The seven pillars of folly

On September 11, 2001, General Mahmud Ahmed, then head of Pakistan's military intelligence service, was in Washington guest of the CIA director, George Tenet. The US wanted Pakistan to persuade the Taliban to hand over Osama Bin Laden.

Gen. Mahmud was a strong supporter of the Taliban. That morning he told the State and Defence Departments that Pakistan was doing its best on the Bin Laden front. Oh, to have been in the room when news of the terrorist attack came through!

This week, some of the follies committed by the US in Afghanistan, since then, have been exposed. Nic Robertson of CNN has documented the resurgence of the Taliban and how little the US and British armies can do with their meagre military and cultural resources. On the BBC's Hardtalk, Francesc Vendrell, the EU envoy, listed the several strategic mistakes.

But for a wider and longer view that embraces developments in Pakistan and Uzbekistan, draws on a 30-year professional knowledge of Afghanistan and is based on close acquaintance with some of the principal actors, one should consult Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid's account, Descent Into Chaos (Allen Lane).

Mr Rashid describes the ethos of the ruthless regional ambitions of the generals of Pakistan, not least the rash Pervez Musharraf, nonchalant before leaping into the unknown, combining a personal liberalism with Islamist prejudice. The army controlled foreign policy - with the support of the US - even when the country was under democratically-elected prime ministers, like Benazir Bhutto.

They took advantage of the US, which first blew hot and cold under Bill Clinton, then seemed completely pliable under George W. Bush - who, according to Mr Rashid, actually did have Bin Laden in his grasp at one point.

If nothing changes, Pakistan's new President, Ms Benazir's widower Asif Ali Zardari, will not be able to deliver on the commitment, made on Tuesday beside Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, to deliver regional peace.

President Karzai is himself one of a handful of truly remarkable, if flawed, personalities that the conflict has produced. A few days after 9/11, he rode into Afghanistan on a motorcycle, with an old satellite phone, to rouse the network of supporters he had been arming within Afghanistan.

Mr Rashid also describes a new breed of warrior-entrepreneur: "As I saw al Qaeda evolve in Afghanistan in the 1990s, I considered it nothing more than a blatant power grab by men whose naked political aims were cloaked in the garb of Islamic ideology".

Mr Rashid writes: "The United States and Nato have failed to understand that the Taliban belong to neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan but are a lumpen population, the product of refugee camps, militarised madrassas (religious schools) and the lack of opportunities in the borderland...".

Illuminating on the region, Mr Rashid sometimes writes about al Qaeda as though it were a corporate organisation controlled by Bin Laden. But a study of some of the key documents and personalities of the network suggests otherwise.

Al Qaeda In Its Own Words (Harvard) is edited by Gilles Kepel, a French scholar whose signature works on Islamic extremism combine political analysis with a scrupulous attention to language; he picks up the connotations and allusions that Arabic readers or listeners get but which are often missed by Western analysts.

The four personalities covered are Abdallah Azzam, an ideologue of "jihad", killed in 1989; Bin Laden, al Qaeda's principal ideologue; Ayman al-Zawahiri, the doctor who turned his back on his high bourgeois Egyptian family; and the Jordanian-born thug, eventually killed by US forces in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Very likely, Azzam met all of them. He was a charismatic teacher who stretched the traditional notion of "jihad" for his purposes. Al-Zawahiri was a rival, intelligent and ruthless, who early saw the importance of influencing Bin Laden, a self-taught Islamist, considered an over-eager, dim-witted jihad entrepreneur by some (but for this reason often underestimated) and with bags of money from Saudi Arabia to dispense.

The close textual analysis tends to bear up this thumbnail sketch. Azzam and Al-Zawahiri emerge as more systemic thinkers, trying to depart from Islamic tradition even as they claim to uphold it.

Bin Laden is a shrewd sophist - claiming to represent the Muslim world even as he articulates an understanding of an elite set of believers, which violates the fundamental egalitarianism of orthodox Islam.

Al-Zarqawi was a thug to the end, to go by a letter to Bin Laden that the US forces say they intercepted: Spewing hate against Iraqi Shiites, theology subordinated to practical considerations of terror.

Mr Rashid points out: "The longer the war goes on, the more deeply rooted and widespread the Taliban and their transnational milieu will become". The analysis offered by Prof. Kepel and his colleagues shows an ideology separable from the Taliban but which can serve to orientate them in the peculiarly modern, madcap world of which they are a product.

We cannot afford to misapprehend either al Qaeda or the Taliban any longer.

ranierfsadni@europe.com