Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (5 page)

Two other major Islamist uprisings in the Arab world during this early period were the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 and the revolt in Hama in Syria in 1983. In Saudi Arabia it took the army two weeks to take back control of the most sacred site in the Islamic world, and at least five hundred people were killed in the fighting. The revolt in Hama against Syria’s secular Ba’athist regime was led by the local Muslim Brotherhood, which had taken a more violent path than its parent organization in Egypt. The fighting in Hama lasted three weeks, much of the city was destroyed, and an estimated 30–40,000 people were killed by the regime’s troops. But none of these attempts to spark a revolution, in Egypt, Syria or Saudi Arabia, led to the overthrow of the existing regime and the creation of
a government run by Islamists. And in case the message was not clear enough already, the fate of the Islamist uprising in Algeria in the 1990s drove it home.

Except for those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserving of death
.

– Attributed to Antar Zouabri, “emir” of the Islamic Armed Group, 1996–2002
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The increasing radicalization and eventual collapse of Islamist opposition to the rule of the army in Algeria during the civil war of 1992–2002 epitomizes the problem faced by Arab revolutionaries in the post-colonial era. In the Algerian independence war of 1954–62 it was obvious who the enemy was: the imperial power, France, and the million French-speaking European settlers in Algeria. For most Algerians the choice was easy, and in the end the French army did not even have to be destroyed in battle. Just make the cost to the French of staying in Algeria too high in lives and in money, and they will eventually cut their losses and go home
because they actually have another home to go to
. Revolutionary victories in several dozen European colonies in the 1950s and 1960s created the myth that revolutionary war, whether fought as a guerrilla war in rural areas or a terrorist war in the cities, was unstoppable, but it really only worked well in the anti-colonial context.

Subsequent decades showed that when later generations of “Third World” revolutionaries tried to use the same
techniques against local regimes that had failed to produce either prosperity or democracy in the newly independent countries of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, they generally failed. The enemy in power now consisted of fellow-countrymen, military or civilian, who had wide networks of allies and supporters in the population, making it much harder to organize a mass mobilization against them. Moreover, most of the regime’s supporters would stay and fight rather than cut and run, because—except for the very rich with foreign bank accounts—they had no other home to go to. So the success rate in these post-colonial revolutionary wars was very low.

Algeria, which had been ruled by the army since shortly after independence from France, had mass anti-regime protests in 1988 that resulted in a number of political reforms, including the legalization of opposition parties. The army assumed that the public would be so grateful for these reforms that they would vote for its own party, the National Liberation Front. But in the first vote under the new dispensation in 1990, a new Islamist party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), won control of about half of the municipal and provincial assemblies in local elections. It also won a large majority of seats in the first round of voting for a new national parliament in 1991—but that development panicked the military into cancelling the second round of the elections and aborting the democratic process. The army also arrested the main FIS leaders and banned the party.

Algerian Islamists responded with an armed struggle that lasted more than a decade. The FIS rapidly spun off two other Islamist groups that competed with each other in their religious radicalism: the Islamic Salvation Army (which operated mainly in rural areas making guerrilla attacks against government forces) and the Islamic Armed Group (which was primarily city-based and specialized in urban terrorism). Neither of them succeeded, although it took the regime ten years and up to 150,000 deaths to quell the revolt. As the struggle proceeded, relatively mature revolutionary leaders were killed or jailed, and replaced by younger leaders who were more extreme in their ideology and less discriminate in their killing. By 1997 entire villages were being massacred for collaborating with the regime—“Except for those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserving of death”—and the bulk of the population came to the conclusion that the regime, however cruel and corrupt, was more acceptable than the revolutionaries.

By 2005 the war had effectively come to an end in Algeria, and the regime had won. Even before that, various Islamist leaders had concluded that their whole strategy for stimulating revolutions in the Arab world was missing some vital element. Two decades of terrorist attacks in the Middle East, which killed many thousands of people, the vast majority of them Muslim Arabs, had still not created a critical mass of popular support for the Islamist revolutionaries in any Arab country. It is not clear
whether the Islamists consciously contrasted this failure of terrorism against domestically based regimes with the earlier successes in comparable struggles against foreign imperialists, but some of them did get to the obvious conclusion. It was high time for a better strategy: what they needed was a foreign —preferably infidel—enemy.

The nations of the infidels have all united against the Muslims.… This is a new battle, a great battle, similar to the great battles of Islam like the conquest of Jerusalem.… The Crusaders [i.e., the Americans] come out to fight Islam in the name of fighting terrorism
.

Osama bin Laden, October 2002
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By the late 1990s, Osama bin Laden was a man on the run. Born in Saudi Arabia in 1957 into a family that had become immensely wealthy in the construction business, he became more radical in his religious thinking and more openly critical of existing Arab regimes (including the Saudi royal family) during his time at King Abdulaziz University in 1977–79. He left Saudi Arabia in 1980 to support the mujahedeen who were fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. First as a volunteer in Pakistan coordinating the flow of money, supplies and arms to the fighters in Afghanistan, later as a leader of foreign fighters inside the country, he spent most of a decade waging jihad
against the Russian infidels before Moscow gave up and pulled all its troops out in 1989. Like most of the foreign volunteers, his views were transformed by the experience of fighting alongside Muslims from many other countries in a common struggle against infidel invaders, and it was in 1988 or 1989, in the mujahedeen camps in Afghanistan, that bin Laden created the organization known as al Qaeda (“The Base” or “The Foundation”).

What he had learned, like many of his generation, was that the experience of fighting foreign invaders had a powerful unifying and radicalizing effect on people from all over the Muslim world. He also learned that if Islamists win a war against infidel foreign invaders in any Muslim country, they almost automatically win the struggle for domestic power as well. (The Taliban, the Afghan Islamist group closest to bin Laden’s own theological views, did not finally defeat their rivals and take power in Kabul until 1996, but it was clear much earlier in the civil war that followed the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan that the victors would be Islamists of one stripe or another.) So it was very much under the influence of his Afghan experiences that bin Laden formulated the revolutionary strategy that made him famous.

He began to talk in terms of the “near enemy” (the corrupt regimes to be overthrown by Islamist revolutions in Arab and other Muslim countries) and the “far enemy” (the powerful infidel governments that dominated the Muslim world from afar). There was no possibility of
overthrowing the “far enemy,” but also no need. All you had to do was get the far enemy to invade Muslim countries, as the Russians had invaded Afghanistan, and the results would be the same: radicalization in Muslim countries, a rapid growth in the number of young men wanting to wage jihad, ultimate defeat for the infidel invader, and the establishment of Islamist governments in the countries from which the invaders were finally expelled. Bin Laden was trying to recreate the circumstances that had just brought the Islamists such a striking victory in Afghanistan, after such a long string of revolutionary failures elsewhere. In the end, he was quite successful.

A co-founder of al Qaeda, Egyptian ex-colonel Saif al Adel, later summarized the organization’s long-term plans in five consecutive phases under the title “Al Qaeda’s Strategy to the Year 2020”:

1. Provoke the United States and the West into invading a Muslim country by staging a massive attack or string of attacks on U.S. soil that results in massive civilian casualties.

2. Incite local resistance to occupying forces.

3. Expand the conflict to neighbouring countries, and engage the United States and its allies in a long war of attrition.

4. Convert al Qaeda into an ideology and set of operating principles that can be loosely franchised in other countries without requiring direct command and control, and via these franchises incite attacks against the United States and countries allied with the United States until they withdraw from the conflict.

5. The U.S. economy will finally collapse by the year 2020, under the strain of multiple engagements in numerous places, making the worldwide economic system, which is dependent on the United States, also collapse, leading to global political instability, which will in turn make possible a global jihad led by al Qaeda. Following the collapse of the United States and the rest of the Western countries, a Wahhabi caliphate [one that follows the austere Saudi Arabian variant of Sunni Islam] will then be installed across the world.
⁶

This document was clearly written in the late 1990s at the earliest, but is still heavily influenced by the fact and manner of the mujahedeen’s victory over the Soviet Union. The first three stages of the strategy are an obvious attempt to relive that triumph by entangling the United States in a similarly forlorn war, the only difference being that, as the United States will not obligingly stage an unprovoked invasion of a Muslim country, it will be necessary to lure it into this trap by making a mass-casualty attack on the American homeland.

The fourth phase is a genuinely original plan for a decentralized jihadi organization that is invulnerable precisely
because of its lack of a centre. The franchise model has been al Qaeda’s greatest strength—although on some occasions, most notably in the case of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a franchise has gone down what bin Laden and his companions would have considered the wrong road and has had to be disowned.

The fifth and final stage, of course, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy that reveals the real naïveté behind bin Laden’s apparent strategic sophistication. He is more realistic about the strength of the “far enemy” than most of his colleagues, but in the end he too believes in the caricatures of morally superior Muslims who will triumph just because they are in the right, and corrupt and decadent non-Muslims who will be defeated simply because they are evil. The lost Golden Age will return, and then everyone (or the survivors, at least) will live happily ever after.

And there is one key calculation that goes unmentioned not only here but in every document produced by every revolutionary organization that employs terrorist tactics: that bringing death and devastation down on the heads of those whose support the organization wants is the only way it can actually get that support. Most ordinary people would really just like to get on quietly with their lives, but the terrorists deliberately provoke the local regime (or, in al Qaeda’s case, a foreign country) in order to make their lives hell. It’s a kind of political jiu-jitsu: the revolutionaries make spectacular attacks that don’t really do any strategic harm to their opponent, but infuriate the target
regime or country to the point that it unleashes massive violence in retaliation—violence that, in the nature of such things, will by and large hurt innocent people the most. Repeat as necessary, until a large enough section of the population has turned to your organization (now posing as the defender of the people) to create the critical mass needed for a revolution.

Just as it is not clear exactly when Saif al-Adel wrote the above document, it is not known exactly when Osama bin Laden finally arrived at the strategy it outlines. Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1989, but when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and threatened the Saudi kingdom, King Fahd allowed American and other Western “infidel” forces to deploy troops on Saudi territory. Outraged, bin Laden denounced the king’s decision, and was eventually forced into exile as a result. The only Arab country willing to take him was Sudan, where a military officer called Omar al-Bashir had recently seized power in a coup and imposed Shari’ah law on the country. Bin Laden enjoyed sanctuary in Sudan until 1996, when the United States succeeded in getting him expelled in return for an easing of sanctions on Sudan. He found a new home in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, like-minded Afghan Islamists, had captured Kabul and brought a measure of peace to the south and centre of the country in 1996. They invited bin Laden and his merry men to set up shop there.