Al-Qaeda (6 page)

The Abu Sayyaf group in the southern Philippines was formed by radicals returning from the war in Afghanistan as an off-shoot of a far
older Islamic movement that has roots in the struggle of local Muslims against the Christian dominance that resulted from colonial conquest. Its links to bin Laden are tangential at best. The founder, Abdurajak Janjalani, died in 1998, and since then the group has largely abandoned militant Islam in favour of crime, particularly the kidnapping of wealthy Westerners. This does not stop the Philippine government labelling the group ‘al-Qaeda’ or Washington deploying hundreds of troops in the country to help eradicate it.
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One of the most egregious examples of this sort of manipulation is in Kashmir. The fact that bin Laden has never shown any real interest in the disputed Himalayan mountain state, let alone tried to go there, has not stopped repeated attempts by Indian intelligence to claim his presence there. Usually their regional rivals, Pakistan, are blamed. Predictably, as tensions rose between Islamabad and New Delhi at the beginning of 2002, the claim that bin Laden was in Kashmir surfaced again. The London
Daily Telegraph
reported that, according to Indian intelligence, bin Laden was being hunted by a British special forces team there.
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Quite why the 6′ 4′″ fugitive, one of the most instantly recognizable men in the world, would choose as a refuge a war-torn province in a hostile nation garrisoned by more than 700,000 troops and paramilitary policemen was not made clear. The claim re-emerged during another period of tension six months later. Towards the end of 2003, during a period of warmer Indo-Pakistani relations, senior Indian intelligence officials told me unequivocally (and very much off the record) that there had never been an al-Qaeda link to Kashmir.
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Intelligence services lie, cheat and deceive. Propaganda is one of their primary functions. On 4 October 2001 a dossier was presented to the press on the ‘responsibility for the terrorist atrocities in the US, 11 September 2001’ by the British government. It included the line that ‘[al-Qaeda] activity includes substantial exploitation of the illegal drugs trade from Afghanistan,’ and claimed that bin Laden’s ‘drugs stockpiles’ were protected by the Taliban. There has never been any evidence that bin Laden has ever been involved in narcotics production, and everyone involved in the trade in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere, from farmers through to the United Nations experts monitoring drugs production, denies the allegation. The dossier also claimed that ‘from
1989 until 1991 [bin Laden] was based in Afghanistan and Peshawar, Pakistan. In 1991 he moved to Sudan, where he stayed until 1996.’ Bin Laden’s tumultuous two-year stay (from early in 1990 to late 1991) in Saudi Arabia was omitted. The dossier also said that ‘in the spring of 1993 operatives of al-Qaeda participated in the attack on US military personnel serving in Somalia.’ This refers to the battle in Mogadishu in which eighteen American servicemen were killed. This claim is almost certainly untrue as well.

The British intelligence specialists must have known that the dossier they gave to the prime minister to reveal to parliament and the British public to justify involvement in a major conflict included demonstrably false material but felt the war in Afghanistan needed to be fought and the public needed to be convinced of it. Painting bin Laden as profiting from the heroin trade served the same purpose as atrocity stories about Germans in World War One; and Saudi Arabia is a key ally that needs protecting. Yet there was no need to exaggerate the threat from bin Laden or al-Qaeda in the weeks after 11 September.
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That it was necessary to dismantle bin Laden’s terrorist complex in Afghanistan was widely accepted.

Similar tactics were used, at least by politicians drawing on intelligence material if not the officials themselves, to prepare a reluctant public for a war with Iraq. It is now clear that senior figures in the Bush administration concluded, completely erroneously, that Saddam Hussein’s regime was somehow involved in the 11 September attacks while the dust was yet to settle over Manhattan. In late 2001 senior former CIA officers and American politicians briefed journalists that Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi agent in Prague prior to the attacks. Investigations by the FBI, the CIA and British and other European intelligence services showed the claim, itself retracted by the local intelligence service, to be untrue. Credit-card documents proved Atta to have been in America at the time of the alleged meeting. In the summer of 2002, President George Bush, White House hawks and Tony Blair, the British prime minister, started talking about ‘broad linkages’ between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda, with Ansar ul Islam as the main connection. I travelled to Iraqi Kurdistan to investigate the allegations and found them to be utterly unfounded. Yet the flaws in
the testimony of several key sources – many of whom were demonstrable liars – did not stop the widespread dissemination of their material.
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In America, statements about the alleged connections between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were particularly mendacious. Much was made of supposed ‘contacts’ between representatives of Saddam and the Saudi. What was rarely mentioned was that bin Laden consistently rejected the approaches of Baghdad. ‘Intelligence from reliable sources’, usually self-serving defectors or Iraqi dissidents, was deployed to bolster the claim. Several of the individuals named as key al-Qaeda figures, such as the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, were not linked to bin Laden but were in fact rival militants. Nor did the alleged chemical arms factories at Ansar ul Islam’s strongholds in the Kurdish-held areas of the country exist. I visited the bases on the day after their capture and found evidence of an interest in chemical weapons but nothing that indicated their manufacture.

Oddly, a convention seems to have developed whereby something from a ‘security source’, even if released by politicians, suddenly acquires a degree of reliability. Actually, such material should be treated with extreme circumspection, not exempted from normal journalistic practices. The fact that it cannot be corroborated independently should not be seen as a confirmation of the utility of the information but as the opposite, especially when the source, such as a defector, is clearly identifiable and clearly tainted. There are many who have no scruples about disseminating misleading information to achieve their own goals, and when writing about al-Qaeda there are, of course, no press officers to approach for official confirmation of stories. In the months after 11 September it was frequently claimed that bin Laden lived a life of debauchery in Beirut in his mid-teens. Bin Laden was in fact a pious, studious, polite and somewhat shy teenager who was married at 17. Nor, as some have claimed, is there any evidence that bin Laden is a fan of north London’s Arsenal Football Club and personally ordered the assassination of David Beckham, the English soccer star.
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For the record, bin Laden does not have a small or deformed penis and is not homosexual either.

Journalists, as I know from my own experience, find it is a lot easier to sell a story to a news editor if they can involve bin Laden. When, as
a penurious freelancer in the autumn of 1998, I reported an attempt by Russian smugglers to sell supposed ‘enriched uranium’ in Peshawar, the foreign editor of the tabloid I was working for said he was interested only if bin Laden was the putative buyer. When on 28 August a man was arrested in Stockholm’s Vasteras airport with a gun in his toilet bag, the mere fact that he had been travelling on a plane with a group of Muslims who were on their way to a conference on the Salafi strand of Islam in Birmingham was enough for British newspapers to splash a ‘bin Laden link’ on their front pages. Prosecutors subsequently found no such connection or indeed any terrorist intent at all. ‘Terrorist suspects’ arrested in the UK in November 2003 and March 2004 were immediately dubbed ‘al-Qaeda’ by newspapers long before any reporter could have had real knowledge of the detainee’s alleged connections.
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Bin Laden has of course been complicit in the confusion over the true nature and capability of his group. He has never directly claimed credit or admitted responsibility, at least not wittingly, for an attack. This clearly does not make the task of working out exactly what he is responsible for any easier. It does not mean, however, that we should leap to conclusions. Bin Laden did not claim credit for the embassy bombings in 1998 despite the fact that they were one of the operations run closely and directly by his close associates, though he has claimed a role in instigating the attacks. With other attacks, such as those in Saudi Arabia in 1995 or in New York in 1993, he has praised the militants who were responsible. He has sometimes claimed some kind of a role in the attacks on American forces in Somalia, though in reality he did little. On other occasions he has denied involvement altogether. There have been various reasons for these inconsistencies. One was his own changing security environment. (While a guest of the Taliban, bin Laden was careful not to irritate his hosts.
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) It is also true that strict Muslims believe it is wrong to claim credit for an an act that has been successful solely due to the will of God. It is particularly wrong to claim credit for something with a view to improving one’s position in some material way. Tactical considerations have played a part too. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, though explicit about their status as ‘vanguards’, are aware that their minority status within the Islamic world
should be played down as much as possible. Their support in the broader community should be emphasized instead. From this point of view, it is better to imply that unknown ‘brothers’ rose up of their own will.

However, on the whole bin Laden and the various elements outlined above share an interest in emphasizing his role in modern Islamic militancy. A dialectic is thus set up. Myth breeds more myth. History gets re-written.

One history that is currently being revised is that of the training camps that were maintained in Pakistan and Afghanistan following the end of the war against the Soviets. Currently the dozens of facilities where militants trained in the 1990 to 1996 period are now referred to as ‘bin Laden camps’ or ‘al-Qaeda camps’. The implication is that all those who trained there during this period, and the terrorist acts that many committed at the time or went on to commit later, were instigated, inspired, facilitated, indeed even directly commissioned, by bin Laden. Yet there is no evidence for any significant involvement of bin Laden in the dozens of establishments set up by Afghan and Pakistani religious hardliners at the time. The 1995 US State Department report on terrorism says that ‘all the factions’ including ‘the regime in Kabul’ are ‘involved in harboring or facilitating camps that have trained terrorists from many nations who have been active in worldwide terrorist activity’. It does not mention bin Laden and instead fingers one particular warlord, Abd al-Rab al-Rasul Sayyaf, for ‘continuing to harbor and train potential terrorists in his camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan’. A 1996 internal State Department memo again mentions Sayyaf and speaks of ‘various Arab groups’.
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The simple truth is that bin Laden was a marginal player at the time. Men like Sayyaf, one of the most hardline religious and political players in Afghanistan and a man who has excellent contacts with wealthy and devout Saudis who contribute huge sums to his coffers, were far more important. Grasping this is critical for understanding later developments.

Contemporary Islamic militancy is a diverse and complex phenomenon. To blame it all, or even a substantial portion of it, on one man is gross over-simplification. Building bin Laden up to be a global
mastermind directing a well-organized and effective network of terror is counter-productive. Now, with the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ scattered by the US-led action in Afghanistan and under enormous pressure from security services in the wake of 11 September, understanding the true nature of al-Qaeda, and thus of the threat we face, is more important than ever. We are now in a ‘post-bin Laden’ phase of Islamic militancy.

But, much as we must guard against exaggerating bin Laden’s personal role, so we must be careful not to turn to other oversimplifications. One of the most pernicious is the idea that the 11 September attacks were a product of some kind of inevitable ‘clash of civilizations’ between the Islamic and Judaeo-Christian worlds. If there is no evil mastermind, the argument seems to run, then it is Islam that is at fault. But is it?

2
11 September, Terror and Islam

On 11 September 2001, nineteen men flew four planes into three buildings, killing around 3,000 people. The question of whether Islam itself could be blamed for the attack was swiftly asked. In later chapters, I explore the broader elements which may have motivated the hijackers, look at the slow unfurling of the major historical processes and minor events that together resulted in the 11 September attacks and define the situation we now find ourselves in. However, the hijackers found some resources within Islam itself. Though it is impossible to offer any comprehensive survey of Islam and the roots of modern Islamic militancy in only a few thousand words, certain elements are of critical importance.

As in the last chapter, definitions are important. There are multiple ways of defining terrorism, and all are subjective. Most define terrorism as ‘the use or threat of serious violence’ to advance some kind of ‘cause’. Some state clearly the types of group (‘sub-national’, ‘non-state’) or cause (political, ideological, religious) to which they refer. Others merely rely on the instinct of most people when confronted with an act that involves innocent civilians being killed or maimed by men armed with explosives, firearms or other weapons. None is satisfactory, and grave problems with the use of the term persist. Terrorism is after all a tactic. The term ‘war on terrorism’ is thus effectively nonsensical. As there is no space here to explore this involved and difficult debate, my preference is, on the whole, for the less loaded term ‘militancy’. This is not an attempt to condone such actions, merely to analyse them in a clearer way.