prehistoryranch

In contrast to bin Laden’s first recruits, they excelled in their training. By mid-August, Atta and Shehhi were able to make solo African Mango flights and earned their private pilot license tests. In mid-December, they received their commercial licenses and began practicing flying large jets on flight simulators. Jarrah also obtained a single-engine private pilot certificate and advanced to flying larger jets on
flight simulators.

From December“ 2000 to February 2001, the hijackers took va- cations in Europe and in the Middle East and returned to the United  States in the spring of 2001. Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi returned to Florida, while Hazmi and Hanjour eventually settled in New Jersey. They waited for the arrival of the “muscle hijackers,” whom bin Laden  had met with during the summer and early fall of 2000. He selected thirteen men, each of whom he met with personally. The majority were Saudi and included Satam al-Suqami, Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Shehri, Abdul Aziz al-Omari, Ahmed “”>SEO Services al-Ghamdi, Hamza al-Ghamdi, Mohand al-Shehri, Majed Moqed, Saeed al-Ghamdi, Ahmad al-Haznawi, Ahmed al-Nami, and Fayez Banihammad.  Before sending them to the
leather furniture United States, bin Laden had them undergo a s thorough training process that involved learning tactics and attending lectures led by him. They were then sent to Saudi Ara- bia to  obtain visas and new passports and were ordered to return for yet further training. From late 2000 to early 2001 they received spe- cial instruction by Abu Turab al-Jordani at the al-Matar complex in Afghanistan. Afterward, they traveled via Pakistan and the UAE, and from there to the United States. By early summer 2001, they had all settled in Florida.

During the summer sole f80 of 2001, the would-be pilots began taking additional classes and undertook cross-country surveillance flights to prepare for their pending operation. The date for the sole-f63 operation had not yet been set, but Atta knew that it was fast approaching. He and Hazmi met for the first time during the summer. Prior to this  point,
the two teams had operated, for the most part, independently of one another. Khalid had primarily interacted with the California and Arizona group, while bin Laden, through
Ramzi Binalshibh, interacted with the Hamburg contingent. From this point onward, both groups were under the leadership of Atta, and therefore with al-Qaeda, though only a few of its  senior leaders were briefed. July 8, Atta travelled to Madrid to meet with Binalshibh, to go over the final details  of the operation and its timing. Binalshibh reconfirmed the target list with Atta,  and told him that bin Laden wanted the attacks carried out as soon as possible. Atta had asked if it was possible to target a nuclear  plant as well. Binalshibh replied that only targets approved by bin Laden would be allowed. Atta had not yet settled on a date for the attacks replica handbags but told Binalshibh that he would let him know as soon as possible. Interestingly, bin Laden had first pushed for the attack to occur on May 12, 2001, seven months after the Cole attack,
but Khalid made clear to him that they were not ready. Bin Laden then pressed for June or July, around the time of the visit of
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the Temple on the Mount in Jerusalem. Binalshibh told Atta not to inform the other hijackers  about the timing of the attack until the final days.

Returned to the United
States on July 30, 2001. He spent August finalizing the operation, and remained in frequent contact with Binalshibh. He ordered all the
pilots to begin scoping out the selected targets. On August 4, Atta attempted to pick up Mohamed al-Kahtani, the last of the “muscle replica watches hijacker” contingent, but Kahtani was denied entry into the United States. By the
third week of August, Atta had settled on the date, September 11, and confirmed the date of the attack with Binalshibh. Binalshibh promptly reported the date to bin
Laden, and he also sent a message to Khalid confirming the attack. Bin Laden only told Atef, though word had been spreading among the shura council Essay writing and  the Taliban leadership that an attack was imminent. Bin Laden told visiting guests that this was the case. Mullah Omar warned  bin Laden that he remained opposed to any attack against the United States, and encouraged him to  strike the enemies of the Taliban inside Afghanistan. Senior al-Qaeda leaders urged him to heed Omar’s warning. “I will make it happen even if I do it by myself,” he responded defiantly.

Bin Laden gave the green light for the attacks to take place on the 11th of September 2001. Atta began to assemble his men into teams to travel to their respective points of departure: Newark, Dulles, and Boston. From these points, they would launch the most significant terrorist attack against the American homeland in its history.

Bin Laden counted  on his conclusion that the United States was a paper tiger that would avoid waging a costly, prolonged war. Americans had become unwilling to sustain significant human casu-
digital signage alties. Between 1996 and 2001 he often cited the cases of American troops in Beirut and Mogadishu, in 1983 and 1993, respectively, to demonstrate that the United States lacks the political will to do battle. It had retreated under the cover of darkness from Lebanon and Somalia, bin Laden was fond of saying. According to Data Mining Software testimony by former close associates, he also believed those who had visited America as tourists and told him exactly what he wanted to hear— that Americans had lost their warrior mentality. One or two big attacks would break their will.

Weighed down by group think, a common enough phenom- enon in decision-making, bin Laden dismissed dissenting opinions, in particular from his shura council, which, of course, had opposed attacks on the United States, lest that provoke the lone superpower and endanger the survival of the Taliban’s Islamic emirate. The Islamic emirate was the only refuge for religious activists like

Why not give the Taliban the chance to consolidate its nascent government and apply that Islamic model to other Muslim countries? Their counsel went unheeded. “Bin Laden was a one-man show,” said a former insider who knew him well during the Afghan war and in Sudan. “One must either agree with [his] opinion or shut up; dissent is not tolerated.” Bin Laden ran al-Qaeda with “absolute individual leadership,” acknowledged another senior associate who spent years with bin Laden and Mullah Omar. This makes bin Laden’s al-Qaeda “the first private sector jihad organiza- tion in Muslim history,” said Egyptian-born Abu al-Walid al-Masri.

Bin Laden had informed fewer than a dozen of his aides about the attack and thus narrowed the circle of opposition and debate. He closed his mind to any cognitive dissonance. If the Afghan muja- hideen could defeat one of the most powerful armies in the world and bring down an empire, they could easily expel the United States from Muslim territories.

In an unguarded moment, bin Laden once conceded that the September 11 attacks had exceeded his wildest expectations. His goal had been to “terrorize” Americans, to kill hundreds, and to force them to rethink their military presence in the Islamic world. He had not expected so many people to die, or the World Trade Center Towers to collapse, though he shed no tears over either. Luck also played a big part in the stunning success of the operation. Nonetheless the attack was his doing. Khalid Sheikh Moham- med planned it and saw it through, but responsibility for approving and financing it was bin Laden’s; he owned it.

In mid-1996, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed traveled to Afghani- stan to meet with bin Laden and his close companion Moham- med Atef for the first time. Khalid considered himself a sort of terrorist entrepreneur and freely touted his extensive jihadist credentials—particularly his successes and near-misses during his time in the Philippines—but in truth his track record never matched his own ambitions. Khalid considered bin Laden’s al-Qaeda a business opportunity and he arrived in Afghanistan with an audacious proposal. At his meeting with bin Laden, Khalid unveiled an extensive operation involving ten planes hitting cities on both coasts and tar- geting federal buildings and nuclear power plants. Khalid described how, on the tenth plane, after killing all the male passengers on board with his own hands, he would land the plane and then give a long speech about how America had deserved this. This operation would send shock waves around the world. He, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, would be the most famous man on Earth. Bin Laden, who had a symbiotic and neurotic relationship with the media, not surprisingly reacted with little enthusiasm to this grandiose one-man show. He thought the plot impractical and wor- ried about its impact on the future course of his organization. He had received numerous other proposals for attacks. He encouraged Khalid to stay in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda, but he stressed that he was not ready yet to commit to such a large-scale operation. Kha- lid politely declined bin Laden’s invitation; he chose instead to travel around the world to work with other jihadist organizations.

Intoxicated with the success of the embassy bombings in East Africa two years later, in August of 1998, Mohammed Atef encour- aged bin Laden to revisit Khalid’s proposal. What had seemed overly ambitious two years earlier now seemed possible, but would require modifications to make it less about Khalid and more about bin Laden. According to former associates, after the bombing of the two US embassies and the retaliation by the Clinton administration against al-Qaeda, bin Laden had reached a point of no return—the only way to force the United States to withdraw from Muslim lands was to kill a large number of Americans by striking inside the United States. In the spring of 1999, bin Laden informed Khalid that al-Qaeda had accepted his proposal.

 In a series of meetings with Atef and Khalid in Kandahar (Zawahiri was noticeably absent from these meetings), bin Laden put his own personal mark on the plot, and transformed it. He narrowed the targets to the Pentagon, the White House, the World Trade Cen- ter, and the Capitol. He dismissed the use of one of the planes to make a media statement, as Khalid had originally envisioned. He designated Khalid as the mastermind of the operation, but he never ceded full control of the plot. After the spring of 1999, Bin Laden’s personal involvement deepened. From the outset, he and Atef micromanaged the plan- ning and execution of the plot. Bin Laden selected the men who would pilot the planes in the attacks, never even consulting Khalid, who found himself in the position of having to make bin Laden’s choices work. Bin Laden preferred those whose personal loyalty to him trumped all other considerations. The Yemeni jihadis whom bin Laden initially chose, however, could not obtain US visas. Of the initial four selected to be pilots, only those with Saudi passports, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were able to take part in the operation. Bin Laden told Khalid to send these two men to California to begin pilot training. On January 15, 2000, after tac- tical training in Afghanistan, they arrived in Los Angeles. Bin Laden believed that the remaining pilots should be chosen from seasoned al-Qaeda members who had been with him in Afghanistan. But, in late 1999, a group of jihadis from Hamburg who arrived to train in Afghanistan changed his thinking. Mohamed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah’s flu- ency in English, their technical education, and their long experience living in the West made them more suitable for the operation.

Shortly after their arrival in Afghanistan, Atef met with the Hamburg group and informed them of bin Laden’s decision to include them in the mission. After receiving tactical training in Afghanistan, Atef instructed them to return to Germany to begin pilot training. Bin Laden designated Mohamed Atta the opera- tional commander, again, without consulting Khalid, who had not yet met these new recruits. Bin Laden would inform him later of his decision. Before returning to Germany in early 2000, Atta met several times with bin Laden to discuss the operation. Then he and his men began to prepare for their mission. Atta found the flight schools in Germany and Europe unsuitable for their training and did not like the length and cost of their programs. In March 2000, he began researching schools in the United States. Khalid assisted with their visa arrangements to enter the United States. Meanwhile, in California, the initial recruits, Hazmi and Mih- dar, who lacked the education of the Hamburg contingent, found themselves struggling with the immense task set out for them. By May 2000, they had concluded that their inability to learn English (despite language courses and tutoring) prohibited advancement in their training. They were inept pilots. One trainer remarked that they showed no interest in take-offs or landings, but were only inter- ested in flying the plane after it took off. They surprised their in- structors when they asked if they could be trained to fly Boeing jets. On June 9, 2000, Mihdar left the United States after deciding that he lacked the necessary skills. He would later return as one of the “muscle hijackers.”

With the abrupt departure of Mihdar, bin Laden sent Hani Han- jour to California to meet up with Hazmi. Hanjour arrived in San Diego in December 2000 and met Hazmi, who was working at a gas station at the time. Hazmi was assigned to accompany Hanjour for training in Arizona, but was no longer considered suitable for pilot training. Instead he was designated as a “muscle hijacker.” After many hurdles, by the end of March 2001, Hanjour had completed his training and Hazmi and Hanjour arrived in Falls Church, Vir- ginia, to await further instructions.

All  causus belli  are often overlooked in favor of a reductionist approach that views these organizations simply as “jihadi murderers,” crazy Arabs; or Islam itself is presented as “the enemy.” As a result, these analysts tend to become propagandists for the War on Terror, trafficking in orientalist pseudo-explanations, and effec- tively ignoring the key questions: how and why did al-Qaeda and transnational jihad rise and why did they turn their guns against the United States? In US policy circles, as well as those in the West (though to a lesser extent), there existed little appreciation of the fact that neither Islam nor its religious texts would be useful in unlocking the “al- Qaeda riddle.” Bin Laden and Zawahiri thought in strategic and political terms, veiling their real ambitions in cultural and religious cloth. In his two most recent works, 2008, respectively, Zawahiri acknowledges that al-Qaeda’s strategy is designed to win Muslims’ hearts and minds and become the leader and vanguard of the umma. To do so, he points out that the Islamist movement must raise the banner of liberation over the three most important holy sites, all of which are occupied by foreigners— Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia and al-Aqsa in Jerusalem: the Muslim masses would not rise up unless there is leadership that they can trust and a well-defined enemy. In particular, Zawahiri stressed that Palestine is the one issue on which the umma agrees and the Islamist movement must champion and take ownership of it. Time and again, bin Laden and Zawahiri stressed that the expulsion of American and Israeli occupiers from Islam’s holy sites remains their top priority. From the beginning of his trans- national journey in the mid-1990s, bin Laden’s pronouncements were littered with references to America and Israel or what he called the “Judeo-Christian alliance which is occupying Islamic sacred land in Palestine and of Saudi Arabia.” When he formally launched al-Qaeda in February 1998, bin Laden prioritized his call to Mus- lims: “To kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and mili- tary—is an individual duty incumbent upon every Muslim in all countries, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [ Jerusalem] and the Holy Mosque [Mecca] from their grip.”

Bin Laden’s detractors and supporters mistook his rhetoric for strategy and painted his terrorist tactics in terms of expressive cul- tural acts. But al-Qaeda is a vehicle for his nationalist empowerment inside the Saudi kingdom, along similar lines to Zawahiri’s Tanzim al-Jihad in Egypt. The empowerment of the umma and the restora- tion of the Islamic caliphate is an ideal, impossible to attain, but a powerful tool of ideological and theological mobilization that reso- nated with thousands of young Saudis and Yemenis. In multiple testimonies, some of these recruits have said that they joined bin Laden because they were motivated by a desire to expel American occupiers from Muslim lands, particularly Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden targeted an important constituency, one that responded reflexively to specific religious and cultural symbols and references, and was willing to act upon them. A qualification is in order here: one must guard against a reverse tendency to diminish the significance of September 11 or underes- timate its consequences. There are few examples of non-Western insurgent groups striking the metropole in the way that al-Qaeda did, and this “global” element remains hugely significant, whatever exaggerated claims are made of the reach of transnational jihad. Throughout the Cold War, insurgents kept their struggles local, even though they fought as proxies of foreign powers. The same was true with most anti-colonial conflicts. Algeria represents an exception to the rule, but there, much of the mainland terrorism was perpetrated by homegrown right-wingers. A crucial and enabling factor of the attacks on New York and Washington was, therefore, globalization

As we have seen, al-Qaeda emerged as a result of the convergence of two developments—entropy of the local jihadist movement in the mid-1990s (not in the late 1980s, as many terrorism experts and security pundits claim) and the reverberations of the Afghan jihad. Transnational jihad spearheaded by al-Qaeda was a desperate effort to keep a ship from sinking by altering its direction, if not its final destination—in this case away from the near enemy and toward the far enemy. Bin Laden was the most powerful force behind the rise of al-Qaeda, a testament to his leadership and managerial skills. Turning the table on his ideological and theological mentors and patrons, he founded his organization on the ruins of a broken move- ment and absorbed some of its heavyweights, such as Zawahiri and Abu Hafs al-Masri, within the transnational network.

In this sense, al-Qaeda began as a mutation, the result of an implosion within a fringe social movement teetering on the brink of collapse. When bin Laden’s group burst onto the Islamic scene in the early 1990s, the jihadist movement had largely spent itself— jihadism had failed. Al-Qaeda’s diamond engagement rings decision to internationalize jihad was less an indicator of internal cohesion and strength of jihadism than of its inner turmoil.

In the 1990s some scholars conducting field research on social movements were fully aware of internal cleavages appearing among Egypt in late 1998, for example, a fierce war raged between most jihadis who, after six years of armed struggle, lost the fight against Arab and Muslim rulers and a small group of the so-called Afghan Arabs led by bin Laden on one side and Zawahiri on the other. While domestic jihadis declared a unilat- eral ceasefire—a codeword for surrender—and began to reflect on their failed and costly jihad, a determined minority chose to keep fighting. They declared war against the world’s last remaining super- power, with the hope of resurrecting militant jihadism among the rank and file and gaining credibility in the eyes of the umma.

Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was therefore at odds with the great majority of local jihadis, who by the turn of the millennium had revisited and rethought the use of violence as a means of gaining political power. While incarcerated, top ideologues of the move- ment were putting the final touches on theological and ideological “revisions” that formalized and legitimized the end of armed jihad. Long before September 11, the jihadist civil war had started, and it would spread throughout the Muslim world and determine the future of the entire movement. It was not mere coincidence that the first shots in this civil war were fired in Egypt in the late 1990s, given that the jihadist offensive against the near enemy had started there. With eighty million people, it is the most populous Arab state and was, until recently, the Muslim world’s cultural and intellectual epicenter. Egypt was the birthplace of the modern jihadist movement, and it remains to this day the best place to look to understand its complexities and to locate its fault lines. The movement’s founding fathers were almost entirely Egyptian, as were the authors of many of its defining docu- ments. The brain of contemporary jihadism is Egyptian.

A few years before September 11, I spent some months inter- viewing the rank and file of the movement, to take stock of where it was going. A man named Kamal al-Said Habib seemed to stand out as being somehow representative of this generation. I knew him only by reputation. Many of those concerned about the future of Islamist militancy did as well. He was one of the top former leaders of al-Jihad, a paramilitary organization that had played a pivotal role in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 (Zawahiri was also then part of Habib’s al-Jihad). Habib was a key figure in the first generation of Muslim militants, who in the 1970s had planted the seeds of armed jihad throughout Muslim lands. If I wanted to locate the starting point of the jihadist movement and its future prospects, I needed to understand the worldviews and thoughts of Habib and his generation.

They had learned the hard way what happens when one tries to Islamize Proactol society through force. The resulting bloodshed was hor- rific; there were executions and lengthy prison sentences (Habib had spent ten years in an Egyptian prison); families were destroyed. He and other former “warriors of God” had now, I was told, reas- sessed their old ways—their misguided, offensive interpretation of jihad. They were charting a new course, one committed not to vio- lent revolution but to political persuasion and, or religious calling. They were older now. They were wiser. In late 1998 and early 1999 I spent six months with Habib and other militants pro- filing his generation and the new journey the jihadist movement was traveling. Habib acknowledged that he and his peers had made a fatal mis- take. Rather than trying to build support from the bottom up, they became fixated on capturing political power and imposing their reli- gious order from the top down. Instead of galvanizing the masses, as they had imagined, their methods—such as the random killings of tourists and ordinary citizens—repelled most Egyptians. God- fearing and peace-loving by nature, the Egyptin public withdrew any sympathy they might have shared with the revolutionaries. “We were naïve, arrogant, and immature, fired up by the spirit of youth,” Habib told me in one of our last conversations. It was early in the evening and we had gone to a political rally organized by a moderate Islamic party, the kind of gathering he would not have dreamed of Rolex replica watches attending thirty years ago. “We had big dreams but few resources, and there was a pronounced gap between the means at our disposal and our ambitions. Gradually, we lost sight of the balance between ends and means and fell into the trap of armed escalation with the government. We were no match for its powers.”

Every movement goes through phases, the jihadist movement no less than any other:We have come a long way since the 1970s, even though our journey has been painful and costly. We had to learn by trial and error. We were fortunate to be the pioneers. But we had no support network of wise men and spiritual mentors to guide us through the minefields. We were on our own , struggling against great odds and challenges. We read the inspiring works of Ibn Kathir, Ibn Taymiya, and Sayyid Qutb out of context and history. We superimposed our fears, aspirations, and immature interpretations on their complicated ideas. We horribly miscalculated.

“What if you had succeeded?” I asked him. “Were you truly pre- pared to establish a viable Islamic government?” Thank God, we did not win, because we would have constructed a state along the same authoritarian lines as the ones existing in the Muslim world. We had no vision or an intellectual framework of what a state is or how it functons and how it should be administered, except that it should express and approximate the Islamic ideal. While I cannot predict that our state would have been totalitarian, we had little awareness of the challenges that needed to be overcome.

The honesty of his reply left me dumbfounded. He was suggesting that he and his generation of domestic jihadis had been misguided; they had been more an elitist vanguard than a mass movement. This contradicted their initial claim that they had represented the umma’s popular will and that their armed jihad was legitimate steriods.

Of all the militants I have come to know over the years, Habib still stands apart. Privy to the innermost councils of the radical Islamist movement for more than a quarter of a century, he is per- haps the most open and candid of them all. His story also reveals the dramatic changes that have taken place within jihadism over the decades. Once a fierce proponent of armed resistance against pro- Western secular Muslim rulers, he is now struggling to reconcile himself to nonviolent political action. He has taken the lead in trying to chart a new course for those who are fed up with killing and getting killed but are still wedded to the dream of a Qur’anic- based state.

His jihadist journey seemed to have come to an end. Habib was not the only radical who questioned the raison d’être of his violent actions against secular-leaning Muslim regimes; many of his cohorts had reached a similar conclusion. He and others of his generation had been destroyed by their armed struggle: thousands perished and thousands more were still rotting in prison cells. “What do you tell the families of the martyrs, and how would you take care of their beloved ones?” he once asked with genuine emotion. That was the 1990s, an era promising new beginnings for Habib and his generation. There was a consensus, both inside and outside jihadist circles in the region, that jihadis had reached the end of their rope, and that their fight against secular Arab regimes had been lost. Equally important, the executive or so-called historic leader- ship of the jihadist movement (al-Gamaa al-Islamiya or the Egyp- tian Islamic Group and to a lesser extent Egyptian Islamic al-Jihad) were penning revisions along Habib’s lines, explicitly acknowl- edging failure and revisiting old sacred concepts that legitimized their armed insurgency.

From its very inception in the mid-1990s, transnational jihad has been, as I have argued, a fringe phenomenon. Bin Laden always portrayed his actions as a last resort to defend the Muslim commu- nity, filling the void left by “apostate” rulers and pliant religious scholars who collaborated with Islam’s enemies. In a message addressed to clerics in Saudi Arabia in the mid-1990s, he asked rhe- torically whether they were prepared and willing to lead: “Our Islamic umma is confronting a very grave challenge and being sub- jected to terrible aggression, and her rulers and many of her scholars have forsaken her. Who will lead and direct her, if not [me]?”A year later, in August 1996, bin Laden released a juridical edict declaring defensive war, or jihad, against the Americans for their continued presence in Islam’s birthplace, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and positioned himself and his cohorts as a pioneering van- guard. Just as they had smashed “the largest infidel military force in the world,” the Soviet Union, he vowed that “today, in the same peaks of Afghanistan, we work to do away with the injustice that has befallen our umma at the hands of the Judeo-Crusader alliance, especially after its occupation of Jerusalem and its appropriation of Saudi Arabia.”

Few people then and now appreciate that bin Laden’s call-to- arms against “the Judeo-Crusader alliance” was primarily directed to Saudis and Yemenis who rallied to the battle cry of jihad. The presence of a potent American military force in Saudi Arabia caused considerable upheaval and opposition inside the Kingdom and polarized the country. Bin Laden’s call to jihad resonated with key religious scholars in the Kingdom who legitimized and authorized his call. Volunteers journeyed to Afghanistan to train in bin Laden’s camps and join his vanguard. The bulk of al-Qaeda’s foot soldiers were, as we have seen, Saudi and Yemeni, indicative of the local, nationalist context of bin Laden’s struggle, as opposed to the global- ized, borderless public utterances. Stripped of its rhetoric and drama, bin Laden’s call was aimed at inciting opposition against the House of Saud and destabilizing the regime. In a sense, transna- tional jihad was bin Laden’s fig leaf, masking a desire to seize power in his native land. There was no better way to mobilize his people and Muslims in general than by summoning them to liberate Islam’s holiest places in Saudi Arabia and Palestine. He advanced his nationalist ambition by appealing to higher interests than his own— the umma’s. By appropriating the language of Islam, bin Laden hoped to attain greater legitimacy for his nationalist agenda.

Like Zawahiri, bin Laden was religiously hyper-nationalist, even though his jihad call is rhetorically transnational and does not rec- ognize territorially based nationalist units. For bin Laden, the only way to level the playing field with the Saudi monarchy was to expel American troops from the Kingdom as the mujahideen expelled the Soviets from Afghanistan. Once Soviet troops retreated from Afghanistan in 1989, the client government they left behind fell like rotten fruit.

Nonetheless, after September 11 most observers (“security- based analysts,” as they are sometimes called) have generally viewed al-Qaeda through a cultural and religious prism, and missed the util- itarian and political-strategic drivers. They take bin Laden’s rhetoric at face value, while neglecting its historical-political context. Seen as the quintessential moment that changed the world, the attacks were invested with exaggerated and unnecessary cultural and religious meanings, conflating terrorism, a universal tactic, with “Islamic ter- rorism,” an intrinsically cultural or expressive element of the con- flict. The tendency to “ideologize” the use of terrorism—that is, to create a link between the raison d’être of radical Islamist groups and the tactics they employ—has led to ignorance of specific contexts and motives, and distortion and misunderstandings as well. A well- known Israeli observer asserted: “Motives are entirely irrelevant to the concept of political terrorism. Most analysts fail to recognize this and, hence, tend to discuss certain motives as logical or necessary aspects of terrorism. But they are not. At best, they are empirical regularities associated with terrorism. More often they simply confuse analysis.”

If contexts for and motives behind politically based violence “confuse analysis,” then there is no reason to understand the socio- political and strategic logic behind the actions of al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups; if anything, it would be a waste of time. Instead of considering the use of terrorism by militant Islamists as a common tool in asymmetric warfare, these observers portray them as war- riors in a cultural war against the West and the liberal rationalist nar- rative of history. Everything can be explained as part of timeless and irrational hatred of the West. For example, Israeli diplomat-analyst Dan Gold has traced the historical roots of the violent tactics used by domestic and transnational jihadis to “the ideological motivation to slaughter thousands of innocent people.” Gold and like-minded pundits do not seem concerned that until 1990 bin Laden was part of the US-led alliance pitted against “god- less communism.