Al Qaeda: The True Story Of Radical Islam (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
Read this yonks ago, but never got around to reviewing it, actually had to reread bits of it recently to remind myself.My edition is the 2007 volume, so it covers the 7/7 bombings but obviously came out before Osama Bin Laden's assassination, the Arab Spring, it's arguable failure, continued conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq and more recent violence in Boston and Woolwich. Nonetheless the book is still highly relevant.Burke's central premise is that perceiving al-Qaeda as a "gang of evil doers" - a group with a single leader, a hierarchical structure, a disciplined cadre of international networks and sleeper cells is to fail to understand the nature and causes of what is less an organisation as an ideology. In failing to understand this the West will continue to fail to effectively address radicalised Islam. The closest al-Qaeda came to that, what might loosely me the called the Bin-Laden network, only existed and effectively operated between 1996 and 2001; and even in this sense is better compared to a wealthy university handing out grants - a sort of venture capital firm of Jihad. That is something worth remembering when you read this morning's headlines about al-Qaeda capturing Fallujah (actually ISIS).The false al-Qaeda label is easier to grasp, makes better news, and continues to be used by repressive regimes (and democracies) to take off the gloves to suppress local Muslim communities and breach privacy and personal freedoms.Burke looks broadly at the the nature of Islamic radicalism, tracing its path from colonialism, Arab nationalism and the post cold war environment. He argues that al-Qaeda's extreme form of Wahhabis Islam - millenarian, violent, nihilistic and mythic, can be seen as a reaction to the failure of Political Islamism to address key issues of social justice within Islamic society. It is the doctrine of Islam under threat.Inevitably much of the book does focus on Bin Laden's rise to notoriety, from duteous anti-soviet Mujahideen financier to icon of evil or hero to martyrdom . Particularly interesting are some of the Wests failed attempts at suppression that simply drove his rise to success. The Clinton administration's cynical (on the back of the Lewinsky scandal), poorly conceived response to the US embassy bombings of 1998 (Kenya and Tanzania) is notable. The subsequent cruise missile attacks (Operation Infinite Reach) were key in raising Bin Laden's status from a dubious,rich-boy, minor player in radicalised Islam to a credible figure. Burke analyses the difficult initial relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and highlights their remarkable ideological differences. "The Shiek" with a vision of global jihad and an end-of-days struggle with the Kufr, the Mullahs parochial, neo-traditionalist and seeking a rural idyll. The Taliban had in fact struck a deal with Saudi Intelligence to hand Bin Laden to them, and remarkably, banned opium production in an effort to seek recognition by the west in the Afghan civil war period. By the UN imposing sanctions on Afghanistan in 1999(against the advice of it's own drug agency) they effectively pushed the disparate parties together.It's a incredibly detailed and well researched book. Burke's conclusion is that the mainstream appeal of al-Qaeda as doctorine is that it relates to personal experience and offers an action to theory. Effectively that the autonomous nature of the doctrine is that you are in al-Qaeda if you say so. Sadly the book will be relevant for a very long time for the same reason.
The author's thesis is that Al-Qaeda isn't that big of a threat per se, and that the true problem is the radicalization of a generation of Muslims who subscribe to AQ's mission statement but have only informal ties to the organization. But then he goes on to describe Al-Qaeda's direct role in the Nairobi embassy bombings and the 9/11 attacks and you're like "Hey man, Al-Qaeda is a pretty big deal just by itself."But he's probably right in the long term, and a couple decades in the future, when I'm surveying the smoking, radioactive crater that was New York City, I'll probably think to myself "dude made some good points."
What do You think about Al Qaeda: The True Story Of Radical Islam (2004)?
After seven years of reading books and articles about al-Qaeda and violent political Islamists, I might just now have read the best book of the bunch. At least, it comes closest to the sense of al-Qaeda that I've arrived at after a lot of library research. Burke is knowledgeable, fair, broad, deep, and occasionally eloquent. I didn't learn a lot that I didn't already know (partly because Burke's book has been important to every publication on al-Qaeda since Burke appeared), but this book and its argument about our mistaken understanding of the nature of al-Qaeda seems spot on. If I knew of a military officer being re-assigned to Afghanistan or anyplace where al-Qaeda is known to be active, I'd make sure he or she added this book to their mandatory reading list. There are as well a lot of people in government who would be well served by spending some time with Burke.
—James
