Al-Qaeda (4 page)

It seems unlikely that those involved with bin Laden called themselves ‘al-Qaeda’ at all at this stage. Some activists who were in Peshawar at the time say the group attached to bin Laden was referred to as ‘al-Qaeda’ as early as 1990, but most say they never heard the term though they knew of its leader. Certainly an ‘Encyclopedia of Jihad’, an eleven-volume compilation of the tactics and techniques of modern irregular warfare and terrorism put together in Pakistan some time between 1991 and 1993 by veterans of the war against the Soviets for use in other theatres of conflict, does not mention ‘al-Qaeda’. Instead, it thanks Azzam, bin Laden and, the only group or organization mentioned, Azzam’s
Maktab al-Khidamat
(‘Office of Services’, or MAK).
⁵
And when, a few months before the 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Center in New York, a militant called Ahmed Ajaj was detained on arrival at JFK airport and found to be carrying a terrorist training manual entitled ‘al-Qaeda’, the word was translated by American investigators, correctly in my view, as ‘the basic rules’. Again this
is not a name for a group but is being used in the real sense of the word, as ‘a
maxim
’ or ‘the fundamentals’.
⁶

Bin Laden left Pakistan in 1989 and returned to his homeland of Saudi Arabia. In 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he, along with several other Arab veterans of the war in Afghanistan and a number of Afghan commanders, offered to form an army of Islamic militants to protect Saudi Arabia. Rebuffed, bin Laden devoted most of his energies to reform of his own country. His project of building an international group languished. In 1991 bin Laden left his native land and fled to Sudan, where he remained until 1996.

American intelligence officials have been criticized for ‘missing’ al-Qaeda during this period. This is unfair. No group called ‘al-Qaeda’ (or operating as ‘al-Qaeda’ is commonly conceived to operate) existed. In his first few years in Sudan, bin Laden was at least as interested in experimental arboriculture and road construction as he was in creating an international legion of Islamic militants. His own group had barely expanded beyond the dozen or so individuals who had pledged allegiance to him back in 1989 and he was heavily reliant on the know-how and resources of larger and more established militant outfits. Nor was he connected to the raft of attacks that occurred in this period.

The reason he was ‘off the radar’ was that he was not very important. American intelligence reports in the early nineties talk about ‘Middle Eastern extremists… working together to further the cause of radical Islam’, but do not use the term ‘al-Qaeda’. After the attempted bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, FBI investigators were aware of bin Laden, but only ‘as one name among thousands’.
⁷
In the summer of 1995, during the trials of a group of Islamic terrorists who had tried to blow up a series of targets in New York two years earlier, ‘Osam ben Laden’ (
sic
) was mentioned by prosecutors only once. ‘Al-Qaeda’ was not mentioned at all.
⁸

In fact, American intelligence assessments were remarkably accurate. The US State Department’s 1995 report on
Patterns of Global Terrorism
explains that ‘individuals and group-sponsored terrorist acts [now] overshadow state-sponsored terrorism’. It says:

Many of these terrorists – some loosely organized and some representing groups – claimed to act for Islam and operated, increasingly, on a global scale. These transnational terrorists benefit from modern communications and transportation, have global sources of funding, are knowledgeable about modern explosives and weapons, and are much more difficult to track and apprehend than members of the old established groups or those sponsored by states.
⁹

This is a fair characterization of the situation. Some analysts see the Americans’ apparent failure to ‘spot’ al-Qaeda as indicating, not that the group did not exist, but that it was so secret that no one, militant or counter-terrorist agent, mentioned it. This is facile doublethink.

The first reference to something called ‘al-Qaeda’ appeared in a CIA report compiled in 1996, which mentions that ‘by 1985 bin Laden had… organized an Islamic Salvation Front, or al-Qaeda’, to support mujahideen in Afghanistan. It is unclear if the author is referring to a group acting as an ‘al-Qaeda’ or called ‘al-Qaeda’. Though the memo, entitled ‘Usama bin Laden: Islamic Extremist Financier’, goes into exhaustive detail about bin Laden’s activities up to 1995 it does not mention ‘al-Qaeda’ again.
¹⁰
Certainly there is no mention of ‘al-Qaeda’ in memos between the American State Department and their representatives in Pakistan at the time. In 1996 bin Laden is described by senior diplomats as the ‘ex-Saudi financier and radical Islamist’. There is no mention of any group that he might be leading. Only in 1997, in the report compiled in the early months of 1998, does the State Department use the term ‘al-Qaeda’ for the first time. It is described, not as an organized group, but, accurately, as ‘an operational hub, predominantly for like-minded Sunni extremists’.
¹¹

In 1996 bin Laden had moved from Sudan to Afghanistan. This provided the first real opportunity for him to build something that could genuinely be described as an organized terrorist entity. Over the next five years, something approximating to an organized group was formed. It was still centred on a small number, somewhere between fifty and a hundred, of experienced and committed militants, but, with a series of coincidental historical factors working in his favour, bin Laden was able to turn something of his earlier vision into reality.
During this period, which ended in 2001, there was something that came close to ‘the base’ or ‘al-Qaeda’ as commonly conceived. However, even when at its most organized in late 2001, it is important to avoid seeing ‘al-Qaeda’ as a coherent and structured terrorist organization with cells everywhere, or to imagine it had subsumed all other groups within its networks. This would be to profoundly misconceive its nature and the nature of modern Islamic militancy. For example, bin Laden’s group was only one of very many radical Islamic outfits operating in and from Afghanistan at the time. It had no monopoly on militant Islamic activism. Nor, significantly, did bin Laden or his associates use the word ‘al-Qaeda’ to describe his organization during this period.

Though these critical points have subsequently been forgotten, they were recognized at the time. In the immediate aftermath of the double bombings of American embassies in east Africa in 1998, President Clinton merely described the target of the retaliatory missile attack he ordered as ‘the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Usama [
sic
] bin Laden, perhaps the pre-eminent organizer and financer of international terrorism in the world today’. Sensibly, Clinton talks of ‘the bin Laden network’, not of ‘al-Qaeda’.
¹²
In fact, it is only during the FBI-led investigation into those bombings that the term first starts to be used to describe a traditionally structured terrorist organization. A related concept that starts appearing in legal documents prepared by the FBI is the idea that there are ‘al-Qaeda members’ who swear allegiance to the organization (not to bin Laden), through a
bayat
, or oath. In fact, in traditional or pseudo-traditional Islamic societies, a
bayat
can only be a pledge of loyalty to an individual. The change is a significant one, and the reasons behind the shift are obvious. The culture of the FBI is focused on achieving convictions, and the teams working on the prosecution of those responsible for the east African embassy bombings of August 1998 had to work within the extant laws, particularly those of conspiracy. Such laws were designed to deal with coherent and structured criminal enterprises, not with amorphous and dispersed politico-religious movements where responsibility for any one single act is very difficult to pin down. Evidence that someone is a member of an organization is thus extremely useful.
Unfortunately, in the case of ‘al-Qaeda’, it completely misrepresents the nature of the entity under investigation.

The FBI’s main source was Jamal al-Fadl, a Sudanese militant who fled bin Laden’s circle after stealing a large sum of money from him in 1995. He subsequently hawked himself around a series of Middle Eastern security agencies before being picked up by the Americans in 1996. As such he is not a particularly reliable source, and it is clear that, as a prosecution witness in USA
v
. Usama bin Laden (
sic
), he had a strong interest in exaggerating the role of the main defendant. Most analysts rely heavily on his account of the formation of ‘al-Qaeda’ in 1989.

But al-Fadl’s insistence that a coherent group by the name of al-Qaeda was up and running by the late 1980s is challenged by an exchange on the nineteenth day of the trial when an FBI agent gave to the court details of his interrogation of Khalfan Khamis Muhamed, one of the suspected bombers:

PROSECUTION
: Did you ever ask K. K. Muhamed whether or not he ever heard of the term
bayat
?

FBI
: Yes, we did.

PROSECUTION
: What did he say?

FBI
: He said he had not.

PROSECUTION
: And did you ask him about the term ‘al-Qaeda’?

FBI
: Yes we did.

PROSECUTION
: And what did he say?

FBI
: He said that
al-Qaeda was a formula system
for what they carried out, talking about the bombing.

PROSECUTION
: And did you ask him whether or not he’d heard of a group called al-Qaeda?

FBI
: We did.

PROSECUTION
: And what did he say in response?

FBI
: He claimed he’d never heard of a group called al-Qaeda.
¹³

This exchange clearly shows K. K. Muhamed’s understanding that the phrase ‘al-Qaeda’ described a function or a tactic, not an entity. K. K. Muhamed was a minor figure whose involvement with serious players close to bin Laden was minimal and who fulfilled a menial
role in the actual bombing. But his understanding of ‘al-Qaeda’ is significant. The exchange also makes very clear that the US investigators were very keen to find a group, led by an identifiable figure, and to give that group a name. Even as late as 2001 one former militant, interviewed by a crew from ABC TV, said he did not recognize the supposed name of his organization despite having spent eight months in training camps run by bin Laden’s aides. He had even met ‘the sheikh’ himself at least once. ‘I never heard the name al-Qaeda,’ he said.
¹⁴

This is not to say that al-Qaeda does not exist, but merely that the labelling implies that bin Laden’s group is something it is not. To see it as a coherent and tight-knit organization, with ‘tentacles everywhere’, with a defined ideology and personnel,
that had emerged as early as the late 1980s
, is to misunderstand not only its true nature but the nature of Islamic radicalism then and now. The contingent, dynamic and local elements of what is a broad and ill-defined movement rooted in historical trends of great complexity are lost.

What bin Laden was able to do, between late 1996 and late 2001, was provide a central focus for many of these disparate elements. This led, not to the formation of a huge and disciplined group, but to a temporary focus of many different strands within modern Islamic militancy on Afghanistan and what, in terms of resources and facilities, bin Laden and his close associates were able to provide there. These resources – training, expertise, money, munitions and a safe haven – were what many militants, either as individuals or working as groups, had spent the years since the end of the war in Afghanistan trying, with varying degrees of success, to find.

This period, from 1996 to 2001, is when ‘al-Qaeda’ matured. Yet it was still far from the structured terrorist group envisaged by many commentators. Al-Qaeda at the time consisted of three elements: a hardcore, a network of co-opted groups and an ideology. This tripartite division is essential to understanding the nature both of the ‘al-Qaeda’ phenomenon and of modern Islamic militancy.

The term ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ is clumsy but useful. During this time, bin Laden was able to attract, in addition to the dozen or so associates who had stayed with him since the late 1980s, many of the pre-eminent
militants active around the world. This was a key achievement. Together, these men formed the hardcore of the al-Qaeda project and the heart of al-Qaeda’s capability.

An extraordinary letter, written in early 2001 and found on a computer used by senior militants close to bin Laden, reveals how important this process of ‘ingathering’ of experienced militants was. The letter, written in a crude code so as to resemble an innocent business communication, lists the benefits of Afghanistan as a base and shows how critical the use of the country as a ‘safe haven’ was to radical activists. ‘We have been trying to go back to our main, previous activity,’ the letter says.

The most important step was the opening of the school [i.e. training camps]. We have made it possible for the teachers [i.e. skilled militants] to find openings for profitable trade [i.e. terrorist operations]… Our relatives in the south have abandoned the market [i.e. our former allies in Sudan are now hostile to us] and we are suffering from international monopoly companies [i.e. the American government and its security agencies]. But Allah enlightened us with His mercy when the Omar Brothers Company [i.e. the Taliban] was established…
One benefit of trading here is the congregation in one place of all the traders
[i.e. militants]
who came over from everywhere and began working for this company
[my italics].
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