Observer

9/11 One Year On: Al-Qaeda And The Roots Of Terror

tombarton — Sun, 08 Sep 2002 00:00:00 -0700

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THEY WERE living in a bombed-out school. It had no roof and no windows. They had no food and no blankets. There were three families: nine adults and 16 children. Or at least there were when I first spoke to them. Two days later there were eight adults and 14 children.

The school was on the outskirts of Gardez, a town high on a plateau in eastern Afghanistan. It was November and, although the days were warm, the nights were cold enough to freeze puddles in the dirt streets, cold enough to make the town's packs of stray dogs howl, and cold enough to kill Mohamed Rahmatullah's mother and five-year-old daughter one night and his four-year-old son the next.

Rahmatullah and his family had left their homes on the Shomali plains, 150 miles to the north, six weeks earlier, when the US bombardment began. Their money got them to Gardez, but not to safety in Pakistan as they had hoped, and they did not have the cash to buy food or a roof over their heads. Overhead the vapour trails of American jets streaked across the washed-out winter sky.

Six months later Rahmatullah was gone. Other families were living in the wreck of Gardez's primary school. The day before a local warlord had mortared the town, killing 25. A year on, little has changed for the innocents in the way of the bombs. And that is a failing that threatens to derail the war on terror.

To start with, the US-led campaign achieved most of its immediate aims with ease. The Taliban collapsed, al-Qaeda's camps were destroyed and the group itself was dispersed. Most of its leaders, notably Osama bin Laden, have yet to be captured, but are, for the moment, out of action.

Why, then, is there a growing sense that the war on terror is in fact far from won? Partly because we now know far more about the nature of al-Qaeda. And partly because, after a week in which Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, narrowly escaped assassination and a bomb killed at least 30 in Kabul, we are realising that a stable Afghanistan is still a long way off.

Just north of Gardez is a wide, open plain studded with small villages. In May I stepped out of an RAF Chinook with a troop of Royal Marines who were in search of 'AQT', as the British military call 'al-Qaeda and former Taliban' elements, watched by the locals. 'We are pleased to see them here,' one village headman told me. 'Now maybe things will be good for Afghanistan.'

AFTER THE FALL of the Taliban there was joy. In Kabul, coffee shops were thronged with returning refugees discussing the past, the future and the rapidly rising prices. In Herat, people like Mairy Easa were able to teach female students in public. Her husband, Abdul, who fought the Soviet forces and had seen six of his brothers killed by the Afghan communist secret police, remembers dancing in the streets.

In April in Bamiyan, where the Taliban had destroyed two 1,700-year-old Buddha statues a year before, people spoke to me of democracy and justice. Now they speak of their fears, not their hopes.

So what is going wrong? Afghan government officials, aid workers and development economists all say that the problem is money.

Last November the leaders of the developed nations promised that the Afghans would not be abandoned.

But out of pounds 1.1bn pledged for 2001, only a fraction has arrived, and there is little prospect of more in the near future. The situation is so bad that even the UNHCR - which dealt with 1.5 million returnees - has run out of cash. Now, as winter nears again, seven million people are at risk of famine.

The whole reconstruction project is threatened. Traditionally, Afghan leaders owe their authority to their skill in battle, their wisdom in settling disputes and the resources they can access for their followers. In a country this poor, the latter is critical. Any leader who fails to bring benefits swiftly to his followers will find them defecting.

Karzai is now in an unenviable position. His bravery and judgment are not in doubt, but he must deliver practical benefits soon. If he is killed, few doubt that chaos would follow.

In late 1999 Mohamed Atta, the man who would lead the strike on 11 September, left Hamburg for Afghanistan. With him were three other key men in the hijack plot.

Details of the trip emerged 10 days ago in pre-trial hearings for Mounir al-Motassadeq, a Moroccan alleged to have been a key 'cog' in Atta's scheme. According to the prosecution, the four men were travelling to Kandahar, the al-Qaeda centre, 'to get backing for their plan'. That detail is crucial. It indicates that Atta and his co-conspirators thought up the 11 September attacks, not the al-Qaeda leadership. Atta went to Afghanistan to seek bin Laden's approval and logistical help.

He would have joined a long queue. It is increasingly clear that bin Laden and his aides instigated only a fraction of the attacks for which they have been blamed.

Hundreds of activists from all over the world beat a path to bin Laden's door to present him with their dreams of destruction. The Saudi, with his funds, his reserves of experienced experts and his training camps, could turn those dreams into reality.

Early last year, for example, two Islamist groups from Iraqi Kurdistan arrived to request aid and training. The men then returned home and launched suicide attacks.

Even where al-Qaeda has been more pro-active, it has looked to 'plug into' pre-existing groups in Algeria, South-East Asia and elsewhere. Their offers of help have not always been accepted.

A close reading of court testimony and interviews with al-Qaeda-associates shows that many activists overcame huge obstacles to make their way to Afghanistan. Men like Rasheed Daoud al'Owhali, who drove a truck bomb into the US Embassy in Nairobi in 1998, gave up a comfortable life in Saudi Arabia.

Ahmed Ressam, a penniless thief who tried to blow up Los Angeles airport in 1999, made his way across half the world to find bin Laden's camps.

Letters I found last November in the deserted Khaldan camp in Afghanistan, where the hijackers are suspected of having trained, showed again that the hundreds of men who passed through were angry, motivated and full of ideas for waging a violent 'jihad' against the West.

This is crucial. Bin Laden built a 'terrorist university' unlike any previously seen. He was able to do it because of a historically unique set of factors: chaos in Afghanistan, the weakness of its neighbours, especially Pakistan, the emergence of a new, violent ideology with powerful backers in the Middle East - all compounded by a profound lack of interest in the region on the part of Western powers.

He - or someone similar - will only be able to do it again if a similar set of circumstances occur. This shows the importance of reconstructing Afghanistan and preventing any situation developing elsewhere that is as much 'counterterrorism' as the sexier, special forces operations.

But the fact that bin Laden was a facilitator, not a Bond-style villain orchestrating a global network, stresses another key point. Destroy ing the 'terrorist university' does not eliminate its students' reasons for wanting to attend. Nor does it stop them acting.

IN CONVERSATIONS in Gaza, Algiers, Karachi, Damascus and Amman and in hundreds of kebab stalls and in taxi ranks and hotel lobbies throughout the Middle East and Asia in the last two years, the same fundamental themes resurface.

A 20-year-old university student in any of these places is confronted with an invidious choice. He can either aspire to the perceived glamour of the West and accept, as he looks at the squalor around him, the lack of jobs and fundamental freedoms, that his will always be a second-rate, ersatz version of Western life as shown on MTV. Or he can embrace the empowering certainties of extremist Islam. Hardest of all, he can try to reconcile the two.

On Friday, on a hill above Kabul, a father helped bury his 21-year-old son who had died of wounds sustained in the market place bombing. 'I had two sons before, now I only have one,' Shah Mohamed said, weeping quietly.

The tragedy for Shah Mohamed, for Rahmatullah and for all the Afghans is that, as the world attempts to work out solutions to these pressing problems, whether through military force or other means, someone is always going to get caught in the crossfire.

Byline

By Jason Burke, additional research by Tom Barton

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Observer News Pages, Pg. 23

Six Months That Changed The World

tombarton — Sun, 10 Mar 2002 00:00:00 -0800

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· 795,763 tonnes of building rubble have been removed from Ground Zero...

· Workers have cleared 148,429 tonnes of steel from the World Trade Centre site - including 50 handguns.

· The remains of 749 victims from the New York disaster have been identified...

· ...as well as 273 complete bodies and 250 pieces of jewellery. 2,672 death certificates have been issued. A further 158 people are unaccounted for.

· 'Asymmetrical warfare', 9/11 and 'Osama effect' are set to be included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

· The 200 Royal Marines in Afghanistan have eaten 30,800 dehydrated meals (including curries) and drunk 101,640 gallons of water.

· Amateur musicians have posted 64 songs commemorating the 11 September attacks on the web.

· There have been 46 documentaries about 11 September and the 'war on terror' broadcast on British TV.

· More than 4,000 FBI agents are investigating the 9/11 attacks.

· Twelve US soldiers have been killed in combat during the war in Afghanistan, while 14 have died in non-combat accidents.

· Civilian deaths in Afghanistan total 3,608. Airstrikes in Kosovo killed 500 and 3,200 Iraqi civilians died in the Gulf war.

· US planes have dropped 328,000 blankets, 3.4 million pounds of wheat and 2.5 million daily rations into Afghanistan.

· Ten thousand tonnes of bombs have fallen on Afghanistan since 11 September, half of what fell on London in the Blitz.

· At least 1.2 million refugees have left their homes. Four thousand have gone back.

· The Afghani has gone from 78,500 to the dollar, to 4,762 to the dollar.

· Wal-Mart has sold 3,000,000 US flags,10 times its usual number.

· The Dow Jones index is now worth $386bn, or 11 per cent, more than it was on 10 September.

· The first women's magazine for five years has been launched in Kabul.

Byline

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Special Supplement; Page 1

How Experts See The World Now

tombarton — Sun, 10 Mar 2002 00:00:00 -0800

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China

Dr Peter Ferdinand, Warwick University

The Chinese leadership have been far more accommodating towards the US in the second half of the year than they were in the first half. The Chinese got very hot under the collar over the spy plane incident in spring last year. What would they have done then had they found the President's plane had been bugged, as they have recently? This is possibly because the Chinese now see that they can work with the US on a wide range of security issues, such as the terrorist threat in Xinjiang, which they previously thought were going to be turned against them.

Pakistan

Professor Geoff Wood, University of Bath

In India, it's clear that there has been a strengthening of a Hindu nationalist perspective, and that this may lead to groups in Pakistan marching in favour of their Muslim brethren in India. Events in Kashmir have led to a strengthening of the pro-Taliban Inter Services Intelligence group within the Pakistan army, and that poses a threat to President Musharraf if he is trying to get some kind of return to representative and vaguely secular democracy.

Afghanistan

Haleh Afshar, professor of Politics and Women's Studies, York University; Lecturer in Islamic Law, Strasbourg University

I don't see that a sensible political solution can emerge in an unsafe environment. I think the country will split into fractions. But it has always been illogical to assume that Afghanistan is one country. It was pulled together as a kind of buffer zone, and really it consists of a great many different tribal groupings, and at the very very best one could hope for a very loose kind of confederation of different groups, a kind of federal structure. But even that will need some kind of secure environment, so I'm very pessimistic.

Egypt

Dr Michael Johnson, Dean of the School of African and Asian Studies, Sussex University

It rather depends on whether America goes into Iraq. If they do then it will only stoke antagonism all over the Arab world, and would unite Arab countries against America and any of its allies. I think that Egypt would have to be seen to be being opposed but would not make a huge fuss about it. I think that an attack on Iraq would be seen as an attack on the Arab would and it would encourage radical movements and it could easily encourage Islamic opposition in other countries.

Israel / Palestine

Professor Efraim Karsh, Professor of Mediterranean Studies, King's College, London

My belief has always been, if you look at Israel or the Middle East over the last two or three hundred years, the main dynamics have been generated in the region, not outside. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it is nothing to do with the wider world of Islam or whatever. I think in six months' time, either it will be more of the same or Israel will have destroyed the Palestinian Authority, and maybe a new leadership will come, and then maybe some negotiations

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Special supplement; page 5

9/11 Six Months On: New York Factfile

tombarton — Sun, 10 Mar 2002 00:00:00 -0800

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* This year's Sundance Film Festival will show five films on 11 September.

* 94,000 jobs have disappeared from New York City in the past six months, costing the city Dollars 800m.

* Dollars 100m worth of art was destroyed in the collapse of the World Trade Centre, including a huge tapestry by Joan Miro and a 25ft metal mobile by Alexander Calder. Some of this art has been recovered: the broken pieces of a bronze sculpture by Auguste Rodin, from a collection owned by Gerald Cantor, can be seen at Fresh Kills salvage site.

* 343 people from the New York Fire Department died in the attacks. They expect to have recruited around 900 new firefighters by the summer. Nearly 2,000 firefighters have sought counselling since September and 350 are still on stress-related medical leave.

* 380,000 New Yorkers who lost their medical insurance as a direct result of the attack have enrolled in government-backed emergency health programmes. 32,900 have applied for food stamps, usually reserved for the homeless or unemployed.

* Seven of the 11 subway stations closed by the attack have now reopened.

* Because of a ban on single-occupant vehicles on some bridges rush-hour traffic in Manhattan has declined by 16 percent since 11 September. Up to 65,000 more passengers a day use the ferries.

* 78 British people died in the World Trade Centre attacks. The youngest was 22-year-old Vincent Wells, an employee of Cantor Fitzgerald. The British World Trade Centre Disaster Fund has raised Dollars 7m for the families and victims of the attacks.

Byline

By TOM BARTON

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Observer Special Supplement, Pg. 7 "