The Base: in Search of Al Qaeda, the Terror Network that Shook the World

by Jane Corbin

The late 1990s saw a number of attacks against American military and government offices, most notably the US Embassy bombings in Africa in 1998. On 11 September 2001, however, the scale of this conflict changed dramatically. The kidnapping of four commercial airliners led to the deaths of some 3,000 people. As in 1998, the terrorist group responsible for this devastating campaign was Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, or "The Base", a loose network of extremists, many of whom are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their cause. Jane Corbin has studied Bin Laden's organization for four years and has followed in his footsteps through the Middle East, Africa, Europe and America. She has conducted hundreds of interviews with key eyewitnesses, investigators and intelligence officers around the world. Tracing al-Qaeda's roots back to the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Corbin picks up the complicated trail that led to the collapse of the Twin Towers and beyond. And as President Bush's "war on terror" in Afghanistan poses more questions than it answers, Corbin examine's the West's response to the threat of al-Qaeda and declares it a failure. "The Base" should be essential reading for anyone interested in the history and likely further operation of arguably the biggest threat to democracy since the Cold War.

Genres: History

315 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, this stands up better fifteen years later than many potboilers churned out by journalists in the wake of great events. It is a summary of what was known at the time about Al-Qaeda, the event itself and the early Western foray into Afghanistan.

Corbin, a BBC investigative journalist, includes her own reportage, often under difficult conditions but she does not allow it to dominate. If there is a fault, it is a retrospective one. She allows herself to be a little seduced by the political preoccupations of one faction in the Western security apparat.

As she was writing, Washington was going through one of its usual bouts of passing the buck and blaming others which often makes one wonder how this massively powerful super-state has ever managed to hold it together as an imperial power.

If Lenin was right about splits in the ruling order being a precondition for revolution, the US should have crumbled long ago but, of course, it has not. It will probably muddle on for decades or centuries yet so long as it stays prosperous. If anything, divisions have significantly worsened.

Her primary security sources seem to be the 'hawks' in the game, itching to position international terrorism (disputably) as the central problem of their time and inclined to get a little over-excited as the 'proof' of their thesis got landed to them on a plate by Bin Laden.

So, a slight warning is required - take some of the interpretation of events with a pinch of salt and go to a wider range of sources for the 'big picture' - but this is a solid account in every other respect even it it has to run into the dirt of unresolved issues in Afghanistan at the end by necessity.

She cannot know, of course, just what a disaster Afghanistan was to turn out for the West. The even bigger disaster of Iraq was still a twinkle in the eye of the neo-con loons but the last chapters show us enough evidence of incompetence and 'spin' to suggest what would ensue.

In fact, what really comes out of this book is the sheer brutal effectiveness of what was really a fairly tiny organisation (Al-Qaeda) set against the lumbering dinosaur that it decided to try and humiliate by using four planes as missiles in its heartland.

Al-Qaeda was not defeated quickly by any means. If eventually it was effectively neutered and Bin Laden killed after vast effort and cost, we all know that its ideology has merely morphed into new forms and extended its reach since then. Rolling back IS is not exactly a picnic.

Corbin doesn't really do deep analysis - if you want to understand Islamic terrorism beyond the mobilisatory agit-prop of the West, you can worse than read an article on the subject in the August 16th Edition of New Scientist which says what we should all have understood decades ago.

What Corbin does is what journalists are supposed to do - tell us a story based on facts that we can choose to interpret as we wish. And it has to be said that he writes well and clearly and, when it comes to the murderous acts themselves, movingly. The interpretation still has to be ours.

As of 2002, the broad Western establishment, in an excess of lack of imagination, was still thoroughly puzzled by the phenomenon of Al-Qaeda and of suicidal war against the West. It should not have been ... but it was. Corbin's book is like a time capsule of puzzlement and confusion.

In fact, what comes across is the existentially 'heroic' discipline of the hijackers under a charismatic organiser in Mohammed Atta in which, if not all, at least three to six colleagues were not only prepared to die for a cause but live for a long time knowing they would die.

Don't get me wrong on the word 'heroic' - that is not approving. Few today would approve the murderous 'heroism' of Hector or Achilles and such a term can be applied to the Nazi Officer or Red Army officer as much as the British Officer who throws away his life for a cause.

Understanding the cause is not approving of it. One can be moved by Mishima's suicide without exalting his peculiar form of Japanese nationalism. One is a little awe-struck by Atta's cold commitment while simultaneously being horrified by it. This is not 'normal'.

Something drove not only Atta and his team but many more militants in Afghanistan and many others across the region into extreme acts of self-immolation that are not explained in the terms of cultism as in the case of (say) Aum Shinrikyo - almost similar but not precisely the same.

The late liberal incomprehension of sacrifice was not necessarily shared by the Western soldiery who were sent out by the politicians to wrest control of Afghanistan from the Taliban and Al-Qaeda so that the self-perception of the 'enemy' as soldiers and not just terrorists holds some water.

Terror was consciously the technique of the relatively weak abstracted from morality much a drone attack that blew up a bunch of Afghan metal merchants because one of them was tall and so might have been Bin Laden is a technique abstracted from morality. This is what war is like.

Since 9/11, with its horrific loss of innocent life by what are rightly called fanatics, the West has tried to deal with this through denial. It has denied the long run of causes behind the rise of the phenomenon and it has tried to use propaganda as a mobilisatory substitute for honest appraisal.

The brutal truth is that Al-Qaeda and its successors and cognates are all the logical result of a lack of analytical skill and a cavalier approach to the lives of others that emerged out of the imperialistic thrust that characterised the West for centuries and that saw no corrective action in recent decades.

Now, the West and, indeed, non-fanatical Arabs and Muslims who just want to get on with their lives have a reasonable common cause in wanting to extirpate what the West had inadvertently created through its lack of intelligence, arrogance and even cruelty.

The horrible, miserable truth is that the 3,000 people murdered in the US which energised Americans as only Pearl Harbour did before and brought out an atavistic desire for revenge that permitted a possibly fateful weakening of their own civil liberties was not the only tragedy.

The 'other side' mobilised its support on other crimes - Sabra and Chatila, for example, is quoted. Its death toll ranges from 762 to 3,500 depending on your partisan source, Naturally, the Arab side goes for 3,500 and that figure is what embedded itself in angry Muslim minds.

In other words, the drive for revenge on one side resulted in a horrific act that drove revenge on the other side and so on ad infinitum with both sides having incommensurate world views that studiously avoided history and context. Corbin is not really interested in being sophisticated.

The bottom line in the end had nothing to do with the concatenation of mounting immoral acts that, in retrospect, now includes the deaths and horrors of interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and those through proxies in Syria and Yemen arising from subsequent destabilisation.

What has to do with is tribe and power. Al-Qaeda took a calculated gamble that it could totally destabilise the West by mounting a coup de theatre of staggering presumption, destroy the viability of the American Government and markets and cause a total all-consuming Arab uprising.

That gamble failed because the West is, for all its weaknesses, fundamentally resilient to almost anything the rest of the world can throw at it. The US, in particular, had a super power status at the turn of the century that enforced supportive compliance from its satrapies around the world.

The sheer horror of the act - some of which was covered live in mobile phone calls by distressed ordinary people who deserved none of this - turned the US first and then the 'official' elite of the West into a tribe and then into a tribe demanding action and revenge.

Similarly, though admired by many in the Arab street for what it was - an act of theatre against a system that humiliated their sentiments - there was no Arab uprising. Most Arabs fear Islamism and, more to the point, there were no mechanisms for uprising under conservative regimes.

We can add to that the fact that some regimes liked to treat Islamists as tools but were horrified when the tools started to think for themselves while a different model of Islamism - democratic seizure of power where possible through the Muslim working class - competed with Al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda's assault on America was thus test and failure of the idea that ideology and sentiment could actually change anything. All that happened was that globalisation and migration created the opportunities for future mayhem while the act helped to trigger regional destabilisation.

Where we are now, fifteen years on, is in a state of chaos because sentiment rather than reason dominated two tribes each with an inability to understand the limits of their own power and the moral imperfections of their cases in a wilful denial of history.

For the avoidance of doubt, let me say that, once Al-Qaeda had struck, then conventional morality should (as it did) go out of the window and every brutal means was reasonable and necessary for the US to go out and extirpate the organisation at whatever cost if it could do so effectively.

The finer points of intellectual analysis go out of the window when a mouse bites an elephant. The elephant will stamp on the mouse. This is not good or bad. This is just how it is. Al-Qaeda was threatening to kill any civilian traveler or citizen globally. It had to go. it gambled and lost.

Where we have a right to criticise our masters (apart from wondering how these idiots got us into this situation in the first place) is in their success in making things worse at so many levels. The animal instinct for revenge resulted in blunders which we really do not have to enumerate here.

"Revenge is a dish best eaten cold." I leave the reader to think on the world we have now and whether the War on Terror, as it unfolded, did very much more than change our state from one fearing big focused terror acts to one anxious about constant small random terror acts.

We in the West may not choose to care about the massive death rate and destruction of livelihoods, educational opportunities and property that has happened since 9/11 in the Middle East, North Africa and West Asia but the mayhem has certainly destabilised Europe.

This book is thus useful but not decisive. It tells us something of the origins of Al-Qaeda's rage, it allows a grudging respect for the fanatics, it reminds us of the horror of the consequences of fantaticism but it also shows a West that did not know its arse from its elbow and still does not.