Pre 9-1-1 Intelligence

Worldwide Terrorism & Crime Against Humanity Index

Pre 9-1-1 Intelligence

by Bob Price/Editor

Forward: The cost of the Clinton Presidency continues to devastate America's Intelligence infrastructure.

While there is a mountain of pre-9-1-1 intelligence to be found today; The US stood behind the curve in National Defense and effective use of it's intelligence services and operations during the morally corrupt and pre-occupied Presidency of Bill Clinton.

Intelligence problems are a continuing challenge as new technologies arise and as the world begins to expand economically. As a nation we have to take lessons of the past and move forward swiftly to solve them

Following Vietnam the US Army learned that 'over-protection' of information actually worked against us in the field of combat and effective counter measures against a determined enemy.

To solve that mistake the Army undertook a reformation and developed the Intelligence and Service Command which effectively solved the military aspect of the problem by placing Army Intelligence under one umbrella.

During the Clinton administration the Military and Civilian forces suffered grievous harm thru down-sizing and frustration; and our intelligence was compromised by counter-terrorism spies within the ranks.

America's posture weakened in the eyes of the world.

And a weakly perceived nation becomes a target for terrorism.

Today our civilian agencies are facing the same burden faced by the military in the 1970's. And these dedicated professionals are America's first line of Defense. But, information without the ability to take action is useless; except in the arena of the press and in the history books to later assign blame.

America's intelligence services are in need of bold leadership and American resolve in supporting President Bush's plan for a Homeland Security Department. Please contact your National leadership; and Support George W. Bush. Our national security depends on your support.

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Clinton's Whitehouse Well Aware of the Threat

1998 National Security Briefing for Governor George W. Bush

The 1998 NDCF Organization Briefing for Governor Bush stated in part...

International Terrorism/Muslim Fundamentalism

"International terrorism has emerged as a substantial threat to US security and its interests and personnel abroad. In 1997 the US State Department recorded over 304 acts of international terrorism. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia proved that the US is no longer immune to the terrorist threat.

Terrorism against the US has always been a concern, but the scale of devastation resulting from these recent attacks forces the US to re-examine its efforts to fight terrorist groups and the nations that support them.

Countries such as Libya and Iran are both known to sponsor terrorist groups like Hammas and the PLO. The US must take a more proactive role in suppressing this threat. Terrorists have gradually been upgrading their offensive capabilities and may soon begin to attack with NBC and Electro- Magnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons.

Such attacks that would prove devastating to the US. A .5 kiloton backpack nuclear weapon attack on Wall Street at 500 feet (over 8 stories high) would take out a trillion dollars of our economy with an EMP burst, while killing or injuring 60,000 people.

While the majority of the Muslim people, composing 20% of the world's population, are friendly towards the US, there are anti-Western/anti-American Muslim Fundamentalists that are dedicated to our destruction and are making inroads in this area. Muslim fundamentalism is on the rise worldwide and is constantly gaining strength. Traditional Muslim states such as Iran and Afghanistan no longer represent the only Muslim threat. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey and the Balkans have historically been more friendly than not towards the United States, but are beginning to succumb to Muslim Fundamentalist pressure as they offer sanction to these Muslim groups while providing them with monetary support.

The World Trade Center, Khobar Towers, and Pan Am Flight 103 bombings were all perpetrated by Muslim terrorist organizations with implicit, if not tacit, support from extremist Muslim countries. The US must isolate extremists whether they are Muslim, Christian or Jewish. As it spreads, however, Muslim Fundamentalism specifically will increasingly become a hurdle for the US."

* * *

The Middle East Quarterly

Summer 2001

The Taliban’s International Ambitions

by Julie Sirrs

A war is taking place in Afghanistan, a country as mentally remote from most Americans as it is geographically distant. Already, this war has claimed American casualties—not directly on Afghanistan’s battlefields but indirectly, by terrorists trained in that country. If the wrong side wins the war, the result could be the death of many more citizens of the United States and its allies.

The conflict is being waged by two sides: the Taliban and the United Front. The former, much the better known to Americans, is notorious for its draconian policies against females and ancient Buddhist statues, as well as its harboring of the U.S.-indicted terrorist Usama bin Ladin. The latter is an alliance of various groups, including Shura-ye Nezar, Jamiat-e Islami, Shura-ye Mashreqi, Wahdat-e Islami, and Jombush-e Melli, that represent all of Afghanistan’s ethnic and religious groups; it controls about a quarter of the country’s territory.1 Most of the United Front’s leadership is made up of mujahidin (fighters of jihad) who had fought the Soviets in the decade after 1979; the head of the United Front’s military wing is the noted Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Mas‘ud.

Far from fighting a purely intra-Afghan civil war, the Taliban’s goals and supporters extend far beyond the borders of Afghanistan. As such, thousands of foreign Muslim extremists have flocked to the movement’s side. It is these radicals to whom the Taliban pander with the movement’s most infamous acts—from destroying the famed Buddha statues, to striving to make women virtually invisible, to harboring terrorists. The Taliban is thus not merely a group that is a threat to Afghanistan but to the entire world, and one that the United States should take a more active and effective role in countering.

Profile of the Prisoners

To fight the United Front, the Taliban actively recruits non-Afghans. While Arabs and Pakistanis have been involved in Afghanistan’s wars since the anti-Soviet campaign of the 1980s, today they are playing a more central role than in the past. This is evidenced by the fact that many more of them have lately been captured as prisoners of war than during the Soviet occupation.2

Afghans now view foreign fighters differently than in the past. In the 1980s, the Soviet invaders were foreign and so foreign allies were relatively more acceptable. Now that the Taliban target only Afghans, foreign assistance seems less justifiable. But, at the same time, Afghans waging war against Afghans is also seen as less acceptable and thus the Taliban is more reliant on its foreign volunteers.3

To find out more about these foreign soldiers, I traveled twice to Afghanistan, in October 1999 and March 2000. Since the Taliban do not make them available for interviews, I visited the 113 of them being held prisoner by the United Front. The following analysis is based on information gathered through direct interviews with many of these prisoners, as well as through prison records maintained by the United Front.

The foreign soldiers are recruited with the active support of several terrorist organizations, including bin Ladin’s, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and Harakat ul Ansar. Once inside Afghanistan, the recruits receive weapons training in Taliban camps and direct combat experience in fighting against the United Front.

There is a general belief that the Taliban’s foreign supporters are young madrasa students. For instance, Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid, who has perhaps the most experience with the Taliban, writes in his book of how in 1997 and 1998 over a dozen madrasas in Pakistan closed to allow their students to fight for the Taliban.4 William Maley, in his comprehensive book on the Taliban, also identifies only Pakistani students as being sent to fight in Afghanistan.5 Students are only part of the picture; as Table 1 shows, slightly less than one-half of the prisoners report their profession as talib alim, or religious students. It bears noting that some of the prisoners were employed in professional fields.

Table 1

Profession:	Number (Total Sample=103)	Percentage:
Talib Alim or other student	49	48%
Other religious occupations	7	7%
Agricultural or manual labor	13	13%
Merchant	8	8%
Professional	9	9%
Other	16	16%

Further, the prisoners are not as young as one might expect from a group of so-called students (as reflected in Table 2). Even noting that most of these prisoners were captured more than a year ago, their average age (mid-twenties) is well above what one might expect.

Table 2

Age:	Number (Total Sample= 113)	Percentage:
20 or younger	6	5%
21 - 25	71	63%
26-30	19	17%
Over 30	16	14%

All but four of the 113 foreign prisoners are Pakistanis; the others are from Yemen, Great Britain, and China. The very small number of Arab POWs compared to the thousands of them fighting for the Taliban inside Afghanistan is striking. Their zeal is probably the explanation; United Front commanders say that Arabs are difficult to capture because they often commit suicide when they realize they are surrounded.

Turning to the ethnicity of the Pakistani prisoners, it is noteworthy how wide a range of ethnic groups they include. Many reports assume that the Pakistanis are mostly, like the Taliban, Pushtuns. For instance, the Australian journalist Anthony Davis, who has reported on Afghanistan since the earliest days of the Soviet invasion, writes of "the Taliban’s main recruitment base in the madrasas of Baluchistan and the Frontier Province"—Pakistan’s two predominantly Pushtun areas.6 Ahmed Rashid, when identifying the madrasas as a primary source of Taliban volunteers, also implies their largely Pushtun student body when he describes how the curriculum in such schools is "heavily influenced by Pashtunwali, the tribal code of the Pashtuns."7

Pakistan’s leader, Chief Executive General Pervez Musharraf, has even defended Pakistan’s policy of support for the Taliban on the basis of shared ethnicity between Pakistani Pushtuns and the Taliban’s predominant Pushtun ethnicity.8

Most notable about the figures in Table 3, then, is that just 29 percent of the prisoners are Pashtun. One must conclude that there is something besides shared ethnicity that motivates the 71 percent of the foreign fighters who are not Pushtuns. What might that be?

Table 3

Ethnicity:	Number (Total Sample= 113)	Percentage:
Pushtun	33	29%
Punjabi	28	25%
Urdu speaker	17	15%
Sindi	15	13%
Baluchi	11	10%
Other	9	8%

Foreign Help: Pakistan

Many Western analysts note that the Taliban’s battlefield victories would be impossible without substantial logistics and technical assistance from Pakistan’s military.9 Western intelligence sources contend that in the fighting that took place in 2000, some regular units of Pakistan’s army aided the Taliban in taking over the strategic city of Taloqan.10 The United Front has long alleged that regular Pakistani soldiers, disguised in civilian clothing, are fighting with the Taliban, and they have recovered a Pakistani military identity card from a Taliban corpse.

That the average prisoner is in his mid-twenties lends credibility to this charge. Although the prisoners I met all denied being a current member of the Pakistani armed forces, some of them did acknowledge that Pakistani officers trained them inside Afghanistan. One prisoner also asserted that he was directly recruited by Pakistan’s military intelligence agency—the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate—to spy on the United Front.

In all, the thousands of Pakistani volunteers fighting on the Taliban’s side, as well as the money and materiel the movement receives from Pakistan, have had a decisive impact on a war in which battles are frequently won on the basis of numbers alone. After some battles, United Front sources report that 40 to 50 percent of the corpses left behind by retreating Taliban have Pakistani civilian identity cards. And certainly Islamabad does nothing to stop the massive influx of its citizens into Afghanistan over borders which, at other times, the Pakistani government does a good job controlling. In November 1999, for instance, Pakistan instituted a crackdown on smuggling wheat into Afghanistan; it was so successful that the price of bread doubled in Kabul.

Foreign Help: Terrorist Organizations

Even more troubling than Pakistan’s involvement is the open affiliation of the Taliban’s foreign fighters with terrorist organizations. The Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan have become a magnet for terrorists seeking a safe haven, such as Usama bin Ladin, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad’s Ayman Zawahiri, and those involved in the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. The connections between these Afghanistan-based soldiers and terrorist groups around the world, taken together with their joint military training in Afghanistan, creates a network of contacts that spans the globe.

The prisoners I interviewed confirmed these terrorist affiliations. Nearly half their foreign fighters (as Table 4 shows) are affiliated with terrorist groups such as the Harakat organization, which includes the groups Harakat al-Ansar, Harakat al-Mujahidin, and Harakat al-Jihad. This organization has operated primarily in Kashmir where they have been fighting Indian troops and engaging in a variety of terrorism, some of it against Westerners. A subsidiary group of Harakat, al-Faran, was responsible for beheading a U.S. tourist in Kashmir in 1995 and its members likely also killed an additional American and several Europeans whom they took hostage in the same incident.11 Also, this network was behind the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane, on its way from Kathmandu to New Delhi, that resulted in the murder of one passenger. Ironically, the Taliban helped to negotiate the hijackers’ demands with the Indian government when the hijackers directed the plane to land in Kandahar, the headquarters of the Taliban. After the hijackers’ demands were met—in part because the Taliban refused to allow the Indians to launch a rescue effort—the Taliban soon "lost" the hijackers whom they were supposed to be escorting out of Afghanistan. So vital and integrated is Harakat in support of the Taliban, that the Taliban has given the group its own designated posts in front-line positions against the United Front, according to one prisoner’s report.

Table 4

Party Affiliation:	Number(Total Sample=110)	Percentage:
Harakat al-Ansar/ Mujahidin / Jihad	51	46%
Jamiat-e Ulema	48	44%
Muslim League	4	4%
Other	6	5%

Foreign Prisoners Speak

I interviewed about two dozen of the mainly Pakistani prisoners; the following examples give a sense of the POWs’ diversity:

Jawed Akhtar is typical in that he has Pakistani citizenship; he is atypical among the prisoners, however, in being forty-six years old and in speaking English relatively well. Unusual, too, is the story he tells. He says he was a teacher who came to Afghanistan just to "have a look." He was merely taking a sightseeing tour of the Taliban’s front lines when his position was overrun by United Front forces. Prison records show that Jawed was carrying an AK-47 assault rifle when captured. When told that his tale is rather hard to believe, he replies firmly, "Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it."

‘Ubayd ‘Abd ar-Rahman is a Yemeni. Despite his three years as a prisoner of war, his kohl-rimmed eyes and cocky smile exude defiance. ‘Abd ar-Rahman says he was recruited to join the Taliban from his mosque in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, and the Pakistani-based group, Harakat al-Jihad paid for his travel to Afghanistan. After a brief training in small arms, ‘Abd ar-Rahman was dispatched to the front lines north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, and within months was captured. ‘Abd ar-Rahman was the most open of the prisoners in expressing violent sentiments; he told me that if he gets out of prison, he hopes to "kill Americans," even schoolchildren if that is what Islamic scholars order him to do.

Anwar Khan was born in Great Britain, and his Manchester accent contrasted oddly with his long, dark brown beard. According to Anwar, after he got into trouble with police in both Great Britain and Southeast Asia, his parents sent him to relatives in Peshawar, Pakistan, to "clean up his act." Soon after arriving in Peshawar, Anwar joined the terrorist group Harakat al-Ansar, which sent him to Afghanistan to fight the United Front. Pakistanis and Afghans trained him in the use of small arms and physical exercise at a camp in the Afghan capital, Kabul. But training bored him, and he left it early to join the fighting. Within months, he was captured by the United Front.

Nur Muhammad ‘Abdullah, an ethnic Uighur from the Kashgar region of China, reached the Taliban via a circuitous journey that began when the Islamic Party in China’s Xinjiang province arranged for the twenty-eight year old ‘Abdullah to leave China and attend a madrasa (Islamic school) in Islamabad, Pakistan. After only a few months at the school, he joined the Taliban, and after a month’s training in the use of assault rifles and heavy machine guns in a Kabul training camp, ‘Abdullah was sent to the front lines with several other Uighurs, where he was soon captured.

Though each of these men took a different path to their present condition as POWs, they share much in common. In particular, they are joined by their desire to enhance their extremist worldviews with military training. Most important, not one of the non-Afghan recruits plans to stay in Afghanistan for the long term; nearly all hope instead to take their new combat skills abroad in order to target their own governments, Americans, and Israelis.

Aims and Motives

The Harakat organization provides a good example of what attracts members of groups with seemingly diverse goals—from Palestinians to Filipinos—to the Taliban. Although the Harakat came into being in 1985 to fight Indian control of Kashmir, it has now expanded to include the struggle against the predominantly Sunni United Front in Afghanistan, because it needs Afghanistan as a secure rear base for its Kashmir struggle. Perhaps the most ironic aspect of the current fighting in Afghanistan is that the United Front—an Islamic resistance movement—now finds itself the target of so-called Islamic militants who burn UF members’ homes and kidnap their women, all in the name of Islamic purity.12 Yet the Afghans currently fighting against the Taliban still consider and refer to themselves as mujahidin. Muhammad Es’haq, the United Front’s Washington, D.C. representative explains:

It’s simple, really. The Taliban claim that they are fighting to establish Shari‘a [Islamic law], so, if we resist them, then we must be against Shari‘a. If we are against Shari‘a, then we are against Islam, and they can do whatever they want to our people.13

But are matters that simple? After all, the United Front resistance does implement Shari‘a—albeit in a more moderate version—in the areas it controls.For instance, though the authorities in United Front areas recognize that the Qur'an allows for the amputation of thieves’ limbs, they do not enforce this punishment because much Islamic jurisprudence forbids such drastic measures when the thief could conceivably have committed the act out of necessity, as for instance, when there is such poverty as prevails throughout Afghanistan today. Es’haq shrugs. "Well, the Shari‘a is not the real reason the Taliban are fighting," he says.

Indeed, the Taliban’s campaigns at times have had overtones of ethnic cleansing, targeting either non-Pushtun ethnic groups or Afghanistan’s Shi‘a minority, in particular in a series of well-documented massacres in Mazar-e Sharif in 1998, in the Shamali region in 1999, around Taloqan in 2000, and in Bamiyan early in 2001. Yet the movement’s main goal is the establishment of a radical Islamic state, one that provides safe haven for anti-U.S. terrorists from all over the world. This safe haven accounts for the foreign extremists’ aid to the Taliban. The militants realize that the United Front represents the only viable threat to their security inside Afghanistan, (periodic ineffectual U.S. cruise missile strikes aside).

Several of the interviewed prisoners justified their involvement in Afghanistan by insisting that mosque imams or madrasa teachers had told them that Afghanistan had been invaded by infidel foreigners—Americans, Russians, or Indians. One prisoner said that he felt tricked and had no interest in fighting anymore. A handful of others, however, added that although they have no quarrel with the United Front, they still maintain a strong desire to take their jihad elsewhere. Afghanistan was not the first war for some, having fought in Kashmir and Tajikistan. With the military experience gained from Afghanistan, these prisoners stated, they fully intended to continue their jihad either at home or abroad, specifically against the United States and Israel.

Still others argued that their war against the United Front is justified because the Afghan opposition prevents the militants from establishing a secure base for their activities. One prisoner, for example, stated quite bluntly:

Afghanistan is the best base to establish our policies; for example, to do something about Palestine. We don’t have the means to fight Israel at the moment, therefore we need a base where we can strengthen ourselves, but the United Front is creating problems for our future programs.14

Other foreign militants really do seem to believe that Afghans living in United Front areas are "bad Muslims." When probed on this assertion during my interviews, the prisoners stated that though their guards prayed five times a day and had beards, their beards were generally shorter than those of the Taliban. Furthermore, their captors spoke Persian and some wore Western-style pants, which the prisoners deemed to be "against the Qur'an." The prisoners noted that they had been told by "religious scholars" that "women had freedom" in United Front areas, a concept presumably alien to their idea of Islam.

It should not be surprising that these foreign fighters, though claiming to fight for Islam, are profoundly ignorant of their own religion. Few prisoners had more than a rudimentary primary education. It is difficult to measure their exact level of education since the prison records do not clearly state whether they studied at madrasas or some other type of school; it is also difficult to quantify their grade level with a Western equivalent.

What is known, however, is that the learning emphasized in Pakistani madrasas, which have trained not only many of these fighters but also much of the Taliban leadership, is primarily rote memorization.15 A true understanding of the Qur'an is not the purpose of these so-called schools, which seem to be successful only at churning out extremist-minded graduates. Because the overwhelming majority of these prisoners do not understand Arabic, they are especially vulnerable to their teachers’ interpretation of the Qur'an. Moreover, their teachers are likely to have been educated in the very same system and thus be similarly lacking an educated knowledge of Qur'anic concepts and interpretation.One Chinese prisoner could understand neither the Arabic of the Qur'an nor the Urdu of his instructors and fellow students in an Islamabad madrasa. One wonders how he could have learned anything at all.

Taliban Subterfuge

The combination of fanaticism and ignorance exemplified by these fighters makes for a mix that is welcomed—and shared—by Afghanistan’s Taliban movement, firmly rooting it in the international network of Islamic extremism. Though Taliban envoys have been careful to hide their true sentiments when speaking with Westerners,16 their real opinions are becoming increasingly evident. Just one day before the terrorist suicide attack against the USS Cole, the Taliban embassy in Islamabad held a press conference during which the ambassador called on "other Muslim countries to wipe out the atrocities being meted out by the Zionist government" and denounced the United States for "harboring enmity with Islam."17 The Taliban’s official newspaper, Shariat Weekly, shortly after the Cole attack and amidst rumors that the United States would again launch a missile attack against bin Ladin, defiantly urged that Israel "should be given a practical and tooth breaking response."18 The Taliban’s foreign minister, Maulvi Abdul Wakil Mutawakkil, said that the Taliban would "retaliate with full force" if the United States were to strike again at bin Ladin.19

Although the Taliban and their supporters demonstrate an ignorance of Islam, they act with surprising sophistication on the international stage. For example, they have convinced the media to accept the claim that their government controls 95 percent of Afghanistan’s territory, a claim that diminishes the United Front’s viability. A map of Afghanistan, however, quickly shows that the Taliban controls less land than claimed, about three quarters of the country, though opposition fighters can roam freely even throughout much of this. Badakhshan province, for instance, is indisputably in the full control of the United Front, as is its link with the Panjshir valley approximately 100 kilometers north of Kabul. This area alone represents far more than 5 percent of Afghanistan’s territory, and it does not include the portions of Takhar province and various central and western areas in which fighting is frequently taking place.

The Taliban have also cleverly manipulated the image of the Afghan mujahidin as lawless and incapable of orderly rule, arguing that while some of the Taliban’s policies may seem harsh, at least they have brought an end to "anarchy." Yet several human-rights reports reveal that the Taliban commit atrocities—such as kidnapping women by the truckload—that exceed in scale even the supposedly chaotic period before the Taliban’s rise.20 By contrast, visitors and inhabitants of the mujahidin areas prior to the Taliban’s rule assert that the law and order situation in most areas was not nearly as bad as is commonly portrayed today. Moreover, a relatively good state of law and order prevails in areas held by the United Front today.

While the Taliban are quick to disassociate themselves from the behavior of the Afghan mujahidin during post-Soviet rule, they are quick to claim credit for the mujahidin’s ousting of the Red Army in the first place. Taliban officials also frequently cite bin Ladin’s minor role in helping fight the Soviets as the reason they shelter him, although they do not extend the same good will toward Afghans who did far more than bin Ladin to rid the country of Soviets, such as United Front leaders Ahmad Shah Mas‘ud and Isma‘il Khan.

The Taliban are in fact an internationally ambitious movement rather than a purely Afghan cause. Note that they continually complain about having insufficient funds to meet even the minimum humanitarian needs of their population, but they can still make a political gesture out of sending humanitarian aid to Iraq in violation of United Nations sanctions. (As it happens, that flight was aborted when Tehran refused to grant the Taliban permission to overfly Iran.)21 Even more telling is an incident related by Afghan expert Olivier Roy: When the Taliban forced Tajik opposition leader ‘Abdullah Nuri’s plane to land in Afghanistan in 1997, Mullah ‘Umar urged Nuri to reject a power-sharing agreement with former communists. Instead, ‘Umar suggested that Nuri establish a base inside Afghanistan from which he could wage a war against the Dushanbe regime with the ultimate objective of creating a Taliban-like government in Tajikistan.22 Lastly, the Taliban’s Foreign Minister has said that his movement’s primary concerns and loyalties may not be with Afghanistan at all. For instance, he is outspoken in his belief that "the presence of American forces in the Gulf is unjustified" and has also noted that "Pakistan is our [the Taliban’s] home."23

Even the ideological roots of the Taliban lie outside of Afghanistan. The movement’s philosophy can be traced back to South Asia’s version of Wahhabism, founded in Deoband, India, in the mid-nineteenth century. A puritanical and reformist movement, Deobandism flourished across South Asia, though its madrasas were not officially supported until the Pakistani government of Zia ul Haq. The schools did not begin to play a direct role in Islamabad’s Afghan policy until the second administration of Benazir Bhutto and they were further strengthened under the subsequent regimes of Nawaz Sharif and Pervaiz Musharraf. Significantly, because such madrasas are sympathetic to the Wahhabi creed, they continue to receive ample financial support from Persian Gulf Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia.24

Usama bin Ladin’s Role

The Taliban’s increasing internationalism is particularly exemplified by its grant of safe haven to Usama bin Ladin. Bin Ladin had been active in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation but left after the Red Army’s withdrawal. When he returned to the country in 1996, he first settled in an area neutral in the war between the United Front and the Taliban, though he and the Taliban quickly developed a mutual affinity, prompting bin Ladin to establish a new base for himself at the movement’s headquarters in Kandahar. The Taliban have claimed that they have prevented him from playing any role in terrorism. (Contrarily, the U.S. government holds him responsible for the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa and likely the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.)

Yet it is certain that bin Ladin himself has become increasingly radicalized while with the Taliban. He issued his most notorious anti-American fatwa (decree) in 1998, calling on his followers to kill any American—civilian or military, adults or children—anywhere in the world. Also in 1998, it became known through an intercept of bin Ladin’s satellite telephone calls, that he was linked to the embassy bombings in East Africa. The Taliban responded that they had taken away his communications equipment.

Apart from this, much has been rumored but little proven about bin Ladin’s activities inside Afghanistan and the exact nature of his relationship with the Taliban. Taliban leader Mullah ‘Umar may have married one of bin Ladin’s daughters. Pakistani papers at times have reported that bin Ladin visits Taliban troops on the front lines and the wounded in hospitals. He is also believed to have given money directly to the Taliban for their war and to have financed a so-called "bin Ladin brigade" of at least several hundred foreign fighters.25 He has also aided these fighters through the distribution of his "terrorist encyclopedia," which has been found on some of the Taliban killed or captured by the United Front.26 United Front military leaders claim that bin Ladin has offered rewards for their assassination.27

Bin Ladin’s links also help the Taliban in other ways. For instance, it is conceivable that as Taliban leaders have become increasingly involved in the drug trade, bin Ladin’s international network may have helped them in distributing these narcotics. Numerous terrorist-affiliated websites are certainly active in soliciting funds for the Taliban.28 As a symbol of defiance toward the United States and of adherence toward the cause of militant Islam, bin Ladin is also valuable to the Taliban as a source of donations from abroad, particularly from the wealthy Arab countries of the Persian Gulf.

Where the Taliban end and bin Ladin’s Al-Qa‘ida organization begins is difficult to determine. Both the Taliban and Al-Qa‘ida are perhaps best viewed as links in the same chain of the international terrorist network. The Taliban have created an indispensable haven in Afghanistan, a base where extremists like bin Ladin and others can meet and plan future attacks in relative safety. The paramount importance of the Taliban’s connection with bin Ladin is best described by the bin Ladin-affiliated website Azzam.com, which argues in a Taliban fundraising appeal that "the fall of an Islamic Afghanistan . . . will be a calamity that will make other Muslim calamities look like nothing in comparison."29

No comprehensive US Policy Against the Taliban

U.S. Policy

Increasingly, the United States government is recognizing the integral role the Taliban play in the terrorist threat it faces. Washington spearheaded an effort to impose arms sanctions against the Taliban in January 2001. If implemented effectively, these sanctions could affect the Taliban’s ability to make additional military gains against the United Front. But such sanctions are difficult to enforce given how deeply the Taliban already are involved in smuggling.30

What is needed therefore is a more comprehensive U.S. policy against the Taliban, one that correctly identifies the movement as an enemy of the United States. Since July 4, 1999, with then-president Clinton’s executive order placing U.S. sanctions on the Taliban for harboring bin Ladin, the United States has made clear its displeasure with the Taliban.31 Yet this displeasure is not primarily aimed at the movement itself, but with its support for Usama bin Ladin. The 1999 sanctions require only that the Taliban cease their protection of bin Ladin—not any of its other activities in support of terrorism.32

Options for toughening U.S. policy against the Taliban include the following:

* Designate the Taliban as a terrorist organization. The Taliban are not cited as a state sponsor of terrorism because the United States does not wish to legitimize the movement as a state. Declaring the Taliban a terrorist organization, however, would avoid this obstacle while identifying its key role in support of terrorism, specifically aiding other terrorist groups such as Al-Qa‘ida, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Harakat al-Ansar/Mujahideen, Hamas, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Such a move would also help to frame overall U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and would prevent public relations tours of the United States such as that made in March 2001 by the Taliban foreign ministry official Rahmatullah Hashemi.

* Allow the United Front to reopen Afghanistan’s Washington embassy. Currently, the United States joins such Taliban allies as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan in refusing to recognize the United Front’s political arm, the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA), or permitting it to establish an embassy in Washington. The United States should instead follow the United Nations and its European allies in recognizing the ISA as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. Doing so would end the ambiguity in Washington’s policy toward the Taliban and boost the morale of the only Afghans currently fighting against the Taliban. It would also send a powerful message to the Taliban that Washington considers the movement to be an illegitimate representative of the Afghan people.

* Directly aid the United Front. To maximize the effectiveness of a policy against the Taliban, the U.S. government should provide the United Front with funding, perhaps from the more than $1 billion currently designated for counterterrorism.33 A relatively small fraction of this aid could have a significant impact in helping to reduce the territorial base of the Taliban and their terrorist allies. According to United Front commanders who were there, a major battle— the battle for Taloqan—was lost in September 2000 because of Taliban superiority in equipment and manpower. The lack of transport helicopters in particular played a vital role in the United Front’s loss. At $1.5 million each, even a small increase in transport helicopter assets could turn the tide of the war in Afghanistan. It is also no secret that many of the Taliban’s victories have been paved with dollars to purchase not only supplies, but also the loyalty of commanders who care little about who prevails, as long as they find themselves on the winning side.34

A more aggressive U.S. policy against the Taliban would demonstrate that Washington is serious about waging war on terrorism. This policy would also avoid the need to apply additional pressure on Pakistan for aiding the Taliban. Indeed, applying pressure to nuclear-armed Pakistan would only widen the growing rift between Washington and Islamabad and could have perilous consequences for regional stability. This is especially true given the growing Islamization of Pakistani society and the fragility of its government. By granting direct financial assistance to the United Front, Washington would not only roll back the gains of the terrorist sponsors in Kabul and Kandahar, it would also remove a serious destabilizing factor to Pakistan in particular and to the entire world in general.

At the memorial service for the crew members killed in the attack on the USS Cole, President Clinton vowed that those responsible for this act would be brought to justice, that they would find "no safe harbor." The Cole attack is particularly significant because it is arguably as much an act of war as an act of terrorism. The time has come for the U.S. government to declare war on the Taliban. Just as Washington worked with the Afghan mujahidin to help defeat the Soviet Union, so too could the United States now work with the Afghan opposition to defeat a new common enemy— terrorism.

Julie Sirrs, a former analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, made four trips into Afghanistan from 1997 to 2000, visiting both Taliban and United Front areas. She is currently vice president of Safehaven Productions as well as a consultant with Argus International.

1 Based on author’s travels in the area; also Ahmed Rashid, "The Year 2000 in Afghanistan," The Nation, Dec. 27, 2000

2 E-mail communication with Olivier Roy, Jan. 15, 2001. author of several books on Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Political Islam who has traveled extensively in Afghanistan including during the Soviet occupation period

3 Testimony by Karl Inderfurth, assistant secretary of state for South Asian Affairs before the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations, July 20, 2000, available at http://www.state.gov, archive.

4 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 91-92.

5 William Maley, "Interpreting the Taliban," Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban, ed. William Maley (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 12.

6 Anthony Davis, "How the Taliban Became a Military Force," Fundamentalism Reborn?, p. 60.

7 Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, p. 90.

8Ahmed Rashid, "Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Pashtun Policy," The Analyst, June 3, 2000, at http://www.caci-analyst.org.

9 Davis, "How the Taliban Became a Military Force," pp. 69-71; Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, pp. 29, 39; Zalmay Khalilzad and Daniel Byman, "Afghanistan: Consolidation of a Rogue State," The Washington Quarterly, Winter 2000, p. 68.

10 Presentation by Olivier Roy, "Central Asia Caucasus Forum," Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md., Oct. 19, 2000; Rory McCarthy, "Masood’s Last Stand?" The Washington Times, Dec. 16, 2000

11 Patterns of Global Terrorism 1998 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 1999), p. 67.

12 U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report for Afghanistan, 1999 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, Feb. 2000), pp. 2, 11-12, 19-20; United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights Report for Afghanistan, 1999 (New York: United Nations, Jan. 2000), pp. 11-12.

13 Conversation with author, Rokha, Afghanistan, Oct. 1999

14 Pakistani prisoner Mohammed Khaled, in Panjshir prison, as seen on videotape

15 Jeffrey Goldberg, "Inside Jihad U.: The Education of a Holy Warrior," The New York Times Magazine, June 25, 2000

16 See, for example, the message from the Taliban leader to "the people of the United States of America" in November 1999, published in the Middle East Quarterly, Mar. 2000, p. 92-93

17 The Taliban’s official website, at http://www.afghan-ie.com, Oct. 13, 2000

18 Shariat Weekly (Kabul), Oct. 24, 2000.

19 Tariq Butt, "Taliban to Retaliate If Attacked by U.S.," The News (Islamabad), Oct. 27, 2000

20 U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report for Afghanistan, 1999, pp. 19-20; United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights Report for Afghanistan, 1999, p. 12; "Focus: Afghan Woman Tells of Torment, Seeks International Support," Kyodo Press, Jan. 12, 2001

21 "Taleban Say Iran Bars Afghan Flight to Iraq," Reuters, Oct. 1, 2000

22 Presentation by Olivier Roy, Johns Hopkins University’s Central Asia Caucasus Forum, Washington, D.C., Oct. 19, 2000.

23 Tariq Butt, "Taliban to Retaliate If Attacked by U.S.," The News, Oct. 27, 2000

24 Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, p. 88-90.

25 Peter Bergen, "He Is Back...Osama bin Laden Makes His Return," The Washington Times, Oct. 26, 2000

26 Reuel Gerecht, Talk, Sept. 2000; see also this issue.

27 Ahmad Shah Mas‘ud in a conversation with author, Bazarak, Afghanistan, Oct. 9, 1998; Mohammed Es’haq, the United Front’s Washington, D.C. representative, in a conversation with author, Rokha, Afghanistan, Oct. 17, 1999.

28 See http://www.azzam.com; http://www.islamicjihad.com

29 At http://www.azzam.com, Jan. 9, 2001

30 Zalmay Khalilzad and Daniel Byman, "Afghanistan: Consolidation of a Rogue State," The Washington Quarterly, Winter 2000, p. 70.

31 "Taliban Pose a Danger to the United States," Middle East Quarterly, Sept. 1999, pp. 92-93.

32 "They [the Taliban] can choose to stop harboring bin Ladin, and these measures can be reversed." James B. Foley, State Department daily press briefing, Washington, D.C., July 6, 1999.

33 Ahmed Rashid, "The Year 2000 in Afghanistan," The Nation, Dec. 27, 2000

Bush Was Warned of Hijacking Plot

By RON FOURNIER

WASHINGTON (AP) - In the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush was told by U.S. intelligence that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network might hijack American airplanes, prompting the administration to issue a private warning to federal agencies, the White House acknowledged Wednesday night.

But officials said the president and U.S. intelligence did not know that suicide hijackers were plotting to use planes as missiles, as they did against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

``There has been long-standing speculation, shared with the president, about the potential of hijackings in the traditional sense,'' White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said. ``We had general threats involving Osama bin Laden around the world and including in the United States.''

He said the administration, acting on the information received last summer, notified the ``appropriate agencies'' that hijackings ``in the traditional sense'' were possible. The warning was never made public, he said.

The development, first reported by CBS News, comes as congressional investigators intensify their study of whether the government failed to adequately respond to warnings of a suicide hijackings before Sept. 11. It is the first direct link between Bush and intelligence gathered before Sept. 11 about the attacks.

Fleischer would not discuss when or how the information was given to Bush, but a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the president was made aware of the potential for hijackings of U.S. planes during one or more routine intelligence briefings last summer.

The CIA would not confirm what it told Bush, but the agency said the issue of bin Laden's attempting an airline hijacking was among a number of terrorist methods raised to U.S. government officials at the time.

But there was no information that suggested hijackers would crash planes into American landmarks and there was no mention of a date, a CIA official said.

The information was based on intelligence obtained by the U.S. government, the official said, without specifying.

``I will tell you there was, of course, a general awareness of Osama bin Laden and threats around the world, including the United States; and if you recall, last summer we publicly alerted and gave a warning about potential threats on the Arabian peninsula,'' Fleischer said.

But he said Bush had never been told about the potential for suicide hijackers steering the planes toward U.S targets.

Still, acting on the information the government did have, the administration ``notified the appropriate agencies. I think that's one of the reasons that we saw the people who committed the 9-11 attacks used box cutters and plastic knives to get around America's system of protecting against hijackers,'' he said.

Fleischer said he did not know what agencies were notified or what they were told.

The Associated Press reported earlier this month that FBI headquarters did not act on a memo last July from its Arizona office warning there were a large number of Arabs seeking pilot, security and airport operations training at at least one U.S. flight school and which urged a check of all flight schools to identify more possible Middle Eastern students.

A section of that classified memo also makes a passing reference to Osama bin Laden, speculating that al-Qaida and other such groups could organize such flight training, officials said. The officials said, however, that the memo offered no evidence bin Laden was behind the students that raised the concern.

Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, said through a spokesman Wednesday that the revelations in the memos marked an important discovery in Congress' investigation into why the FBI, CIA and other U.S. agencies failed to learn of and prevent the Sept. 11 plot.

``It represents a failure to connect the dots,'' said Graham spokesman Paul Anderson. ``This was dismissed rather lightly at FBI headquarters.''

The FBI also has faced tough questioning about whether it failed to act aggressively enough after arresting Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent, in August after he raised concerns by seeking flight training at a Minnesota flight school.

Moussaoui has emerged as the lone defendant charged in the aftermath of the attacks, which killed more than 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. He is charged with conspiring with bin Laden and the 19 suicide hijackers to attack Americans.

FBI Director Robert Mueller repeatedly has said he wished the FBI had acted more aggressively in addressing the Arizona and Minnesota leads but said nothing the FBI possessed before Sept. 11 pointed to the multiple-airliner hijacking plot.

05/15/02 21:41

Bush briefed on hijacking threat before September 11

John King CNN Washington Bureau

President Bush's daily intelligence briefings in the weeks leading up to the September 11 terror attacks included a warning of the possibility that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network would attempt to hijack a U.S.-based airliner, senior administration officials said Wednesday.

But, the officials said, there was no speculation about the use of an airplane itself as a bomb or a weapon, and no specific, credible information about the possibility of a hijacking of any sort.

It marks the first time the White House has acknowledged there was a warning of a potential hijacking linked to bin Laden prior to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

The disclosure also comes at a time Congress is examining the government's preparedness prior to the terror attacks and whether an FBI agent's warning about the possibility of potential terrorists attending U.S. flight training schools was appropriately considered by agency superiors.

White House officials, however, said vague talk of the threat of potential hijackings was a recurring issue in U.S. intelligence data, and cautioned against considering this new information with "post 9/11 thinking."

"A general warning of the prospect of a hijacking would be looked at much more differently today than it was pre-9/11," one senior official said.

Hijackers took over the controls of four planes on September 11, 2001. Two of those planes plowed into the World Trade Center, another jetliner nose dived into the Pentagon and the fourth aircraft crashed into Pennsylvania woodlands after passengers tried in vain to overcome the terrorists. More than 3,000 people died in the terrorist attacks.

Only one person, Zacarias Moussaoui, has been charged in connection with the attacks. He was arrested in August after coming under suspicion while taking flying lessons in Minnesota.

Another administration official said there was a "common theme at that time that bin Laden was up to something" and that intelligence reports in the weeks and even months prior to September 11 warned of the prospect of new attacks from al Qaeda.

The reports were general and raised the possibility of strikes on the United States or its interests overseas, but had no specific information about potential targets.

This official did point out that in the summer of 2001 the United States did publicly warn about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the Arabian peninsula.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer refused to discuss specifics of the president's daily intelligence briefings, but said there was back in the summer of 2001 "a general awareness" that bin Laden's terrorist network was considering attacks "around the world, including the United States."

There had been among U.S. intelligence officials "longstanding speculation" about the possibility of a hijacking "but not suicide bombers, not using planes as missiles," Fleischer said.

Appropriate U.S. agencies were put on alert about the intelligence suggesting possible hijackings, Fleischer said.

Another U.S. official said the "chatter" about bin Laden dated back to the Clinton administration but "reached a pitch" in the spring of 2001 that it began to receive more attention in intelligence circles and at the highest levels of government.

It was in May 2001, for example, that Bush asked Vice President Dick Cheney to lead an administration task force to assess the country's counter-terrorism effort.

At that time Cheney told CNN in an interview: "Well, the concern here is that one of our biggest threats as a nation is no longer, sort of, the conventional military attack against the United States but, rather, that it might come from other quarters.

"It could be domestic terrorism, but it may also be a terrorist organization overseas or even another state using weapons of mass destruction against the U.S., a hand-carried nuclear weapon or biological or chemical agents," he said. "The threat to the continental United States and our infrastructure is changing and evolving. And we need to look at this whole area, oftentimes referred to as homeland defense."

Appearing on CNN earlier Wednesday, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said U.S. authorities failed to recognize clues prior to September 11 about a potential terrorist attack -- including a memo from an FBI agent who wondered whether bin Laden was behind Arab students taking aviation lessons in the United States.

05/16/2002 02:24

3 July, 2000

Is There an Islamist Internationale?

Common Grounds for Cooperation between Islamist Terrorist Groups

and their Implications for Western Security and American Foreign Policy

Reuven Paz

ICT Academic Director

Introduction

Many researchers and analysts, not to mention reporters and politicians, seem to view the development of Islamist terrorism over the past decade as a kind of “new terrorism.” Indeed, the prospects of cooperation between a variety of Islamist groups and movements seem to have been improved in the past decade, and particularly in the last two years. There are a number of reasons for this, of which the fall of the Soviet Union is probably the most important. The breakup of the USSR was seen through the eyes of the Islamists as a victory over “the Kingdom of Evil”—a victory that symbolized a long-range historical phase and a foretaste of the future global victory of Islam and the Muslims.

Ten years after the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran, the war against the Soviet Union was seen by the Islamists as the next stage of the global war between Islam and Western culture. The Iranian Revolution had itself provided a revolutionary Islamic model for the Sunnis as well as Shi’ites, even though the Sunni Islamic groups had many reservations about its content. The fall of the Soviet Union not only symbolized victory, but also served as a reminder of the existence of a “global conspiracy against Islam.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union the United States remained the sole force in this conspiracy against Islam. The U.S. is perceived by the Islamists as the spearhead of Western culture and modernization that threatens the Islamic world, not necessarily by military force or political colonialism and influence, but by its cultural influence.

The Islamists saw the fall of the Soviet Union as a direct result of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan at the hands of Islamic warriors. The masses of Arab volunteers recruited to fight the Soviets in the Afghan conflict later sought to maintain the momentum of victory in other places. Hence, the Afghan conflict led to the opening of Islamic and Islamist fronts in various local and national disputes with religious overtones: Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, Chechnya, Dagestan and Kashmir. This involvement has led many observers in recent years to view the phenomenon of “Afghan Arabs” as a kind of Islamist Internationale, similar in many ways to the International Brigades of Socialist and Communist volunteers in the civil war in Spain in the 1930s.

The rise of Islamist Terrorism

Over the past decade Islamist involvement in terrorism and political violence in various Arab and Islamic states, as well as in the West or against Western targets has been on the rise. This trend has gone hand-in-hand with a trend of increasing destructiveness of terror attacks: the use of more powerful car bombs, suicide bombings, massacres of innocent civilians or tourists, and attacks against multi-story buildings in order to cause massive damages and casualties. This type of terrorism has been used against both local regimes in the Middle East and Western—mainly American—interests.

Major developments in Islamist terrorism in the past decade include

Islamist terrorism for the first time in the United States, perpetrated by Egyptian Islamists. In the late 1990s these militants cooperated with Arab Afghan elements.

The consolidation of the Jihad Front around Osama bin Ladin’s Al-Qa`idah organization in Afghanistan. This attracted several small Islamist groups to join him in order to benefit from his financial aid, the training facilities in Afghanistan and the hospitality of the Taliban regime. This consolidation made possible the attacks against American interests in Saudi Arabia, the bombing of two American embassies in East Africa, and the attempts to carry out terrorist operations in the U.S. and other places on the occasion of the Millennium.

A significant increase in casualties caused by Islamist terrorism. This can be illustrated by the attacks on the American military base in Khobar, Saudi Arabia and the two American embassies in East Africa, as well as the Israeli embassy and the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires and mass killing of tourists in Luxor, Egypt. In the Middle East, high-casualty attacks included a series of massive suicide bombings by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Israel. Mention should also be made of massacres of civilians at the hands of Islamists in Algeria. We should add to these the many similar attempted terrorist attacks that were prevented by the security services in various countries.

A shift in focus from religious and nationalist struggles in individual Arab or Muslim states to the global scope of Islam. This international perspective has developed gradually throughout the 1990s, and has led to better organizational ties and cooperation between groups.

A major increase in fund raising for Islamist organizations and movements, mainly those indulging in both terrorist and social activity, where it is sometimes impossible to separate the financing of the various fields of activity in order to curtail the ability of such groups to “juggle” the accounts. There has also been an increase in financial support of Arab and Muslim governments to various Islamic groups or projects in an attempt to gain control over the Islamists, or alternately to influence, through them, various sectors of the population.

It should be noted that the Islamist terrorist activity has taken place against a background of slow but steady decline in popular support for some of the Islamist groups, such as GIA (Armed Islamic Group) in Algeria, The Islamic Jihad and al-Gama`at al-Islamiyyah in Egypt, Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, and the Jihadi groups in the Yemen. The loss of popular support is inter alia the result of massive terrorism, which led governments to apply heavy pressure on large sectors of the population suspected of being affiliated with Islamist groups or sympathetic towards them.

An improvement of the ability of Arab Muslim governments to recruit popular support for their counter-terrorist efforts. In most cases Western—primarily American—encouragement allowed governments to crack down on Islamist terrorist groups without the fear of being labeled anti-Islamic.

Islam and the West

One important factor has in fact not changed since the beginning of the Islamist revival in the Arab world in the 1970s: the difficulty of Muslim populations to cope with modernization and with Western culture. This has resulted in a rise in the popularity of Islamic and Islamist groups and individuals among the Muslim communities in the West. This popularity is due to the rapid growth of these communities by natural growth and immigration over the past three decades, aided by the development of tension and hatred of foreigners in many of the host countries, particularly in Europe.

There is a growing sense of insecurity on the part of Muslims living in Western societies, brought about by social and psychological processes that led to the return to Islam as a kind of a shield and a source of identity. A visitor to the Islamic bookstores of London, Paris, New Jersey, or Michigan would find that most of the religious doctrinal literature sold or distributed relate to the issues of “How to preserve Muslim life in Western society and culture.”

These processes increased the quest for an organized religious society, in which the Islamic organizations play a role in helping communities to cope with the threat of Western culture—a threat, in the eyes of many Muslims, to the Muslim mind, soul and cultural values. Similar tensions exist in the Arab and Muslim world itself and are at the root of the popularity of the Islamist groups there as well. But in the Western world this sense of threat has only increased over time.

The fundamentalist, radical messages of modern Islam, the most political religion on earth, has gained a following among Muslim populations in the West. In many cases this has occurred with the help of the Western governments themselves, through their inability or unwillingness differentiate between social welfare or educational activities and potentially violent political activities. Western democracies—particularly the more culturally liberal among them—have thus unwittingly leant themselves to the cause of the Islamists, for better or worse. For many of the violent Islamist groups, their Islamic projects, publications and welfare services serve as the backbone of support for their terrorist activities. Such services aid in recruitment, fund raising, training, communications, connections within the group and with other groups, distribution of political, doctrinal, and ideological messages, publishing pamphlets, assistance from foreign governments, etc. Part of this activity is sometimes sheltered by a kind of “untouchable” legitimate organizational complex, in the form of social and welfare associations. In some countries, particularly in the UK, Germany and Scandinavia, these organizations benefit from generous financial support from the authorities.

In general, over the past decade the freedom of operation of most of the Islamist groups has greatly improved outside of their homelands. This relative freedom did not decrease the basic hostility to the West, particularly the U.S., but may even have led to increased animosity.

Wahhabi-Takfiri Jihad

Under the influence of the “Arab Afghan” phenomenon there has also been an ideological consolidation of Wahhabi-Takfiri Jihadi ideology and rhetoric that resulted in two main developments:

A shift in the struggle, mainly through massive terrorism, from the heart of the Arab World into the “Wild West” of Central Asia and to Western countries or Western interests in the region.

Better cooperation between various groups and organizations. In the Middle East examples are Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and to some extent Hizballah. On the international scene one can see this in the case of the Egyptian, Pakistani, Kashmiri, Algerian, Jordanian, Yemeni, and Sunni Lebanese groups.

The response of the West under American leadership was to improve international cooperation in counter-terrorism. However this has not really helped to confront the recent developments. For most of the past decade cooperation in counter-terrorism between the Arab states did not exist, and only during the past year has such cooperation begun to bear fruit.

The development of the Islamist perspective

The Islamist or Jihadi terrorism is an extension of the more radical aspects of the Islamic revival. This revival was a result of the inability of Islamic societies to cope with the modernization presented to them by Western civilization and culture. It was encouraged by regimes unable to merge Islamic social, political, and cultural perceptions with the “imported” Western secular culture.

The outcome was the development of a doctrine of Jihad, which offered a solution to the clash of civilizations. The opposing forces were presented as Islam, as represented by the movements of the Islamic revival, on the one hand and the processes of modernization, as represented by Western culture on the other hand. The incursion of Western culture was perceived as being aided and abetted by national, royalist, socialist or Marxist regimes in the Arab and Muslim World.

One of the greatest successes of the Islamist groups was their ability to present the ideology of this inexorable clash as true and genuine Islam, and hence to attract relatively large proportions of the Muslim public.

The next stage was the Islamist movements’ attempt to crystallize Muslim public opinion around the notion that the Muslims are at constant war. This war is seen as part of an eternal global struggle between Islam and its adherents and a long string of enemies throughout the history of Islam. The 20th Century gave many Muslims a sense of permanent retreat in which they were besieged by the threatening Western culture and modernization. The immediate outcome was secularization and the decline of Islamic political and social culture as a way of life, as it should have been according to the Islamic teachings. The superiority of the West gave this war a sense of desperation, causing it to be presented as a war of self-defense, with Jihad the only response.

But Jihad does not mean only military conflict. This was a war of cultures, and therefore it has been conducted mainly for the minds of those Muslims attracted to the new perceptions. The feeling of being involved in a war of self-defense led to a sense of being under siege by the both the West and the secular Arab regimes. Most of the Islamist movements succeeded in convincing their followers that they were threatened everywhere in the world. Anyone who reads the collection of Sayyed Qutb’s letters in the book “America from the inside” (Amrika min al-Dakhil) in the early 1950s(2), can easily trace the origins of the sense of global war that eventually led to Islamist terrorism, violence, and hatred in the form of Jihad.

The next stage was the formation of Jihad groups aimed at the creation of a proud new generation of Islamist warriors, who saw themselves as defenders of Islam in this global war—a war in which they were persecuted and threatened from all sides.

One of the questions we should ask ourselves is “who threatens whom? And who terrorizes whom?” Is the admittedly extant tactical threat of Islamist terrorism to Western societies greater than the threat of Western modernization and culture to certain Muslim publics? Was the American intensive assistance to the Afghan Mujahedin (the former partners of Osama bin Laden) really meant to save them from the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union? If so, then why not allow them to establish a true Islamic State? Why did the Americans bombard the Serbs in Kosovo, but totally ignore the Islamists in Chechnya, who fight the successors of “the Evil Empire”?

The Western mind can find the answers through the logic of political culture and interests. But, the Islamist political culture, which in Islamic eyes is an integral part of religious rulings and perceptions, cannot.

And thus we come to the last phase of the development of these Islamist perceptions. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 led many Western societies to view Islamist terrorism as a new threat to the free world. The result is that the United States, the leading element of Western civilization, is on the verge of adopting the Islamic perception of the Global War.

For Muslims, the wars against the Christian Crusaders are the archetype of the Islamic Jihad—a war on clear religious principles with no distinction between religion and politics. This perception was revived in the last decades by all the Islamist movements. When Osama bin Ladin styles his front “The Front of Jihad against the Crusaders and the Jews” it is obvious to the entire Muslim world what he means. Furthermore, such a perception evokes, not only for his immediate followers but also wider Islamic circles, a vision of a better future in which they emerge victorious.

Bin Ladin’s success in marketing this notion not only lends legitimacy to terrorism against the West, but also opens the door to the feelings of hatred rooted in social and economic ills. This closes the circle and brings us to the roots of the Islamist violence: once again we find the inability to cope with Western modernization.

The roots of Islamic fundamentalism lie in the search for the glorious past of Islam in the Middle Ages. The source of the phenomenon lies in the pursuit of immediate solutions to revive this glorious past. The continuous sense of retreat during the second half of the past century led to impatience, which in turn led to violence. The doctrines of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab World or of Maududi’s Jamaah Islamiyyah in India and the non-Arabic Muslim World have lost their attraction for part of Islamic societies. Where these traditional doctrines stressed long-range social revolution, what people seek today is more immediate improvement in their social conditions. Thus many readily adopted the notion of Jihad and the clash of civilizations.

Islamist Terrorism in the 1990s

This quite long survey of the development of Islamist ideology is essential for the understanding of what seems to scholars and politicians as the “new Islamist terrorism” of the 1990s. But there is another element, which is perhaps the most important of all. The ideology of Jihad became for many adherents of Islamist movements not only an integral part of the religion, but the main and sometimes the only part of the religion to follow.

Many members of Islamist groups lack knowledge any clear understanding of orthodox Islam. As their knowledge of true Islamic doctrine is poor, they often rely on various Sheikhs and religious scholars, adopting these leaders’ perceptions of Islam as their own. This gives these leaders and ideologues great influence over those sectors of the Muslim public whose knowledge of Islam is even poorer. Thus the version of Islam they offer their followers is often wholly divorced from religious law, centering instead on the roots of social and political confrontation.

Another element that brought about the perception of global war was the vagueness of Islamist goals. Their struggle is not just to liberate a certain country from foreign occupation or from a “heretic” regime. These are merely steps along the way in an eternal religious mission, whose victory, though guaranteed, is to be realized only by future generations. Thus many of the Islamists lack a clear political world view and hence, any kind of pragmatism.

New Terrorism?

Many researchers and analysts tend to see the violent Islamist phenomenon as a kind of “new terrorism.” However, what we should ask ourselves is, do we face a new kind of terrorism, or do we simply lack a basic understanding of the sources and developments of the “old” terrorism? The conclusion drawn by at least some scholars is that a great deal of work remains to be done in order to identify the conditions that cause alienation to erupt into violence. What is especially important is to trace the links between religion and extreme forms of violence.

So where then is the new terrorism? What is new in the Islamist terrorism of the 1990s?

To begin with the so-called new Islamist terrorism is not the result of the decline of state-sponsored terrorism. Unlike the “secular” national, radical, anarchist terrorism sponsored by states such as Libya, Syria, Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, and behind the scenes by the Soviet camp, most of the Islamist terrorist groups have never been sponsored by states. Most of the Egyptian Islamist terrorist groups, for example, actually grew independently out of the internal Egyptian scene. Other than occasional logistic assistance to some of them on the part of Sudan they were not state-sponsored groups. The Algerian terrorist groups likewise were not sponsored by foreign states.

Many of these groups neglected social activity, and were thus ineligible for the very generous financial support rendered to other groups by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Other groups, notably those of the school of the Muslim Brotherhood received extensive financial aid for all kinds of social and welfare projects.

In this sense Hamas is unique, in that it is the only movement of the Brotherhood that is intensively involved in both terrorism and social activity. Its terrorism, due to the fact that it is directed only against Israel and as part of a Palestinian national struggle, gains the support of several Arab states or wealthy individuals in Arabia, not to mention its social and welfare infrastructure. But no one calls upon the U.S. State Department to include those countries in the list of states sponsoring terrorism.

The model of Hamas has been imitated in recent years by Hizballah in Lebanon, which apart from its guerilla activities against Israel, is also involved in the social and political strengthening of the Shi`i community in Lebanon, and is sponsored by Iran under the patronage of Syria.

A Geographical Shift

The new phase of Islamist terrorism is actually the shift on the part of most of the Islamist groups from activities in their own countries against the secular “heretic” regimes to activities in the global arena. This shift began with two developments, which though unconnected on the organizational level, yet share a common ideological basis. The first of these was the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993. The second was the participation of Islamist volunteers in the conflicts in Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Dagestan throughout the 1990s.

These two developments seem to point to the establishment of what seems to be an international or inter-Muslim front in Afghanistan. However this trend was also the result of the oppression of these groups by the various Arab regimes, which created a camp of Islamist refugees who could no longer operate in their homelands. Thus these “Arab Afghans” were forced to take a new direction, that of global terrorism. This trend toward international activities was thus not necessarily a conscious decision, but may be more the result of external factors.

Sociological Roots of European Islamism

But there is an older sociological process at work in all this that seems to have been reinforced in the last decade, and may be even stronger in the future. In the second half of the 20th Century there was a significant increase in Muslim immigration to the West, mainly to North America and Western Europe. Whereas the first generation of immigrants sought to merge into Western society and fought to overcome major economic difficulties, the expectations of the second and third generation of immigrants were in many cases unfulfilled. This has reinforced their alienation from the Western societies that surrounded them.

Although in many countries, primarily the UK, Scandinavia, and Germany, the immigrants were granted generous economic support, and benefited from total freedom of organization, speech and education, their own communities were built mainly through the generosity of the wealthier Muslim countries.

The xenophobia of the surrounding societies, coupled with unemployment and the difficulty in coping with modernization, led to the growth of an Islamic infrastructure, which in the liberal atmosphere of Western democracies could serve as a hothouse for Islamist movements. Social associations in London or research foundations in the United States, can, for example serve as the logistic foundation of Islamist terrorist groups. Such activities as recruiting, fund raising, publication and distribution of messages can all be done under the cover of social and cultural activities.

This tends to reinforce the globalization and internationalization of Islamist terrorism, and will most likely continue to do so in the future. The growing feeling of alienation of Muslim youngsters is perhaps the most important factor in analyzing the prospects of future Islamist terrorism.

Conclusion

The answer to this phenomenon deserves a separate article. But part of it lies in a better understanding on the part of the Western world of the roots of Islamist violence. The steps taken by Western countries, under the leadership of the United States—steps such as increased cooperation in the field of intelligence, new legislation, encouragement of counter-terrorism by Arab and Muslim states, extradition of wanted terrorists—are all very important. But they provide no solution to the root cause of this phenomenon. This is especially true so long as Western countries, as represented by their media, politicians, and cultural leaders seem so ready to adopt the Islamist perception of the clash of civilizations between Islam and Western culture. In so doing they assist the Islamist terrorism to become a strategic global issue. By building up the image of an Islam at war with the West, they play into the hands of the Islamists.

An additional element should be borne in mind, and is often neglected by scholars dealing with the Islamist phenomenon. This is the existence of elements of dissension, personality conflicts and rivalry that have so far prevented the growth of Islamist terrorist groups beyond the current level.

At present the “Islamist Internationale,” such as it is, has several thousand hard core members and some ten thousand sympathizers, supporters and fund raising activists. However, Osama Bin Ladin is nowhere near to being the new Islamic Khalifah and has little prospects of being proclaimed as such. And while it is true that there is an increase in international cooperation between different groups, and even a consolidation of a new version of Wahhabi-Takfiri ideology that helps to unite some of these groups, we cannot say that there is an Islamist Internationale ready to unite into a global movement and become a global strategic threat.

(Reuven Paz is the academic director of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) in Herzliya, Israel, and is currently a senior visitor research fellow in The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington D.C. His main fields of research are Islamic movements and terrorism and Palestinian society.)