August 9, 2011 | National Post

Declaring War on the ‘Far Enemy’

August 9, 2011 | National Post

Declaring War on the ‘Far Enemy’

On Aug. 23, 1996, Osama bin Laden, within a few months of arriving in Afghanistan, issued a manifesto proclaiming himself at war with the world's only remaining superpower. Bin Laden's overarching grievance was the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, which he described as “one of the worst catastrophes to befall the Muslims since the death of the Prophet.” Bin Laden also named America's support for Israel and U.S.-led sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq as additional justifications for his fight. (There was no love lost between bin Laden and Iraq's secular dictator, but he blamed U.S. sanctions for a humanitarian catastrophe in that country.) Few in the United States took notice of bin Laden's declaration, either among the public at large or within the government.

As Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's Bin Laden Unit, has written, these political grievances were intended to place al-Qaeda's fight within the realm of “a defensive jihad sanctioned by the revealed word of God.” That is, in contrast to an “offensive jihad,” expansionist warfare designed to enlarge the abode of Islam, this was a case, bin Laden argued, in which the faith itself was under attack by its foes. In such instances, each Muslim has an individual obligation to join the battle. It's not enough if some group takes up arms; this must be done by all Muslims. If such a religious duty is an individual obligation (fard ayn), young people do not even have to receive permission from their parents to join the fight.

This declaration of war did not represent a totally aberrant turn within Islamic thought, as some commentators have claimed. Although there are credible, powerful and widely held interpretations of the faith that find bin Laden's arguments and actions unjustified and immoral, bin Laden does draw on legitimate sources, tap into venerable currents of Islamic thought and make arguments that resonate with many of the faithful. The concept of jihad has variegated meanings, and there are non-military aspects of this struggle. But as Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, has written, “The overwhelming majority of early authorities, citing the relevant passages in the Qur'an, the commentaries, and the traditions of the Prophet, discuss jihad in military terms.”

As a salafi – an adherent to an austere religious methodology that seeks to recreate Islam as it was supposedly practiced by the Prophet Muhammad and the first generations of Muslims – bin Laden argued that other Muslims should return to the earliest, purest interpretation of the faith. If Muslims do return to the earliest interpretation of Islam, salafi jihadism holds, they will understand the righteousness and the necessity of these calls for violence.

Thus bin Laden tapped into currents of thought that preceded him. These currents of thought have also survived his death. The narrative of al-Qaeda and other salafi jihadi groups holds that Islam itself is under attack, both physically and morally, by the United States and other forces of disbelief (including the corrupt regimes that dominated the Middle East throughout the 20th century) and that violence is necessary to defend the faith. This is not to say that al-Qaeda is correct in its interpretation of the Islamic faith, or otherwise. But it is always a mistake to underestimate the strength of your enemy's arguments, which is precisely what many Western analysts have done in the case of al-Qaeda and other salafi jihadi groups.

There has been a division within the jihadi movement concerning whether it should focus on the “near enemy” – the toppling of the corrupt Arab regimes, which jihadis sometimes refer to as apostate governments – or instead target the “far enemy,” the United States and other Western powers. Thomas Hegghammer, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment in Oslo, notes that this controversy may be “the most significant political rift in the world of militant Islamism since the mid-1990s.”

Although al-Qaeda views both the United States and the apostate Arab regimes as its enemies, it has largely focused its warfare against the United States and other Western countries. A study released in the summer of 2009 by a jihadi “think tank” that supports al-Qaeda's decision to do so explains that in waging war against the Saudi regime, the group was faced with the decision of fighting Saudi Arabia directly or striking at the American presence in that country. If it fought Saudi Arabia, the attacks would have met with condemnation by the Saudi ulema (religious scholars). Al-Qaeda's war against the Saudis would have been a losing effort, “given the size and weight of the religious institution, and the legitimacy and prestige it instilled in the people's minds across more than 70 years.”

On the other hand, the study viewed striking at the Americans as a wise choice, because the kingdom would be forced to defend their presence, “which will cost them their legitimacy in the eyes of Muslims.” Moreover, the ulema would be delegitimized if they too defended the U.S. presence. Thus, many of those who favour fighting the United States rather than the “near enemy” think that jihadi groups can weaken both foes simultaneously in that manner.

Although the political grievances that bin Laden and other jihadi thinkers have articulated illuminate their shortterm ambitions, the movement also possesses long-term goals. One is to spread shariah, or Islamic law. As bin Laden said in a 1998 letter published in the Rawalpindi-based newspaper Jang, he believes that al-Qaeda's struggle should continue until “the Islamic shariah is enforced on the land of God.” He has repeatedly emphasized the importance of establishing shariah since then, as have other jihadi leaders. Extrapolating from their conception of the religious concept of tawhid (the unity of God), these jihadi thinkers argue that if only Allah can be worshiped and obeyed, then only Allah's laws can have legitimacy. The version of shariah that these thinkers embrace is undeniably harsh. Illustrating this, when journalist Peter Bergen asked bin Laden's London media representative Khalid al Fawwaz in the late 1990s what present government most resembled his vision of an ideal Islamic state, Fawwaz replied that Afghanistan's brutal Taliban regime was “getting there.”

For perspective, the Taliban's treatment of women was so inhumane that Physicians for Human Rights released a report in 1998 not-ing that “no other regime in the world has methodically and violently forced half of its population into virtual house arrest, prohibiting them on pain of physical punishment from showing their faces, seeking medical care without a male escort or attending school.” Homosexuals were executed, although there was some disagreement among jurists as to whether they should be pushed to their deaths from a high altitude or crushed beneath a toppling wall. Virtually every imaginable form of light entertainment was banned, including kite flying, movies, television, music and dancing. Also banned were paintings and the celebration of holidays that were cultural rather than religious, such as the Afghan new year. Afghans were beaten and sometimes killed for flouting this complex and outright absurd set of rules.

Another goal of the jihadi movement is reestablishment of the caliphate, a theocratic government that would rule a united Muslim world. Islam's first caliph (Arabic for “successor,” denoting that the caliph follows Muhammad as the faith's political leader) was Abu Bakr, who led the umma beginning in 632 A.D., after the Prophet Muhammad's death. One jihadi thinker, in a representative statement, described Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's abolition of the caliphate in 1924 as the “mother of all crimes.”

Similarly, bin Laden made explicit reference to the grave injustice of the caliphate's fall in his 1996 declaration of war against the United States and referred to the need to re-establish it multiple times thereafter. Indeed, the introduction to al-Qaeda's training manual describes the manual as a “contribution toward paving the road that leads to majestic Allah and establishing a caliphate.” And new al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has written that al-Qaeda's “intended goal in this age is the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet.”

Yet the caliphate's establishment wouldn't end the war against the infidels. One work that shows how the jihad would continue is Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein's influential 2005 book Al Zarqawi: The Second Generation of al Qaeda, which Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright has called “perhaps the most definitive outline of al-Qaeda's master plan.” Hussein shows that in this master plan, al-Qaeda's strategists foresee a “stage of all-out confrontation” with the forces of atheism after the caliphate is declared. He writes, “Al-Qaeda ideologues believe that the all-out confrontation with the forces of falsehood will take a few years at most. The enormous potential of the Islamic state – particularly because the Muslim population will amount to more than 1.5billion – will terrify the enemy and prompt them to retreat rapidly.”

Some Western analysts fail to appreciate what the caliphate's re-establishment signifies. For example, Michael Scheuer, in his 2004 book Imperial Hubris, describes Saudi Arabia as “a regime that, since its founding, has deliberately fostered an Islamic ideology, whose goals – unlike bin Laden's – can be met only by annihilating all non-Muslims.” This claim is nonsensical. It is premised on the idea that bin Laden's practice of Islam (and that of al-Qaeda) was more moderate than Saudi Arabia's. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that this is the case. Bin Laden turned against the Saudi monarchy not because it was too extreme nor because he had rejected the tenets of its Wahhabi creed, but rather because he believed that the Saudis were not living up to their strict ideals. Once Scheuer concedes that Saudi ideology is designed to foster an eternal conflict with non-Muslims – a view supported by a literal reading of Wahhabi scholarship – it makes no sense to say that al-Qaeda's conflict with the West is anything but existential.

– Excerpted from Bin Laden's Legacy, by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross.

Issues:

Afghanistan