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February 19, 2002
SYNDICATED: The last revolution
A superpower sends an expeditionary force armed with the latest in military technology to fight a small war against a ragged, if fanatical, army led by a mysterious cleric, known as the ‘Mad Mullah’. Thousands of tribesmen equipped with ludicrously inadequate weapons die under the withering fire of cutting edge weapons for the loss of a handful of the victors’ troops. The war is over, the threat is ended and everyone goes home happy (except the dead locals). Sounds familiar? Rewind to 1898 and the British campaign in the Sudan — the world’s premier nation flexing its vast military muscle to swat a new and unforeseen threat to its interests.
But quite how unforeseen was the more recent threat posed by Osama bin Laden? He did not suddenly appear to ruin any putative ‘new world order’ or to restart history like a video that was paused when the Berlin wall came down or the US won the Gulf War. The threat he poses to America, like that posed by the Mahdi to Britain, is rooted in historical trends that go back at least 40 years. Westernization and the political and cultural dominance of America, the resurgent fundamentalist religion that is partly a reaction to Westernization and the cold war have all played a part in the genesis of Osama.
The bare facts about Osama — the illiterate self-made construction magnate father, the youthful attraction to radical Islam — are now familiar. Other biographical details are still being contended — he did not, as has been widely reported, go whoring and drinking in Beirut. Nor did his daughter marry Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.
Osama became profoundly interested in the radical strain of Islam that provided solace to many millions of alienated young Muslims in the late seventies. By 1979 the attempt to return to unpolluted religious texts and the reaction to Westernization had taken on its own dynamic. Islamic radicals seized the Grand Mosque in Makkah, an Islamic revolution deposed the decadent West-worshipping Shah of Iran and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
At first Osama fought the Russians from an office in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar. In the late eighties, Osama fought in Afghanistan alongside thousands of motivated men who would, once the Soviets had been defeated, spread out across the world as an Islamist diaspora, searching for a new Jihad.
Months after arriving in Afghanistan from the Sudan in 1996, the then 39-year-old signed his first communication to the world ‘from the Hindu Kush’. Osama was at Tora Bora, the cave complex made famous by al-Qaeda’s final stand last month. His point was clear: I may be stuck on a scrub-strewn hill in a country almost without roads, let alone telephones but I am still here. I am still a force.
Many authors stress the role of technology in Osama’s rise. Although it has undoubtedly aided him and his al-Qaeda group, Osama’s attempts to build an army by publicizing himself and his cause in the media may have been less effective than he and others think. The real publicity has come from his enemies. In early 1998, days before the bombing of the East African embassies and the subsequent US retaliation, I asked a score of young Taliban soldiers in Kabul about the Saudi-born dissident. None had heard of him.
Last month I asked an old man near Jalalabad a similar question. “Bin Laden?” he answered. “What village is he from?” Very few recruits who came to the Afghanistan training camps before 1998 were drawn in by Osama. In their statements to the FBI they say they only heard about ‘the sheikh’ on their arrival. They came because they wanted to fight their Jihad.
Since then they have come in their thousands to join al-Qaeda’s cause. In 1994 the Taliban — backed by Pakistan, the US and Saudi Arabia began their rampage across Afghanistan. For Osama they provided a haven. And, as Middle Eastern governments cracked down on a wave of Intifada-inspired unrest, thousands of Islamic recruits flowed into the camps built for an earlier conflict.
We all know what happened: how the towers fell; how the US military machine chewed up the Taliban; how the formal structures of al-Qaeda fell apart. Osama has disappeared, for the moment but no one believes that the cancer has been cut out. For Osama was not a chief executive running Holy War Inc. a global conglomerate with market penetration in scores of countries as Peter Bergen in his otherwise excellent meticulously researched and highly readable book has it, but the titular head of a huge and amorphous movement. There is no top-down hierarchy that can easily be disrupted, no carefully organized cell structure that resists but is ultimately vulnerable to covert subversion, no nation state that can be battered into submission.
The nearest parallel to Osama’s ‘organization’ is the anti-globalization movement. It too is inclusive; joining hardcore Italian anarchists with Surrey housewives concerned about GM crops. It too crosses national frontiers without problem, has esoteric sources of funding, has forced world leaders into well-defended citadels. There is now no individual figurehead for anti-globalization but if there were, would anyone think that chasing him into a cave in eastern Afghanistan would end support for his project?
Those surprised by the level of literacy and wealth of al-Qaeda recruits have forgotten that, historically, starving people don’t make good rebels.
Recently, the Saudis appeared to be questioning the American presence in their country. Time magazine spoke of the need to tackle global poverty as a root of terrorism. Other writers call for pre-emptive intervention by America across the world. Newsweek has run a series of comment pieces by Fareed Zakaria, who tried to answer the question ‘Why do they hate us?’ The debate in the US is, thankfully for all of us, heated. A few days ago Donald Rumsfeld, the American Defence Secretary, made clear that America was not ‘the problem’. He may or may not be right. What is certain is that the US has to provide the answer. —Dawn/Observer news service
Holy War Inc.
By Peter L. Bergen
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN 0297829122
302pp. £18.99
How did this happen?
Edited by James F. Hoge
& Gideon Rose
ISBN 1586481304
352pp. £8.99
Two hours that shook the world
By Fred Halliday
256pp. £L7.99
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