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BOOK REVIEW
Osama's
universe
By Sreeram Chaulia
A Review of "Inside Al Qaeda, Global
Network of Terror" by Rohan Gunaratna
"Look at Osama. Look at
his face. He is a good man. He is a kind man. He is a man of God, He
cares for poor Muslims."
- A taxi driver in Jakarta, after naming his baby "Osama my hero",
October 2001
Sri Lankan intelligence expert
Rohan Gunaratna has drawn on his vast experience as a consultant to
governments on counter-terrorism and come up with a power-packed and
information-filled book on Osama bin Laden's universe and its dreadful
consequences for our universe. The author personally conducted several
hundred hours of interviews of more than 200 terrorists, including al-Qaeda
members, in more than 15 countries, and thoughtfully compressed the data
into a book elucidating the threat posed by Islamism's "operational
vanguard" and its prospect of "more or less continuous conflict with the
West". (p.2)
Brief history of The Base
Until September 11, Osama bin Laden or his coterie never used the term
al-Qaeda, although the shadowy organization was in existence since 1989,
when the Pakistan-based Maktab-al-Khidmat (MAK) was converted from an
Afghan jihad group into an "Islamic rapid reaction force" aiding Muslims
anywhere on earth.
Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, MAK's founder and mentor of bin Laden, disfavored
expansion into a global terrorist force that would re-establish the
Caliphate through worldwide jihad. It is a closely guarded secret that
bin Laden sanctioned his teacher's assassination in Peshawar in 1989 due
to this fundamental difference. Azzam's murderers belonged to the
Egyptian "family", who then went on to occupy the top rungs of al-Qaeda.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Ali al-Rashidi and Mohammad Atef, who held key
positions within al-Qaeda, were all followers of the Salafi school like
bin Laden - a universalist brand of Islamism that shrugged off sectarian
divides and believed in pragmatic alliances of jihad forces, be they
Shi'ite or Sunni, against the common enemies of America, Russia and
Israel. This tendency was to later bear fruit in al-Qaeda-Hezbollah
cooperation (dealt at length in Yossef Bodansky's book, Bin Laden.
The Man Who Declared War on America). From the early 1990s, bin
Laden invited Islamists of varied strands to join al-Qaeda's shura
majlis (consultative council), thus laying the foundation for a
formidable and gargantuan terrorist network that would challenge the
foundations of world power.
However, widening the orbit did not mean dilution of cadre skills, as is
the case with other terrorist outfits. Quality of recruits being of
paramount importance, al-Qaeda accepted only 3,000 (3 percent) of the
mujahideen who trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 1989 and
2001. Al-Qaeda screens out "all but the most committed, most trustworthy
and most capable operatives". (p.8) It is this exclusivity which has
made it legendary and enviable in the eyes of Islamic fundamentalists
around the world, who may or may not be allied with al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda's financial infrastructure was nurtured during bin Laden's stay
in Sudan (1991-1996) as the guest of the National Islamic Front's
Hassan-al-Turabi. Once the Soviets fled Afghanistan, al-Qaeda fighters
expressed restiveness and a desire to find new pastures to fight. The
relocation to Sudan was with the hope that holy warriors "could go to
work again". In Sudan, bin Laden diversified his businesses by
establishing 30 companies, ranging from genetic research labs and civil
engineering to construction and road building. From Sudan, al-Qaeda
spread like a hydra, using communication signposts of the globalization
era like encrypted web sites, satellite telephones, laptops etc. It was
also in Sudan that al-Qaeda began investing in chemical, biological,
radiological and nuclear weapons.
The aborted Operation Bojinka (the plan in 1994 to assassinate Bill
Clinton and Pope John Paul in Manila and simultaneously crash 11 US
airliners over the Pacific) and the failed assassination attempt on
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia (1995) caused Sudan to
request bin Laden's departure from its soil in 1996. Al-Qaeda's
infrastructure in Pakistan was intact since the Afghan war days and the
"Sheikh" decided to shift back to the original "land of jihad". Using
material and military goodies, bin Laden quickly consolidated his hold
on the Taliban leadership in neighboring Afghanistan, especially the
amir-ul-momineen (commander of the faithful), Taliban leader Mullah
Omar.
While in Pakistan-Afghanistan, bin Laden and Zawahiri engineered a
tactical shift from concentrating mainly on puppet Muslim rulers of
Egypt and Saudi Arabia to a "second front" against the "King of Satan",
America. In 1998, al-Qaeda announced the formation of "a World Islamic
Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders", and released new fatwa
ordering the killing of Americans. The link between munafiqeen
(hypocrites who pose as "true Muslims") and their sponsors in America
became crystal clear when the Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam US embassy
bombings (August 7, 1998) were timed to coincide with the arrival of
American troops in Saudi Arabia.
Bin Laden grew in stature of radical Muslims between 1998 and 2000 by
calling for the induction of nuclear weapons into Pakistan's arsenal "to
prepare for the jihad", persuading the Taliban to destroy the Buddha
statues in Bamiyan and successfully bombed the USS Cole in Yemen. The
last critical "gift" of bin Laden to the Taliban before September 11 was
the assassination of Ahmad Shah Masoud, the Afghan resistance commander,
two days earlier. After striking at the heart of American political and
economic assets, the name bin Laden has become associated with heroism
"among many Muslim communities, from Pakistan to Indonesia and from
Nigeria to Egypt". (p.52) After all, he has achieved what no other force
on earth has done since the British in 1812 - attacked mainland America
with devastating impact.
Organization and ideology
Al-Qaeda is organized on the principles of decentralization and slippery
fungibility. "Under severe pressure, it is likely to mutate and disperse
into less accessible parts." (p.55) Constituent groups of al-Qaeda
operate as a loose coalition, each with its own command, control and
communication structures. It is a fluid, dynamic and goal-oriented
(rather than rule-oriented) body, whose most potent weapon is the 055
Brigade, a guerrilla group of 2,000 battle-hardened fighters, comprising
Arabs, Central, South and Southeast Asians.
Training camps accept non-al Qaeda jihadis as well and run cadets
through practical and theoretical training far more rigorous than those
of a normal military academy. The 7,000-page textbook, Encyclopedia
of the Afghan Jihad, instructs trainees on urban, mountain, desert
and jungle warfare, surveillance, counter-surveillance, forging of
identity documents, and conducting maritime or vehicle-borne suicide
attacks. Religious indoctrination is considered more important than
combat preparedness and bin Laden himself addresses elite students on
how "bitter situations came about as a result of children's love for the
world, their loathing of death, and their abandonment of jihad". (p.74)
Al-Qaeda's finance and business committee - comprising professional
bankers, accountants and traders - runs the group's funds across four
continents. Wealthy Arab benefactors in the United Arab Emirates,
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are the mainstays, while an extensive web
of cover businesses from diamond-trading, import-export, manufacturing,
transport and Islamic charities and "humanitarian" NGOs (such as the
International Islamic Relief Organization) provide the second rung of
monetary support. In Europe, al-Qaeda's Algerian agents raise
approximately $1 million a month through credit card fraud and
collaboration with organized crime racquets.
Gunaratna credits al-Qaeda for perfecting the art of "agent-handling",
that is, infiltrating political and security establishments of many
countries. "Several Egyptian, Pakistani and Central Asian police
officers and military personnel have served in the ranks of al-Qaeda."
(p.76) Utmost precautions are taken to reduce the risk of detection of
attack plans and arrangements, as is visible in setting up of small
"urban training camps" all over Europe and North America in private safe
houses, now that the public camps in Afghanistan-Pakistan have been
bombed. Cellular networks that deny knowledge of other cells or are
simply kept ignorant of operatives on different missions, even within
the same town or city, enable high resistance to intelligence service
penetration. "Martyrdom operations" are so chosen that few fidayeen
have past terrorist records, thereby diminishing the chances of arrest.
Ideological brainwashing and radicalization of Muslim communities is a
very crucial component of al-Qaeda tactics. It can "draw on the support
of some six-seven million radical Muslims worldwide, of which 120,000
are willing to take up arms". (p.95). Non-ejection of US troops from
Muslim lands is equated with "sin", and the same abhorrent sin will be
invoked to fresh cadres now regarding US troops in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. "No group has invested so much time and effort as al-Qaeda in
programming its fighters for death." (p.91)
Global outreach
Al-Qaeda is easily the world's biggest multinational corporation, with
branches in nearly 100 countries and countless billions of dollars in
annual turnover. In North America, Sheikh Kabbani of the Islamic Council
admitted, "Islamists took over 80 percent of the mosques in the United
States ... the ideology of extremism has been spread mostly to the youth
and the new generation." (p.103) In fact, bin Laden entrusted the
September 11 attacks to Hamburg and Kuala Lumpur cells due to the
knowledge that the FBI was tracking radical American Muslims.
In Europe, most operatives are immigrant Muslims, mainly Algerians,
Moroccans, Tunisians, Libyans and Egyptians. London, with the infamous
Finsbury Park Mosque, was "al-Qaeda's spiritual hub in the Western
world". (p.116) Indian intelligence revealed recently that a suicide
team of al-Qaeda had planned ramming planes into the British House of
Parliament on the same day as the Pentagon and World Trade Center were
smashed. The interrogation of Sheikh Omar, Daniel Pearl's Pakistani
assassin, has revealed that al-Qaeda's British-based operatives also had
a hand in the suicide attacks on the Jammu Kashmir Legislature (October
2001), the parliament of India (December 2001) and the US Information
Center in Kolkata (January 2002).
France is a sworn enemy of al-Qaeda due to its support of "un-Islamic"
dictators in the Maghreb. The Algerian Groupe Salafiste and GIA conduct
most of al-Qaeda's propaganda and terrorist campaigns in France. The
Netherlands is a favorite banking and investment destination of al-Qaeda.
Islamists have also taken over mosques for Muslim immigrants - so much
so that, "in addition to Dutch citizens of Arab origin, there are
several native Dutch converts to Islam openly willing to sacrifice their
lives for Allah and go to Afghanistan". (p.126) Similarly, Italian and
German authorities believe that al-Qaeda recruited heavily from mosques
and madrassas (religious schools). In the Balkans, up to 4,000
foreign mujahideen fought against the Serbs and Croats, with the
ferocity of killings by the "guest militants" shocking Bosnian Muslims.
In the Caucasus, around 1,500 Afghan veterans entered Azerbaijan to
fight Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, and once fighting ceased there in
1994, they swiftly moved on to Chechnya-Daghestan (Shamil Basayev was a
bin Laden associate).
Egypt is literally the cradle of al-Qaeda, and bin Laden has carefully
nurtured both Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group, bridging the gap
between fighting factions and putting up a united front against the
government in Cairo. A "high percentage of radicalized Egyptian
intellectuals, professionals and military wish to see an Islamic regime
in power", forming the eyes and ears of al-Qaeda in a tightly monitored
society. Many of the Egyptian and North African terrorist actions were
launched from Yemen, whose long-standing Islamic uprising against
communism was bin Laden's favorite cause since childhood. Saudi Arabia,
like Egypt, is a virtual police state and disallows Islamist activities.
But such is the aura of bin Laden here that al-Qaeda raises most of its
funding from wealthy patrons, with some "pious" individuals donating
$1.6 million a day to "Islamic causes".
Iran, Syria and Lebanon play important subsidiary roles for al-Qaeda due
to the Hezbollah connection. Imad Mughniyeh helped al-Qaeda develop
agent-handling and bombing big urban buildings. In Israel and the
occupied territories, al-Qaeda has a wellspring of associates in Hamas
and Islamic Jihad, and the fact that bin Laden is viewed as the
successor of Abdullah Azzam adds to his legitimacy.
Islamists see Africa and its 200 million Muslim inhabitants as al-Qaeda's
"newest theater". Bin Laden's followers strongly believe that the Horn
of Africa is "facing a furious Christian onslaught". (p.152) Al-ittihad-al-Islamiya,
an al-Qaeda outfit, claims responsibility for the Mogadishu ambush of
1993 which "drove the crusaders out". In Sudan, although al-Turabi has
been imprisoned and President Bashir is dishing out leads on al-Qaeda to
the US, "the threat posed by Islamists has not diminished and is likely
to resurface". (p.157) Ninety percent of the Islamic NGOs in Uganda were
either established or operated by Arabs with al-Qaeda leanings.
Eastwards, in Tajikistan, bin Laden supported the Islamist struggle to
topple the Russian-backed communist government, a conflict spilling into
a full-scale civil war after 1991. Uzbek Islamist, Juma Namangani, is
said to be an avid bin Laden follower and his IMU rebels have received
training in al-Qaeda facilities. Until October 2001, al-Qaeda camps in
Afghanistan also prepared Uighurs to fight the Chinese government in
Sinkiang.
In the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf Group's organization, ideology and
target-selection are deeply influenced by al-Qaeda. Through the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), bin Laden's battalions have penetrated
domestic and international Islamic entities based in Southeast Asia.
Jemaah Islamiyah is a- Qaeda's "Asian arm", aiming to establish "an
Islamic republic unifying Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, southern Thailand
and Mindanao". (p.192)
The Indian subcontinent is fertile ground for al-Qaeda "sleeper" and
active agents. Pakistan is "the single most important refuge other than
Afghanistan, before and after 9/11". (p.205) Al-Qaeda members are
present in all major Pakistani jihad outfits fighting India in Kashmir,
that is Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), Jaish-i-Muhammad, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen
and Lashkar-I-Toiba. Al-Qaeda influenced a change in their strategy by
"encouraging and assisting them to strike at the heart of India-New
Delhi and the major cities rather than in the periphery of Jammu and
Kashmir". (p.206)
Gunaratna speculates that the reason that Pakistan did not extradite
Sheikh Omar to America, unlike previous terrorists like Ramzi Yousef, is
"because of the complicity of the Pakistani state in his training" in
HuM camps. The author also quotes from an al-Qaeda manual at a HuM camp:
"We saw Russia disintegrate. Now we will see India fall apart. In the
flames of jihad we will see America ablaze." (p.215) The
Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islam is also reported to be
benefiting from a 25-member al-Qaeda team imparting sophisticated armed
training since June 2001.
Recommendations
Gunaratna's solutions to counter the "self-reproducing" al-Qaeda are
threefold, surprisingly stressing the non-military over the military. In
the short run, instead of aerial bombardment that generates negative
reactions, "invisible black operations such as assassination of
terrorist leaders should be given priority". (p.235) If the US
unilaterally attacks Iraq, which has no established connection with bin
Laden, "the victor will be al-Qaeda". In the medium term, Islamism
should be prevented from moving from the margins to the center in Muslim
societies and polities. The battle for the future, to recall M J Akbar's
phrase, will be fought "in the mind". In the long term, schools and
community centers disseminating modern education and humane
non-sectarian values have to be promoted in place of madrassas.
Resolution of outstanding disputes like Palestine and Kashmir will also
take the wind out of bin Laden's habit of adding new "causes" to his
diabolical mission.
Gunaratna has made a valuable intelligence-redolent intervention into
the burgeoning market of bin Laden literature. Policy makers and private
citizens would be well advised to read Inside Al Qaeda for their
own good.
[Inside Al Qaeda,
Global Network of Terror by Rohan Gunaratna, Columbia University
Press, New York, 2002. ISBN: 0-231-12692-1. Price: US$22.95, 272 pages.]
[Sreeram
Sundar Chaulia studied History at St.Stephen’s College, Delhi, and took
a Second BA in Modern History at University College, Oxford. He
researched the BJP’s foreign policy at the London School of Economics
and is currently analyzing the impact of conflict on Afghan refugees at
the Maxwell School of Citizenship, Syracuse, NY.]
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