The dismantling of some terrifying terrorist myths

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This was published 12 years ago

The dismantling of some terrifying terrorist myths

By Jason Burke

HIDDEN deep in the leaked Guantanamo files is a small but important trove of information, too historical and too technical to have commanded much space in newspapers keener on hyperventilating about ''nuclear al-Qaeda hellstorms'' this week. Each of the 700-plus files includes a short biography of its subject. These cover his ''prior history'' and ''recruitment and travel'' to wherever he became fully engaged with violent extremism and, with brutal if unintended efficiency, demolish three of the most persistent myths about al-Qaeda.

The first is that the organisation is composed of men the CIA trained to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan who then turned on their mentors. In fact, among the bona fide al-Qaeda operatives detained in Guantanamo Bay there are very few who are actually veterans of the fighting in the 1980s, and none of these were involved with groups that received any substantial technical or financial assistance from the US.

The second is that an ''international brigade'' of Islamist extremists was responsible for the Soviet defeat. The records make it clear that their combat contribution was negligible.

The third myth is that most of those currently waging ''jihad'' against the Crusader-Zionist alliance were actively recruited by al-Qaeda and brought, brainwashed, to Afghanistan to fight or be trained. The descriptions of almost all those in Guantanamo genuinely associated with al-Qaeda show that in fact they spent much time and money overcoming many difficulties to find a way to reach al-Qaeda. They were not dumb or vulnerable youths ''groomed'' to be suicide bombers; they were highly motivated, often educated and intelligent, men.

Such details are easy to dismiss as irrelevant to the threat posed by Islamist militancy today. But they are not. For one of the elements marking the evolution of al-Qaeda is the extraordinary degree to which it has been informed by myths.

There have been various waves of myth-making about al-Qaeda. The first came in the late 1990s, when it gained international notoriety with attacks on US embassies in east Africa and a warship off the Yemen. It was then that the idea that al-Qaeda was ''blowback'' from the Afghan war became conventional wisdom. After September 11 came a new, massive surge of fearful fantasy. There was the normal derogatory propaganda expected in wartime - that Osama bin Laden has deformed genitals or partied wildly with prostitutes - which gained no real purchase. A more pernicious myth was the idea that al-Qaeda was a ''tentacular organisation'' with sleeper cells across the world waiting for the moment to strike with weapons of mass destruction. This minimised the role that both ideology and a variety of historical factors (ranging from demographics in the Islamic world to a discourse that stressed the ''humiliation'' of Muslims by the West) had played in the success of the group.

The emphasis on the agency of bin Laden and his entourage discouraged interest in the broader causes of terrorism and thus made the fundamental strategic errors made by US and other policymakers early last decade much more likely to happen.

Many myths were deliberately generated by governments. In 2002 and 2003, repressive regimes around the world scrabbled to uncover or rebrand local militant movements with long histories as al-Qaeda offshoots. New Delhi claimed bin Laden, one of the most recognisable fugitives for centuries, had hidden in Kashmir, a smallish part of India crawling with 500,000 soldiers and police. The Russians claimed the Chechen conflict was not about centuries of territorial wars in the Caucasus but about ''global jihad''. The discovery of a local branch of al-Qaeda guaranteed major financial, diplomatic and military pay-offs from Washington - or at the very least a blind eye turned to domestic repression. So the Macedonians rounded up some Shia Pakistani immigrants, clothed them in combat outfits and executed the ''al-Qaeda operatives''.

Finally, there were the most egregious examples of mythmaking: the spurious connection of al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein and the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Most of the documents in the Guantanamo files date from 2003 to 2005, and reflect the concerns of the time. The assessments of each detainee reveal a particular focus on the threat of a mass casualty attack involving chemical and biological weapons.

For those who remember the headlines announcing al-Qaeda plans to smear ricin, a poison, along parts of the London Underground nine years ago, the stories this week announcing the existence of an al-Qaeda nuclear device hidden in Europe, or that London is a ''hub'' for al-Qaeda activity, seem from a distant era when every reported scare provoked panic. Indeed, many of this week's scare stories, based on the ''confessions'' of tortured Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, were leaked at the time, and now appear to have been made up or even the product of al-Qaeda's own myth machine. Now, thankfully, the public is better informed and less prone to being scared. Given that terrorists' primary aim is to terrorise, this is to be welcomed.

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The events of the so-called Arab spring have shown that bin Laden and his cronies are definitively drifting to the geographic, political, cultural and ideological margins of the Islamic world. Crowds shouting slogans of democracy, not of violence, have succeeded in forcing the departure of two dictators and shaken several more. The few statements from al-Qaeda's leadership or affiliate groups have sounded tired and irrelevant.

One reason for the group's current weakness is the gradual unpicking of the myths that contributed to the fear al-Qaeda once inspired and the aura it had for the alienated and the angry of the Islamic world. Happily, it is unlikely those myths can be rebuilt.

Jason Burke is the author of Al-Qaeda: The true story of radical Islam.

The Guardian

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