THE WAR FOR MUSLIM MINDS
Islam and the West
By Gilles Kepel. Harvard Univ. 327 pp. $23.95
Are we winning the war on terror? The divergence of opinion on the issue is breathtaking. On the one hand, President Bush and his administration boast of having put three-quarters of al Qaeda's leadership out of business, though there is little hard evidence to substantiate that figure. On the other hand, many Middle East experts and veteran U.S. counterterrorism officials point to the growing number of groups that have adopted Osama bin Laden's arguments and tactics as an indication that the situation is getting worse, even while acknowledging that there has been no second catastrophic attack like that of Sept. 11.
At the center of the debate is the question of "hearts and minds." Are more of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims accepting the jihadists' claims that the United States is fundamentally a malignant force determined to destroy Islam? Astonishingly, in a presidential campaign in which terrorism may well have been the decisive issue, the subject of whether the war in Iraq and other elements of U.S. policy are driving Muslims into the arms of the militants was barely touched. (When Sen. John Kerry suggested in one of the debates that bin Laden was successfully using the Iraq war as a recruitment tool, President Bush snapped back, "Osama bin Laden isn't going to determine how we defend ourselves.")
The promise, therefore, of Gilles Kepel's The War for Muslim Minds could hardly be greater. Kepel, a French scholar who is one of the world's foremost experts on political Islam, has been shaping expert thinking on these matters since the appearance two decades ago of his first book, Muslim Extremism in Egypt. That work traced the intellectual and operational path of the jihadist movement that culminated in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat; scholars who study al Qaeda, which has deep roots in Egypt, owe a significant debt to its analysis. Few analysts could be better suited to judge whether, as the British ambassador to Italy recently remarked, President Bush is "the best recruiting sergeant ever for al Qaeda," or if the current mixture of war-making in Iraq and intelligence operations around the world is succeeding, in the White House's phrase, as a "forward defense of freedom."
Unfortunately, The War for Muslim Minds does not deliver on that promise. The book is less an effort to paint the big picture of our nascent clash of civilizations than a collection of disjointed essays examining aspects of what has become known as the global war on terror -- the "GWOT," as the policy world calls it, an acronym as ugly as Washington has coughed up in a long time. Still, there is much to be learned here that will broaden even a knowledgeable reader's understanding of the background to the Sept. 11 attacks and the religious ideas coursing through the intellectual bloodstream of the Muslim world today. Kepel has wide-ranging interests, and he is equally at home writing about Saudi clerical debates, politics in Iran and factional strife in France's Muslim community. But he makes scant effort to pull it all together and assess whether the U.S.-led campaign is diminishing the appeal of bin Laden's ideology or whether, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wondered in a leaked memo, this is a case in which "the harder we work, the behinder we get."
The closest Kepel comes to taking on the big question comes in a chapter entitled "Al Qaeda's Resilience," where he produces a partial, unsatisfying answer. A harsh critic of the neoconservatives who have driven U.S. strategy since Sept. 11, he judges that "Washington's strategic planners were culturally incapable of grasping an actor that was not, in the final analysis, a state." He echoes American critics, including Kerry, when he writes that the "American offensive . . . lost valuable time while it focused on the Afghan infrastructure, on overthrowing the Taliban, and especially on the war in Iraq. It set about cutting out the visible parts of the terrorist tumor, but it did not have a systemic cure for the cancerous cells that were metastasizing throughout the world." As a result, the "war to eradicate terror has thus far been unsuccessful." But an American failure is not the same as an al Qaeda victory. Kepel identifies the terrorists' principal goal as seizing "power in Muslim countries through mobilization of population galvanized by jihad's sheer audacity." Since that obviously has not happened, he views the jihadist insurrection as a failing cause.
This is a dubious assessment. Though the oft-discussed "Muslim street" has not risen in anger, Kepel ignores significant polling data that suggest deep dissatisfaction with the status quo in the Muslim world and a deepening hatred of the United States. If that translates into increased terrorist recruitment, as many intelligence services have suggested, we may have a bigger problem on our hands than rioting. In addition, jihadists seem to be close to securing, if not a state, at least a sizable enclave from which they could operate in western Iraq, a fact Kepel simply does not address. Moreover, while seizing a state is undoubtedly important to the radicals' project of creating a modern caliphate -- a theocratic Muslim superstate -- it is, as they know, by no means the only way forward for them.
After all, al Qaeda turned to attacking the United States because it concluded that the authoritarian regimes of the Muslim world were too strong to overcome anytime soon -- a judgment based on hard experience accrued from the 1970s onward, when Islamists in Egypt and elsewhere were consistently beaten back by government security services. Bin Laden and his inner circle figured that catastrophic attacks on America, by contrast, would drive Washington to pull out of the Middle East and end its support for such autocrats as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and the Saudi royal family. The terrorists believe that withdrawal of that support would leave the "apostate" Arab regimes that they most hate weak and defenseless. Bin Laden and his chief strategist, the Egyptian radical Ayman Zawahiri, were not so naive as to believe that so much upheaval could be achieved in just a few years. The strategic horizons of these men are decades off, if not further.
If Kepel's big picture is unfinished and unpersuasive, his work still repays the reader's effort. He includes, for example, an illuminating chapter on Iraq that spells out how the Bush administration blundered in not foreseeing the emergence of radical Sunni opposition to the U.S. occupation. (Saddam Hussein could not field an army that was much of a challenge for the American military, but in the last years of his reign, he supported a Sunni religious revival that was intended to strengthen his standing. The forces unleashed by that effort have been at the core of the resistance to the U.S. occupation.) The shame is that such insights are not knitted together into a more compelling whole -- one that might have given us a clearer sense of the very real storm gathering around us. •
Daniel Benjamin was director for transnational threats on the National Security Council staff in 1998-99. He is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and co-author of "The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam's War Against America."
