Read Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East for Free Online Page A

construction business, he became more radical in his religious thinking and more openly critical of existing Arab regimes (including the Saudi royal family) during his time at King Abdulaziz University in 1977–79. He left Saudi Arabia in 1980 to support the mujahedeen who were fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. First as a volunteer in Pakistan coordinating the flow of money, supplies and arms to the fighters in Afghanistan, later as a leader of foreign fighters inside the country, he spent most of a decade waging jihadagainst the Russian infidels before Moscow gave up and pulled all its troops out in 1989. Like most of the foreign volunteers, his views were transformed by the experience of fighting alongside Muslims from many other countries in a common struggle against infidel invaders, and it was in 1988 or 1989, in the mujahedeen camps in Afghanistan, that bin Laden created the organization known as al Qaeda (“The Base” or “The Foundation”).
    What he had learned, like many of his generation, was that the experience of fighting foreign invaders had a powerful unifying and radicalizing effect on people from all over the Muslim world. He also learned that if Islamists win a war against infidel foreign invaders in any Muslim country, they almost automatically win the struggle for domestic power as well. (The Taliban, the Afghan Islamist group closest to bin Laden’s own theological views, did not finally defeat their rivals and take power in Kabul until 1996, but it was clear much earlier in the civil war that followed the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan that the victors would be Islamists of one stripe or another.) So it was very much under the influence of his Afghan experiences that bin Laden formulated the revolutionary strategy that made him famous.
    He began to talk in terms of the “near enemy” (the corrupt regimes to be overthrown by Islamist revolutions in Arab and other Muslim countries) and the “far enemy” (the powerful infidel governments that dominated the Muslim world from afar). There was no possibility ofoverthrowing the “far enemy,” but also no need. All you had to do was get the far enemy to invade Muslim countries, as the Russians had invaded Afghanistan, and the results would be the same: radicalization in Muslim countries, a rapid growth in the number of young men wanting to wage jihad, ultimate defeat for the infidel invader, and the establishment of Islamist governments in the countries from which the invaders were finally expelled. Bin Laden was trying to recreate the circumstances that had just brought the Islamists such a striking victory in Afghanistan, after such a long string of revolutionary failures elsewhere. In the end, he was quite successful.
    A co-founder of al Qaeda, Egyptian ex-colonel Saif al Adel, later summarized the organization’s long-term plans in five consecutive phases under the title “Al Qaeda’s Strategy to the Year 2020”:
1. Provoke the United States and the West into invading a Muslim country by staging a massive attack or string of attacks on U.S. soil that results in massive civilian casualties.
2. Incite local resistance to occupying forces.
3. Expand the conflict to neighbouring countries, and engage the United States and its allies in a long war of attrition.
4. Convert al Qaeda into an ideology and set of operating principles that can be loosely franchised in other countries without requiring direct command and control, and via these franchises incite attacks against the United States and countries allied with the United States until they withdraw from the conflict.
5. The U.S. economy will finally collapse by the year 2020, under the strain of multiple engagements in numerous places, making the worldwide economic system, which is dependent on the United States, also collapse, leading to global political instability, which will in turn make possible a global jihad led by al Qaeda. Following the collapse of the United States and