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Bin Laden has two principal
grouses against the USA. First, the very mention of the name, he
admitted, provoked "disgust and revulsion." To start
with, by aligning itself with the Saudi regime, Washington had
committed "an act against Islam." He was determined to
unseat the Saudis and, by implication, beat down the Americans.
That was not all.
The USA was responsible for all those killed in Palestine,
Lebanon and Iraq. It was against these acts of "aggression
and injustice" that he had declared jihad. The end-goal was
to drive Uncle Sam away from all Muslim lands.
Bin Laden was
convinced that the end of the Cold War and the eclipse of the
Soviet Union had made the USA "ever more haughty and
arrogant." Not that this deterred him in the least. His
answer to globalisation was the restoration of the Khalifa and
the caliphate. Which, ominously, was to begin from Afghanistan
with the swath of green eventually spreading all the way from
Tunisia to Indonesia.
Asked about his
future plans, he blurted, "You’ll see them and hear about
them in the media, Insha Allah." And, indeed, few if any
missed the grim and grisly holocaust of September 11! Bin Laden’s
first television interview by Bergen was telecast in 1997.
Laden’s Al-Qaeda
stretches across three continents and a dozen or more countries.
And it had truly gone global. Incidentally, a recent study on
globalisation posits a new class of world citizens: the
cosmocrats. They are as compatible in London or Hong Kong as in
their hometowns, say Ireland or Nigeria. A typical example may
be an English World Bank executive, married to a Russian, who
spends six months a year shuttling between Poland and Colombia.
The cosmocrats value academic excellence and often have multiple
degrees from an array of prestigious universities. What counts
aren’t family backgrounds but talent and drive.
Bin Laden’s
network, which also values technical proficiency, albeit of a
rather specialised kind, is as cosmopolitan as the cosmocrats.
They have operated in all sorts of places—Sudan, Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bosnia, Croatia,
Albania, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Tajikistan,
Azerbaijan, Kenya, Tanzania, nearer home in Kashmir and not so
far away in Chechnya. For the record, in the USA Al-Qaeda has
attracted followers in New York, Boston, Texas, Florida,
Virginia and California. In Britain it has followers in London
and Manchester.
Among the
countries of special interest for Al-Qaeda mention may be made
of Egypt, the land of the intellectual mentor of modern Islamism
Sayyid Qutb (1906-66). Qutb lived in the USA from 1949 to 1951
and was imprisoned and later executed in Egypt on conspiracy
charges. Bergen underlines the interesting fact that all the key
members of Al-Qaeda have been Egyptians and suggests, "one
cannot overestimate" the influence of Qutb on the jihadi
groups in Egypt and, by extension, on Osama bin Laden.
Again, like
Mohammed Atta, another Egyptian who was an outstanding student
of architecture, the vast majority of Al-Qaeda’s ideologues
are graduates in technical or scientific subjects. This ties up
with a singularly disturbing fact about the New York attack of
11 September, apart from its train of death and destruction—the
technical proficiency with which it was carried. For, as a
graduate of Cairo University’s faculty of architecture as well
as Harburg Technical University, Atta knew exactly where to hit
the buildings.
Bergen underscores
the harsh reality that Al-Qaeda’s Islamist message, while it
draws on pre-modern readings of the Koran and other religious
texts, is wholly modern in its revolutionary existentialism and
that this unholy alliance between pre-modern and modern pervades
the entire Muslim world where modernist or ‘accommodationist’
readings of jihad, loosely rendered as "holy war,"
have been undermined by radical conservatives. While Osama bin
Laden remains the focal point of Bergen’s interest, he has
also profiled several other key players who have both influenced
and been influenced by him. His narrative, fast-moving and
spine-chillingly authentic, needs to be set against the backdrop
of two other studies, Michael Griffm’s Reaping the Whirlwind
and John Cooley’s Holy Wars, now deservedly in its second
edition, both published in London (2001). In their totality,
they reveal a grim and grisly world that, once appearing remote,
has now entered every household.
An American by
birth, Peter Bergen grew up in England and has blossomed into a
terrorism analyst for the prestigious American news channel,
CNN. In the course of his researches he interviewed scores of
people familiar with bin Laden, from his Saudi friends to the
CIA officials tracking him, to cabinet members of the now
defunct Taliban regime.
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THE
equivocation of the US Secretary for Defence notwithstanding, his
broad hint about the presence of Al-Qaida across the Line of Control
in Kashmir helps underline the grave threat this terrorist outfit
and its principal political mentor, the Saudi multi-millionaire
Osama bin Laden, pose to the peace and security of the region. The
blast outside the US consulate in Karachi (June 14) offered proof if
one was needed. Meanwhile, the broad contours of the evil empire
over which the twosome preside are only slowly but surely emerging
from the shadows.
