Through Our Enemies Eyes

I finished this book yesterday, written by an Anonymous CIA agent on Osama Bin Laden. He started writing it before 9/11 and got it published shortly after by an obscure press. Since then, it has been lauded as the best work on Osama Bin Laden and he has written a second book called Imperial Hubris, which focuses more on the US reaction to 9/11, criticising the Iraq and Afghan invasions. The author has also "come out" due to the popularity of his books - Michael Scheuer, although for all we know, it could be a fake name.

I found this book to be tremendously interesting - it read part like a narrative, part like an intelligence report, with long chronicles of wins and losses in the war on terror...which, incidentally, he thinks is a misnomer. Bin Laden, he says, is not waging a terror war, but a world-wide Islamic insurgency, primarily motivated by faith. He's created a self-sustaining organization that can run on the cheap, has proven resiliant to US attacks - via intelligence services and now, via the military.

He think westerners far underestimate the power of faith to bin Laden and his followers. He notes that we constantly talk about money and how bin Laden is basically a rich kid that funds terrorist activities. It's true he has money, but has also proven very successful at building profitable businesses and raising money from like-minded Islamicist. He has also suffered major set-backs, losing assets in Saudi Arabia, being duped into buying fake atomic bomb materials, and never using Western banks or financial institutions.

The book, full of great information, tracking al Queda all the way back until the 1980s, does not offer a great proposal for dealing with al Queda and bin Laden. Like an intelligence report, it gives tremendous amounts of information, but no policy solutions. The most I can get from it is that we need a more savage war on terrorism - we need to pummel the enemy, not underestimate him, and beat him into submission...but how exactly, is not answered. He criticises going into Afghanistan and Iraq, because democracy does not know how to grow in those places. But how can we maim al Queda without attacking their base of operations? (Afghan, not Iraq) He thinks waging a "sensitive" war, where we try to minumize civilian casualties is a recipe for losing. He most strongly urges us to focus on specific goals: What do we want to accomplish? How do we measure progress? What do we define as victory?

We have yet to do this coherently. And, I will also note, once we do this, we need to sell our goals to our country and the world, so we can have support rallying behind those goals.

Bin Laden has been clear in his public addresses about his goals: Removal of the US army for the Holy Land. Elimination of the state of Israel. Elimination of apostate regimes in the middle east, namely the Saudi royal family. His tactic - attack the US, who he views as the puppetmaster of all these problems. He will attack the US in increasingly larger attacks until the weight is too much to bear on the citizens and the economy and the US retreats from our support of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the middle east in general. Bin Laden will urge the formation of a pan-Islamic caliphate that runs the middle east in a strict form of Islam, will sell oil at much higher prices to the rest of the world, and he will build infrasture and schools in the middle east to espouse his world view of jihad - that the west and Islam have been in battle, military and economic, for the past 900 years and that only recently has the Islamicists won anything of significance - the removal of the USSR from Afghanistan. He sees himself as a modern Saladin, the famous Arab warrior who beat and battled the Christians in the crusades.

But he is not an egomaniac and does not claim to be the rightful heir of power for the Islamic world. He thinks the rightful religious men are locked up in Saudi Arabia, mullahs who have been preaching radical Wahhabism for years, that are the high members of Islam. He sees himself as an ordinary Muslim, doing his duty of Jihad since Islam is under constant attack by the West and apostate Muslims.

The strength of his belief is unquestioned, even by those in the Middle East who disagree with him. His competence and the competence of his organization should also be clear, although we like to pooh-pooh an organization whose base is in caves and does not have superior scientific technology. He makes up for a lack of resources with patience and cunning. They beat the Russians, by uniting Arab fighters with Afghan fighters and calling it a holy war. This, in itself, was a major military and organizational triumph...Afghanistan, notoriously a factionalized, tribal place, rarely was united. Yet, during the Russian invasion, Afghans, tough fighters, united together and with the support (money and troops and technology) of Bin Laden and like minded Arabs defeated the largest army in the world, at the time. The Arabs, not known as great fighters, learned from the Afghans and now, the Islamic insurgents, are tougher and more battle-hardened than many fighting forces. Evidence is in their survival against many different enemies - Russians in Chechyna, Chinese troops in Western China, US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israeli troops in Palestine, Indian troops in Kashmir. These are the biggest, baddest, armies in the world and the Muslim insurgents are fighting all of them at once - and NOT losing.

Bin Laden has promised increasingly larger attacks agains the US homeland. So what can we expect from him - to keep his word. He has done so, so far, by attacking the Cole, the Embassy's, and 9/11, not to mention a string of other, smaller attacks, and failed attacks. He is contantly trying to find chemical, biological, and nuclear ways to attack us. If there's a will, there's a way...and he will find it. He has already trained and bred competent successors, and engrained a solid work-ethic, patience, and confidence in many of them.

Anonymous thinks it will take another attack, of larger proportions than 9/11, to stir the American public to make the kind of decision it does not want to currently make - a fight to the death with the world-wide Islamicist insurgency, one that has a 20 year head start in training and preparation than us.

The future is going to be gnarly.