Every page of “The Looming Tower” reveals fascinating details about the history of modern Islamic extremism. The book renders the characters alternately as cartoons, murderous lunatics, and caring family men.
It punctures the myth of thousands of battle-hardened Arabs making a difference in the war against the soviets in Afghanistan. The Arab militants that made it to Afghanistan were largely in the way, often getting blown up and leaving Arab-shaped silhouettes on the walls of blasted canyons.
In May 1986, bin Laden led a small group of Arabs to join Afghan forces in Jaji, Sayyaf’s territory near the Pakistani border. One night the Arab tents were pelted with what seemed to be rocks, perhaps debris thrown from the occasional distant bombs. When a Yemeni cook got up to prepare the pre-dawn meal, there was a huge explosion. “God is great, God is great!” the cook cried out. “My leg! My leg!” The Arabs awakened to find mines strewn around their encampment, although they were difficult to see because they were green and disappeared in the grass. As they were evacuating the site, a guided missile struck a few yards from bin Laden. Then a huge explosion on the mountaintop spewed boulders and splintered timber upon the besieged Arabs. Three were wounded and one, an Egyptian graduate student, was killed. The Arabs were thrown into panic, and they were further humiliated when the Afghan forces asked them to leave because they were so useless.
Bin Laden comes off like a dithering clown in the first half of the book. Smarter men fought for control of his money and his image.
He went to Sudan and showed more poor decision making skills combined with credulity that left him completely broke by the time he left.
He walked a jittery path between clever manipulation of his public persona and believing in that persona too much. He was a earnest wanna-be who stumbled onto the world stage at just the right time and was lifted higher because of American mistakes, which are themselves cartoonish.
The most precise tool we had in dealing with these people turns out to be Tomahawk missiles. Picture a lonely night watchman at a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, checking his watch, looking forward for his shift to be over. In the cartoon version, there is a whistling sound and the watchman looks at the audience, eyes widening. He jumps up and begins pinwheeling his legs but stays in one place as the sand beneath him is displaced. Then, as viewed from about a mile up, the entire area disappears in a big mushroom cloud. The night watchman is shot through the cloud in charred robes.. In Afghanistan, continuing the cartoon, we blew the living shit out of some kitchen tents. Down the road, two Jihadis sit down for some late-night tea and after they clink their mugs and raise them to drink, an expensive Tomahawk embeds itself in the dirt right in front of them. The tea pours into their laps. Then they jump up, pinwheel their legs with their arms stretched out in front of them and hide behind some rocks looking at the missile. The scene cuts to the same Jihadis selling the missile, now strapped to the back of a llama, to the Chinese military(which is, in fact, what happened).
After this, Bin Laden and his people, reviled for blowing up the embassies and killing innocent people, are suddenly back in vogue because of the heavy-handed American response.
This book, more than any other, drove home the fact that we are fighting a fourth generation war, in which our Tomahawks are the enemy’s most effective weapons.
The most interesting theme in the book is the controversy within the movement about Takfir, which, loosely translated, means, “if you disagree with someone about the correct way to practice Islam, you get to kill him.” You are excluded from guilt about killing a fellow Muslim because through some magic of logic, the other guy ceases to be a Muslim.
Bin Laden would go around supporting the Takfiri elements of any Islamic movement he could find and often blanched when the Muslim bodies started to stack up. A horror show that the book touches on are the national “kill everybody” experiments in Algeria and Egypt. There, tourists, respected Muslim scholars, and innocent villagers alike topple like bowling pins in self-destructive civil wars that were barely reported in American newspapers.
I finished the book feeling that the story is of the burning out of these mad sparks. As Wright mentions in this book and establishes in later articles, many Islamic fundamentalists are turning against the Takfir notions of the Bin-Laden/Zawahiri camp. It is easy to see that while Al-Queda managed to strike some painful blows against the west, their main victims have been Muslims.
