What were the causes of 9/11?
- From: ano457@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 26 Aug 2006 19:54:59 -0700
What were the causes of 9/11?
Five years on, everyone has a theory about the real causes of 9/11.
They range from the nutty (it was the US government) to the plausible
but flawed (a response to foreign occupation) to the credible
(collateral damage from a clash within Islam)
Peter Bergen
The author is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His book
"The Osama bin Laden I Know" is published by Simon & Schuster
No event in recent times has produced as many explanations as the 11th
September attacks five years ago. Within the space of an hour, al Qaeda
inflicted more direct damage on the US than the Soviet Union had done
throughout the cold war, a cataclysm seen by more people than any other
event in history. Yet it took only 19 men armed with small knives to
destroy the World Trade Centre, demolish a wing of the Pentagon and
kill 3,000 people. This mismatch has led some-especially in the
Muslim world-to seek a deus ex machina to explain what otherwise
appears inexplicable. The usual suspects have been assembled on 9/11's
grassy knoll: the Jews were behind the attacks; the US government
engineered them; the "Cheney-Bush energy junta" planned them so that
they could grab the oil fields of central Asia, and so on.
Osama bin Laden himself claims that al Qaeda was solely responsible for
9/11. In 2004, he released a video in which he explained his dealings
with lead hijacker Mohammed Atta. After the largest criminal
investigation in history, the US government's 9/11 commission also
concluded that al Qaeda was solely responsible for the attacks.
Attributing the sole responsibility for 9/11 to al Qaeda then brings us
to the larger question: what caused al Qaeda to launch the attacks?
Explanations for the attacks can be sorted into two categories-the
seemingly plausible but flawed, and the more credible.
Plausible but flawed theories
Poverty. Many politicians and commentators see the poverty of the
middle east as a factor. (Some political leaders even argued that the
Doha round of trade talks, launched soon after 9/11, were intended
partly to quash terrorism.) This claim is not supported by the
evidence. Those who attacked on 9/11 were sons of the middle eastern
middle and upper class, not the dispossessed. Throughout recent
history, from the Russian anarchists to the German Baader-Meinhof gang
in the 1970s, terrorism has largely been a bourgeois endeavour. Al
Qaeda is no different.
Madrasas. A related argument to the poverty canard is that madrasas,
religious schools that teach the Koran by rote and sometimes instil a
simplistic view of jihad, are breeding grounds for terrorists. Quite
the opposite. Madrasa graduates have rarely, if ever, carried out major
anti-western attacks. None of the 9/11 hijackers attended a madrasa and
most had been to college, several of them in the west. Bin Laden went
to the European-influenced Al Thagr high school and then studied
economics at King Abdulaziz University, both in Jeddah.
They hate us because of the freedom-loving people we are. President
Bush has been the principal exponent of this view. In 2004 Bin Laden
responded by asking why, if this were true, had he not attacked
freedom-loving Sweden?
The CIA. The notion that Bin Laden is a CIA creation, and that the
attacks on the Trade Centre and Pentagon were "blowback," is a standard
analysis among leftists around the world. Indian novelist Arundhati Roy
has written that Bin Laden was "among the jihadis who moved to
Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin
Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA." This theory is
advanced as axiomatic but it has no supporting evidence. The real
scandal here is not that the CIA helped to create Bin Laden during the
1980s, but that the agency had no idea of his significance until
sometime in 1996, when it set up a special unit to track the Saudi
exile.
Weak and failing states. It is a staple of international relations
theorists that weak and failed states are attractive bases for
terrorists and criminals. That the 9/11 attack was first hatched in
1996 as al Qaeda moved its base from a weak state, Sudan, to a failed
state, Afghanistan, seems to underline this theory. Certainly al Qaeda
thrived under the incompetent rule of the Taliban. However, much of the
9/11 plot took shape in Hamburg, where most of the pilots and secondary
planners of the attack became more radical than they had been while
living in their home countries. Although Afghanistan was critical to
the rise of al Qaeda, it was the experience that the plotters acquired
in the west that made them both more militant and better equipped to
carry out the attacks.
Saudi financiers. Little or no hard evidence has been proffered for the
claim that Saudi financiers were sponsoring al Qaeda, and the 9/11
report determined that there was no evidence that the money for the
attacks came from Saudi Arabia. Moreover, money is not the "oxygen" of
terrorism. Terrorism is a cheap form of warfare-the first Trade
Centre attack in 1993 cost only a few thousand dollars. No amount of
money will buy you 19 young men willing to commit suicide in a
terrorist operation. According to court documents entered in the trial
of the supposed 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, the 9/11 operation
cost a little over $200,000, a trivial sum considering the damage it
inflicted. The pilots who flew the hijacked planes into two of the
world's most famous buildings saw what they were doing as an act of
worship. Al Qaeda's strength lies not in its material resources, which
are small, but in its beliefs.
The Saudis in general. Some commentators have assigned much of the
responsibility for the rise of al Qaeda to the Saudis. This is also the
contention of many of the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks,
who have signed on to a class action lawsuit against a range of Saudi
institutions and individuals. In this view, the Saudi royal family made
an unholy alliance with the purist Wahabbi sect and exported Wahabbism
in order to shore up its shaky credibility as the custodian of the holy
places of Mecca and Medina. The historian Bernard Lewis has observed:
"The custodianship of the holy places and the revenues of oil have
given worldwide impact to what would otherwise have been an extremist
fringe in a marginal country... Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan or some
similar group obtains total control of the state of Texas, of its oil
and therefore its oil revenues, and having done so, uses this money to
establish a network of well-endowed schools and colleges all over
Christendom, peddling their own peculiar brand of Christianity."
The Saudi export of Wahabbism did eventually bear disastrous fruit in
Afghanistan with the advent of the Taliban, a regime that was
recognised and supported by only three countries, including Saudi
Arabia, and was influenced by Wahabbist doctrines. However, since at
least the mid-1990s, al Qaeda's ultimate goal has been the destruction
of the Saudi royal family and so it is a stretch to blame the Saudi
state for al Qaeda's recent activities. Moreover, there are millions of
Muslims who follow a Wahabbist version of Islam, yet only a very few
turn to violence.
The clash of civilisations. Samuel Huntington famously predicted that
clashes between civilisations would replace cold war rivalries, and
9/11 seemed to vindicate his theory. But did it? Most Muslims condemned
9/11, and after the attacks Bin Laden's attempt to ignite a clash of
civilisations fizzled out. It is rather the US war of choice in Iraq
that galvanised anti-Americanism among Muslims.
Suicide terrorism, including 9/11, is a response to foreign occupation.
In his influential 2005 book Dying to Win, political scientist Robert
Pape examined a series of modern suicide campaigns and concluded that
they are driven not by religious zeal but by foreign occupations (see
review by Peter Nolan and Patrick Belton, Prospect online). Pape
pointed out that the secular Tamil Tigers have engaged in one of the
most protracted and bloody campaigns of suicide terrorism of the modern
era. Pape's theory might explain why 15 of the 9/11 hijackers were
Saudis, as there was a substantial US presence in the Saudi kingdom
around that time, but it does not explain the other four hijackers, who
were Lebanese, Egyptian and Emirati, none of whose countries were
occupied by the US.
Moreover, events in Iraq have undermined Pape's contention that foreign
occupation is the driving force behind suicide attacks, particularly in
the Islamic world. Suicide attackers in Iraq are largely foreigners,
and half or more are estimated to be Saudis, while the rest are from
other middle eastern countries, with a sprinkling of Europeans. Only
around 10 per cent of the suicide attacks in Iraq are undertaken by
Iraqis. It is not foreign occupation, but rather a globalised culture
of martyrdom that is driving suicide attacks in the Muslim world.
Indeed, in 2003, US forces in Saudi Arabia-Bin Laden's original casus
belli-were reduced almost to zero, yet Bin Laden and his followers
continued to advocate attacking the US.
We are in a clash with a totalitarian ideology, similar to communism.
The most serious proponent of this idea is Paul Berman, whose 2003 book
Terror and Liberalism places "Binladenism" squarely in the tradition of
modern millennial totalitarian ideologies such as fascism and
communism: "9/11 was an event in the 20th-century mode. It was the
clash of ideologies. It was the war between liberalism and the
apocalyptic and phantasmagorical movements that have risen up against
liberal civilisation ever since the calamities of the first world war."
While this idea has some attractions, Binladenism does not pose the
existential threat to the west presented by the totalitarian ideologies
of the 20th century. And although it is certainly an ideology, it has
precious little to do with either communism or Nazism, both of which
abolished the very notion of God. Binladenism is not just another
totalitarian ideology of the kind which we have seen before. Al Qaeda
may use modern technology but it is animated by a 7th-century view of
the world that has nothing in common with Hitler or Stalin.
The death rattle of political Islam. Could 9/11 be the last gasp of the
radical Islamists? French academic Gilles Kepel has made the point that
Islamist states such as Sudan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan have turned
out to be abject failures. In his book Jihad: the Trail of Political
Islam, published after 9/11, Kepel argued, "in spite of what many
commentators contended in its immediate aftermath, the attack on the US
was a desperate symbol of the isolation, fragmentation and decline of
the Islamist movement, not a sign of its strength." However, Kepel was
writing before the US occupation of Iraq, the election of Hamas in
Palestine, and the present troubles in Lebanon. Today political Islam
seems to be on the march around the middle east, and to treat 9/11 as
the swansong of militant Islamists seems like wishful thinking.
The most credible explanations
None of the following explanations is alone sufficient to explain the
attacks, but together they do help us to understand 9/11. They are
ranked in ascending order of importance.
10. Radicalisation caused by the Afghan jihad. While there is no
evidence that the CIA trained or funded Bin Laden or his followers, the
Afghan war against the Soviet Union nonetheless radicalised a
generation of Arab militants. They swapped business cards, gained
battlefield experience and came to believe that they had played a big
role in the destruction of the Soviet Union. All of these factors would
lead to the founding of al Qaeda in 1988, established to take the jihad
to other parts of the globe.
9. A particular reading of Islamic texts. In the many discussions of
the "root causes" of Islamist terrorism, Islam itself is rarely
mentioned. But if you were to ask Bin Laden, he would say that his war
is about the defence of Islam. We need not believe him but we should
nevertheless listen to what our enemies are saying. Bin Laden bases
justification of his war on a corpus of Muslim beliefs and he finds
ammunition in the Koran to give his war Islamic legitimacy. He often
invokes the "sword" verses of the Koran, which urge unprovoked attacks
on infidels. Of course, that is a selective reading of the Koran and
does not mean Islam is an inherently violent faith, but to believers
the book is the word of God.
8. Decline and stagnation in the middle east and the "humiliation" of
the Islamic world. Bernard Lewis is the best-known exponent of the idea
that the Muslim world is in a crisis largely attributable to centuries
of decline, symbolised by the fate of the once powerful Ottoman empire
and its ignominious carve-up by the British and French after the first
world war. Lewis also argues that the problems of the middle east were
later compounded by the import of two western ideas-socialism and
secular Arab nationalism-neither of which delivered on their promises
of creating prosperous and just societies. The economic and political
failures in much of the Muslim world are underlined by statistics such
as the fact that the non-oil revenues of all of the gulf states add up
to less than the GDP of Finland.
Three weeks after 9/11, as the US began launching air strikes against
Taliban positions, a video of Bin Laden sitting on a rocky outcrop was
broadcast on Al-Jazeera. On the tape, Bin Laden said, "What America is
tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted
for scores of years. The Islamic world has been tasting this
humiliation and this degradation for 80 years... Neither America nor
the people who live in it will dream of security before we live in it
in Palestine, and not before the infidel armies leave the land of
Muhammad." So in his first statement following 9/11, Bin Laden
emphasised the "humiliation" of the Muslim world and the negative
effect of US policies in the middle east. In this sense, Bin Laden
seems to agree with Bernard Lewis. Indeed, Bin Laden often talks about
the "humiliation" suffered by Muslims at the hands of the west. For Bin
Laden, the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that carved up the Ottoman empire
between the French and British has the same resonance that the 1919
treaty of Versailles did for Hitler. It must be avenged and reversed.
7. The spread of communications technology. The humiliation felt by
some Muslims is amplified by the communications revolution. The umma,
the global community of Muslims, is far more aware of conflicts around
the Islamic world-and the role of the west in some of those
conflicts-than was the case a decade ago. The creation of Al-Jazeera
in 1996 coincided with Bin Laden's first call for a holy war against
the US. Since then Arabic satellite channels and jihadist websites have
proliferated, sensitising Muslims to the oppression of their
co-religionists in Kashmir, Palestine, the Balkans and so on. These
grievances have fuelled the spread of al Qaeda's ideology and
underpinned the rage of the 9/11 hijackers.
6. Authoritarian middle east regimes helped incubate the militants.
Sayyid Qutb, the Lenin of the militant jihadist movement, and later
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's number two, were radicalised by their
time in the jails of Cairo. It is no accident that so many members of
al Qaeda have been Egyptians and Saudis.
5. The alienation of Muslim immigrants in the west. Three of the four
9/11 pilots and two key planners, Ramzi bin al Shibh and Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, became more militant while living in the west. Perceived
discrimination, alienation and homesickness seem to have turned them
all in a more radical direction. This is true for other anti-western
terrorists. Swati Pandey and I have examined the biographies of 79
terrorists responsible for five of the worst recent anti-western
terrorist attacks. We found that one in four of these terrorists had
attended colleges in the west.
4. US foreign policies in the middle east, in particular its support of
Israel. By Bin Laden's own account, this is why al Qaeda is attacking
America. His critique has never been cultural; he never mentions
Madonna, Hollywood, homosexuality or drugs in his diatribes. US support
for Israel, especially the support it gave to Israel's invasion of
southern Lebanon in 1982, first triggered Bin Laden's anti-Americanism,
which during the 1980s took the form of urging a boycott of US goods.
He was later outraged by the "defiling" export of 500,000 US troops to
Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
3. Bin Laden is an astute tactical leader and rational political actor
fighting a deeply felt religious war against the west. Like others
before him, Bin Laden has made a rational choice to adopt terrorism as
a shortcut to transforming the political landscape. It is clear from
the 9/11 commission report that Bin Laden intervened to make two key
decisions that ensured the success of the attacks. The first was to
appoint Mohammed Atta to be the lead hijacker; Atta would carry out his
responsibilities with grim efficiency. The second was to rein in Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed's plans for ten planes to crash into targets in Asia
and on the east coast of America simultaneously. That number of attacks
would have been hard to synchronise and might not have succeeded.
2. 9/11 was the collateral damage of a clash within Islam. The view
that 9/11 was the result of a conflict within the Muslim world was
brilliantly articulated in early 2002 by middle east scholar Michael
Scott Doran in a Foreign Affairs essay, "Somebody Else's Civil War."
Doran argued that Bin Laden's followers "consider themselves an island
of true believers surrounded by a sea of iniquity and think that the
future of religion itself, and therefore the world depends on them and
their battle." In particular, Egyptians in al Qaeda, such as Ayman
al-Zawahiri, hold this view, inheriting it from Sayyid Qutb, who
believed that most of the modern middle east is living in a state of
pagan ignorance. The Egyptian jihadists believed that they should
overthrow the "near enemy"-middle east regimes run by "apostate"
rulers. Bin Laden took the next step, urging Zawahiri that the root of
the problem was not the "near enemy" but the "far enemy," the US, which
propped up the status quo in the middle east.
1. The 9/11 attacks were the fruit of Bin Laden's flawed strategic
reasoning. Bin Laden's total dominance of al Qaeda meant the
organisation was hostage to his strategic vision. His analysis of US
foreign policy was based on the US withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983,
after the attack on the barracks that killed 241 American servicemen,
and from Somalia in 1993 after 18 US soldiers were killed in Mogadishu.
capable of withstanding only a few strikes before it would withdraw,From these retreats, Bin Laden concluded that the US was a paper tiger,
leaving client regimes in the middle east vulnerable. But the US
response to 9/11 was to destroy the Taliban regime and decimate al
Qaeda. Although 9/11 was a tactical success for al Qaeda, it actually
threatened the organisation's future.
Some of the harshest critics of the 9/11 attacks have been al Qaeda
insiders such as Abd-Al-Halim Adl, who in June 2002 wrote to the 9/11
operational commander, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying: "Today we must
completely halt all external actions until we sit down and consider the
disaster we caused. The east Asia, Europe, America, horn of Africa,
Yemen, Gulf, and Morocco groups have fallen."
To conclude, 9/11 was collateral damage in a civil war within the world
of political Islam. On one side there are those, like Bin Laden, who
want to install Taliban-style theocracies from Indonesia to Morocco. On
the other side there is a silent majority of Muslims who are prepared
to deal with the west, who do not see the Taliban as a workable model
for modern Islamic states, and who reject violence. Bin Laden adopted a
war against "the far enemy" in order to hasten the demise of the "near
enemy" regimes in the middle east. And he used 9/11 to advance that
cause. That effort has, so far, largely failed.
Yet Bin Laden and his attacks on the US have shaped an ideological
movement that will outlive him. Binladenism has drawn tremendous energy
from the war in Iraq, and will probably gain further adherents from the
conflict in Lebanon. Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak was prescient when
he warned in 2003 that the Iraq war would spawn "100 new Bin Ladens."
It is that new generation of militants that is Bin Laden's legacy.
.
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