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The Eurasian Politician - October 2003
Rohan Gunaratna: Inside Al Qaeda. Global Network of Terror. Berkley Books, New York, 2003.
Reviewed by: Anssi Kullberg, 23 Oct. 2003
Since the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September, 2001, bookstores have been filled with various books on international terrorism, radical Islamist terror and particularly on Al Qaida or its leader Usama bin Ladin. Many books on the issue were published in the years before the 9/11 already. In the last years, I have read more of these books than I can remember, and because of that, I can with certain delight praise Rohan Gunaratna's "Inside Al Qaeda" as the undoubtedly best popular book on Al Qaida, which I have read so far.
A majority of the recent popularly sold terrorism books seem to fall to three categories:
The first is constituted by alarmist accounts with strong religious and rightist political bias, which typically repeat Islamophobic narratives, try to paint a picture of a "clash of civilizations", and attempt to explain the threat of terrorism by interpreting terrorism and violence as something inherent in Islam, or at least in the cultures of the regions that happen to coincide with the range of Islam. They like to pay attention on simplistic interpretations of the conceptions like jihad, kafirs and dhimms, recall the Assassins, and remind us of the Arab, Moor and Turkish "hordes" and conquests of "Christian lands". And of course they fiercely defend Israel's struggle for survival, forgetting that the Zionists, too, originally employed terror just like their later Arab counterparts in Palestine.
The second category is even less comprehensive to anyone with some grass-root knowledge of countries outside of the postmodern West, and with even a stronger political bias than the first category, though this time either leftist or far-rightist. It is constituted by the fashionable conspiracy theories with the single goal of blaming the United States of America for all the problems of the world. They harshly exploit their mighty position in the leftist-dominated media of Western Europe and American East Coast, and greatly contribute to the equally anti-American political discourse in the Islamic countries, where the "critical" views of European and American leftist media are faithfully reprinted with short delay.
The more moderate views of this tradition simply suggest that the US should stay at home while more money should be used on development aid, especially on "progressive" (socialist) regimes and parties in the "South". Their academic expertise is, however, limited to ironical and parodical mocking at Western rhetorics, while their case knowledge is based on repeating selective leftist myths of world politics, often starting with age-old Soviet disinformation and ending up in the urban legends of present anti-American discourse.
According to them, terrorism is caused by the fact that the US assisted Afghan mujahidin to fight the cruel Soviet occupation of their land in the 1980s. Generally this genre insists on the West giving aid to any poor country, but obviously this should not be done against the interests of the Soviet Union or Russia. The discourse goes on blaming any pro-Western Muslim government for "fascism" or "dictatorship", especially those, which are in fact democratic and moderate, like Turkey. Yet according to the anti-American genre, Turkey is guilty to the genocide of Armenians and Kurds (how many have actually been massacred?) while socialist dictatorships like Iraq and Syria (from where Kurds have been fleeing to Turkey for decades) are considered "progressive" and at least worthy of guaranteed sovereignty which Americans should respect, though Russians need not. As India is allied with Russia, they also share general hostility against Pakistan (even for periods when Pakistan has not been as pro-Western as during Musharraf's regime).
The third category of mainstream terrorism books is constituted mainly by accounts written by experienced journalists. Although there are many quite good books in this genre - for example the ones by John K. Cooley and Peter Bergen - the journalistic approach creates certain level of populism and superficiality, and the authors of this genre easily repeat erroneous information or myths derived from their media sources.
There is also an inherent weakness in the Western point of view of the authors, which overemphasizes the "exotic" features, especially when speaking of Islam, and seldom finds very novel approach to the conventions of speaking about certain nations, regions or countries. Even those "non-Western" authors, who have been successful in selling their books in the West, have adopted an approach that is even more Western than that of the Westerners themselves. A good example is the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, a Lahore intellectual, who has unfortunately only contributed to the Western distortions in regard to Islam, South and Central Asia, when adopting a bias designed to please the expected Western readers. Besides of echoing Pakistani inner politics, Rashid leaning to the left, he has practically mixed up radical Islamism and Islamic conservatism with each other. This only confuses the picture of the region's politics and weakens the author's otherwise skilful works.
Against the background of these bulks of terrorism literature, Gunaratna's book is both outstanding in its expertise and overwhelming in the unbiased, analytical and sensible moderation it has adopted. Gunaratna is Sri Lankan, although he has later worked in several Asian and Western countries, and probably his background a South Asian cosmopolitan from a small country has greatly contributed to his capability of taking distance to the myth-making prevailing in media. Sri Lanka has for long suffered from very cruel terrorism by the Tamil Tigers, but Gunaratna does not fall to the trap of exploiting the "war on terrorism" to spread propaganda against the Tamils. Quite the contrary, he mostly avoids creating linkages to this issue, except of a couple of remarks connected with weapons trade, which are justified. This deserves special thanks: I have yet never read a book written by a Russian analyst without attempts to demonize Chechens; by an Indian analyst without attempts to demonize the Kashmiri separatists or Pakistan; and very seldom by a Pakistani analyst without attempts to demonize Indian secret services.
Gunaratna has also avoided most of the popular urban legends wide-spread in the Western media, beginning with the fantastic claims of Usama bin Ladin's connections with the CIA. Another special thanks, therefore, must be addressed to Gunaratna for his several remarks where he consciously (but modestly and elegantly) tries to refute some common media-generated myths.
However, having now praised Gunaratna, I also have to address some serious criticism towards his book. The most serious flaw is his obvious lack of insight in regard to certain regions, most of all to the Caucasus, and to lesser extent to the examples of Central Asia and the Balkans. This is probably mostly due to the fact that these regions are not part of the main domain of Gunaratna's interests and expertise. His book is strongest in regard to Southeast and South Asia. Especially in regard to Southeast Asia, Gunaratna's book is the best in this genre that I have read, and I learned a lot of new details from it. Also the background of Al Qaida and many of its key operatives is here given in a more specific and detailed as well as more reliable package than in any other recent terrorism book in popular distribution.
But then to the weaknesses: It is easy to identify Gunaratna's worst choice of revealed source, since it seems to me that at least half of the errors and pieces of disinformation in Gunaratna's book are taken out of a single source, a publication named "The Jihad Fixation", for which Gunaratna also does not give an author, publisher or any of the information needed to identify the source. This rises suspicion.
It is also easy to identify the single weakest-quality chapter in Gunaratna's book. It is the chapter dealing with the Caucasus (pp. 179-180). Unfortunately this two-page chapter is not only totally inadequate and superficial; it is also full of factual errors, contradictions, and the author has failed to give references to his sources, with the exception of the above-mentioned dubious source and some use of John Cooley's book, where the Chechen remarks are among the weakest of Cooley's account, too. Part of the "information" seem to originate in an oral source, maybe an intelligence official (Russian?), who has wished to remove references. In this chapter, there is a reference (105), which cannot be found in the endnotes (perhaps removed), which has resulted that all the forthcoming references of the part "Al Qaeda's Global Network" refer to wrong endnotes, one too early, starting with the endnote number 105 about Islambuli, which clearly should be the reference number 106.
Gunaratna (p. 179) cites John Cooley in telling that soon after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Al Qaida founded an office in Baku, and "supported" the Azerbaijanis in the Karabagh War in 1988-1994 - meaning Al Qaida exploited this conflict in trying to get foothold in the region, typically for Al Qaida strategy. Yet Gunaratna fails to tell us that Al Qaida entirely failed in Azerbaijan. He tells that "according to Russian intelligence", in September 1993, about 1500 Afghans came to Azerbaijan, but he does not give us the proper context, since the participation of these Afghans in the conflict in Azerbaijan was coordinated by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar from Iran, which supported the Armenians, not the Azerbaijanis, in the Karabagh War, and moreover, continued to serve Russian interests in Azerbaijan by helping the KGB general Heydar Aliyev to overthrow the pro-Turkish (and anti-Iranian) President Ebülfez Elchibey.
Moreover, Hekmatyar's agents were reported to train the Russian-backed Lezgin terrorists destabilizing Azerbaijan at the Dagestani border area. Gunaratna touches this issue, although it seems to remain unclear to him, what the actual context was: "After suffering heavy casualties in battle with the Armenians, the Azeri Afghan brigade was dissolved in 1994, but many of its remaining troops participated in other regional conflicts. A few disgruntled and disbanded members of the brigade resorted to terrorism in Baku, mostly bombings of public places and transport infrastructure." (p. 179) Although the first Chechen War was launched by Russia late in the same year, the "other regional conflicts" refers to the Lezgin Sadval campaigns, and the terrorist strikes to the bombing campaign against Azerbaijan in 1994-1995. In March 1996, three Armenians were convicted in a Russian court for the bombs in the Rostov-Baku trains - two of them (Djahan Hovanissian and Ashot Galoyan) were senior officers of the Armenian secret service, while one (Boris Simonian) was an officer of the Russian FSB.
Gunaratna goes on in a section lacking all reference notes, informing us of the participation of some Chechen commanders in the Karabagh War, and arms provided by Chechens to the Azerbaijanis from the stockpiles of weapons that President Djokhar Dudayev inherited from removed Russian troops in 1991. According to Gunaratna, by summer 1994, there were 2500 Chechens fighting in Karabagh. However, Gunaratna's account on the development of the situation in Chechnya is based on poor quality of information. He writes: "Al Qaeda's major involvement in Russia began when Jokar [sic] Dudayev, a Soviet Air Force general, initiated a campaign for an independent Chechnya. Dudayev was supported by the Chechen branch of the Muslim Brotherhood [sic], the Islamic Path Party". (p. 179)
Gunaratna has failed to understand that Djokhar Dudayev was a secular nationalists, and the Islamists - including the Islamic Path Party - were both Dudayev's opponents and also against the idea of an independent national state. The Soviet Islamist party, Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP), founded in Astrakhan in 1989 under KGB surveillance, advocated Islamism, but also the unity of the Soviet Union first, and later of the Russian Federation, or a wider North Caucasian entity. From the beginning, the IRP Islamists were set against the national independence movements, and they had solid links with the Soviet and later Russian secret services. In fact, the Islamist parties were used to undermine the reviving nationalist movements (separatists), while they were at the same time used to construct the foundation of pro-Moscow Islamic movement aligned with the pro-Moscow Islamic states such as Syria, Iraq and Iran. It is hardly a coincidence that the IRP was named in accordance with the Ba'ath (Renaissance) of Syria and Iraq. The strategy became most apparent when the Russian secret services armed and raised Chechen Islamists into rebellion against Dudayev and later against Aslan Maskhadov. Many of the Islamist leaders later got key positions in the pro-Russian puppet governments, including the leader of the Islamic Path, Bislan Gantemirov. Meanwhile, the actual independence movement maintained nationally inspired secular or Sufi character, with open pro-Western orientation.
Gunaratna continues with demonizing the Chechen radical Islamist leader Shamil Basayev, but here the chronology and logic of narrating the Chechen conflict get seriously confused. Gunaratna claims Shamil Basayev to have been "Afghan-trained" and having "a close relationship with Osama". While there is no evidence of any relationship between Usama bin Ladin and Basayev, the latter was certainly not Afghan-trained before 1994, although many Chechen commanders had participated in the Afghan War - on the Soviet side! Basayev, with some of his men, made a short visit to Afghanistan around mid-1990s, but this had not much importance. The radicalization of Basayev and his allies started only when the Russians assassinated the secular Chechen leader Dudayev with a missile in 1995. The vice president to take over for a short period, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, later turned a radical Islamist and visited Mullah Omar in Taliban's Afghanistan, but then he no longer had any official position in President Maskhadov's government. The Taliban recognition for Chechen independence, which Yandarbiyev managed to get from Mullah Omar, was rejected by Maskhadov, because the Chechens did not consider the Taliban to be the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
Basayev turned to radical and aggressive opposition against Maskhadov after having lost a democratic election to him in 1997. Basayev's Arab ally, the undoubtedly radical Islamist, Saudi extremist with the nom de guerre Khattab, is the only established link between Chechens and Al Qaeda, and he probably influenced strongly to Basayev's turning into radical anti-Western Islamism, while simultaneously clashing against the Chechen leadership. In 1999 it was (Russian-controlled) Dagestan that destabilized Chechnya, leading to the joint provocation by Dagestani and Basayev's Islamists, known as the Dagestan Incursion. More about the development of the situation in Chechnya and Dagestan, see:
http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/2003/tsets-4
http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/2003/tsets-5
Unfortunately, Gunaratna's narrative goes even wilder: "Experienced mujahidin from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Azerbaijan also joined them [the Chechens and the Afghani Arab volunteers in Chechnya], and gradually the conflict spilled over into neighboring Ingushetia, Daghestan and North Ossetia. [sic] The intelligence agencies of the governments of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon [sic] and Iran [sic] directly and indirectly supported the Chechen guerrillas. [sic] With this increased backing for the guerrillas, Russia proper was affected, and even Moscow witnessed a series of bombings. [sic]" Unfortunately this kind of vague and erroneous narrative weakens considerably Gunaratna's book, and it is surprising as well as even suspicious why he has decided to study the Chechen conflict with such ignorance and uncritical repetition of Russian propaganda, while he has studied so many other regions in such a detailed and pedantic way. However, the Chechen narrative of the book is entirely careless, vague and dilettantish.
First, the chronology seems totally confused, which is in sharp contrast with Gunaratna's careful chronological analysis on other regions. While the conflict of the Prigorodniye region (between North Ossetians and Ingush) took place before the Chechen War, the Moscow bombs took place only in September 1999. It was Dagestan that destabilized Chechnya, not vice versa, and radical Islamism first got foothold in Dagestan (Khattab included), and could gain foothold in Chechnya only after the death of President Dudayev. It is absurd to claim that the pro-Russian governments of Lebanon and Iran would have supported the Chechen guerrillas, especially as the Chechens are Sufi Sunna Muslims. Finally, the bomb blasts in Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buinaksk in autumn 1999, as far as any evidence is concerned, had nothing to do with Chechens, although they were used to justify the launch of a devastating second invasion to Chechnya (against the secular government, not against the Islamists, who were provided safe return from Dagestan to the Serzhen-Yurt district).
On page 180, Gunaratna writes: "As mentioned in an earlier chapter, Al Qaeda's 055 Brigade had an unusually large percentage of Chechens and Central Asian Muslims, and over half of the fighters killed in combat against the Northern Alliance were foreign." However, not a single Chechen has been found dead, identified or captured in Afghanistan. Not a single one. An American researcher, Professor Brian Glyn Williams, even made field research for months in Northern Afghanistan, trying to find either a Chechen or at least one witness who would have seen or met a Chechen fighting on the Taliban or Al Qaeda side. Finally he managed to find one single Chechen: this man, however, had been fighting first in the rows of the Uzbek government against the IMU, and later as General Dostum's bodyguard against the Taliban.
It is of course not surprising that there are no Chechens in the Al Qaeda or Taliban troops, and there never were. The idea of an "exchange program" between the Taliban and the Chechen guerrillas is absurd. When the Chechens are heavily outnumbered and outgunned, why would they leave their own war theater to fight in Afghanistan, where they don't have any relations, no common language, and neither a religious kinship, except perhaps with the Sufi Tajiks of the Panjshir Valley, who used to fight against the Taliban.
Therefore it is obvious that all the "Chechen tales" of Afghanistan seem to refer to the Uzbeks, who were many in the 055 Brigade, including Juma Namangani. All those "former Soviet" fighters who were later captured or killed in a couple of clashes with the Pakistani forces in the North-Western Frontier Province in 2002, proved to be Uzbeks. However, it must be also remembered that the Chechen tales, when traced, have always originated in Russian or Indian media, and this means that it has not only been the Western media's careless ignorance that causes this kind of myths to be born, but also purposeful and systematic disinformation, which is machined with massive repetition. It is very unfortunate that, besides of ignorant journalists, even serious and esteemed researchers like Gunaratna uncritically repeat this disinformation and therefore contribute to the distortion of our understanding of the Eurasian conflicts.
Moreover, on page 180, Gunaratna writes on Khattab in Afghanistan: "In some battles - such as the Lion's Den Operation in 1987 - Osama and Khattab fought side by side under the leadership of Khattab's teacher and mentor, Hassan as-Sarehi. In 1995, as-Sarehi, according to the Saudi government, played a role in the bin-Laden-inspired Riyadh bombing, after which he was extradited to Saudi Arabia from Pakistan. After the civil war in Tajikistan ended, Khattab moved to Chechnya, where as head of foreign mujahidin, he was appointed military commander of the operations under the overall commander, Shamil Basayev. [sic] To fight the Russians in Chechnya and Daghestan, Khattab mobilized mujahidin from Ingushetia, Ossetia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, with the finances provided by Al Qaeda. Russian officials state that Osama provided $25 million to the Chechen mujahidin, but this cannot be independently verified."
This piece has no reference note, but apparently the original source is Russian. A hint towards this is for example the transliteration of the article al in as-Sarehi's name in the way preferred in Russia, instead of the Anglo-Saxon way, which Gunaratna uses in other names - for example al Zawahiri, not az-Zawahiri.
In case of some of the "Chechen tales" Gunaratna refers to an unnamed "European intelligence agency", but the poor quality of some of these pieces of disinformation (pp. 180, 210, 228) strongly hints that the original source is Russian like in the above piece. The weapons trade and mafia myths connected with Chechens - especially in relation to "Ukrainian mafia" providing (Russian) arms to Al Qaeda - are unfortunately typical for some of the circles in German intelligence community today. This information, however, usually shows heavy marks of Russian disinformation. Whether "European intelligence agencies" reproduce it unconsciously or in the name of political interest is secondary compared with the devastating effect that this kind of myth-making has on true understanding of radical Islamist threat and terrorism - also in the Chechen context.
In the next parts of this book review, I will concentrate in the better and most insightful parts of the book in more detail. So do not let the above criticism against one bad chapter in an otherwise excellent book spoil your willingness to read this book, which The Eurasian Politician can warmly recommend.
AKK