The 9/11 Wars (72 page)

Whatever future evolutions were likely to be, it was clear by 2009, however, that few of the darker predictions made over previous years had been realized. There had been no mass uprising. The ‘European Intifada’ that both Abu Musab al-Suri and right-wing commentators had predicted following the 7/7 attacks in London had not taken place. There had still been no significant follow-up to the French riots of 2005 or the cartoons crisis. There were no mini-Fallujas. ‘There are six million [French] Muslims. If the community had got really radicalized it would have been pretty obvious,’ noted Kamel Bechik, a thirty-five-year-old who ran a Muslim Scout organization in south-west France. At the Marché d’Aligre in Paris’s twelfth arrondissement, where wealthy local Parisians go at the weekend to buy fruit and vegetables from largely Tunisian stall holders or beef from halal butchers, Amos, who was sixteen when he first ran errands for his immigrant parents on the market, pointed to his two employees – one from Algeria, the other from Morocco. One was married to a French-born Catholic, he said, the other to ‘a black girl’. ‘Integration? Politics? Religion? None of that here,’ he said. ‘We’re just trying to earn a living. The only people who get involved in religion are the ones with something on their conscience.’ Anis Bouabsa, the baker who supplied the presidential palace with breakfast patisserie, said he would be fasting for Ramadan while still cooking bread for his clients. ‘It’s my roots, my culture, that’s how I grew up,’ Bouabsa told the author. ‘But I’ll still be in the bakery twelve hours a day.’
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THE MAGHREB, THE MASHRIQ

If there was cause to be somewhat more sanguine in Europe, there was equal reason to be more optimistic in much of the Maghreb and the countries of the core Middle East, the Mashriq.
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The effect of the 9/11 Wars on communities from the eastern edge of the Atlantic to the Arabian Sea had been inevitably much greater than on the nations of Europe. In the latter it had been the relatively small Muslim minorities who were at risk of being been drawn into violent extremism (plus a statistically negligible number of converts). But in the former whole populations could potentially have been radicalized, with tens of millions of people suffering the direct effects of the conflict or, in the case of Iraq, under occupation themselves. But by the summer of 2009, the wave of violence and polarization that had flowed across the region since 2001 and particularly since 2003 seemed to be very much on the ebb. Almost everywhere, Islamic militants affiliated to, or simply inspired by, al-Qaeda or its ideology were on the defensive. The turning-away from radicalism that had begun to manifest itself in 2005, 2006 and 2007 was now well consolidated. A crude measure was the level of support pollsters found for Osama bin Laden. In almost every country from Morocco to Saudi Arabia, the popularity of al-Qaeda and its leader had continued the decline it had begun three or four years earlier or at the very least remained at a relatively low level. Confidence in bin Laden ‘to do the right thing in world affairs’ was highest in the Palestinian territories – at more than 50 per cent – but more generally lay between the 5 and 25 per cent mark.
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One of the best examples of the problems faced by militant groups in the region – and there were many – was the plight of the grandly named al-Qaeda in the Maghreb. AQIM, as it became known, had been formed by the remnants of the Algerian Groupe Salafiste de Prédication et Combat (GSPC) in late 2006, and its existence and new affiliation to the al-Qaeda central leadership announced by Ayman al-Zawahiri in January 2007. ‘We pray to Allah that this [alliance] would be a thorn in the neck of the American and French crusaders and their allies, and an arrow in the heart of the French traitors and apostates,’ Zawahiri said, with careful if rather outdated attention to local sentiments towards former colonial overlords. The logic behind the GSPC’s decision to finally accept the various invitations of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri after many years of stubborn independence was simple.
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The GSPC was formed from a faction that had broken away from the defunct Groupe Islamique Armée in the late 1990s as the latter disintegrated. It had, like its parent organization, had difficulty in gaining any popular support or legitimacy. It had also been hit badly by a series of amnesties from 1999 which had reduced its strength from several thousand to a few hundred. By 2005, the organization was split, with one half effectively using radical Islamic ideology as a cover for running a trafficking and kidnapping racket in the southern deserts and the other half, more ideologically committed, largely confined to the eastern uplands of Algeria with very limited local support and considerable difficulties in escaping the effective, if brutal, security services.
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‘We saw the merger with al-Qaeda as giving us the breathing space we badly needed,’ Abu Umar Abd al-Birr, the former head of the GSPC’s media committee, later recalled. ‘Faced with the national reconciliation process in Algeria, we’d no choice but to stop fighting. But with the merger we gained new authority in people’s eyes: it allowed us to project an image of ourselves as a new group.’
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As ever, the credibility, status and resources furnished by an alliance with ‘al-Qaeda central’ came at a high price. The internationalization of the GSPC’s campaign might have been superficially attractive as a propaganda coup which also brought valuable technological and strategic advice but it had no perceptible impact on the broad rejection of violence by Algerians generally, and, though the group now theoretically had a regional reach, genuine links with groups elsewhere in the Maghreb proved very difficult to build. One major obstacle was the simple chauvinism of the GSPC’s Algerian leaders, who, after nearly three decades of fighting a local battle against local authorities, had little genuine knowledge of, or interest in, the conflicts in neighbouring countries. They had even less enthusiasm for sharing authority with anyone ‘from outside’.
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Desultory bids to mobilize networks of supporters in Europe, particularly in France, also failed to make much progress. This disappointed the al-Qaeda senior leadership, who had seen the alliance with the GSPC as a way of acquiring a network in Europe that might reinvigorate the campaign there and resolve their growing strategic problems on the continent. Worse for AQIM, the tactics they were encouraged to use by the al-Qaeda senior leadership proved disastrous. Though the dark years of the civil war of the 1990s had seen appalling atrocities, Algeria had never previously seen suicide bombers nor massive bombings with the very visible civilian ‘collateral damage’ they inevitably caused. Successive attacks on government buildings, the United Nations offices, police stations and a range of other civilian targets between April 2007 and August 2008 killed large numbers of ordinary Algerians, provoked redoubled efforts on the part of Algiers’ security services and did nothing to endear the militants to a public that, despite their grievances against the incompetent, avaricious and undemocratic government, was even less keen on violent radicalism and all it entailed than they had been a decade or so earlier.
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Memories of where such activities led were all too fresh. Even within militant ranks such tactics were deeply controversial and prompted a number of defections. One mid-ranking leader who left the group after the April 2007 bombings in Algiers explained that his decision stemmed from the complaints of his comrades-in-arms about ‘carrying out suicide operations, shedding the blood of innocents in public places’. Another, charged with enforcing the application of
sharia
law in one area where the group was fighting, opposed the use of such tactics, because Algeria was not occupied by foreign infidel forces as Iraq and Afghanistan were.
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Attempts to ‘relocalize’ the AQIM’s agenda by invoking the name of very specific historical figures such as Tariq bin Ziyadh, the Berber general who led Muslim forces in the conquest of Spain in 711, looked merely clumsy.
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By 2009, though occasional attacks continued, no one could pretend that AQIM were a significant force.
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For one British security official, the spate of attacks in 2007 and 2008 and the GSPC’s alliance with al-Qaeda was the ‘dead cat bounce’ of Algerian militancy.
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The comment may have been premature – cats have nine lives after all – but was not entirely unjustified.
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The same could be said for many of the other militant groups which had looked to be such a threat four or five years earlier. Egypt had always been, politically and culturally as well as geographically, the keystone in the arch of Arab Muslim-majority states spanning the north African shoreline to west Asia. It had been where many of the new modern revivalist ideas that had emerged in response to Western colonialism in the Islamic world had first been synthesized and articulated in the late nineteenth century and where the first major Islamist movement – the Muslim Brotherhood – had been founded in 1928. Through the later twentieth century too, Egypt had set the ideological tone for much of the region. From the revolution of 1952 and the subsequent rule of Gamal Abdel Nassr and on through the decades of the domination of socialist, nationalist and pan-Arabist ideas, the example of what the Egyptians were doing or thinking had been crucial to developments elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond. So too was the emergence of Islamism as an ideological alternative, an opposition movement and discourse of dissent in the country in the wake of the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel. The Islamic militant violence of the 1980s and 1990s had played a crucial role in forging the fundamentals for the new global vision and strategy of al-Qaeda and its like. It had been the course of the militancy in Egypt that had revealed so much about the reality of such activism, its strengths and weaknesses, and it was, of course, from Egypt that much of the al-Qaeda senior leadership had come. The country, ruled by President Hosni Mubarak since 1981, was also representative of so many other repressive, incompetent and unyielding governments in the region. Seen historically by Washington as the key to local stability, Egypt had received more than $60 billion of American aid since signing the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. It was on Egypt too that the Bush administration’s ‘Freedom Agenda’ had, for a brief moment, been focused and it was, of course, in Cairo that Condoleezza Rice had spoken of how America had too long preferred stability in the region to democracy in her speech in June 2005.
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Egypt was representative of the region economically too. Despite the growth towards the end of the decade due to radical liberal economic measures, food prices had continued to rise rapidly, with inflation reaching 25 per cent in 2007.
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While new gated communities were constructed with fountains in the desert outside major cities, millions went without running water. Corruption was endemic. Especially for the 29 per cent of the country between fifteen and thirty years old, life remained tough. Crammed into insalubrious, poorly maintained apartments, with a desperate daily struggle for basic services let alone decent employment, the young had very few prospects. Graduates drove taxis or ran shops. The average age for marriage had crept steadily up as the expense incurred and the shortage of homes made even as basic an act as forming a couple and having children extremely difficult. As elsewhere too, particularly among the lower middle class and parts of the working classes, a new social and religious conservatism was more and more evident among a population long known for relative tolerance, moderation and a disdain for purely ritual devotion. One national survey found that 10–29-year-olds claimed to spend an average of forty minutes every day on religious devotions, and by far the most popular ringtone on the now ubiquitous mobile phone was the call to prayer. In one revealing incident the transport minister had to resign after eighteen died in a train crash caused by a signalman who left his post to pray. In 1986, there had been one mosque for every 6,031 Egyptians, according to government statistics. By 2005, there was one mosque for every 745 people – and the population has nearly doubled.
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As elsewhere too, anti-Americanism in Egypt remained at a historically high level. Nonetheless, none of this translated directly into any backing for renewed Islamic militant violence. After the attacks of 2004, 2005 and 2006 in the Sinai, Egypt had remained relatively untroubled by violent radicalism. Though support for Islamism as a political doctrine remained significant and the radicals’ single narrative had been integrated into the fundamental worldview of tens of millions, only a very few became involved in extremism.
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Undoubtedly the vicious efficiency of the experienced Egyptian security services was a factor, but so too were the trends evident elsewhere in the Middle East and the Maghreb. Support for suicide bombing in Egypt had dropped from around 33 to 8 per cent after the wave of attacks in the middle of the decade before stabilizing at around 15 per cent.
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When bin Laden and al-Zawahiri attempted to create an ‘al-Qaeda in the land of Egypt’ towards the end of 2007, they had failed ignominiously. The man chosen to lead the new group, a veteran of the violence of the 1990s who had been based in the FATA since 2001, was unable to convince those few former associates he was able to contact to become involved. The fact that many such approaches took place online did not help. Nor did his death in a drone strike in August 2008.
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