Al Hunt has an interesting column today in The Wall Street Journal. It's an attempt to sketch a profile of the Taliban. One particularly interesting point the woman he interviews makes is "They hate Israel, but Ms. Sirrs is convinced a Palestinian settlement would have little effect on these terrorists." I've heard this same observation before.
interactive.wsj.com
October 4, 2001
Politics & People
Know Thine Enemy
By ALBERT R. HUNT
Julie Sirrs recalls that in her lengthy interview with Mohammed Khaled, he was very calm and measured; he didn't pour out fiery rhetoric or spew venom, and he spoke of long-term goals.
Khaled is one of the Taliban's commandos, a Pakistani university graduate who went to Afghanistan to train and fight in the war against infidels. He was one of more than 100 prisoners captured by the Northern Alliance or United Front who Ms. Sirrs, a former Defense Department Intelligence Agency analyst and Afghanistan expert, studied in 1999 and 2000. She conducted freewheeling, in-depth interviews with about a dozen.
The fighters did not conform to all the popular stereotypes, she says. Their hatred is deep-seated, but to them very rational -- and they don't anticipate quick victory. Khaled, like others, said freely that if he got out he would return to fight in other foreign lands, including the U.S. Ms. Sirrs, in a conversation this week, agrees with an emerging view that the Taliban and Osama bin Laden may not last through the autumn, but she cautions that the dangers won't vanish along with them.
The depth of anti-American hatred in some Middle East circles is far-reaching. Cairo is the cultural capital of the Arab world but a New Yorker piece this week reports astonishing vitriol against the U.S. It comes from leading editors, clerics and business people: "This was an attack on American arrogance," said one prominent Egyptian. Former Sen. Gary Hart, co-chair of the Commission on National Security last year, met with leading Egyptians at the American ambassador's residence and remembers being "verbally beaten up" by anti-American tirades from a well-to-do lawyer. Throughout the Muslim world, tens of thousands of babies are being named Osama.
There are countless explanations for the rampant anti-Americanism, and some are unavoidable -- such as the U.S. commitment to Israel. The United States personifies power, wealth, success and modernity -- all of which is resented by factions in the Middle East.
But some of it grows out of American miscalculations. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius argues U.S. Middle East policy has drifted into "an arrogant neglect," and has aligned with corrupt and authoritarian Arab regimes that many Muslims see crassly dictated by oil interests. The first Bush administration justified the Gulf War on this basis.
There also is not enough American expertise of these bitter adversaries. There has been considerable focus on the lack of knowledge in the intelligence field, but the U.S. faces the same problem in the military and most other civilian sectors.
An exception is Julie Sirrs, a 31-year-old mother of a 10-month-old baby, who has made four different trips to Afghanistan and conducted two sets of interviews with prisoners who had been fighting for bin Laden. Other than New York Times journalist Judith Miller, she probably has more firsthand experience with these forces than all but a handful of Americans.
Julie Sirra and companion
When she first went to Afghanistan, Ms. Sirrs thought Muslims from countries like Pakistan went to fight because of "shared ethnicity." Instead, she found it was ideology: "What motivated them overwhelmingly was to come to Afghanistan to train and fight in the hopes of going back to their home countries and establishing an extreme Islamic state or to target the United States." Unfortunately, notes Richard Rubenstein, a George Mason University professor of conflict resolution, terrorists are most effective "when bound together by a common religion."
The Sept. 11 terrorists were recruited, Ms. Sirrs says, by Osama bin Laden's network. Equally clear she says, is that the Sept. 9 assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the United Front leader, was orchestrated by bin Laden and related to the World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorism. "When I interviewed Massoud in 1998, he told me bin Laden was trying to kill him," she says.
Her experience with the prisoners suggested they had a clear-minded resolve based on ignorance, much of it fed by extremist clerics and religious scholars in their home countries. Many of the subjects were madrassa, or seminary, students. "They believe this conspiracy theory notion that everything bad happens because of the United States, and the U.S. is an enemy of Muslims."
When she would question whether some of the practices -- on women, or narcotics trading or terrorism -- were at odds with Islamic teachings, they would quote their religious teachers or scholars who they insisted understood these matters. "One Yemeni prisoner told me he would be willing to get on a school bus and kill children if the religious scholars told him to, even though he seemed aware that Islam did not condone the killing of innocents."
They hate Israel, but Ms. Sirrs is convinced a Palestinian settlement would have little effect on these terrorists. "They see America as a barrier to establishing an Islamic state," she notes. "Even if the Israeli-Palestinian issue were resolved, that wouldn't change."
She believes that eliminating Osama bin Laden and the sanctuary the Taliban provides would impair the terrorist network, but, based on her interviews, Ms. Sirrs warns against viewing this as a top-down operation that then would fade away. She agrees with Mr. Hart that there's an "entrepreneurial element" to these actions: "They come to the bin Laden leadership with an idea and request funding. If it seems feasible they then go execute the specifics on their own." She fears there are operations that have been in the pipeline for years that won't be effected by what occurs in Afghanistan in the ensuing weeks.
One of the goals of the Sept. 11 attacks, Ms. Sirrs believes, was to lure the U.S. into Afghanistan, where they believe America would suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union. She doubts that, but believes the viability of any post-Taliban coalition in Afghanistan depends on U.S. willingness "to put the screws to Pakistan," which has played a destructive role in that country.
In the future, she says, America has to do a better job of "framing the issues in the Muslim world," and countering the religious fanatics. "Why don't we focus more on the atrocities bin Laden and others commit against devout Muslims?"
And, she warns, incidents of anti-Muslim retaliation or slurs in America or demagogic comments like Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's tirade that Western civilization is superior to Islamic culture "play right into their hands . . . this stuff gets circulated and distorted among the Muslim masses. They want to make this a war of the West against Muslims."
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