I read a lot of book reviews. They’re great: You can stay current on the state of ideas and always have something to talk about at parties; but you don’t have to read the whole book. But the Times‘ book review of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 was so compelling that I needed to read it myself. In the spirit of giving back, here are some notes about the book.
I approached the book with the prospect of trying to understand al-Qaeda and Islamist extremists. I suspect that I had earlier totally misunderstood the Muslim Brotherhood as it emerged in Egypt and later took root and inspired others elsewhere. If Wright is correct — and I suspect he is in this copiously researched and well-written book — it was born as an opposition to colonialism and its nationalist / socialist / modernist / capitalist alternatives. To Sayyid Qutb and other seminal figures in the Brotherhood, Islam was an all-encompassing system to remake the post-colonial world. Qutb, who actually studied in America, returned in the late 40’s scandalized and radicalized. Qutb savaged our supposed depravity and regarded the U.S. as propping up regimes that the majority in the Middle East didn’t like, as well as being a good friend of Israel and opposed to Islam — complaints we still hear today.
Decades later, Ayman al-Zawahiri (whose al-Jihad group would later merge with al-Qaeda) saw the U.S. as an enemy and a target because of our superpower status. Wright suggests that the genesis of 9/11 was in the Egyptian prisons of the early 1980s. Many Egyptians — especially Islamists like Qutb and Zawahiri — wanted their repressive government overthrown and saw US aid as propping up anti-democratic and secularist regimes. Zawahiri’s scope at the time was limited to change in Egypt, but his desire for retribution against westerners was, in his words, “all encompassing.”
Early chapters in The Looming Tower present biographical sketches of ideologues, extremists (or soon-to-become extremists) and powerful men in the Arab world. While introducing the Saudi intelligence chief Truki al-Faisel, Wright paints a picture of Arabian religiosity and fervor that could quickly lead to violence in defense of faith and the instiutions (like Turki’s) that sought to maintain the delicate status quo. It shows currents (though perhaps only minor undercurrents) in Islam and Arab, Egyptian, and Persian history that likely lead to the current religious, transnational violence. Wright suggests that many Arabs thought the Arab fighters in Afghanistan were odd, even as they donated large sums of money to the cause. He also presents fault lines within Islam concerning jihad and the se of violence against non-Muslims and (eventually) other Muslims. Still, there were many who venerated death (not unlike early Christian martyrs) and began to see themselves as stateless actors once they (as radicals) became personae non gratae in their home countries. Clearly the Afghan war was another galvanizing event in violent radicalism.
Afghanistan, where the Arabs (and Americans and Pakistanis) financially supported the mujaheddin and sent disaffected and pious young men to martyrdom, is almost anticlimactic in this retelling. (Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 is much better here.) But it’s supposed to be. The Arabs did little more in the battles than direct money and make favorites for the international community. But for them it was a critical time. We see a struggle for the soul of jihad between “moderates,” whose goal was to expel the Soviets, and takfirs, aiming at worldwide religious purification via the murder of everyone who stood in their way. Bin Laden’s dream of creating an Islamic state (and a name for himself in the process) played a crucial role.
After Afghanistan fell into chaos, bin Laden returned home to a country oppressed by religious police and poorly governed — essentially the Taliban with petrodollars for a small elite who largely held themselves apart. The description is reminiscent of Qutb and Zawahiri’s Egypt but with far more religious control over society. It would seem that Saudi Arabia is almost exactly what all Islamists had desired, except for the royal family which bin Laden denounced. Within a year of his return in 1989, the Saudi kingdom would host American troops. (The United States appears relatively late in the narrative.)
Not long after the end of the first Gulf War, Osama bin Laden was expelled to Sudan. Al-Qaeda was aimless and ideologically lost, but America (which really knew nothing about it) became its threat as the superpower whose cultural and material influences are so contrary to bin Laden’s world view; and we were, in his mind, blocking the resurrection of a pan-Islamic caliphate. Sharia and social control were the counterforces to capitalism and liberty. And al-Qaeda wanted the U.S. to engage in “a war with Islam — ‘a large-scale front which it cannot control.’” Bin Laden started reaching out to several older terrorist/Islamist organizations. Though not part of al-Qaeda, Ramzi Yousef aimed to destroy symbolic targets (albeit with significant casualties) and economic targets in the hopes of encouraging retaliation that would unite Muslims. In 1993 he attempted to level the World Trade Center towers using a truck bomb. The same year, Zawahiri began using suicide bombers in Egypt and elsewhere, a trend which quickly spread to other groups. Extremism in the Middle East was still diverse but seemed to be coalescing in ideology and techniques. Yet, the groups still lacked popular support.
The Taliban weren’t sure about bin Laden when he returned to an even more lawless and brutal Afghanistan after the U.S. pressed Sudan into expelling him. But the Taliban’s antipathy to all things modern or “Western” (or Indian for that matter) aligned well with bin Laden’s worldview. In Tora Bora he fully developed his millenarian mythology and formally declared war on the U.S. He lacked resources — and was in most respects an unstable failure — but met Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, who had grand visions of how to wage the kind of war that bin Laden and Zawahiri wanted.
The American counterterrorism and intelligence community was seriously dysfunctional in the 1990s. The CIA and NSA didn’t want to share intelligence. The FBI sounded like macho-cop good-ole boys. The political situation barely appears in the analysis, which is perhaps a point Wright is trying to make. (Of course, the Islamists may just be more interesting or exotic.) Wright concentrates most of his narrative efforts on John O’Neill, the FBI agent who later died in the World Trade Center attack, and the mostly nameless group at the CIA’s “Alec Station,” which followed Islamic terrorism. It’s clear even from this limited narrative that the intelligence community had not begun to penetrate or understand Islamic terrorist organizations.
But the al-Qaeda and al-Jihad organizations seemed similarly disorganized, fractious, and ideologically inconsistent. Bin Laden and Zawahiri were tangentially related to several terrorist actions but provided training and ideology for several suicide attacks in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Africa. These missions fragmented the cause and lost the hearts and minds of the people they tried to rally to their cause. Meanwhile, ineffectual U.S. “pinprick” actions against bin Laden in Sudan and Afghanistan elevated him in the esteem of his erstwhile community and (especially) in his own mind. He was thoroughly outside the control of the Saudis, the U.S., and the Taliban.
At the same time, the nature of “jihad” was changing to include the young, the disaffected, the criminal. Though martyrdom was still a primary concern, many of these young men — mostly upper-middle class and well-educated — were not fervently religious at the outset. What they “tended to have in common . . . was displacement.” These are the children of transplanted families or students away from their families, people “with little standing in the host societies where they lived.” In part, terrorism becomes a problem of diaspora, a failure to assimilate or be welcomed: “marginality” is Wright’s term. Ironically, the disaffected and the impressionable found safe havens in open, libertarian societies — the very kind of societies they seem most opposed to and yearned to destroy.
Wright’s description of the time surrounding the U.S.S. Cole bombing is perhaps the most challenging passage in the book in light of what happened later. The FBI was stymied in its investigations by the CIA, which withheld information that could have also easily led to the discovery of the 9/11 plot. (The CIA comes across worst of all American groups in this book.) The State Department hampered the FBI investigation in Yemen because of the best of diplomatic intentions and the pettiest of personality differences. Foreign governments actively obstructed American efforts and gave protection to al-Qaeda. And a weakened White House lacked engagement and the political will to do much of anything during an election year, including retaliation or coordination of the government message.
These same pointless barriers between the intelligence services continue until the days before Sept. 11, 2001, where Wright’s narrative essentially ends. As the Times‘ reviewer noted, other works have covered the actual day of the attack in much more detail. Nevertheless, I found the description of the attacks (as witnessed by FBI agents in lower Manhattan) extremely moving and difficult to read.
Ultimately, this book raises as many questions for the careful reader as it answers. Given all of the problems that the American intelligence and counterterrorism infrastructure had, is it now organized to effectively combat al-Qaeda and other extremist groups? Is there a downside to closer integration of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies? Could the domestic attacks really have been prevented? Are the conclusions of the Congressional 9/11 Commission correct? Has the world post-9/11 been effective in combating terrorism, whether its ideological underpinnings or actual terrible effects?
Perhaps just as challenging are the questions it should pose about contemporary society. Is this view of Islam or the Arab world balanced? Despite Wright’s compelling arguments and copious sourcing, I’m still left wondering how much al-Qaeda’s ideas reflect the prevailing mood of the region and how the average citizen experienced the same governments that bin Laden and al Zawahiri did. This says more about my and the West’s lack of understanding of Islam and the region, the polarization of American views post-9/11, and tension between liberal and secular multiculturalism and other value systems. What I still don’t know — what I was unable to glean from Wright’s rather narrow history — is how people in the Middle East view jihad; whether they admire, despise, or ignore the ideas of Qutb and the Muslim Brothers (much as people in the South now universally reject segregation, secession, and Jim Crow except in all but the most isolated and sociopathic cases); whether they want an Islamic empire with its union of religion, politics, and law; if they see the current religious groups as distinct from post-colonial, anti-despotic resistance; etc.
In his defense, Wright does present a lot of causes that came together to create al-Qaeda: post-colonial struggles, anti-modernity, a desire for a caliphate, anti-Zionism, anger at America, Soviet invasions, lack of opportunities for the young in rich Gulf countries, violent strains of Islam that were nurtured in the formation of contemporary Arabia, fixation on holy death, a sort of fear of Western or powerful women, and so on. I find it incredible that all of these could occur in one short span. It’s possible to read The Looming Tower and get some sense of the disorientation that likely occurred to many in the region over the last fifty years of globalization. Wright seems to suggest that all of these factors combined to produce violent extremism and goes out of his way to point out that bin Laden was the sine qua non of radicalism, the critical “symbolic figure of resistance” worldwide.
My review really doesn’t do justice to the compelling narrative that Wright creates, which (apart from what it tells us about the contemporary world) alone makes it worth reading. And yet the book is packed with ideas without feeling ponderous or partisan. So go read The Looming Tower for yourself.
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Okay, here are my recommendations. Just be aware: I’m rubbish at giving short synopses that don’t totally suck the life out of whatever I’m recommending.
