Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  Because the IDF stayed on the ground, as the British did in Northern Ireland, it could continue gathering intelligence and acting on it within hours or sometimes minutes. This prevented Hamas, the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade, and other terrorist groups from rebuilding their infrastructure. Many suicide bombers still tried to attack (thirty-six in 2009 alone), but few got through. As the terrorist threat waned, the IDF was able to dismantle some checkpoints, thereby improving life for the Palestinians. This was as far as the IDF would go toward trying to win the “hearts and minds” of a fundamentally—and understandably—hostile population. But even in 2011, more than a decade after the start of the Second Intifada, the IDF was still conducting nightly operations in the West Bank leading to the arrest of terrorist suspects. The creation of a truly sovereign Palestinian state—the object of Arafat’s lifework—seemed as far away as ever.174

  LOOKING BACK OVER the long span of Arafat’s armed struggle, from 1965 to 2004, it is hard to say whether terrorism “worked” or not. Certainly terrorist attacks put Arafat and the PLO on the map; neither the man nor the movement would have become world famous without them. By sparking an Israeli backlash the attacks also helped to radicalize a hitherto apathetic Palestinian population and gave rise to a national identity that had previously been lacking. But on at least three occasions—in Jordan in 1970, Lebanon in 1982, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2000—Arafat’s resort to terrorism produced major setbacks that delayed the attainment of statehood. It was a double-edged sword: Palestinians’ association with terrorism brought their grievances international attention but also sullied their reputation and made Israel more intransigent.

  Arafat apparently believed, at least in the beginning of his career, that through incessant attacks the Jews could be forced to cede sovereignty over Palestine as the French had been driven out of Algeria and the Americans out of South Vietnam. He had visited both Algeria and Vietnam, and came away deeply impressed by the FLN and the Vietcong. His onetime deputy Abu Iyad wrote, “The guerrilla war in Algeria, launched five years before the creation of Fatah, had a profound influence on us. . . . [It] symbolized the success we dreamed of.”175 This missed a crucial distinction. The French and Americans could abandon those distant conflicts without committing national suicide. From the Israeli standpoint, however, surrender was tantamount to another Holocaust. Israeli Jews would not leave their homes unless their armed forces were annihilated, and that was far beyond the modest military capabilities of the PLO. By one estimate between 1968 and 1985 its operations killed 650 Israelis or an average of 40 a year—hardly a fatal blow even to such a small nation.176

  There is good cause to believe, as the liberal Israeli writer Gershom Gorenberg has argued, that the Palestinians would have made greater gains toward statehood if led by a Mahatma Gandhi or a Martin Luther King Jr. rather than by Arafat.177 Liberal democracies such as Israel are more susceptible to appeals to their conscience than to brutal attacks that stir public outrage. It is significant that the biggest Palestinian gains came after the First Intifada, which was much less violent than the two decades of terrorist attacks that preceded it or the Second Intifada, which succeeded it. But Arafat rose to prominence by the gun, and he could never quite renounce it. He could not make the transition that a few other terrorist leaders, including the Israeli prime ministers Menachim Begin (onetime leader of Irgun) and Yitzhak Shamir (the “Stern Gang”), had made to being normal politicians. And his power, and that of other extremists, made it impossible for those Palestinians who advocated nonviolent resistance or compromise with Israel to come to the fore.

  The biggest victims of Palestinian terrorism, in the final analysis, were the Palestinians themselves. More than 3,200 of them died in the Second Intifada alone—and without winning statehood.178

  57.

  LEFT OUT, OR REBELS WITHOUT A CAUSE

  The End of the (Marxist) Affair in the 1980s

  LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, guerrillas and terrorists are subject to popular moods and intellectual fads. From the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century, revolutionaries ranging from George Washington, Simón Bolívar, and Toussaint Louverture in the New World to, in Europe, Wolfe Tone, Francisco Espoz y Mina, and the two Giuseppes, Garibaldi and Mazzini, were inspired by liberal ideals that were then au courant among progressive thinkers. By the turn of the twentieth century the concepts of the Enlightenment had been superseded, at least in certain intellectual circles, by more extreme schemes for reorganizing society. It was in this milieu that anarchist terrorism flourished, anarchism then being a respectable ideology of the left. Anarchist terrorists were not much heard of after the 1920s, because by then anarchism had been displaced in the revolutionary vanguard by socialism.

  A later generation of leftist terrorists and guerrillas emerged out of the anticolonial atmosphere of the 1940s and 1950s and enjoyed their moment in the sun in the 1960s and 1970s when progressive opinion glorified Third World movements of “national liberation” as idealistic battlers against the ogres of imperialism and “neoimperialism.” This was the period when Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Yasser Arafat were on everyone’s lips and on many a college dorm room wall. Even some of their adversaries, such as Edward Lansdale, Robert Thompson, and John Paul Vann, became well-known figures if not quite idols of youth. By the 1980s, as memories of colonialism faded, as the excesses of postcolonial rulers became more apparent, and as capitalism revived under the impetus of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, leftist movements went into eclipse, and the guerrilla mystique faded like an old Volkswagen van that had been left out in the elements too long.

  The liberation ideology of the postwar period was discredited not only by the economic failure of its patrons in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, which had become evident by the 1970s, but also by the inhumanity of its proponents once in power. The most extreme illustrations could be found in the tens of millions of murders perpetrated by Stalin and Mao. From Idi Amin’s Uganda to the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, there were countless other examples of brutality on a lesser if still shocking scale that discredited the ideals that onetime insurgents had fought for. Even groups that never attained power, such as the Tupamaros, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, cost themselves moderate support because of the indiscrimination with which they targeted civilians. To their own detriment, they ignored the lessons of more successful terrorist groups of the past, notably the IRA from 1919 to 1921 and the Irgun and Stern Gang from 1944 to 1947, which generally although not invariably focused their attacks to the occupation authorities. By contrast the terrorist groups of the 1970s specialized in high-profile operations, such as the hostage taking at the Munich Olympics and the hijacking at Entebbe, which targeted civilians in front of the world’s television cameras. While successful in publicizing their grievances by means of this powerful new communications medium, they generated far more revulsion than support from viewers around the globe.

  By the 1980s the bankruptcy of Marxism was apparent even to Marxist rulers. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev implemented perestroika and glasnost, but those reforms failed to stop the rot, and in 1991 the entire state collapsed. By then the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe had already been overthrown. China, after Mao’s death in 1976, made a more gradual transition to capitalism (but not democracy) under the Long March veteran Deng Xiaoping. Vietnam was not far behind after Le Duan’s death in 1986. The handful of states like Cuba and North Korea that remained unapologetically communist were economic basket cases. Few but the most purblind ideologues could imagine that the future was being born in these impoverished and oppressed lands or that it was worthwhile to launch an armed movement to emulate their wretched example.

  The end of the old regimes in Moscow and Beijing also had a more direct impact on insurgent groups by cutting off a valuable source of subsidies, arms, and training. The Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s had been unable to generate much
of a support base of their own and expired along with the end of their foreign backers. Nationalist movements such as the PLO and IRA fared better, although they too were hobbled by a decline in outside support, demonstrating once again the importance of external aid for any insurgency. Some leftist guerrilla movements such as Colombia’s FARC and India’s Naxalites remained in existence, but they became increasingly marginalized. Even Nepal’s Maoists finally gave up “people’s war” in 2006 and signed a peace accord that forced them to compete for votes with other political parties. The Palestinian struggle continued, needless to say, but the Marxist PFLP was no longer at the forefront; it had ceased to be a major player long before George Habash’s death in 2008.

  Although leftist insurgency was on the wane, guerrilla warfare and terrorism were hardly disappearing. They were simply assuming different forms as new militants shot their way into the headlines motivated by the oldest grievances of all—race and religion.

  BOOK VIII

  GOD’S KILLERS

  The Rise of Radical Islam

  58.

  FIFTY DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

  Tehran, Mecca, Islamabad, and Kabul, November 4–December 24, 1979

  THE TRANSITION FROM politically motivated to religiously motivated insurgency—from leftist to Islamist extremism—was the product of decades, even centuries, of development. It could be traced back to the writings of the Egyptian agitator Sayyid Qutb in the 1950s–1960s; to the activities of Hassan al-Banna, who founded Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in 1928; to the proselytizing of Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab, who in the eighteenth century created the puritanical movement that would one day become the official theology of Saudi Arabia; even to Ibn Taymiyya, the fourteenth-century theologian who laid the foundation for declaring fellow Muslims to be takfir (apostates) and thus subject to attack; and to the seventh-century Kharijites who believed that only the most fundamentalist Muslims were fit to rule.1 But the epochal consequences of their ideas—which were to consign more-secular Muslim revolutionaries such as Yasser Arafat and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, to growing irrelevance—did not seize the world’s attention until the fateful fall of 1979.

  The fifty days that shook the world began on November 4, 1979. That morning, amid a light rain, protesters began scaling the brick walls of the U.S. embassy compound on Takht-e-Jamshid Avenue in Tehran. Iranian police charged with protecting the embassy did nothing to stop them. The shah of shahs, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a stalwart American ally, had been driven out of office earlier that year. But the nature of the post-shah government remained far from settled. Islamist supporters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who wanted to set up a theocratic dictatorship (velayat-e faqih, or “guardianship of the jurist”) were jostling for influence with secular leftists and liberals. Many of the moderates were eager to continue their country’s alliance with the United States; Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan had just traveled to Algiers along with his foreign minister to meet with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the American national security adviser.

  The embassy takeover had been organized by radical university students, including the future president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who wanted to strike a blow not only against the “Great Satan” but also against Mehdi Bazargan and other secularists. Thousands of students had been mobilized to overrun the embassy grounds and provided with placards, identification badges, bolt cutters, even strips of cloth to bind their captives. With Marine guards ordered to hold their fire, it did not take them long to overwhelm the skeletal embassy staff. As the blindfolded hostages were led out of the chancery building, a vast throng shouted ecstatically God is Great! and Death to America! Khomeini had not known in advance of the takeover, but seeing that popular sentiment was behind the students he embraced their cause in order to consolidate his power. Bazargan resigned in protest, thus removing a major obstacle to the Supreme Leader’s accretion of absolute power.

  President Jimmy Carter, good-natured to a fault, at first tried to be conciliatory and then ordered a hostage-rescue mission, which ended on April 25, 1980, in a fiery explosion at a rendezvous point in Iran code-named Desert One that killed eight American servicemen. The fifty-two hostages would not be freed until January 20, 1981, the very day that Carter left office and Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. Their 444-day, media-hyped ordeal would reveal America as a crippled giant, helpless to defend its own diplomats. Khomeini crowed, “Americans cannot do a damn thing.” He was thus encouraged to make anti-Americanism, along with anti-Zionism, the centerpiece of his attempts to mobilize the Iranian people behind his leadership and to spread the Iranian revolution abroad.2

  Iran was not the only American ally to feel the wrath of the Islamists that fall. Saudi Arabia was also targeted. Unlike the shah, a secular Westernizer, the Saudi royals were already Muslim fundamentalists—but not fundamentalist enough for the most extreme Salafists, who harked back to an early version of Islam practiced by their “pious predecessors.” Hoping to spark a revolt that would overthrow the monarchy, hundreds of militants at daybreak on November 20, 1979, took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca—the holiest shrine in Islam—with rifles and automatic weapons they had smuggled inside coffins. Their leader was Juhayman al Uteybi, a bearded and volatile veteran of the Saudi National Guard who denounced the Saudi princes as “dissolute . . . drunkards” and castigated them for allowing “cinemas, clubs, and art shows” into the kingdom. Juhayman claimed that his brother-in-law, who also participated in the mosque takeover, was the Mahdi (messiah) who would usher in the Day of Judgment. Juhayman and his heavily armed followers bloodily repulsed initial attempts to retake the mosque. It would take two weeks and cost as many as a thousand lives for the Saudi security forces, with the help of French advisers, to end the uprising. Rebels who were not killed outright were tortured and executed.

  In order to win the support of their religious establishment to fight in the holy of holies, the royals had to roll back the liberalization that had occurred in the 1960s–1970s. Women’s pictures were banished from newspapers, theaters closed, goon squads from the Committee to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice unleashed to crack down on any hints of sexuality in public. Even dog food was removed from supermarkets because dogs were considered unclean by pious Muslims. More menacingly, the Saudis increasingly resorted to what has been labeled “riyalpolitik” to safeguard their position. This meant increased spending to spread their harsh Wahhabi doctrine around the world: the very same doctrine that would one day inspire Osama bin Laden and his followers to turn on the Saudi monarchy and its backers in the West.3

  The Saudis were so embarrassed at the seizure of the Mecca mosque that they tried, with some success, in the last pre-Internet decade, to black out all news about the incident, leading to wild speculation that the culprits were either Iranian agents or, alternatively, Jews and Americans. The latter theory spread like a raging wildfire through Pakistan.

  On November 21, 1979, just one day after Juhayman had captured the Grand Mosque, mobs shouting “Death to American dogs!” converged on the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. As in Tehran a few weeks earlier, the demonstrators overran the compound with relatively little resistance. The Pakistani army and police were just as disinclined to intervene as their Iranian counterparts had been. President Mohammed Zia ul-Huq was moving his country in a more Islamist direction, and he had no desire to alienate the radicals by fighting them. The embassy personnel avoided disaster only because the Pakistani protesters were not as well organized or as determined as the Iranian students. Flinging Molotov cocktails, they burned the embassy’s six buildings, but a hundred staff members took refuge in the secure-communications vault on the chancery’s third floor. Although the vault’s floor tiles cracked and buckled from the fires raging below, the Americans managed to hold out until nightfall when they emerged to find the mob gone. Only four embassy employees died—two Americans, two Pakistanis—along with two protesters. The outcome could have been worse, but the incident was bad enough: an ominous indicator of growing radicalization in t
he world’s second-most populous Muslim state.4

  Islamists were by no means the only significant insurgents of the turn of the millennium. The post–Cold War period had also seen the reemergence of ethnic and tribal conflict, principally in Africa and the Balkans. Those wars of race were characterized by at least as much savagery as the wars of religion, and their body count has been even greater. They were, however, of limited interest to the West and then primarily as a humanitarian matter. The jihadists, by contrast, were of great concern to the West whether they were seen as a strategic ally (the Afghan mujahideen) or a threat (Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in Iraq). This section will look at all of these groups, whose full trajectory is not yet clear but which have already shown an ability to humble superpowers—whether in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan or in the rubble of the U. S. Marine barracks in Beirut and the World Trade Center in New York.

  59.

  RUSSIA’S VIETNAM

  The Red Army vs. the Mujahideen, 1980–1989

  FEW COULD HAVE imagined that jihadist insurgents would prove so powerful when the Soviet Union launched its textbook takedown of Afghanistan. The Soviet assault began on Christmas Eve 1979—exactly fifty days after the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran—with more than a division of paratroopers landing at Kabul airport and at the Bagram airbase thirty-five miles away. A day later, on December 25, a Motorized Rifle Division rumbled across the border from Soviet Turkestan and began racing south toward Kabul. Ostensibly these troops were only responding to pleas of assistance from a communist regime that had taken power in a coup the preceding year. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, as the communists were known, had immediately begun to alienate the population by challenging age-old social customs and landownership patterns. Landlords and mullahs were arrested, women ordered to unveil. Even the color of the Afghan flag was changed from Islamic green to communist red. The government tried to repress the resulting unrest by sending aircraft to bomb civilian neighborhoods and soldiers to massacre entire villages. Such excesses only drew more recruits into a burgeoning holy war. By the end of 1979 more than half of the Afghan army had deserted and 80 percent of the country had fallen out of the central government’s control.