The holy warrior

"Holy War, Inc." does come much closer than any other bin Laden book to conveying what sort of people al-Qaida operatives tend to be. First, there's their reverent devotion to a leader who, given the network's decentralized structure, most know only through reputation. But what a reputation! To rich and desperately poor alike, bin Laden's personal sacrifices to the cause are deeply moving. And they are genuine. Witness after witness tells Bergen that they have seen him living in the most modest of circumstances. "His followers really, really believe in him," a journalist who visited bin Laden in his cave said, recalling the leader's crude dwelling built from branches of trees. "They can see this millionaire, who sacrificed all those millions, and he is sitting with them in a cave, sharing their dinner, in a very, very humble way."

Bergen sketches the histories of a few al-Qaida members (the ones who were apprehended by authorities and became informants, mostly), ranging from Khalfan Kahmis Mohamed, a low-level go-fer who helped with the 1998 embassy bombing in Tanzania and had never even heard of al-Qaida, to the unnerving Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian-born American citizen (he married an American) who taught seminars to the U.S. Army Special Operations forces at Fort Bragg, worked for the counterterrorism department of Egyptair and had some kind of relationship with the CIA (the agency won't talk about it much). He spoke four languages and won commendations for his superb physical fitness and for his "expert use of the M-16 rifle." He also was a member of Egypt's terrorist Jihad group, took unauthorized leave to fight with the Afghan mujahideen in the '80s and became "an indispensable player in al-Qaida."

Although the reasons why a reasonably affluent and gifted individual like Ali Mohamed joined the group remain mysterious, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, son of impoverished African farmers, clearly suffered from a lack of purpose. A psychologist who testified at his trial and who is quoted by Bergen described him as "extremely deferential to religious authority and someone who had a rather empty life outside the mosque ... He went to Afghanistan for training, not just military training, but also ideological conditioning, which meant that Mohamed was indoctrinated beyond his first inchoate ideas to help suffering Muslims." As "Arabs" like Mohamed hold out in the besieged city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, it's important to remember that unlike most Afghan members of the Taliban forces, these men have been brainwashed to believe not just that martyrdom is glorious but that life without their cause has no meaning at all. Defection, for them, is not an option.

"Holy War, Inc." does have its flaws. There are the usual anecdotes about the absurd inefficiencies of undeveloped nations that the British seem to find so amusing: camels copulating in the middle of the road, the ancient guide who promptly falls asleep and jolly asides like "Memo to self: in the event of a kidnapping never be 'rescued' by a Third World Army." For Brits, Afghanistan is the wild, wild East, and the rest of us must sometimes be patient while they natter on about its "promise" of "mystery, a movement back into a time of medieval chivalry and medieval cruelty, an absence of the modern world that is both thrilling and disturbing," and so on.

A bigger problem is the book's scattered quality, which is less a result of Bergen's last-minute revisions than of the fact that when it was written Bergen couldn't expect to find large numbers of readers with an automatic interest in al-Qaida. As a result, "Holy War, Inc." is crammed with local color, digressive mini-profiles of interesting minor characters and other side stories, all seemingly in an effort to keep us entertained. Journalists with frequent deadlines, and especially television journalists like Bergen, are seldom called upon to explain the larger shape and patterns of events. As a result, "Holy War, Inc." feels like a collection of trees rather than a forest. Though it has a structure, it's constantly veering away from it distractedly; it's hard to grasp the book as anything more than a collection of interesting bits. You often have to make the connections for yourself.

The unifying theme that Bergen ostensibly hangs all this upon is his concept of "Holy War, Inc.," the idea that bin Laden has fused a "retrograde reading of holy war" with "21st-century communications and weapons technology," and then runs the whole thing like an international corporation. Bergen finds much to remark upon in the fact that al-Qaida uses statellite phones and e-mail, and that bin Laden's archaic-sounding proclamations are printed out from an Apple computer. This seems not nearly as striking or significant as the way that satellite channels like Al-Jazeera have circumvented government control of the media in many Arab countries and allowed samizdat ideas to spread unchecked, for better or (perhaps mostly) for worse. As a Kashmiri militant explained to Bergen, "This technology is a good thing, but we reject the civilization of the West." So far, that contradiction isn't tripping up many Islamists.

More interesting are Bergen's observations about how bin Laden stands for a "privatization of terrorism that parallels the movement by many countries in the past decade to convert their state-supported industries to privately held companies." Apparently, the atavism of the free market has more than one face. And isn't it intriguing that the man who ostensibly brought the corporate approach to terrorism is facing off against the American said to have patterned his presidency after the example of big business? Do both use the most primitive language -- "evildoers," "soldiers of Satan" -- to rally people to what's essentially a battle for market share?

I think not. If bin Laden weren't deluded enough to believe that Allah will grant his clever, but minuscule organization victory over the world's only superpower, he wouldn't have picked this fight to begin with. While Bergen, in his afterword, is correct that bin Laden's complaints are primarily political -- U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, U.S. support for Israel, U.S. bombing of and sanctions against Iraq, etc. -- his approach to addressing them is demented.

And even if bin Laden got everything he's called for, which is Muslim rule over more or less all the land of the caliphate (roughly the equivalent of the Ottoman Empire), it's not clear that he'd be satisfied with that. After all, he supports Islamist militants who demand an independent state in the Philippines, which is a far cry from the caliphate. It seems likely, from statements his mentor, Azzam, has made, that bin Laden has inherited the belief that any nation with a Muslim population should be under Islamist rule. And those are imperial ambitions that even Bill Gates can't match.

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