My shameless plug for Jonathan Schanzer

To simplify this entire post into one sentence, Jonathan Schanzer is a superb counter-terrorism analyst and his book, Al-Qaeda's Armies: Middle East Affiliate Groups & The Next Generation of Terror is something that should probably be on any aspiring terror watcher's reading list. The broader context of the post, however, deals with all of the terror literature that has cropped up since 9/11 and why I think that we need more books of this nature in stores.

• Predominant Literature on al-Qaeda
• Reasons For This Limitation
• Differing Methodologies
• Where Schanzer Fits In
• My Own Reading List

Predominant Literature on al-Qaeda

Ever since 9/11, literally hundreds of books have been published on subjects ranging such as international terrorism, al-Qaeda, Islamic extremism, and in particular on Osama bin Laden. With regard to the latest category, I myself am of the opinion that by the time this is all over we are going to see as many books, studies, papers, and articles on the development of bin Laden as we currently do on Hitler.

I have tried to read as many of these books as I can get my hands on and/or afford on the modest income of a college student and, like many such readers, have been rather mystified by the amount of not only contradictory information but also of differences in perspectives as far as the authors of these books are concerned. As I noted at one point in the comments, these works appear (to me, at least) to fit into one of the following categories:

1. Right-wing: This is just my way of categorizing the books and I suspect that a number of the authors would take issue with me for such an ideological characterization. The majority of these books subscribe to the Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" between the West in general or the United States in particular which is sometimes declared nothing less than World War IV. The enemy is usually described as an amorphous movement of which al-Qaeda is the chief of generally known as "Islamism," which is usually not distinguished from the rest of Islam in any measureable way, which may be one of the reasons for the repopularization of terms like dhimmi and kufr in certain circles. The Islamists are understood as being supported by a loose coalition of states that at its greatest extent is seen as consisting of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and occasionally Pakistan as well. No measureable attempt is made to distinguish between local and global-oriented Islamists, and both the war on terrorism as defined by the policies of George W. Bush as well as the Israeli response to the Intifada is wholeheartedly supported.

2. Left-wing: There should probably be a distinction here between center-left and far-left, but that said both seem to share a number of characteristics. Whether conspiracy-mongering or merely attempting to analyze what they view as the realities of post-Cold War unipolar world, most of these authors generally view misguided US or Western policies as being the driving force of the current terrorism coming from the Islamic world, traditionally starting with the Western folly of support for the Afghan mujahideen during 1980s and leading all the way up to the present with US support for authoritarian regimes throughout the Middle East and unqualified US support to Israel in general and Sharon's Likud party in particular. Most pro-US Muslim states are viewed almost unequivocally as "fascist" or "tyrannical," though little discussion is made of the very real fascist derivations that exist in Syria and formerly Iraq. The role of anti-American regimes in sponsoring terrorism against the US is generally ignored or at least strongly downplayed to the extent that such actions, if they occur, should result in any kind of US military retaliation against said regimes, who are seen as having a sovereignty that the US must respect, though Russia or any of the neighboring states need not. Islam is seen as a religion whose inhabitants are majority peaceful except for a few bad apples who are sometimes equated with the Christian right in the United States. The US-led invasion of Iraq was a mistake of unparalleled dimensions, as is Israel's response to the Intifada.

3. Journalist writings: These are generally pretty good as far as the basic stories of their books are concerned, but many journalists are quite capable of being manipulated in print the same way they are in the regular press, especially on such complex subjects. As a result, while many of these books contain some excellent information, they also tend to be somewhat superficial in their analysis and quite suceptible to repeating easily-refutable erroneous information or myths derived from either other media or government sources.

4. Accounts of former government officials: Just wait till Tenet's book comes out and I'll have another one to add to this stack. These books are generally quite useful if you want to get inside the heads of the people who were at one point on the front lines of the war on terrorism. Unfortunately, these books are not nor do they purport to be unbiased and as a result in addition to the information you get all of the baggage (personal and analytical alike) that was part of these former officials' careers. Not surprisingly, these books also place their authors in the best possible light and generally contain at least some argument (explicit or implicit) against their detractors or their positions.

Please understand, I am not "bashing" any of these approaches or their authors, many of whom I have great respect for and even agree with as far as much of their analysis, predispositions, and conclusions are concerned. My main problem, however, is that out of the myriad of works available on this topic there exist very, very few resembling a serious overview of al-Qaeda.

Reasons For This Limitation

To begin with, it's a pretty tall order and the subject spans the globe. A detailed, in-depth study on al-Qaeda would require quite a lot of work and quite a lot of travel to accomplish and involve interviews with military, intelligence, and law enforcement officials, interviews with captured terrorists, reading hundreds of pages of al-Qaeda propaganda, government documents, media reports, etc. And then consider the utter and complete nightmare involved in fact-checking it all once you've gone through all the relevant information!

So what are we left with, then?

In Imperial Hubris, Mike Scheuer explains that of all the books out there on al-Qaeda, only two, Jason Burke's Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam (and presumably its companion Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror) and Rohan Gunaratna's Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (and presumably its soon-to-be-published companions).

That's it.

Oh, and for those who are interested, at some point much further down the line I plan on writing a history of the war on terrorism, using the database I periodically post excerpts of on my website as a guide. This is not the book referenced at the top of my blog, which refers to a science fiction/fantasy anthology that up until now only Aziz Poonawalla has seen (if anybody else is interested, shoot me an e-mail at scorpius@shwiggie.com), but I still think that writing a history of the war on terrorism will make for an interesting project further down the line.

But back to Gunaratna and Burke.

Differing Methodologies

Readers will know that I am exceeding partial towards the "Gunaratnan" view of al-Qaeda, which provides what I think is the best definition for what the organization is:

Al Qaeda's organizational and operational infrastructure differs markedly from other guerrilla or terrorist groups ... Al Qaeda is also characterized by a broad-based ideology, a novel structure, a robust capacity for regeneration and a very diverse membership that cuts across ethnic, class and national boundaries. It is neither a single group nor a coalition of groups: it comprised a core base or bases in Afghanistan, satellite terrorist cells worldwide, a conglomerate of Islamist political parties, and other largely independent terrorist groups that it draws on for offensive actions and other responsibilities. Leaders of all the above are co-opted as and when necessary to serve as an integral part of Al Qaeda's high command, which is run via a vertical leadership structure that provides strategic direction and tactical support to its horizontal network of compartmentalized cells and associate organizations ...

To further advance the Islamist project, in 1998 Al Qaeda was reorganized into four distinct but interlinking entities. The first was a pyramidal structure to facilitate strategic and tactical direction; the second was a global terrorist network; the third was a base force for guerrilla warfare inside Afghanistan; and the fourth was a loose coalition of transnational terrorist and guerrilla groups.

The "Burkean" view of al-Qaeda is quite different, viewing the actual al-Qaeda organization as being limited to an exceedingly small number of people, the majority of whom were captured or killed when the US attacked Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda in Burke's mind is not an organization but a brand name adopted by governments to refer to the amorphous adherents of violent Islamic extremism. There is no coordinated global terrorist offensive against the US or the West with bin Laden and his lieutenants as its leaders, but rather the actions of isolated and unconnected groups of Islamic extremists with only the most peripheral of ties to the actual al-Qaeda organization. Because al-Qaeda is an idea rather than organization, attempting to destroy it militarily is nothing short of folly. You can't kill an idea and the US attempt to do so is only serving to create a stronger following for it. I should also add that Juan Cole and many other academics and analysts (as well as investigative journalists such as Seymour Hersh) have been heavily influenced by the "Burkean" view in their own conceptions of al-Qaeda.

Faced with these two stark parallel interpretations of the evidence, the 9/11 Commission seems to have tried to juggle the two in its final report (though star witness Dick Clarke is a Gunaratnan, at least from my reading of Against All Enemies), which is how we end up with stuff like the following:

• the Gunaratnan description of al-Qaeda's impressive infrastructure and terrorist coalition on p. 57
• the bizarre attempt to merge Gunaratna and Burke's view of Afghan-trained terrorists on p. 67
• the Burkean description of the Millennium Plot on p. 180

And yes, you can add this CYA attempt to merge data interpretations to all the problems I still have problems with the 9/11 Commission, if due for no other reason than what a commenter so eloquently wrote in response: "But while those [my objections] are the visible clowns in the car, I share a great annoyance that anything the 9/11 Commission recommended is viewed with greater reverence than Moses' bringing tablets down from Mount Sinai."

That said, I tend to find myself in agreement Gunaratna a lot more than I do Burke for a whole host of reasons, foremost among them:

1. Dr. Gunaratna is Sri Lankan and has been working for years on the Tamil Tigers before he started writing on al-Qaeda. All he is essentially doing is using the same methodologies that he employed when studying the LTTE, including thorny issues like those of state sponsorship, and redirecting them towards the much larger al-Qaeda. This is important, because one of the reasons I think he's so good is because he was able to establish himself as an analyst without getting involved in all of the inter-agency ideological battles that has occurred in the US. Burke, on the other hand, seems to have a very clear axe to grind when it comes to either the Bush administration, the neocons, in particular being quite eager to dismiss off-hand the former's opinion on issues of terrorism with his own.

2. Because he's been studying the majority Hindu LTTE for so long, he is quite familiar with the phenomenon of their own oppression of Sri Lankan Muslims within their guerrilla zone even as they make extensive use of Muslims to support their procurement network. Apply that same model to the Shi'ite/Sunni, secular/religious, or even Muslim/Christian divide and you'll see why I think that he is able to view such situations as al-Qaeda interaction with Iran from a far more balanced perspective and without ideological blinders than are many other observers.

3. Burke strikes me as going to great and in many cases quite painful lengths to separate such groups as the Chechen jihadis, Abu Musab Zarqawi's al-Tawhid wal Jihad, and even the every day terror detainee from bin Laden, whereas Dr. Gunaratna is extremely open to the possibility of such links and doesn't simply dismiss them off-hand. I tend to think that this is extremely unwise from an analytical perspective, not the least of which because I don't think that he's correct in many cases. This is, as with just about everything else in the war on terrorism, open for debate, but my view is that there is simply too much of a perponderance of evidence in many cases to accept the Burkean view. Moreover, I would argue that at the absolute least leaving oneself open to the possibility of broader links is an awful lot better of a view from an intelligence/law enforcement perspective - a Burkean view of El Sayyid Nosair or Mohammed Bouyeri would have completely missed the far broader terrorist networks that both men were part of.

4. Dr. Gunaratna's adheres to the Greek principle of kyamon apechete (my term, not his) and as such goes to great pains not to involve himself in the domestic politics of other countries. The edition of his book in May 2002 identified all of the major players in the Bali bombing nearly half a year before it occurred, yet even after it occurred his first act was not to run around screaming "I told you so!" to the Indonesian government but rather to offer practical suggestions for the dismantling of the various Jemaah Islamiyyah mantiqis set up across Southeast Asia and to offer to his expertise to the very people who had shunned his advise months earlier. In addition, he has served as a prosecution witness against a number of terrorist suspects in both the US and UK. To me, that means a lot more as far as his dedication to the war on terrorism and lack of a political agenda than Burke sharing his insights with the BBC for "The Power of Nightmares."

5. Despite his extensive work on Sri Lanka, the LTTE, and his knowledge of its extensive use of a majority Muslim procurement network, Gunaratna has not made any attempts to link the LTTE back to al-Qaeda except for a handful of well-documented black market connections.

6. It strikes me as infinitely more probable that the various "spikes" in the field of international terrorism (such as during the whole month of October 2002) that periodically occur either concurrently with or immediately following statements by the al-Qaeda leadership are the result of some kind of loosely coordinated global counter-offensive by al-Qaeda than that they are the result of a bunch of unconnected groups acting on their own. Sorry, but I just don't think that there are that many coincidences in the world.

But that's just me and I may well be not giving Burke his due. My advice would be for anybody who wants to know the ins and outs of both methodologies to read both authors and decide for yourself. There are also real-world policy implications to who is right on this one, as if Gunaratna is correct then and al-Qaeda is an organization than it can be attacked militarily, one of the three responses that he recommends at the end of his book. If al-Qaeda is simply an idea or a brand name as Burke suggests, then obviously our responses shift.

Oh, and for those eager to embrace the Burkean view out of the belief that it mitigates any further US military responses to terrorism, I would point out that al-Qaeda as an idea rather than an organization is a heck of a lot more compatible with the Huntingtonian view than is the Gunaratnan, which holds that there are at tops between 100-110,000 people that the US has to neutralize. If Burke is right and al-Qaeda is nothing more than idea, then we should regard the 40-80% of Saudis who support bin Laden (depending on one's survey) as potential terrorists who have to be neutralized. Once you remove from the equation that US policies are the cause of anti-Americanism (one of Scheuer's main points is that bin Laden is not simply a reactionary against the US but has an articulate totalitarian ideology) then that's a lot of potential terrorists that have to be neutralized out of a population of about ~20,000,000 Saudis.

Anybody willing to front the butcher's bill for that one? I mention it here simply as food for thought.

Where Schanzer Fits In

Schanzer's book, which I have yet to receive, is probably best viewed as being of the Gunaratnan school of thought with respect to al-Qaeda, as can be seen from the title alone. As he explains in an interview with Frontpage Magazine:

One year after the 9/11 attacks, analysts inside the beltway were spending countless hours researching al-Qaeda, but there was something missing. The primary target known as "al-Qaeda" had been oversimplified. As a result, many Americans believed that if the U.S. military simply captured Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the terrorist threat would dissipate. The Bali bombing and the attack on the French Tanker Limburg in Yemen that fall demonstrated to me that al-Qaeda's power and reach stemmed from a network of small and local groups that work as "subcontractors" for terrorist attacks all over the world, even as bin Laden and his top lieutenants hid in distant caves. In other words, the al-Qaeda network was able to be resilient because it relied not only upon its top leaders and clandestine cells, but also "affiliate groups," which are larger, homegrown, organic Islamist terror groups that became volunteer fighters for the al-Qaeda matrix.

I worked with the hypothesis that the next challenge in the War on Terror is to defeat this growing network of affiliates and cells – what amounts to "al-Qaeda's Armies." As such, the book examines the affiliate groups operating specifically in the Arab world. I looked at Asbat al-Ansar in Lebanon, the Islamic Army of Aden in Yemen, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat in Algeria, Ansar al-Islam in Iraq, as well as the two original affiliate groups in Egypt – al-Jihad and al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya.

As can be seen from this description, he clearly accepts Gunaratna's view of al-Qaeda as an organization but is far more preoccupied with the various affiliate groups that provide it with its cannon fodder and officer corps. While I realize that this book is likely to fail the litmus test for many American liberals' ideological purity because its author is open to the claims provided by Mr. al-Shamari (an abbreviated version of which was printed up in the Weekly Standard awhile back), I would nevertheless recommend it as a welcome companion to Gunaratna's own chapters on al-Qaeda's infrastructure in the Middle East.

My Own Reading List

A number of people have asked me for my own reading list as it relates to resources international terrorism, so here they are. The ever-valuable DoctorZin is working to get it so that I can eventually advertise these on my blog, but until he does here you go:

General al-Qaeda Primers

These should probably be read before anything else:

• Inside Al Qaeda by Rohan Gunaratna
• Through Our Enemies' Eyes by Anonymous (Michael Scheuer)

Bin Laden

Fairly thorough (though contradictory, see the very bottom) readers on Public Enemy #1 and his immediate circle of lieutenants.

• Holy War, Inc. by Peter Bergen
• Osama: The Making of a Terrorist by Jonathan Randal
• Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America by Yossef Bodansky
• The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Laden's Right-Hand Man by Montasser al-Zayyat

9/11

Investigations into the attacks:

• Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 by Gerald Posner
• The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, And Why by John Miller and Michael Stone

Afghanistan and Beyond

The primary and secondary theaters in the war on terrorism:

• Understanding Terror Networks by Marc Sageman
• Al-Qaida's Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network by Evan Kohlmann
• Hatred's Kingdom by Dore Gold
• Blood from Stones by Douglas Farah
• Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid
• Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid
• The Hunt for Bin Laden by Robin Moore
• Who killed Daniel Pearl? by Bernard-Henri Levy
• Inside Al Qaeda: How I Infiltrated the World's Deadliest Terrorist Organization by Mohammed Sifaoui
• Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror by Richard Miniter

Iraq

The current major battlefield in the war on terrorism:

• Tyranny's Ally by David Wurmser
• Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq by Kanan Makiya
• The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America by Stephen F. Hayes
• The Iraq War by John Keegan
• Operation Iraqi Freedom: A Strategic Assessment by Thomas Donnelly
• Hunting Down Saddam: The Inside Story of the Search and Capture by Robin Moore

There's a lot more (including War Against the Terror Masters by Michael Ledeen), but that's quite enough for now to get anybody started on understanding the nature of the enemy, I think. Some (a cynic might say much) of the information contained in the above-listed books contradicts itself, but I still think that all of the books that I listed above contain valuable information that will hopefully be of use, in addition to Schanzer's book, for the reasons I outlined above.