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Beyond Bin Laden
Terror Network Extends Far Beyond
Bin Laden, Experts Say
Oct. 22 — The United States is expending blood and treasure to run down Osama bin Laden and his organization in Afghanistan, but that will not eliminate the thousands of supporters positioned around the globe for possible terrorist attacks.
U.S. experts have noted the campaign is only one aspect of an aggressive, multi-pronged effort to rid the world of what they describe as a global terror campaign against the United States.
At the core of it, experts say, are "Afghan Arabs," Muslims from the Middle East and elsewhere who fought in the Afghan guerrilla "holy war" to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Some were armed by the CIA, they say.
Since the early 1990s, many of those Afghan Arabs and people they have recruited and trained have dispersed around the globe, engaging in a new "holy war" directed against the secular governments of Muslim countries and the nation viewed as their sponsor: the United States.
By promoting an extremist Islamic, anti-Western ideology, creating nebulous underground financial networks, and encouraging independent terrorist activities worldwide, they have created a movement that may persist even if bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization are eliminated.
"Islamic extremism has spread to the point where it now has a global infrastructure, including a substantial network in the United States," Oliver Revell, former FBI associate deputy director for investigations, said in recent testimony before Congress.
Bin Laden at the Center
The Afghan Arabs are believed to have founded or infiltrated terror organizations and created small terror cells in more then 30 countries around the globe, including the United States.
They also are believed to be at the core of Afghanistan-based al Qaeda, which the United States blames for the Sept. 11 terror attacks that claimed more than 5,000 lives.
The FBI also suspects bin Laden and al Qaeda were either responsible for or in some way connected to nearly every major foreign terrorist attack against the United States since 1990.
Created by bin Laden and others in 1988, al Qaeda has been characterized as a giant, underground organization dedicated to attacking the United States, with bin Laden as a sort of CEO, directing, funding and organizing terror operations by its members and other groups worldwide.
"If you get bin Laden, and you eliminate Afghanistan as a place where a guy like him and an organization like al Qaeda can hide, you've made a significant dent" in international terrorism, says Frank Anderson, a former senior CIA official.
Terror Network Decentralized
But as more information is gathered on terror attacks and al Qaeda in recent years, a more refined view of the organization has emerged, in which the pattern of terror appears to be less controlled by bin Laden and more of a decentralized phenomenon.
Al Qaeda, which technically refers to bin Laden's organization in Afghanistan, is seen as sort of a foundation providing grants of money, advice and inspiration to enterprising terrorists and groups in far-flung regions, but not necessarily organizing, motivating or directing all attacks.
"The U.S. government officials talk about him [bin Laden] as the Ford Foundation of terrorism, and the Ford Foundation doesn't write too many of the plans, specific plans that get carried out with their money," says Anderson.
In a recent example, Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who was caught sneaking explosives into the United States just before the year 2000 millennium celebrations, was trained at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and given $12,000 seed money, officials say. He told investigators he was told to raise the rest of the money he needed through criminal activity in Canada, organize his own cell, and choose targets in America to destroy.
In fact, the name al Qaeda means "the base" or "the foundation" in Arabic, former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro told a congressional committee recently.
"It is important to distinguish between the so-called loose networks of affiliated groups, and the tightly controlled inner circle of al Qaeda that conceives and implements their strategic operations," he said.
Subculture of Terror
Simply neutralizing bin Laden and al Qaeda probably would not end Afghan Arab-led terror, experts say.
"It is important to avoid equating the bin Laden network solely with bin Laden," said the RAND Corp. book, Countering the New Terrorism, published in 1999. "The network conducts many operations without his involvement, leadership, or financing — and will continue to be able to do so should he be killed or captured."
Bin Laden's role in the terror campaign certainly has seemed significant. Drawing on his personal wealth, estimated at $250 million, and funds it is believed he has raised from other wealthy Muslims and some Muslim nongovernmental organizations, the Saudi dissident is believed to have supported a range of terrorist activities.
But his backing may not be all that essential for terrorist operations in the United States, suggests Anderson.
"The horrible truth about the World Trade Center attack," he says, is that it could have been pulled off without al Qaeda assistance. He points to the bombing eight years ago of the World Trade Center, which was carried out by Islamic extremists loosely connected to al Qaeda. Their leader, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, was associated with a New Jersey mosque where many of the bombing suspects worshipped.
"The subculture of storefront mosque guys in New Jersey and elsewhere uncovered in the 1993 World Trade Center attack was numerous enough and, I think, committed enough, and sufficiently well-funded" to have carried out the Sept. 11 attacks without outside assistance, says Anderson.
Such potential terror cells also receive large sums of money, not just from bin Laden's war chest, but also from al Qaeda-associated front charities that raise funds in Western Europe and the United States, U.S. officials have said.
Thus to curtail the terror, experts say, the United States must also stop secret Middle Eastern terror funding sources and networks. Potential terrorists positioned around the world must be apprehended, and stability and the rule of law must be brought to Afghanistan so that terrorists can no longer use the country for training, planning and evading justice, they say.
Since Sept. 11, the U.S. government has appeared to be working toward all of this. But to sap the movement's appeal, some experts say, the United States may also need to reconsider some of its policies in the Middle East.
Originates in the Middle East
While eliminating Afghanistan as a safe haven might curtail Afghan Arab terror, the campaign's spiritual and ideological origins, its energy, its money and most of its manpower, appear to originate in the Middle East and Muslim countries elsewhere.
The principal leaders of al Qaeda, after all, include the Saudi-born bin Laden; the suspected head of a faction of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad terrorist group, Ayman al-Zawahiri; and the Egyptian Mohammed Atef, bin Laden's "chief of military operations," who is suspected of organizing the Sept. 11 attacks.
Many of the 19 suicide hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks have been identified as being of either Egyptian or Saudi origin.
Officials say al Qaeda draws not just personnel, but also money from other Muslim nations.
"What we keep discovering is [bin Laden is] not just spending his own money, senior people in the Saudi government and within Pakistani intelligence circles have channeled funds to these guys," says Larry Johnson, a former deputy director of the State Department Office of Counterterrorism.
Cannistraro said several Saudi and Gulf businessmen have given funds, out of solidarity and also as a form of protection money.
A Unifying, Extremist Ideology
In creating al Qaeda and its ideology, bin Laden is said to have tapped into and helped further an extremist Islamic, anti-American culture of persons and groups dissatisfied with the U.S.-supported status quo in their countries, and U.S. support of Israel and other policies in the Middle East.
Bin Laden has argued U.S. and other Western forces should not be based on the Arabian Peninsula, which is home to Mecca and Medina, Islam's two holiest sites — even to protect the peninsula and those sites from the Iraqi army during the Gulf War.
"There is throughout the Arab world and the Islamic world this deep-seated reservoir of hatred of the West, and he's tapped into that," says Johnson.
Bin Laden also dispatched Afghan Arab fighters to their native lands to fight against the secular regimes and replace them with religious governments based on sharia, Islamic law, rather than civil law.
Since the Gulf War, the Afghan Arabs, their followers and associated groups are suspected of engaging in terrorist activity in more than 30 countries across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans, Europe and North America, according to U.S. government information.
They're also believed to have fueled insurgencies and civil wars in global hotspots like Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya and Tajikistan, to have aided violent political groups across the Middle East and North Africa, and to have set up training camps for militants in at least seven countries.
"Unlike traditional terrorist organizations, the Arab Afghans are part of a complex network of relatively autonomous groups that are financed from private sources forming 'a kind of international terrorists' Internet,'" said the RAND book.
In a common pattern, apparently repeated in the Sept. 11 attacks, potential terrorists have attended al Qaeda-related training camps in Afghanistan, and then traveled abroad to melt into Western societies and someday carry out attacks against Western targets.
Appealing to Discontents
The terrorism problem cannot just be solved through force, but also by dealing with the social and economic issues in Islamic countries, says Peter Sederberg, a government and international studies professor at the University of South Carolina.
"I think that is the direction in which we need to go," he says.
Afghan Arab-led terror has tended to attract the poor and disillusioned from many parts of the Islamic world, and particularly from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, he says.
"What they do is they speak to those discontents, they explain them they provide a stable ground of meaning and value for people who don't have [that] because their societies are so unstable," says Sederberg.
Throughout the Muslim world, more than 50 percent of the population — in some countries it's almost three-quarters — is under age 25.
'You've got massive material discontents and you've got the demographic imbalances, you've got too many young men under the age of 25," says Sederberg. "Historically, that has been a destabilizing force."
Many are rootless, he says. "One way people find some sort of niche is through a job, and they don't have those."
The terrorism also appears fueled by the belief by many Muslims the United States wants to preserve brutal dictatorships in many countries because it allows for easier access to their natural resources and makes for stable relations.
"The lack of democracy in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other countries in the Middle East seems to have created fertile ground for the development of terrorist movements in these countries," Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y., said last week while chairing a House subcommittee hearing on the Middle East and South Asia.
"The United States has generally not pressed the issue of democratization over the past five years or so, and it seems to me that the considerations that led the United States to curtail its democratization efforts should be rethought," he said. |
