2 different hws. one is 8 sentences the other is 500 words

MAHMOOD MAMDANI

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective
on Culture and Terrorism

ABSTRACT The link between Islam and terrorism became a central media concern following September 11, resulting in new rounds

of “culture talk. This talk has turned religious experience into a political category, differentiating ‘good Muslims” from “bad Mus-

lims, rather than terrorists from civilians. The implication is undisguised: Whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Islam must

be quarantined and the devil must be exorcized from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Muslims. This article suggests that

we lift the quarantine and turn the cultural theory of politics on its head. Beyond the simple but radical suggestion that if there are good

Muslims and bad Muslims, there must also be good Westerners and bad Westerners, I question the very tendency to read Islamist poli-

tics as an effect of Islamic civilization—whether good or bad—and Western power as an effect of Western civilization. Both those poli-

tics and that power are born of an encounter, and neither can be understood outside of the history of that encounter. Cultural

explanations of political outcomes tend to avoid history and issues. Thinking of individuals from “traditional” cultures in authentic and

original terms, culture talk dehistoricizes the construction of political identities. This article places the terror of September 11 in a his-

torical and political context. Rather than a residue of a premodern culture in modern politics, terrorism is best understood as a modern

construction. Even when it harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, the result is a modern ensemble at the service of

a modern project. [Keywords: Muslims, culture talk, Islamist politics, political identities, terrorism]

MEDIA INTEREST IN ISLAM exploded in the monthsafter September 11. What, many asked, is the link
between Islam and tenorism? This question has fueled a
fresh round of “culture talk”: the predilection to define
cultures according to their presumed “essential” charac-
teristics, especially as regards politics, An earlieT round of
such discussion, associated with Samuel Huntington’s
widely cited but increasingly discredited Clash of Civiliza-
tions (1996), demonized Islam in its entirety, Its place has
been taken by a modified line of argument: that the terror-
ist link is not with all of Islam, but with a very literal inter-
pretation of it, one found in Wahhabi Islam,1 First ad-
vanced by Stephen Schwartz in a lead article in the British
weekly, The Spectator (2001), this point of view went to the
ludicrous extent of claiming that all suicide couriers
(bombers or hijackers), are Wahhabi and warned that this
version of Islam, historically dominant in Saudi Arabia,
had been exported to both Afghanistan and the United
States in recent decades. The argument was echoed widely
in many circles, including the New York Times2

Culture talk has turned religious experience into a po-
litical category, “What Went Wrong with Muslim Civiliza-
tion?” asks Bernard Lewis in a lead article in The Atlantic

Monthly (2002), Democracy lags in the Muslim World,
concludes a Freedom House study of political systems in
the non-Western world,3 The problem is larger than Islam,
concludes Aryeh Neier (2001), former president of Human
Rights Watch and now head of the Soros-funded Open So-
ciety Foundation: It lies with tribalists and fundamentalists,
contemporary counterparts of Nazis, who have identified
modernism as their enemy, Even the political leadership
of the antiterrorism alliance, notably Tony Blair and
George Bush, speak of the need to distinguish “good Mus-
lims” from “bad Muslims,” The implication is undis-
guised: Whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Is-
lam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcized
from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Mus-
lims,

I want to suggest that we lift the quarantine for ana-
lytical purposes, and turn the cultural theory of politics on
its head, This, I suggest, will help our query in at least two
ways, First, it will have the advantage of deconstructing not
just one protagonist in the contemporary contest—Islam—
but also the other, the West, My point goes beyond the
simple but radical suggestion that if there are good Muslims
and bad Muslims, there must also be good Westerners and

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 1 0 4 ( 3 ) : 7 6 6 – 7 7 5 . COPYRIGHT © 2 0 0 2 , AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

Mamdani • Good Muslim, Bad Muslim 767

bad Westerners, I intend to question the very tendency to
read Islamist politics as an effect of Islamic civilization—
whether good or bad—and Western power as an effect of
Western civilization, Further, I shall suggest that both
those politics and that power are born of an encounter,
and neither can be understood in isolation, outside of the
history of that encounter,

Second, I hope to question the very premise of culture
talk, This is the tendency to think of culture in politi-
cal—and therefore territorial—terms, Political units (states)
are territorial; cultuie is not, Contemporary Islam is a
global civilization: fewer Muslims live in the Middle East
than in Africa or in South and Southeast Asia. If we can
think of Christianity and Judaism as global religions—
with Middle Eastern origins but a historical flow and a
contemporary constellation that cannot be made sense of
in terms of state boundaries—then why not try to under-
stand Islam, too, in historical and extraterritorial terms?4

Does it really make sense to write political histories of Is-
lam that read like political histories of geographies like the
Middle East, and political histories of Middle Eastern
states as if these were no more than the political history of
Islam in the Middle East?

My own work (1996) leads me to trace the modern
roots of culture talk to the colonial project known as indirect
rule, and to question the claim that anticolonial political
resistance really expresses a cultural lag and should be un-
derstood as a traditional cultural resistance to modernity,
This claim downplays the crucial encounter with colonial
power, which I think is central to the post-September 11
analytical predicament I described above, I find culture
talk troubling for two reasons, On the one hand, cultural
explanations of political outcomes tend to avoid history
and issues, By equating political tendencies with entire
communities denned in nonhistorical cultural terms, such
explanations encourage collective discipline and punish-
ment—a practice characteristic of colonial encounters,
This line of reasoning equates terrorists with Muslims, jus-
tifies a punishing war against an entire country (Afghani-
stan) and ignores the recent history that shaped both the
current Afghan context and the emergence of political Is-
lam, On the other hand, culture talk tends to think of in-
dividuals (from “traditional” cultures) in authentic and
original terms, as if their identities are shaped entirely by
the supposedly unchanging culture into which they are
born, In so doing, it dehistoricizes the construction of po-
litical identities,

Rather than see contemporary Islamic politics as the
outcome of an archaic culture, I suggest we see neither cul-
ture nor politics as archaic, but both as very contemporary
outcomes of equally contemporary conditions, relations,
and conflicts, Instead of dismissing history and politics, as
culture talk does, I suggest we place cultural debates in his-
torical and political contexts, Terrorism is not born of the
residue of a premodern culture in modern politics, Rather,
terrorism is a modern construction, Even when it har-
nesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, the

result is a modern ensemble at the service of a modern
project,

CULTURE TALK

Is our world really divided into the modern and premod-
ern, such that the former makes culture in which the latter
is a prisoner? This dichotomy is increasingly prevalent in
Western discussions of relations with Muslim-majority
countries, It presumes that culture stands for creativity, for
what being human is all about, in one part of the world,
that called modern, but that in the other part, labeled
premodern,” culture stands for habit, for some kind of in-

stinctive activity whose rules are inscribed in early found-
ing texts, usually religious, and mummified in early arti-
facts. When I read of Islam in the papers these days, I
often feel I am reading of museumized peoples, of peoples
who are said not to make culture, except at the beginning
of creation, as some extraordinary, prophetic act. After
that, it seems they—we Muslims—just conform to culture,
Our culture seems to have no history, no politics, and no
debates, It seems to have petrified into a lifeless custom.
Even more, these people seem incapable of transforming
their culture, the way they seem incapable of growing
their own food, The implication is that their salvation lies,
as always, in philanthropy, in being saved from the out-
side,

If the premodern peoples are said to lack a creative ca-
pacity, they are conversely said to have an abundant ca-
pacity for destruction, This is surely why culture talk has
become the stuff of front-page news stories, It is, after all,
the reason we are told to give serious attention to culture,
It is said that culture is now a matter of life and death, To
one whose recent academic preoccupation has been the
institutional legacy of colonialism, this kind of writing is
deeply reminiscent of tracts from the history of modern
colonization, This history assumes that people’s public be-
havior, specifically their political behavior, can be read
from their religion, Could it be that a person who takes his
or her religion literally is a potential terrorist? That only
someone who thinks of a religious text as not literal, but
as metaphorical or figurative, is better suited to civic life
and the tolerance it calls for? How, one may ask, does the
literal reading of sacred texts translate into hijacking, mur-
der, and terrorism?

Some may object that I am presenting a caricature of
what we read in the press, After all, is there not less talk
about the clash of civilizations, and more about the clash
inside Islamic civilization? Is that not the point of the arti-
cles 1 refened to earlier? Certainly, we are now told to dis-
tinguish between good Muslims and bad Muslims, Mind
you, not between good and bad persons, nor between
criminals and civic citizens, who both happen to be Mus-
lims, but between good Muslims and bad Muslims. We are
told that there is a fault line running through Islam, a line
that separates moderate Islam, called “genuine Islam,
from extremist political Islam. The terrorists of September

768 American Anthropologist • Vol. 104, No. 3 • September 2002

11, we are told, did not just hijack planes; they also hi-
jacked Islam, meaning “genuine” Islam,

I would like to offer another version of the argument
that the clash is inside—and not between—civilizations,
The synthesis is my own, but no strand in the argument is
fabricated, I rather think of this synthesis as an enlight-
ened version, because it does not just speak of the “other,”
but also of self, It has little trace of ethnocentrism. This is
how it goes: Islam and Christianity have in common a
deeply messianic orientation, a sense of mission to civilize
the world, Each is convinced that it possesses the sole
truth, that the world beyond is a sea of ignorance that
needs to be redeemed.5 In the modern age, this kind of
conviction goes beyond the religious to the secular, be-
yond the domain of doctrine to that of politics, Yet even
seemingly secular colonial notions such as that of a civi-
lizing mission”—or its more racialized version, “the white
man’s burden”—or the 19th-century U,S, conviction of a
“manifest destiny” have deep religious roots,

Like any living tradition, neither Islam nor Christian-
ity is monolithic. Both harbor and indeed are propelled by
diverse and contradictory tendencies, In both, righteous
notions have been the focus of prolonged debates, Even if
you should claim to know what is good for humanity,
how do you proceed? By persuasion or force? Do you con-
vince others of the validity of your truth or do you pro-
ceed by imposing it on them? Is religion a matter of con-
viction or legislation? The first alternative gives you reason
and evangelism; the second gives you the Crusades and
jihad. Take the example of Islam, and the notion of jihad,
which roughly translated means “struggle.’ Scholars dis-
tinguish between two broad traditions of jihad: jihad Ak-
bar (the greater jihad) and jihad Asgar (the lesser jihad),
The greater jihad, it is said, is a struggle against weaknesses
of self; it is about how to live and attain piety in a con-
taminated world, The lesser jihad, in contrast, is about
self-preservation and self-defense; more externally di-
rected, it is the source of Islamic notions of what Chris-
tians call “just war” (Noor 2001),

Scholars of Islam have been at pains since September
11 to explain to a non-Muslim reading public that Islam
has rules even for the conduct of war: for example, Talal
Asad (n.d.) points out that the Hanbali School of law prac-
ticed by followers of Wahhabi Islam in Saudi Arabia out-
laws the killing of innocents in war, Historians of Islam
have warned against a simple reading of Islamic practice
from Islamic doctrine; After all, coexistence and toleration
have been the norm, rather than the exception, in the po-
litical history of Islam, More to the point, not only relig-
ious creeds like Islam and Christianity, but also secular
doctrines like liberalism and Marxism have had to face an
ongoing contradiction between the impulse to universal-
ism and respective traditions of tolerance and peaceful co-
existence, The universalizing impulse gives the United
States a fundamentalist orientation in doctrine, just as the
tradition of tolerance makes for pluralism in practice and
in doctrine.

Doctrinal tendencies aside, I remain deeply skeptical
of the claim that we can read people’s political behavior
from their religion, or from their culture, Could it be true
that an orthodox Muslim is a potential terrorist? Or, the
same thing, that an Orthodox Jew or Christian is a poten-
tial terrorist and only a Reform Jew or a Christian convert
to Darwinian evolutionary theory is capable of being toler-
ant of those who do not share his or her convictions?

I am aware that this does not exhaust the question of
culture and politics, How do you make sense of a politics
that consciously wears the mantle of religion? Take, for
example the politics of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda;
both claim to be waging a jihad, a just war against the ene-
mies of Islam, To try to understand this uneasy relation-
ship between politics and religion, 1 find it necessary not
only to shift focus from doctrinal to historical Islam, from
doctrine and culture to history and politics, but also to
broaden the focus beyond Islam to include larger histori-
cal encounters, of which bin Laden and al-Qaeda have
been one outcome,

THE COLD WAR AFTER INDOCHINA

Eqbal Ahmad draws our attention to the television image
from 1985 of Ronald Reagan inviting a group of turbaned
men, all Afghan, all leaders of the mujahideen, to the
White House lawn for an introduction to the media.
“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s
founding fathers,” said Reagan (Ahmad 2001), This was
the moment when the United States tried to harness one
version of Islam in a struggle against the Soviet Union, Be-
fore exploring its politics, let me provide some historical
background to the moment,

1 was a young lecturer at the University of Dar-es-
Salaam in Tanzania in 1975, It was a momentous year in
the decolonization of the world as we knew it, 1975 was
the year of the U,S, defeat in Indochina, as it was of the
collapse of the last European empire in Africa, In retro-
spect, it is clear that it was also the year that the center of
gravity of the Cold War shifted from Southeast Asia to
southern Africa, The strategic question was this; Who
would pick up the pieces of the Portuguese empire in Af-
rica, the United States or the Soviet Union? As the focal
point of the Cold War shifted, there was a corresponding
shift in U,S, strategy based on two key influences, First,
the closing years of the Vietnam War saw the forging of a
Nixon Doctrine, which held that “Asian boys must fight
Asian wars.” The Nixon doctrine was one lesson that the
United States brought from the Vietnam debacle, Even if
the hour was late to implement it in Indochina, the Nixon
Doctrine guided U,S, initiatives in southern Africa, In the
post-Vietnam world, the United States looked for more
than local proxies; it needed regional powers as junior
partners, In southern Africa, that role was fulfilled by
apartheid South Africa, Faced with the possibility of a de-
cisive MPLA victory in Angola,6 the United States encour-
aged South Africa to intervene militarily, The result was a

Mamdani • Good Muslim, Bad Muslim 769

political debacle that was second only to the Bay of Pigs
invasion of a decade before: No matter its military
strength and geopolitical importance, apartheid South Af-
rica was clearly a political liability for the United States,
Second, the Angolan fiasco reinforced public resistance
within the United States to further overseas Vietnam-type
involvement, The clearest indication that popular pres-
sures were finding expression among legislators was the
1975 Clark amendment, which outlawed covert aid to
combatants in the ongoing Angolan civil war,

The Clark amendment was repealed at the start of
Reagan’s second term in 1985, Its decade-long duration
failed to forestall the Cold Warriors, who looked for ways
to bypass legislative restrictions on the freedom of execu-
tive action. CIA chief William Casey took the lead in or-
chestrating support for terrorist and prototerrorist move-
ments around the world—from Contras in Nicaragua to
the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, to Mozambican National
Resistance (RENAMO) in Mozambique7 and National Un-
ion for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) in An-
gola8—through third and fourth parties, Simply put, after
the defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, the
United States decided to harness, and even to cultivate,
terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered pro-
Soviet. The high point of the U,S, embrace of terrorism
came with the Contras, More than just tolerated and
shielded, they were actively nurtured and directly assisted
by Washington. But because the Contra story is so well
known, I will focus on the nearly forgotten story of U.S.
support for terrorism in Southern Africa to make my
point,

South Africa became the Reagan Administration’s pre-
ferred partner for a constructive engagement, a term coined
by Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Chester
Crocker, The point of “constructive engagement” was to
bring South Africa out of its political isolation and tap its
military potential in the war against militant—pro-Soviet—
nationalism,9 The effect of “constructive engagement”
was to bring to South African regional policy the sophisti-
cation of a blend of covert and overt operations: In Mo-
zambique, for example, South Africa combined an official
peace accord (the 1984 Nkomati agreement) with contin-
ued clandestine material support for RENAMO terrorism,10

Tragically, the United States entered the era of “construc-
tive engagement” just as the South African military tight-
ened its hold over government and shifted its regional
policy from detente to “total onslaught.

I do not intend to explain the tragedy of Angola and
Mozambique as the result of machinations by a single su-
perpower. The Cold War was fought by two superpowers,
and both subordinated local interests and consequences to
global strategic considerations, Whether in Angola or in
Mozambique, the Cold War interfaced with an internal
civil war, An entire generation of African scholars has been
preoccupied with understanding the relation between ex-
ternal and internal factors in the making of contemporary
Africa and, in that context, the dynamic between the Cold

War and the civil war in each case. My purpose is not to
enter this broader debate, Here, my purpose is more mod-
est, I am concerned not with the civil war, but only the
Cold War and, furthermore, not with both adversaries in
the Cold War, but only the United States, My limited pur-
pose is to illuminate the context in which the United
States embraced terrorism as it prepared to wage the Cold
War to a finish.

The partnership between the United States and apart-
heid South Africa bolstered two key movements that used
terror with abandon: RENAMO in Mozambique, and
UNITA in Angola,” RENAMO was a terrorist outfit created
by the Rhodesian army in the early 1970s—and patron-
ized by the South African Defense Forces. UNITA was more
of a prototerrorist movement with a local base, though one
not strong enough to have survived the short bout of civil
war in 1975 without sustained external assistance. UNITA
was a contender for power, even if a weak one, while
RENAMO was not—which is why the United States could
never openly support this creation of Rhodesian and
South African intelligence and military establishments.
Because the 1975 debacle in Angola showed that South Af-
rica could not be used as a direct link in U.S. assistance,
and the Clark amendment barred U.S. covert aid in An-
gola, the CIA took the initiative to find fourth par-
ties—such as Morocco—through which to train and sup-
port UNITA. Congressional testimony documented at least
one instance of a $15-million-dollar payment to UNITA
through Morocco in 1983, Savimbi, the UNITA chief, ac-
knowledged the ineffectiveness of the Clark amendment
when he told journalists, “A great country like the United
States has other channels the Clark amendment means
nothing” (in Minter 1994:152).

By any reckoning, the cost of terrorism in Southern
Africa was high. A State Department consultant who inter-
viewed refugees and displaced persons concluded that
RENAMO was responsible for 95 percent of instances of
abuse of civilians in the war in Mozambique, including
the murder of as many as 100,000 persons, A 1989 United
Nations study estimated that Mozambique suffered an
economic loss of approximately $15 billion between 1980
and 1988, a figure five and a half times its 1988 GDP (Minter
1994), Africa Watch researchers documented UNITA stra-
tegies aimed at starving civilians in government-held ar-
eas, through a combination of direct attacks, kidnappings,
and the planting of land mines on paths used by peasants.
The extensive use of land mines put Angola in the ranks of
the most mined countries in the world (alongside Af-
ghanistan and Cambodia), with amputees conservatively
estimated at over 15,000, UN1CEF calculated that .-531,000
died of causes directly or indirectly related to the war. The
UN estimated the total loss to the Angolan economy from
1980 to 1988 at $30 billion, six times the 1988 GDP
(Minter 1994:4-5).

The CIA and the Pentagon called terrorism by another
name: “low intensity conflict,” Whatever the name, politi-
cal terror brought a kind of war that Africa had never seen

770 American Anthropologist • Vol. 104, No, 3 • September 2002

before, The hallmark of terror was that it targeted civilian
life: blowing up infrastructure such as bridges and power
stations, destroying health and educational centers, min-
ing paths and fields, Terrorism distinguished itself fiom
guerrilla waT by making civilians its preferred target, If
left-wing guenillas claimed that they weie like fish in
water, rightwing terrorists were determined to drain the
wateT—no matter what the cost to civilian life—so as to
isolate the fish. What is now called collateral damage was
not an unfortunate byproduct of the war; it was the very
point of terrorism,

Following the repeal of the Claik amendment at the
staTt of Reagan’s second teim, the United States provided
$13 million worth of “humanitarian aid” to UNITA, then
$15 million for “military assistance,” Even when South Af-
rican assistance to UNITA dried up following the internal
Angolan settlement in May 1991, the United States
stepped up its assistance to UNITA in spite of the fact that
the Cold War was over. The hope was that terrorism
would deliver a political victory in Angola, as it had in
Nicaragua, The logic was simple; The people would surely
vote the terrorists into power if the level of collateral dam-
age could be made unacceptably high,

Even after the Cold War, U,S, tolerance for terror re-
mained high, both in Africa and beyond, The callousness
of Western response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was
no exception. Or consider the afteimath of January 6,
1999, when Revolutionary United Front (RUF) gunmen
maimed and raped theiT way across Freetown, the capital
of Sierra Leone, killing ovei 5,000 civilians in a day, The
British and U,S, response was to pressure the government
to share power with RUF rebels,

AFGHANISTAN; THE HIGH POINT IN THE COLD WAR

The shifting center of gravity of the Cold War was the ma-
jor context in which Afghanistan policy was framed, but
the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was also a crucial factor,
Ayatollah Khomeini anointed the United States as the
“Great Satan,” and pro-U,S, Islamic countries as “Ameri-
can Islam,’ Rather than address specific sources of Iranian
resentment against the United States, the Reagan admini-
stration resolved to expand the pro-U,S, Islamic lobby in
order to isolate Iran, The strategy was two-pronged, First,
with respect to Afghanistan, it hoped to unite a billion
Muslims worldwide around a holy war, a crusade, against
the Soviet Union, 1 use the word crusade, not jihad, because
only the notion of crusade can accurately convey the frame
of mind in which this initiative was taken, Second, the
Reagan administration hoped to turn a doctrinal differ-
ence inside Islam between minority Shia and majority Sunni
into a political divide. It hoped thereby to contain the in-
fluence of the Iranian Revolution as a minority Shia affair,

The plan went into high gear in 1986 when CIA chief
William Casey took three significant measures (Rashid 2000,
129-130), The first was to convince Congress to step up

the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan by providing the muja-
hideen with U,S, advisors and U,S,-made Stinger antiair-
craft missiles to shoot down Soviet planes, The second was
to expand the Islamic guerrilla war from Afghanistan into
the Soviet Republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, a deci-
sion reversed when the Soviet Union threatened to attack
Pakistan in retaliation. The third was to recruit radical
Muslims from around the world to come and train in Paki-
stan and fight with the Afghan mujahideen, The Islamic
world had not seen an armed jihad for centuries, Now the
CIA was determined to create one, to put a version of tra-
dition at the service of politics. Thus was the tradition of
jihad—of a just war with a religious sanction, nonexistent
in the last 400 years—revived with U.S. help in the 1980s,
In a 1990 radio interview, Eqbal Ahmad explained how
“CIA agents started going all over the Muslim world re-
cruiting people to fight,”12 Pervez Hoodbhoy recalled,

With Pakistan’s Zia-ul-Haq as America’s foremost ally, the
CIA advertised foT, and openly recruited, Islamic holy
warriors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Algeria,
Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally
and mentor funneled support to the Mujahidin, and
Ronald Regan feted them on the lawn of the White
House, lavishing praise on “brave freedom fighters chal-
lenging the Evil Empire. [2001]

This is the context in which a U,S,/Saudi/Pakistani al-
liance was forged, and in which religious madrasahs were
turned into political schools for training cadres, The CIA
did not just fund the jihad; it also played “a key role in
training the mujahideen” (Chossudovsky 2001), The
point was to integrate guerilla training with the teachings
of Islam and, thus, create “Islamic guerrillas,” The Indian
journalist Dilip Hiro (1995) explained:

Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete so-
ciopolitical ideology, that holy Islam was being violated
by (the) atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic peo-
ple of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by
overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by
Moscow, [in Chossudovsky 2001]

The CIA looked for, but was unable to find, a Saudi
Prince to lead this crusade, It settled for the next best
thing, the son of an illustrious family closely connected to
the Saudi royal house, We need to remember that Osama
bin Laden did not come from a backwater family steeped
in premodernity, but from a cosmopolitan family, The bin
Laden family is a patron of scholarship: it endows pro-
grams at universities like Harvard and Yale, Bin Laden was
recruited with US. approval, and at the highest level, by
Prince Turki al-Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence
(Blackburn 2001:3), This is the context in which Osama
bin Laden helped build, in 1986, the Khost tunnel com-
plex deep under the mountains close to the Pakistani bor-
der, a complex the CIA …