The Guardian , A perceptive analysis of militant Islam from the heart of the CIA, Imperial Hubris, underestimates the variety of its believers, says Jason Burke
Anonymous is an officer in America's Central Intelligence Agency who has been analysing Islamic militancy for 20 years, mainly from behind a desk in the US.
His first book, entitled Through Our Enemy's Eyes, attempted, largely successfully, to bring some critical rigour to the rubbish being spouted about “al-Qaida” in the months immediately following September 11. With Imperial Hubris, Anonymous hopes to explain “why we are losing the war on terror” by exposing flaws in our analysis of modern Islamic militancy.
The question that he hopes to answer is the one asked repeatedly by Americans since September 11: Why do they hate us? Anonymous is rightly angered by the standard, and generally accepted, response: “because of what we are”. Wrong, he says, they hate us because of what we do. Bin Laden is a rational actor with clear political aims who sees his task as rousing the Muslim nation to defend itself against western aggression. It does not matter if their vision of a belligerent “Crusader-Zionist alliance” set on the humiliation, division and subordination of the lands of Islam is inaccurate. It is what they think. And we need to understand what they are thinking if we are to deal with them.
This is useful and important. Currently each side in the “war on terror” sees the other as the aggressor. This explains the odd symmetry of the statements of Bush and Bin Laden. They both feel their respective culture, society and civilisation is facing a genuine existential threat. When Bin Laden lists the various locations around the world – Chechnya, Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, the Philippines – where Muslims have been the victims of violence that has been largely sanctioned or ignored by the international community, he makes a case that, as Anonymous says, is at the very least plausible. The case that Bush makes is also convincing to many. That both men are wrong doesn't matter. It's the perception that counts.
Bin Laden has always recognised this. In many ways, he acts and thinks like a traditional revolutionary political activist. He is utopian, believing that through human endeavour “in the way of God” a true and just society can be constructed. He knows, too, that the number of people who have believed this is limited and knows that this enlightened elite must work as a revolutionary vanguard to agitate, mobilise and radicalise the masses, who have yet to understand their duty. The best way to do that is through propaganda: by word (television, cassettes etc) and by deed (spectacular and hopefully transformative attacks on symbolic targets).
The central message of Imperial Hubris is that Bin Laden is far closer to achieving his aims than we are to achieving ours. If Bin Laden is seeking to attract as many in the Islamic world to his radical banner as possible, then the groundswell of support for his aims, if not always his methods, indicates that he is doing rather well. If our goal is to reduce the threat of terrorism associated with Islamic militancy to a manageable level, then we are doing rather badly.
To do better, Anonymous argues, we either need to change the policies that make so many Muslims detest us or be ready for an all-out war that will involve razed cities (he mentions Tokyo and Dresden) and astronomic body counts on both sides. To actually suggest that American policies might in some way have contributed to the rise of militant Islam is, of course, deeply controversial in the US. Anonymous even worries that the support for Israel offered so unquestioningly by Washington might not make strategic sense, given the anger, and thus violence, that it appears to unleash.
But then, having made a series of valid and important points, Anonymous turns his attention to the “politically correct” who have refused to recognise the true nature of Islam itself. Throughout the book, he makes sweeping references to “Muslims” and “Arabs”. He speaks with contempt of the “unwashed, unlettered masses” of the Middle East who neither want, nor, in his view, are capable of, democracy.
Anonymous consistently talks about “Muslims” as if the actions and judgments of all 1.3 billion worldwide were determined by a profound religiosity. He quotes radical hardline Saudi Arabian websites repeatedly, as if the pronouncements of a Wahhabi cleric were somehow representative of the views of an Indonesian, a Moroccan or a British-Pakistani Muslim, or of a secular Iraqi who, though he considers himself a Muslim, at least in cultural terms, is an atheist. The effects on identity of ethnicity, gender, class or age appear not to be considered important. I am writing this in in southern Thailand while researching a resurgence of militancy here. Are Thai Muslims closer to every other member of the umma than they are to their Buddhist compatriots? Anonymous seems to think so. He is wrong.
Islam informs values and cultures – and thus behaviour – in an immensely varied, complex and nuanced way. Resources within the religion have allowed it to serve, over centuries, as a discourse that allows the articulation of profound social or political grievances, simultaneously explaining problems while prescribing a programme of action for their resolution. If Anonymous had spent a little more time in the regions he is writing about and less time fighting the bureaucratic battles that have clearly made him so bitter about the failings of his peers, politicians, armchair generals and hand-wringing liberals, he might have understood that a supposed “love of Allah” (something he says is apparently impossible for a non-Muslim to understand) is not the most important thing in the lives of most people in the “Islamic world” and that a desire for health, security, education, opportunity for personal advancement and justice is.
This fundamental error shows in Anonymous's flawed analysis of Afghanistan. He sees the country as on the brink of an insurrection to bring Islamists to power. All Afghans are, in Anonymous's view, possessed of a violent hatred for all things American. Actually, in the many months I have spent in the country in the past three years, I have found surprisingly little animosity towards the west. Though there are grave problems throughout the country, and particularly in the southeast, the Taliban are not about to sweep back into power. They are limited to raids launched from the mountains of the interior and would collapse without support from religio-political networks in Pakistan.
Six months ago I visited Sangesar, the small village southwest of Kandahar, where the Taliban were formed 10 years ago. The villagers had no great desire to see Mullah Omar's militia return to power. They just wanted a well and a road, and told me that they didn't really care who provided them. At no point in Anonymous's substantial book does he mention economic development as a possible counter-terrorism strategy.
