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the rest of the Western countries, a Wahhabi caliphate [one that follows the austere Saudi Arabian variant of Sunni Islam] will then be installed across the world. 6
    This document was clearly written in the late 1990s at the earliest, but is still heavily influenced by the fact and manner of the mujahedeen’s victory over the Soviet Union. The first three stages of the strategy are an obvious attempt to relive that triumph by entangling the United States in a similarly forlorn war, the only difference being that, as the United States will not obligingly stage an unprovoked invasion of a Muslim country, it will be necessary to lure it into this trap by making a mass-casualty attack on the American homeland.
    The fourth phase is a genuinely original plan for a decentralized jihadi organization that is invulnerable preciselybecause of its lack of a centre. The franchise model has been al Qaeda’s greatest strength—although on some occasions, most notably in the case of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a franchise has gone down what bin Laden and his companions would have considered the wrong road and has had to be disowned.
    The fifth and final stage, of course, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy that reveals the real naïveté behind bin Laden’s apparent strategic sophistication. He is more realistic about the strength of the “far enemy” than most of his colleagues, but in the end he too believes in the caricatures of morally superior Muslims who will triumph just because they are in the right, and corrupt and decadent non-Muslims who will be defeated simply because they are evil. The lost Golden Age will return, and then everyone (or the survivors, at least) will live happily ever after.
    And there is one key calculation that goes unmentioned not only here but in every document produced by every revolutionary organization that employs terrorist tactics: that bringing death and devastation down on the heads of those whose support the organization wants is the only way it can actually get that support. Most ordinary people would really just like to get on quietly with their lives, but the terrorists deliberately provoke the local regime (or, in al Qaeda’s case, a foreign country) in order to make their lives hell. It’s a kind of political jiu-jitsu: the revolutionaries make spectacular attacks that don’t really do any strategic harm to their opponent, but infuriate the targetregime or country to the point that it unleashes massive violence in retaliation—violence that, in the nature of such things, will by and large hurt innocent people the most. Repeat as necessary, until a large enough section of the population has turned to your organization (now posing as the defender of the people) to create the critical mass needed for a revolution.
    Just as it is not clear exactly when Saif al-Adel wrote the above document, it is not known exactly when Osama bin Laden finally arrived at the strategy it outlines. Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1989, but when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and threatened the Saudi kingdom, King Fahd allowed American and other Western “infidel” forces to deploy troops on Saudi territory. Outraged, bin Laden denounced the king’s decision, and was eventually forced into exile as a result. The only Arab country willing to take him was Sudan, where a military officer called Omar al-Bashir had recently seized power in a coup and imposed Shari’ah law on the country. Bin Laden enjoyed sanctuary in Sudan until 1996, when the United States succeeded in getting him expelled in return for an easing of sanctions on Sudan. He found a new home in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, like-minded Afghan Islamists, had captured Kabul and brought a measure of peace to the south and centre of the country in 1996. They invited bin Laden and his merry men to set up shop there.
    It was from Afghanistan that he issued his declaration of war against the West in February 1998,