valley, included the former mujahideen base centred on the caves of Tora Bora.
²

The battle of Tora Bora lasted for eighteen days. On the ground, Afghan fighters and small groups of British and American special forces pressed on up the rough, boulder-strewn slopes. On 16 December, the Afghan warlords in charge of the assault on the cave complex declared ‘victory’. A few ragged prisoners, mainly Afghans too poor or stupid to attempt escape, were paraded before the international media. Bin Laden and his senior aides, the Taliban high command, and hundreds of other al-Qaeda fighters had slipped the net.

I left Tora Bora, spent a few days in Jalalabad and then drove out to Pakistan. I arrived in London in time for the office Christmas party.

For me, the sight of cluster bombs exploding over the dry Afghan hills had been profoundly shocking. Though I had been reporting on Afghanistan, Pakistan and bin Laden almost full time for nearly four years, and had been covering conflicts, coups and natural disasters for a decade, nothing had prepared me for what I had seen. In fact, living and working in the region for so long had made the shock altogether more powerful. As I drove the short familiar road from Jalalabad to the border point at Torkham, I was profoundly troubled by what I had seen. In the years I had been travelling in and out of Afghanistan and Pakistan I had watched executions and bombardments, been shot at, sniped at, mortared and shelled, held up at gunpoint and nearly died on several helicopters. I had listened to fathers describing the deaths of their children in missile attacks or at the hands of bandits, watched infants in the final stages of hunger-induced illnesses in filthy hospital wards, walked away from countless scenes of grief and deprivation; but everything I had witnessed, though horrific, seemed to make sense. It was partly what had drawn me to Afghanistan initially. It seemed somehow to be part of the essence of the place. What I had seen at Tora Bora did not make any sense at all and I desperately wanted to understand how it had come to be.

It was clear that it was impossible to explain what had happened merely by looking at developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As I began to look beyond the region it swiftly became very obvious that what had occurred at Tora Bora was the culmination of a huge and complex historical process. The men who had been under those bombs on those slopes above us were from the Yemen, Egypt, the Sudan and Algeria as well as from southwest Asia. The reason for what had happened at Tora Bora involved their histories as much as those of the Afghans.

I also wanted to answer other questions. Like many others I was scared. What was the nature of the threat that now confronted my way of life, my culture, my values, my own personal security and that of those I love? Should I genuinely be frightened of bombs on the London Underground, hijackings at Paris Orly, gas attacks in Los Angeles or dirty bombs in Chicago?

As the months passed, I found that none of these questions were
being answered by the myriad articles and books published on ‘the war on terror’ and its supposed targets. I became increasingly concerned about the misconceptions that were gaining currency. Foremost among them was the idea that bin Laden led a cohesive and structured terrorist organization called ‘al-Qaeda’. Every piece of evidence I came across in my own work contradicted this notion of al-Qaeda as an ‘Evil Empire’ with an evil mastermind at its head. Such an idea was undoubtedly comforting – destroy the man and his henchmen and the problem goes away – but it was clearly misguided. As a result the debate over the prosecution of the ongoing ‘war on terror’ had been skewed. Instead of there being a reasoned and honest look at the root causes of resurgent Islamic radicalism, the discussion of strategies in the war against terror had been almost entirely dominated by the ‘counter-terrorist experts’ with their language of high-tech weaponry, militarism and eradication. The latter may be useful to treat the symptom but does not, and will never, treat the disease.

The nearest thing to ‘al-Qaeda’, as popularly understood, existed for a short period, between 1996 and 2001. Its base had been Afghanistan, and what I had seen at Tora Bora were the final scenes of its destruction. What we have currently is a broad and diverse movement of radical Islamic militancy. Its roots go back decades at the very least. Elements can be traced back to the earliest days of Islam. It involves tens of thousands of people, some merely individuals, some who have formed groups. These groups shift and change and grow and disappear. Similarly, individuals become active and then cease their involvement. Others take their place. This movement is growing. Osama bin Laden did not create it nor will his death or incarceration end it. For all but five (or arguably three) years of his life, bin Laden was a peripheral player in modern Islamic militancy. He may have been the most charismatic and the best known, but there were, and are, and will be, many others who have the will and the capacity to foment violence, murder innocents and sow chaos around the world.

Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are the radical, extremist fringe of the broad movement that is modern Islamic militancy. Their grievances are political but articulated in religious terms and with reference to a religious worldview. The movement is rooted in social, economic and
political contingencies. Over the past fifteen years, tens of thousands of young Muslim men made their way to training camps in Afghanistan. Many, as late as 1998, had never even heard of Osama bin Laden. Their motivations were varied but profound and genuinely felt. They were neither kidnapped nor compelled to travel in search of Jihad. Similarly, the men who sought out bin Laden’s assistance, hoping to find the help that they needed to realize their dreams of violent actions against the West, travelled for what they felt were good reasons. The smoke and the vapour trails over Tora Bora may have signalled the end of Afghanistan as a favoured destination for aspirant terrorists, but it did nothing to eradicate the reasons for the volunteers wanting to go there.

The threat is grave. Thirty years ago a new Islamic political ideology began to resonate among millions of young men and women across the Muslim world. This ideology was a sophisticated and genuine intellectual effort to find an Islamic answer to the challenges posed by the West’s cultural, economic and political dominance. Over the decades that ideology has changed and mutated into something different. Once, Islamic activists thought primarily in terms of achieving power or reforming their own nation. There was room in their programme for gradualism and compromise. There was room in their movement for a huge multiplicity of different strands of political thought. There was room for the parochial, radical and conservative movements of rural areas and for the clever, educated and aware ideologues of the cities. There was even room for those extremists who were committed to violence and who saw the world as a battlefield between the forces of good and evil, of belief and unbelief.

But increasingly, and this is a trend that is accelerating, the extremists are no longer perceived as the ‘lunatic fringe’. Instead they are seen as the standard-bearers. And their language is now the dominant discourse in modern Islamic political activism. Their debased, violent, nihilistic, anti-rational millenarianism has become the standard ideology aspired to by angry young Muslim men. This is a tragedy.

In this book, I attempt to provide a detailed deconstruction of ‘al-Qaeda’, place Osama bin Laden in the context of radical modern Islam and, to an extent, trace out the movement’s roots. The first two
chapters introduce some of the concepts and ideas that I believe are important to understanding the phenomenon of al-Qaeda. Chapters Three to Eight outline bin Laden’s early life and examine, in some depth, the historical events that formed him and formed the movement of which he became a part. There follows a close analysis of al-Qaeda and its operations between 1996 and 2001. This allows us to draw conclusions, in the final chapters, about the nature of the threat we face today.

In the weeks immediately following the tragedy of 11 September there was a genuine interest in understanding ‘why’.
Why
‘they’ hate us,
why
‘they’ were prepared to kill themselves,
why
such a thing could happen. That curiosity has dwindled and is being replaced by other questions:
how
did it happen,
how
many of ‘them’ are there,
how
many are there left to capture and kill. Anyone who tries to ‘explain’ the roots of the threat now facing all of us, to answer the ‘why’, to elaborate who ‘they are’, risks being dismissed as ineffectual or cowardly. To ask ‘why’ is to lay oneself open to accusations of lacking the moral courage to face up to the ‘genuine’ threat and the need to meet it with force and aggression. Many characterize this threat, dangerously and wrongly, as rooted in a ‘clash of civilizations’. This attitude not only plays into the hands of the extremists but, by denigrating the importance of genuine causes, risks encouraging tactics that are counterproductive. I hope, with this book, to redress the balance. As I watched the bombs falling at Tora Bora I had asked the question
why
. This is my attempt to find some answers.

1
What is al-Qaeda?

So what is al-Qaeda? Ask even well-informed Westerners what they believe al-Qaeda to be and many will tell you that it describes a terrorist organization founded more than a decade ago by a hugely wealthy Saudi Arabian religious fanatic that has grown into a fantastically powerful network comprising thousands of trained and motivated men, watching and waiting in every city, in every country, on every continent, ready to carry out the orders of their leader, Osama bin Laden, and kill and maim for their cause.

The good news is that this al-Qaeda does not exist. The bad news is that the threat now facing the world is far more dangerous than any single terrorist leader with an army, however large, of loyal cadres. Instead, the threat that faces us is new and different, complex and diverse, dynamic and protean and profoundly difficult to characterize. Currently there is no vocabulary available with which to describe it. This leads to problems. ‘Al-Qaeda’ is a messy and rough designation, often applied carelessly in the absence of a more useful term. Before attempting any analysis we need to look at the name, where it came from and why.

The word itself is critical. ‘Al-Qaeda’ comes from the Arabic root
qaf
–
ayn
–
dal
. It can mean a base, as in a camp or a home, a foundation, such is what is beneath a house or a pedestal that supports a column. It can mean the lowest, broadest layer of a large cumulonimbus-type cloud. And, crucially, it can also mean a precept, rule, principle, maxim, formula, method, model or pattern.

The word or phrase ‘al-Qaeda’ was certainly in use by the mid eighties among the Islamic radicals drawn from all over the Muslim
world to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan alongside the local resistance groups. Given that it is a common Arabic word, this should not surprise us. For most of them it was used in a relatively mundane sense: to describe the base from which they operated.
¹

However, the word ‘al-Qaeda’ was also used by the most extreme elements among the radicals fighting in Afghanistan, particularly those who decided that their struggle did not end with the withdrawal of the Soviets from the country in 1989, in another sense. Abdallah Azzam, the chief ideologue of the non-Afghan militants drawn to fight alongside the mujahideen and an early spiritual mentor of bin Laden, used the word to describe the role he envisaged the most committed of the volunteers playing once the war against the Soviets was over. In 1987 he wrote:

Every principle needs a vanguard to carry it forward and [to] put up with heavy tasks and enormous sacrifices. There is no ideology, neither earthly nor heavenly, that does not require… a vanguard that gives everything it possesses in order to achieve victory… It carries the flag all along the sheer, endless and difficult path until it reaches its destination in the reality of life, since Allah has destined that it should make it and manifest itself. This vanguard constitutes the strong foundation (
al-qaeda al-sulbah
) for the expected society.
²

Some analysts have taken this statement to indicate that a group called ‘al-Qaeda al-Sulbah’ had been formed by the time Azzam wrote these words. However, it seems clear, not least from the constant references to vanguards elsewhere in radical Islamic thought at the time and previously, that Azzam was talking about a mode of activism, not talking about an organization. Azzam certainly saw al-Qaeda as a base, but a base that was to be composed of individuals committed to the cause who would, through the cumulative weight of their actions, instigate great change. They would be ‘the foundation’ for the edifice Azzam hoped to construct, the bottom layer of the towering cloud, the foot of the pedestal. In short, they would be a revolutionary ‘vanguard of the strong’ who would radicalize and mobilize the Islamic world. Azzam was not referring to an extant organization. He was referring to a tactic.
³

Bin Laden and a number of close associates acted on Azzam’s suggestion and, probably in August 1988, set up a militant group, in the western Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar.
⁴
The war in Afghanistan was over, and the unity that a common purpose had forced on the disparate groups of Islamic extremists who had fought the Soviets was disintegrating. To bin Laden’s great distress, national and ethnic divisions reasserted themselves strongly among the volunteers. His group was formed with the express aim of overcoming those divisions and creating an ‘international army’ which would defend Muslims from oppression, though exactly how this would be done remained unclear. The group was small, comprising not more than a dozen men, and there was little to distinguish it from the scores of other groups operating, forming and dissolving in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Islamic world at the time. Nor did it have the monopoly on the idea of internationalizing the struggle. Though most of the larger groups were focused on campaigning against their own governments, there were plenty of individuals or smaller groups, besides bin Laden and his small band, who, radicalized and enthused by their experiences in Afghanistan, were committed to a wider battle.