PRAISE FOR DEFEATING JIHAD

“Concise, clear, and constructively combative, Dr. Gorka’s book stands apart in its depth of understanding of Islamist terrorists and what their ultimate defeat demands of us. Above all, his defiance of political correctness makes this well-written, finely argued work of immediate practical value. The author has presented us with an inspiring defense not merely of intellectual integrity—so lacking among today’s intelligentsia—but of our civilization.”

—Ralph Peters, Fox News strategic analyst and author of Valley of the Shadow

“Defeating Jihad follows the first rule of war: know yourself and know your enemy. For too long we have failed to properly understand threats like ISIS; to truly win, to steal the willingness away from the opposition and create a real sense of a victor and a vanquished—a clear winner and a loser—requires a sustained whole-of-government effort well beyond what we have been allowed to do in any conflict in which we have engaged in recent times. Strategic victory without sustainment is a recipe for defeat, and we may be on the path to defeat. We cannot win this war without the knowledge Dr. Gorka shares here in this book.”

—Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, U.S. Army (Ret.), former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency

“America is at war, an unconventional war against a new totalitarian enemy. Sebastian Gorka understands this kind of war and the mind of our new enemy. This book provides America with a strategy to destroy ISIS or any group that follows the ideology of global jihad.”

—Lt. Gen. Charles T. Cleveland, U.S. Army (Ret.), former Commanding General of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, home of the Green Berets

“For years Dr. Gorka has been telling the truth about the existential danger of jihadism. The threat is real and it is here in America. With ISIS even more dangerous than Al Qaeda, it is time to listen to what this man has to say. Defeating Jihad must be the foundation of our next commander in chief’s plan to win this war.”

—Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), member of the House Armed Services Committee

“Sebastian Gorka’s trenchant new work, Defeating Jihad, employs a Cold War analogy to make blunt recommendations as to what is to be done about the existential threat of jihadism. Like George Kennan’s 1946 ‘Long Telegram’ analysis to the Truman administration of how to confront predatory communism, the foundation of Seb Gorka’s strategy to destroy the jihadists is containment. Containment, however, was not by itself sufficient to destroy the Soviets, and it won’t roll back and erase Al Qaeda and its kindred of Cain. Seb Gorka reminds us that there are three fundamental tactics that will hasten the defeat of the jihadists. First, speak candidly of the enemy. These are predators who preach a homicidal interpretation of Islam. Second, accept that the U.S. cannot do the fighting. The U.S. can only help those who defend themselves. Finally, educating ourselves about the enemy’s point of view requires patience and resources, and gathering fresh intelligence on the enemy requires even more patience and money. ‘Pay now or pay later.’ To continue Seb Gorka’s historical analogy of the Cold War to defeat the Soviets, at present we are at about 1949. The Berlin Crisis is behind us, and we have learned little about the nature of the enemy or about ourselves in conflict.”

—John Batchelor, author and host of The John Batchelor Show

“Dr. Sebastian Gorka is one of the world’s leading experts in asymmetric warfare. In Defeating Jihad you get a glimpse of why his opinion matters in councils of war and in academia. He combines the perceptive with the analytic, the piercing intellect with the grit of real-world experience.”

—Stephen K. Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News

Copyright © 2016 by Sebastian L. Gorka

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For Colonel Nick Pratt.

The truest warrior-scholar I ever met.

For the passengers of Flight 93, who fought and died to save total strangers.

For the two SEALs of Benghazi, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty.

Men ordered to stand down who instead ran toward the gunfire.

And to Pali and Zsuzsi.

For loving me and showing me why we fight.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE ONE MAN AND HIS CHOICES

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 THE WAR SO FAR

CHAPTER 2 THE STORY OF JIHAD

CHAPTER 3 1979: ANNUS HORRIBILIS—MODERN JIHAD GOES GLOBAL

CHAPTER 4 THE ENEMY MASTERMINDS: THE GRAND STRATEGISTS OF MODERN JIHAD

CHAPTER 5 WHAT IS TO BE DONE? HOW AMERICA WINS AND THE JIHADIS LOSE

AFTERWORD

RESOURCES AND FURTHER READING

APPENDIX A KENNAN’S LONG TELEGRAM ON THE SOVIET THREAT TO AMERICA

APPENDIX B NSC-68: THE TOP-SECRET PLAN TO WIN THE COLD WAR

NOTES

INDEX

PROLOGUE

ONE MAN AND HIS CHOICES

I do not come to the question of America’s role in the world unemotionally or in a simply clinical fashion. Like so many things in life, my attitude toward this issue and the current threat to America is shaped by history, the history of my family.

After the war between the Allies and the evil forces of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi empire had devastated Budapest, the beautiful city of his birth, a teenager called Paul witnessed his “liberated” home being progressively taken over by the new totalitarian ideology of communism.

As he saw the stipulations of the Yalta conference—which was meant to shape the postwar world—flouted one by one, especially when it came to countries like his own being allowed to choose their own governments after the war, Paul decided to resist. As a fifteen-year-old boy he had fought with a submachine gun through the ruins of the Hungarian capital. But now, as a young man enrolled in university, his resistance to the new communist dictatorship would take an indirect and covert form.

Enrolled as an architectural student in the Technical University that still sits on the banks of the River Danube in the heart of Budapest, he decided that with hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops occupying Hungary and the political system rapidly becoming a one-party communist state, the best way to fight back would be by undermining Moscow’s plans for dominating his beloved homeland and the whole region.

In college Paul secretly organized a small circle of Christian students whom he could trust, students who not only shared his strong faith but were prepared to risk their lives in order to make their country free and independent once more. The group would use their mandatory college internships to get placements at strategically important state enterprises, at locations such as railheads and industrial planning bureaus, which were key to Moscow’s domination of the national economy of Hungary and the spread of the Kremlin’s power across what would soon become the “Soviet bloc.”

There the young men, pretending to help “the Party” solidify its grip on the nation and serve the spread of communism, would record convoy movements, the shipments of military supplies, and the measures taken to nationalize the key hubs of industry that the apparatchiks were making subservient to the Kremlin. They did so fully aware that if the Hungarian secret police or their masters in the KGB ever found out what they were doing, they would be arrested, interrogated, and most likely summarily executed.

As this small band of anticommunist patriots intensified their information-gathering activities, they established contact with Western intelligence, specifically MI6, the external spy service of Great Britain. Now the information about what the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was doing in Central Europe and how it was flagrantly in breach of the commitments it had made to its erstwhile allies at Yalta would reach a government that could actually use that information to subvert Moscow’s plan to enslave countries such as Paul’s beloved Hungary.

But he and his friends didn’t realize the deadly danger they were putting themselves in by reaching out across the Iron Curtain to a government that they saw as a pillar of the free world.

Working through a courier who could move across the border between captive Hungary and free Austria, Paul and his team would send coded reports to London via Vienna. But one day in the spring of 1950, the courier was kidnapped off the streets of the Austrian capital, smuggled into Hungary, and dumped in the headquarters of the Hungarian secret police. The courier was eventually murdered, but not before his captors had tortured and interrogated him and uncovered the identities of the student spies, Paul included. Capturing the courier and identifying the band of young anticommunists had been made easy by the treachery of a senior British spymaster.

Kim Philby, a member of the Cambridge Spy Ring, the most infamous band of Soviet double agents of the Cold War, had been at the end of the chain of intelligence reporting that went from Paul and his friends across Europe to the headquarters of His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. Ensconced at the heart of the British spy establishment, Philby and his treacherous comrades were in the perfect place to encourage the identification of anticommunist patriots behind the Iron Curtain, recruit them in the cause of freedom and democracy, and eventually betray them to the occupying Soviet forces or the indigenous secret police machinery. Here it should be noted that the treachery of Philby’s spy ring was not limited to Hungary but reached across Central and Eastern Europe, and even to the Balkans, prepared as they were to sacrifice as many persons as necessary for the greater glory of Karl Marx and the utopia of communism.

Soon Paul and his friends were arrested. At the headquarters of the Hungarian secret police, Paul was tortured for weeks before being sentenced in a communist show trial, at the age of twenty, to life in prison.

Paul was my father.

Despite the horrendous torture that left this young athlete—Paul was on Hungary’s national crew team set to row at the Olympics—injured for life, he was lucky. The government had decided before the trial that given his role in organizing the circle of secret patriots he must be hanged. That was how justice worked under communism, whether in Hungary, the USSR, or Mao’s China. Sentences were determined before the trial even began. But unbeknownst to Paul, he had a guardian angel who would save him from the hangman’s noose.

Today in Hungary, a beautiful country almost fully recovered from the decades of communism, my family name is associated with one person in particular, Geza Gorka, my father’s uncle, a ceramicist and one of Hungary’s most famous twentieth-century artists. He was also a canny survivor with remarkable political sense. In the turbulent world of Central Europe in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, his work was sought after by collectors of every political stripe and regime, no matter which ideology they followed.

In the years after World War I, which had deprived Hungary of two-thirds of its territory and one-third of its population, Geza’s work found favor with the government of regent Admiral Horthy and the vestiges of the Austro-Hungarian nobility and gentry who ran the country. After the Second World War, despite having been favored by the “enemies of the People,” his artwork was prized by Budapest’s new communist overlords. So much so that many a visiting head of state or other dignitary received a Gorka vase as an official gift from the Politburo or the general secretary himself.

When the nationally celebrated artist heard that his favorite nephew had been arrested, and most probably for acts of treason against the communist state, he swung into action. Behind the scenes, very quietly, Geza Gorka reached out to the highest levels of the regime. He knew the Party’s attitude: the people had to see that betrayal of the Marxist system would be crushed. But perhaps Paul could be spared the death penalty.

The reach of the artist was indeed long enough. Geza was told that though his nephew must be made an example of, in light of his youth and his uncle’s service to the regime, he would be given a prison sentence of “only” ten years. Little did my father or his uncle know that even now, in negotiating a secret deal, the regime was lying.

Forty years later, after the communist regimes of the region had fallen, we would be allowed to see the original secret files pertaining to my father’s arrest, interrogation, and sentencing. Now declassified, there is one document that perfectly demonstrates the nature of totalitarianism and how a communist regime worked in reality. Written before my father had even appeared in court, it was stamped by the secret police: SUBJECT NOT TO BE RELEASED EVEN AFTER SERVING HIS SENTENCE. Not only was daily life in a communist state built publicly upon lies, even behind the curtains of totalitarian power, the socialist state was suffused with deception.

So my father was tried and the prepared sentence delivered by the judge: ten years in prison for the crime of treason against the Socialist People’s Republic of Hungary. But even after a decade he was to be kept in political prison. Until he died.

My father began serving his sentence under particularly punitive conditions. Perhaps to counter the “favor” that Uncle Geza had managed to extract from his political connections, Paul was to spend the first two years of his incarceration in solitary confinement. In most penal systems, solitary confinement is seen as a temporary measure, meted out for a week or two in response to some infraction of the prison rules. Under communism, solitary was a way to send a message to the enemies of the state that though they were already in prison, the authorities could always make matters worse. It was another way to show that the state had total capricious control and could punish whenever it wanted and for any reason. (Although I am his flesh and blood, to this day I cannot comprehend, for even a moment, what two years alone in a prison cell without contact with the outside world was like for my father. And I still absolutely cannot comprehend how this treatment by itself, let alone the torture he was subjected to, failed to have a permanent effect on my father’s mind.)

After solitary, my father was released into the general population of political prisoners, among whom he would meet the cream of anticommunist Hungarian society, other patriots imprisoned for their love of freedom and resistance to dictatorship. Priests, professors, leaders of Christian organizations as innocuous as the YMCA, and politicians who had dared to challenge the lies of the Communist Party in what they had believed would be democratic elections at the end of the war.

My father called these years the best “university” anyone could ever attend. One day he would be learning about economics or engineering from men who had worked at the highest levels of the pre-communist government. The next he would be educated in mathematics or philosophy by professors who had been punished simply for being members of the middle class. Then the following day, as they circled the prison yard for their mandatory daily walk, he would imbibe the wisdom of the many old-school Catholic and Protestant clergymen who had been imprisoned simply for believing in God and being men of the cloth. But it was still an education within a prison. And not just a standard prison, but a prison for “enemies of the state.”

Then came the next change.

Given his youth and his strength as a former athlete, my father, along with other able-bodied inmates, was offered a choice: stay among the general population of political prisoners with all that entailed or volunteer for hard manual labor in a prison coal mine.

Already the cost of communism was beginning to show in the national economy. With the law of supply and demand repealed as an expression of capitalist dogma, the nation was not producing as the Party’s five-year plan demanded. The workforce was physically incapable of meeting the production targets needed for communism to flourish everywhere in the East, not just in Hungary. Socialism would never defeat the “rabid dogs” of the democratic West unless more healthy bodies could be applied to the task.

The deal was simple. In return for becoming a manual laborer serving the state, Paul and any other political prisoners who joined him would enjoy perks not available to the other prisoners. Chief among these was better food and more of it. (This can hardly be called a “perk,” of course, since it would be pointless to press prisoners into manual labor and not feed them adequately for their task. Hungry slave labor is weak slave labor, and weak slave labor will make reaching the ideologically mandatory industrial targets impossible!)

In exchange for these “concessions,” however, each prisoner would be required to dig ten tons of coal a day without machinery or explosives. Realizing he was physically a shadow of his former self and that coal mining was the closest thing to exercise he was going to get, my father accepted the deal.

But more important, he knew that working in a mine would bring him into daily contact with people from the outside. None of the prisoners knew anything about mining coal, so the shafts and seams were also manned by civilian miners, who had access to contraband and could communicate with relatives and loved ones. Most important of all, working in a mine, with access to tools, was a chance to escape.

Paul actually enjoyed his two years underground as a manual laborer. Originally the Gorkas had been vojvodas, members of the Polish aristocracy who had ended up in Hungary after the revolutionary turmoil of 1848. Before World War II, his own family had been comfortably positioned at the upper levels of the middle class, his father, Augustus, a bank manager and successful athlete himself, having represented the country as a long-distance runner. Now in the prison mines of Hungary, Paul developed a new appreciation for the working class of his beloved nation. Not the idealized “workers” of communist propaganda, but the sort of men who are the hardworking backbone of any nation, providing the staples and the foundation upon which the country is built. Handful by handful, wheelbarrowful by wheelbarrowful, the former student of architecture and fine arts tore from the earth with his pickaxe the coal that would fuel the furnaces and boilers of national industry.

After two years, however, the communist state had another problem, subtler but just as serious. In its ideological purge of Hungarian society, targeting not only the former aristocracy and political elite but above all the anticommunists of the middle class, the Communist Party had destroyed the intellectual capacity of the country.

People like my father and his older compatriots were the architects, engineers, and other professionals who constituted the level between the manual laborer and the government, the educated men who guided industry and helped the country flourish. With so many of the professional class in prison or executed for having resisted communism, the nation was simply failing to function. The Party’s attempted solution illustrates the perfectly absurd contradictions inherent in Karl Marx’s utopian vision.

Marx had taught that the modern capitalist state was doomed, built as it was on the exploitation of the workers by industrialists and the middle class. The coming revolution would destroy the capitalists and middle classes, leaving only the working class and the Party. But now, just six years after Hungary had been taken over in the name of the workers, the country was falling behind. Quotas were not being met, and the vision of the eventual “workers’ paradise” was slipping further and further away. What was to be done? There was only one group of people with the requisite skills to realize the vision of Marx and Lenin: the surviving members of the bourgeoisie who were in prison.

In desperation, the Party organized industrial offices inside its political prisons and manned them with the people who with their training and expertise had been supporting and running the companies of the free market before the communists had taken over and arrested them. Practically Pythonesque, this solution saw the imprisoned enemies of the state, who had helped build the system that socialism was predicated on destroying, press-ganged into saving the economy from the incompetence and ideological dead end that was communism.

Because of his initial training as an architect, my father had to trade in his pick for a draftsman’s pen. He was moved to the Central Prison, outside Budapest, where an engineers’ office had been set up in the political prisoners’ wing. Here he would work as a prisoner-draftsman, supplying one of the technical skills that the one-party state’s command economy was in desperately short supply of.

In his new office, Paul befriended an older man who had been imprisoned for being a member of the postwar government and a leader of the YMCA. This pillar of pre-communist Hungary, an elegant and handsome man named George, had a wife and young daughters who were now fending for themselves. One day George asked a favor. If ever Paul made it out of prison, would he please help his daughters escape to the West, away from the depredations and soul-destroying nihilism of communist life? Though my father was convinced that he would end his days behind bars, he assured George that should he ever make it out alive, he would gladly locate his daughters and escape to freedom in the West.

Then in the fall of 1956, the world turned upside down. Just for ten days, but it turned upside down.

In response to anticommunist strikes and protests in Soviet-occupied East Germany and communist Poland, a group of Hungarian students from Paul’s old university decided to hold a silent vigil in solidarity with those resisting the Marxist oppression elsewhere. On October 23, they gathered at the statue of a Polish national hero that stood proudly on the bank of the Danube in downtown Budapest.

The number of students at the vigil grew and grew, and they collectively decided to cross the Danube and approach the headquarters of Hungarian state radio. As the crowd of silent marchers traversed the capital, the city’s residents opened their windows and stepped out onto their balconies waving the red, green, and white national flag in support. Not the flag of the communist state, with the hammer and wheatsheaf in the center, but the plain tricolor of a free Hungary, the communist emblem hurriedly torn out of the middle.

A nation was awakening. A people was rising as one to face and fight the totalitarians.

Thus began the ten days of the Hungarian Revolution. The students were joined by the workers from the factories on Csepel Island in the Danube, laborers who had had enough of seeing the machinery and goods they produced shipped off to Russia, as the Party stewards repeatedly increased the mandatory production norms to inhuman levels while they themselves enjoyed all the privileges and luxuries that being a party flunky afforded them.

When the student protestors, their ranks swelled by the revolutionary “working class,” reached the radio headquarters, they demanded access to the studios to broadcast their list of impromptu demands, which included the withdrawal of all Soviet occupational forces from Hungarian territory and a free and fair election with a secret ballot.

It was here that the full force of history was unleashed. Secret police inside the building suddenly opened fire on the unarmed protestors, and the freedom-loving Hungarian people realized that the time had come. Soon anticommunist elements in the armed forces supplied arms to the revolutionaries and even fought on their side. The streets of Budapest became a barricade-littered battlefield, the forces of freedom pitched against the legions of the totalitarian oppressor. Hungarian students had been forced in recent years to attend Party-mandated infantry-skills classes so that they would be ready for any war with the “degenerate” West, and the well-trained young revolutionaries now won street battle after street battle.

It was at this point that the freedom fighters captured a tank from the Russians who were reinforcing the Hungarian Communist Party. The new revolutionary commander of the captured tank decided that rather than use his new weapon to attack the regime, he would liberate those who had suffered the most under the Stalinist dictatorship. The revolutionaries drove the Soviet tank to the national prison, where my father was incarcerated, and stormed it. Crashing through the gates, the freedom fighters flooded in to arrest the warders or kill those servants of the communist state who would not surrender. And so it was that my father was liberated by his fellow patriots during the precious few days when Hungary broke from Moscow and the tyranny of socialist oppression.

Soon a revolutionary cabinet was formed and negotiations were initiated with the weakened communist regime on the “neutral” territory of the Yugoslav embassy. The plan was for Hungary to break from Moscow’s control and force the removal of the thousands of Soviet troops and tanks that had been stationed in Hungary since the end of the war.

But then the revolution was betrayed.

Those negotiating on behalf of a free Hungary were kidnapped from the embassy grounds with the complicity of Marshal Tito, the Yugoslav dictator, and Moscow deployed hundreds of tanks and thousands of troops from the territory of Ukraine and Rumania into Hungary as reinforcements for the regime, crushing the fledging democratic government and taking back by force that which they could not have any other way.

My father was already with his widowed mother when the Soviets reinvaded. As he followed the freedom fighters’ tragic reversal, he was informed by a relative with a connection in the Ministry of the Interior that his name was on a shoot-to-kill list with other escaped “reactionary elements.” If found, he would not simply be arrested and sent back to solitary confinement; he would be shot there and then.

With no choice but to leave the country of his birth, he remembered the promise he had made to his prison mate about his daughters. Presenting himself at the family’s door, he announced that he was going to escape to the West and that the daughters could come with him. Two of them did: the eldest, a tall seventeen-year-old named Susan, and her younger sister Elizabeth. With only the clothes on their backs and enough money to make it to the Austrian border, the three left Budapest just as the forces of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of Hungary were reestablishing their grip on the nation.

Elizabeth, who suffered from polio, had to turn back as the days grew colder and the journey more arduous. (Eventually she too would escape, accompanied to the West by my father’s best friend from his years in prison.) After avoiding the police and roving military patrols, Susan and my father made it to the border. But not knowing how to make it across the minefield laid by the Hungarian security forces along the border, they had to give the very last of their money—and my father’s gold watch, which had belonged to his father—to a local farmer, who revealed the path to safety through the mines.

Finally, after being betrayed, tortured, and imprisoned for almost a quarter of his life, my father made it to freedom and an Austrian refugee camp. Not knowing that he and his band of friends had been betrayed by a British counteragent, he told the authorities at the refugee camp that he wished to be settled in England.

As you may have guessed, Paul married Susan, who became my mother. I was born and raised in England, but I grew up a proud Hungarian. More important than that, I was brought up to understand one thing without question: freedom is fragile. Freedom is not the natural state of affairs, and there will always be those who believe they have the right to take your freedom from you to serve their “greater” ideological cause.

A NEW TOTALITARIANISM

I am a child of the Cold War. The 1970s and 1980s shaped who I am today, the backdrop of the Hungarian Revolution providing clarity as to what was at stake. To quote the great Ronald Reagan, the loss of freedom is always just one generation away.

For me the pronouncements of communists were not just empty words. I could tell the price of their “workers’ paradise” from the scars that the secret police had left on my father’s wrists when they hung him backward from hooks in the ceiling of their torture chamber. The endless speeches from the likes of Brezhnev, Andropov, or even the “reformer” Gorbachev about the glorious tomorrow that socialism would bring brought to mind the names of my father’s friends who had been executed for their “crimes against the state” in the internal courtyard of the Central Prison.

Today I am a proud American, blessed with a beautiful family and the honor of working with my wife in support of the peace officers and warfighters who protect this greatest of nations on God’s earth. As an immigrant who chose to become an American and the son of parents who had to fight for their freedom, I understand 9/11 differently from those for whom the threat of totalitarianism is purely abstract.

Man is made in the image of his Creator. It is this reflection of God that imbues us with inherent value and dignity. The soul that each of us carries isn’t simply an expression of who he is or the eternal embodiment of his identity. It is the building block of our civilization. Judeo-Christian civilization is based upon the idea that the innate dignity of the individual, derived from his being made in God’s image, must be the central value of human society. Man is man because God made him, and he is ultimately fulfilled only through the relationship he has with his Creator.

When men make themselves the arbiters of truth and the guarantors of (earthly) salvation, they sow the ideological seeds of tyranny. That ideology may make the state the object of worship and racial purity the goal of society, as with fascism and Nazism, or it may insist that class conflict is the engine of history and that collective control of the material “means of production” is the key to human flourishing, as with communism. In either case, the individual has no rights, and the totalitarian control of all by a self-appointed elite becomes the only way to “ensure” the perfection of humankind. Man is enslaved by his fellow man for the “greater” good of some utopia.

The Third Reich was the dream of one man, Adolf Hitler, a “thousand-year Reich” that would dominate the world. But it was about this terrestrial reality, eschewing as the Nazi ideology did the Judeo-Christian heritage of Western civilization. There were no gods, the state was to be worshipped instead, along with the Führer, who was the embodiment of the state. Blood and treasure were to be expended in order to build the empire, to secure the master race’s Lebensraum and subjugate or destroy the Untermensch.

Given the events in Hitler’s Berlin bunker before the end of the war, it is now clear that he was a fanatic who eventually lost all sight of the reality on the ground and could never countenance that his plan had failed. But once he and his closest henchmen had died at their own hands, it was a matter of just moments for the rest of the military leadership to surrender to the Allies, for them to realize the war was over. The project had failed; there was no more to be done. The West had defeated Hitler’s race-based totalitarianism. It was close. But we won.

The same is true for the communist threat that America faced for more than forty years. The Kremlin may have blustered about shouldering any burden and paying any price to win the ideological war with their “capitalist enemies,” but the brutality of the Soviet system was not built on blind fanaticism. If it had been, then the policy of mutually assured destruction could never have worked.

Once the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union realized that there was no way for Moscow to launch a first-strike nuclear attack against America and the West without our being able to retaliate with our own nuclear arsenal in such a way that Russia would be devastated, the idea of nuclear war became unconscionable. The communist elite had no desire to die just to teach the “capitalist pigs” a lesson. They may not have loved freedom, but at the end of the day, they wanted to live, and eventually we defeated them and demonstrated the illegitimacy of their ideology.

Today, our enemy is very different.

Today, as a nation we face a new totalitarianism, one that is potentially even more dangerous than fascism or communism. Today’s threat is hybrid totalitarianism that goes beyond man-made justifications for perfecting society along politically defined lines and instead uses the religion of Islam and Allah to justify mass murder.

Our enemy today is again a totalitarian. I call it the global jihadist movement. The members of this movement, be they Al Qaeda, ISIS, or Hizbollah, have a vision of the future world that is exclusive and absolutist. Either the whole planet is under their control or they have lost. There is no middle ground. No peaceful coexistence is possible. Ever. The infidel must submit or be killed.

But the center of the enemy’s ideology today is not a state. In fact, the enemy totally rejects the idea of the state as an invention of the infidel West. Nor is its ideology concerned with class distinctions, economics, or “the means of production.” Today our enemy fights not for earthly reasons to serve a tangible here-and-now but to serve a transcendent reality, to serve Allah.

But in their absolutist “them or us” attitude, they bear a great resemblance to the Nazis and communists of yesteryear, and that is why I am writing this book.

I grew up in freedom in the United Kingdom. Today I am a proud American, but I will never forget what my father taught me. Freedom is as precious as it is fragile. If you are complacent, there will always eventually come a group that will try to take your freedom away from you by violence and through the subversion of your values.

Every generation must remain vigilant. Each generation must make a conscious decision to protect what we have achieved as a civilization and be prepared to fight—if necessary to the death—to save our loved ones and our children from enslavement to the newest dictatorial ideology, secular or religious.

I grew up knowing these truths in my bones, so as I watched the horrific events of 9/11 unfold live on a television screen, it did not take very long for me to understand one thing: the totalitarians are back. This time the dictatorship invokes the name of God, as opposed to the working class or the Führer, but they are back, and they will either kill us or enslave us.

This book is born out of the belief that we Americans can defeat the new totalitarians and that their defeat should be built on the secret plan that America used to defeat our last totalitarian enemy, communism.

In fact, you can argue that our current enemy predates even fascism and communism and that we have been at war with the jihadists since at least the Barbary Wars of the eighteenth century.

Perhaps now is the time for us to have a strategy to defeat them. This book is the first cut of that plan.

INTRODUCTION

Shortly after World War II, a young diplomat called George Kennan was sitting in the American embassy in Moscow when a simple request came in from Washington: Explain to us what the USSR is doing and why it is behaving as it is. Kennan’s response, an unusually long secret telegram to the secretary of state, would shape U.S. foreign and security policy for the next forty years.

Washington was perplexed and stymied. Joseph Stalin, “Uncle Joe,” had been a stalwart ally whose forces had been essential to the defeat of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. But just a few months after the fall of Berlin, the Soviets were acting like new belligerents, not friends, obstructing America and the rest of the Allies and undermining the postwar arrangements agreed upon by all the victors at Yalta, Potsdam, and Tehran. Had the Kremlin changed, or did Washington simply not understand the way Stalin and the Politburo looked at the world? Washington needed an answer, and George Kennan, a professionally trained expert in Russian history and culture, was the perfect man to provide it.

Published in a redacted and revised pseudonymous version a year later in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs under the title “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Kennan’s analysis of our nascent Cold War enemy was a masterpiece. He skillfully explained how the “personality” of the Kremlin was formed by the absolutist and totalitarian ideology of communism, which had created what would later be called a “slave state.” And the ideology that drove this slave state would simply not allow it to coexist with America and the other Western democracies.

Kennan’s analysis became the basis not only for America’s later “containment” policy—the plan to protect the West from the threat of communism that President Truman eventually announced to a joint session of Congress in 1947—but also for National Security Council Report NSC-68, the top-secret White House plan to defeat Soviet Russia, a plan that would result, forty years later, in the fall of the Berlin Wall and victory in the Cold War.

The “Long Telegram,” as Kennan’s work came to be known, and NSC-68 together are a casebook study in what the military and intelligence community call an enemy threat doctrine analysis and a grand strategic response plan.

America lacks such a threat doctrine analysis for our post-9/11 world. Despite more than a decade’s worth of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are unsure how to win our war against global jihad. The purpose of this book is to provide today’s “long telegram” and to formulate a strategic plan to defeat the new totalitarians.

FROM COMMUNISM TO JIHAD

At first it may seem peculiar to just dust off one war plan—and a “cold” one at that—and apply it to today’s threat. But this isn’t simply an unimaginative exercise in repetition. To begin with, understanding how we analyzed that threat and eventually defeated it is a valuable exercise in itself. Few people know anything about how America really planned the fall of communism in the 1950s and how far-ranging and sophisticated a strategy we had right at the beginning of the Cold War.

Secondly, the similarities between the threat we faced then and the threat we face now are numerous and remarkably deep, and therefore it is all the more important to know what we did as a nation at the start of the Cold War and how we can profit from it today in the post-9/11 world.

Later we will look in more detail at how the Long Telegram and NSC-68 should shape the plan to destroy our jihadist enemies today, but for now consider this passage from Kennan’s original secret cable:

In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi[,] that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken. . . .

Kennan was writing about the USSR, but this description of a fanatical enemy incapable of living in peace with America applies word for word to the jihadist organizations behind all the major terrorist atrocities from 9/11 to the San Bernardino massacre.

Kennan’s original analysis had a critical effect on the U.S. government’s strategic response to the threat of global communism for decades to come. After answering Washington’s question about the nation’s new enemy, Kennan returned to Washington, gave a series of lectures at the National War College, and turned the secret cable into the article for Foreign Affairs (published under the name “Mr. X”) that would shape the Cold War.

Internally, his analysis became the foundation of the administration’s public and covert response to the Kremlin. In 1947, President Truman declared to Congress, the American people, and the world that communism must be contained and that the United States would assist any group of people threatened by the Kremlin or local communist forces, beginning with Greece. Two years later, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed, and in 1950 the United States went to war to stop the communist takeover of the Korean peninsula. But an analysis of the new enemy and an overt declaration of our intent to stop communism was not enough. A detailed, classified, long-term plan for ultimate victory was needed. And this is where Paul Nitze joins our story.

THE SECRET PLAN TO DEFEAT THE SOVIETS

Nitze, the director of policy planning in President Truman’s State Department, would go on to a prestigious career serving administration after administration, eventually rising to assistant secretary of defense under President Gerald Ford and cofounding the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.

In January 1950, Truman tasked the State Department and the Department of Defense “to undertake a reexamination of our objectives in peace and war and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans.” As a result, the State-Defense Policy Review Group was established under the chairmanship of Paul Nitze.

The final fifty-eight-page top-secret strategy, NSC-68, was eventually declassified in the 1970s by Henry Kissinger, and so today we can see exactly how our nation understood the threat of communism at the start of the Cold War and what our plan to defeat it actually was.

It is obvious that Kennan’s cable informed Nitze and his team. In the very first section of NSC-68 they write:

[U]nlike previous aspirants to hegemony, [the USSR] is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or nonviolent methods. . . .

The “design” of the communist masters of the Kremlin requires “the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition to their authority” and calls for

the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin. . . . The United States, as the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world and the bulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion, is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design.

Despite its obvious debt to the Long Telegram, NSC-68 does much more than simply reiterate Kennan’s analysis of the existential threat that the Soviet Union represented to the free world.

WHAT IT TOOK TO WIN THEN. WHAT IT TAKES TO WIN NOW

In the pantheon of military thinkers and grand strategists, two giants stand out: the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz and the Chinese master Sun Tsu.

Clausewitz’s posthumously published work On War, shaped by the age of Napoleonic warfare, is best known for the concept of the friction and the fog of war and the “Clausewitzian dictum” that war is but the continuation of politics by other means. Clausewitz is still taught at military academies and war colleges across the globe, and his theories continue to inform how military men and women think about war in the twenty-first century.

Just as famous, if not more so, is the ancient Asian sage Sun Tsu, author of The Art of War. Sun Tsu is a much easier and quicker read than Clausewitz, full of short pieces of advice, from the tactical to the strategic, that have been quoted and applied far beyond the military, often in the world of business. The adage most frequently attributed to Sun Tsu—“know your enemy if you wish to win”—is actually a misquotation. It is indeed good to know your enemy if you wish to win, but Sun Tsu’s recipe for ultimate victory begins with knowing yourself—why you are going to war, what you are fighting for. You may have studied the culture and ways of your foe for years and be intimately familiar with his thinking, but first you must be able to answer the questions, What do I represent? What am I prepared to risk blood and treasure for, and why exactly am I going to war? If you cannot answer these questions, then you should not be going to war at all.

And these are the questions that we Americans have not adequately answered since that dreadful Tuesday morning in 2001. In the beginning it was clear enough: we were going to war to crush those responsible for the largest terrorist attack in modern history and to destroy Al Qaeda’s bases in Afghanistan. But then we stayed in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq came next, and the clarity we had in the days after 9/11 was replaced with confusion, obfuscation, and what the Washington set euphemistically calls “mission creep.”

Not so at the onset of our last war with a totalitarian enemy. Thanks to Truman, Nitze, and NSC-68, America knew what it stood for as a nation and why it had to defeat the communists.

Nitze clearly had read his Sun Tsu, or he at least intuitively knew that expert knowledge of the enemy like Kennan’s was an insufficient platform upon which to construct a war plan. He knew that we could win against a vicious absolutist ideology only if we knew what we represented as a nation and what was therefore at stake. His top-secret strategy to defeat the Soviets opens with a discussion of matters that are in no way secret. Referring to facts about the American founding recounted in any schoolbook, Nitze declares that “the fundamental purpose of the United States” is “to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual.”

Paul Nitze fully understood that a communist Russia, which by this time had acquired nuclear weapons, represented an existential threat to the United States of America and the values enshrined in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. He and his team went on to lay out the strategic options available, identify the only feasible course, and explain how to navigate it. NSC-68 supplied the details of how America could strengthen its allies and partners, promote democracy in general, limit the spread of communism, and weaken the grip of the Kremlin from within. We will look at those details later. Suffice it to say now that the plan was right and the plan worked. Eventually the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. And all without a shot being fired across Checkpoint Charlie.

In the Cold War we faced a totalitarian enemy committed to a “them or us” view of the world. The same is true today, except that, unlike our old atheist enemy, our new foe fights us for the glory of Allah.

Fifteen years into this competition to the death, we need a new Long Telegram, a clear-eyed analysis of what our enemy believes and an understanding of how those beliefs inform his actions. Only when we understand the enemy as he understands himself will we be able to craft a new NSC-68 to defeat the global jihadists just as we defeated the USSR.

As Kennan wrote in his original secret cable:

Our first step must be to apprehend, and recognize for what it is, the nature of the movement with which we are dealing. We must study it with same courage, detachment, objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which [a] doctor studies [an] unreal and unreasonable individual.

But before we clinically dissect the beliefs and the resultant strategy of today’s enemy, so as to arrive at a place where we can draw a plan to defeat him, we must first look in the mirror and diagnose the failures of our response to 9/11.

CHAPTER 1

THE WAR SO FAR

We are a nation at war. Or at least we should be, because there are large numbers of deeply committed people in the world who wish to see us all dead or enslaved.

America stands for something unique. It is the only nation to have been established around an idea, not an ethnicity, language, or dynastic fiefdom, and it will always have enemies who disagree with that idea. And that founding concept is liberty and the freedom of the individual.

Other nations are the result of national identities established over centuries. Identities based upon a shared ethnic heritage, or simply the accident of being established on the territory of a preexisting political monopoly.

America was born in direct opposition to “power by decree,” under which an unelected elite exercised unaccountable control over the people. America was an idea formed in the crucible of a monarchy’s arrogating the sovereignty of its citizens, the colonists of British North America. The American Revolution was defined by the idea that it wasn’t the happenstance of being born into the correct family or class which secured your membership in a governing elite. Government was recognized by the Founding Fathers as an expression of the will of the people, not the caprice of an unrepresentative elite.

And anyone can be an American. Membership of the Republic does not depend on whether you belong to a special group but on whether you share and respect the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The values expressed in these documents created America and made it the mightiest nation the world has ever seen—more powerful than the ancient Greeks, more powerful than the Roman Empire, more powerful even than the British Empire.

But this power hasn’t brought safety and security.

In part because of the values upon which the nation was founded and in part because evil always prowls the earth, America is anathema to those who follow false gods or those who believe in their own power to define and monopolize truth here on earth or in the hereafter. Just look at the history of the last hundred years. First it was Nazis who wished to create a global empire in which the individual was just a cog in the machine of a state that worshipped racial purity and the glorious Führer. Then there were the Marxists and the communists, who replaced the Aryan race with the working class, but who again saw freedom and individual liberty as a threat to the power of the “enlightened” elite.

Sixty million people were killed in the war that followed the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland. More than one hundred million souls were extinguished by communists between 1917 and 1989, from the gulags of the Soviet Union to the killing fields of Cambodia. The only nation that could put a stop to the totalitarianism of Berlin and then Moscow was the United States.

In the case of Hitler’s Third Reich, the victory was won on the battlefields of Europe, in the deserts of North Africa, and in the jungles of Asia. In the case of the USSR, it took the bipartisan application of the policy of containment, the delegitimizing of the ideology of communism, and the bankruptcy of the Soviet economy to bring down the Iron Curtain. But it took just a generation for a new globally ambitious totalitarianism to establish itself as the greatest threat to democracy and target us as the bastion of individual freedom and liberty. That new hybrid totalitarianism was global jihad.

ONLY AMERICA

On the beautifully sunny day of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the jihadists of Al Qaeda managed to do something that neither Hitler nor Stalin had ever achieved. In less than two hours they massacred almost three thousand innocent men, women, and children on American soil, including members of our armed forces working inside the Pentagon. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, is said to have bellowed at the American people, “We will bury you!” But the Soviets never buried us. The new totalitarians, the Islamic terrorists of Al Qaeda, succeeded in doing so in Washington, New York, and Pennsylvania. And so our world changed.

As I write, we have entered the fifteenth year of our war with global jihadism, making this the longest war America has ever fought. We have lost thousands of our brave servicemen and women in faraway campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet our nation is still not safe. While our intelligence community tracked down Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and our special operators killed him in one of the most daring raids in military history, Americans are still dying in attacks on U.S. soil, from the Boston Marathon bombing to the San Bernardino Christmas party massacre. And now we face an even deadlier threat in the form of the jihadi insurgency that calls itself the Islamic State (ISIS), which now controls territory in Iraq and Syria and has affiliates in more than a dozen countries from the Middle East to Africa and even Asia.

My first motivation in writing this book is the reality that America’s strategic response to this new existential threat is failing. And believe me, it is an existential threat. The global jihadist movement may not yet have tank divisions at its disposal as did the Nazi regime or thousands of nuclear weapons as did the Soviets, but it has something much more important: a religious fervor combined with an un-Western degree of patience that produces a lethal and unbelievably resilient commitment to its cause. And the jihadists will not be negotiated with. For this enemy it truly is a question of “them or us.” They will not be stopped unless someone stops them.

I am also writing this book because I am now a proud American who believes that no other nation can defeat the global jihadist movement. Whatever your politics, ask yourself one question: Whom do you trust to fight this fight if we don’t? France? Germany? China? North Korea? Russia?

Our European allies simply do not have the ability to do what is required, even if they had the will to do so—which they do not. In light of the resolve he has shown in Syria, many see Vladimir Putin as the answer. But ask yourself another question: Is Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel who spent his pre-political career plotting to subvert and destroy us, moving into the Middle East because he believes in the values upon which America was founded?

Once again, America is the only answer to a globally ambitious and capable totalitarian threat. But is it just a matter of redeploying the Eighty-Second Airborne and sending U.S. troops into harm’s way overseas? The past fourteen years would seem to be an argument against our using large-scale military operations against terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or insurgents like the Islamic State. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq started under George W. Bush’s administration with the names Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom may have removed the Taleban and Saddam Hussein, but they have not led to a victory over the jihadists or the increased safety of our citizens back home. On the contrary.

As I write, America is witnessing the greatest increase in domestic jihadist plots and attacks since September 11, 2001. From a free speech rally in Garland, Texas, to a recruiting office in Chattanooga, Tennessee; from an office Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, to the attempted assassination of a police officer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the global appeal of the jihadist message is being turned into horrific violence against Americans, not to mention the scores of deadly attacks in Canada, France, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and Africa.

At the same time, ISIS has displaced Al Qaeda as the brand leader of global jihadism and succeeded where Osama bin Laden and all other previous jihadi groups have failed: It has reestablished the theocratic empire of Islam. It has founded the new caliphate.

Why are we still fighting this war more than a decade later, and why are we losing? We defeated the Nazis in less than five years, yet the global war on terror is now in its fifteenth year. How can America, a country of unprecedented military power, not yet have vanquished this new deadly religious totalitarianism?

The answer to this burning question has many elements, the most obvious one being that we have applied the wrong strategy since 9/11. But the most important reasons go beyond not having the right plan of action and have instead to do with politics and ideology.

NAMING THE ENEMY

Our nation’s immediate response to the attacks of September 2001 was to declare a “global war on terror.” Yet this wasn’t actually a war, nor was it global. It may seem a pedantic point, but the law defines war as protracted armed conflict between two or more nations. Al Qaeda is not a nation, nor is it a signatory to the Hague or Geneva Conventions on the laws of war. Our troops, therefore, were contending with a new threat that had very little to do with the system established in the twentieth century to regulate the use of force in international conflict. Nor did America apply itself “globally” to the mission of eradicating all terrorism. We did not deploy our special operators or CIA paramilitary forces to “take down” the Basque separatists of Spain, the ecoterrorists in the forests of Canada, or the Naxalite Marxist terrorists of India. We focused instead on a specific threat group, which we seemed unwilling to call what it called itself—jihadists, or holy warriors of Islam.

The sensitivities were clear. Originally, President Bush did not want to give the impression that America was at war with a religion. Nor did he want to alienate our Muslim allies. This was despite the fact that our Muslim partners, such as the Jordanians and the Egyptians, knew full well how Al Qaeda was using religion to fuel its war against not only the West but Muslims who disagreed with its vision of a theocratic future. Unfortunately, this distortion of reality would only increase over time until it reached outlandish and surreal proportions under President Barack Obama.

Under the bumper-sticker slogan of “global war,” our brave fighters joined battle with Al Qaeda and its hosts, the Taleban regime of Afghanistan. In a stunning series of operations starting in October 2001, a handful of CIA personnel and U.S. special operations forces leveraged the Taleban’s domestic enemies, the Northern Alliance, and not only destroyed Osama bin Laden’s terror bases in Afghanistan but deposed the Taleban government in Kabul.

MISSION CREEP

However unfavorable your impression of the military endeavors that followed the fall of the Taleban, the initial operations in the winter of 2001 were a truly masterly example of “unconventional warfare.” As the Green Berets like to say, we should try to achieve America’s objectives “by, with, and through” the local friendly forces. And this is exactly what we did at the end of 2001 with just a handful of men in uniform on the ground. But after that fabulous initial success, the mission mutated, accelerated, and expanded in ways that would not be good for America or its citizens.

Once the Taleban fell, it was decided that that wasn’t enough. Very soon the mission expanded from punishing or destroying those responsible for the original 9/11 attacks into what was called “nation building.” Afghanistan would become home to tens of thousands of American and NATO and non-NATO troops, and the country would be molded into the shape of a modern country with a representative government and human rights for all. This despite the fact that Afghanistan, which had been at war for more than a generation, was made up of dozens of competing tribes and ethnic groups that had foiled similar grandiose and foreign plans over the centuries, from those of Alexander the Great to those of the British Empire and the Soviet Union.

But these realities were pushed aside. President Bush’s advisors were confident: Afghanistan would be made into a modern nation that never again would harbor the likes of Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cadre. Then came the next war.

Key members of the Bush administration, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, had been involved in the first Gulf War back in 1990–1991. Many of them thought that war had not been concluded properly. The decision by the first President Bush not to decapitate the Iraqi regime and remove Saddam Hussein after his forces had been ejected from Kuwait had been a mistake, according to these members of his son’s administration. And now, after 9/11, the reality of mass-casualty terrorism was no longer just a hypothetical.

Al Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan had been destroyed, but bin Laden had escaped. Should he wish to attack the United States once more and kill even more innocent Americans, what better way than to use some type of weapon of mass destruction (WMD)? And the Bush cabinet knew that Saddam Hussein had WMD capability. What if Al Qaeda could lay its hands on Iraq’s chemical weapons, smuggle them into the United States, and use them in Boston or Los Angeles or Washington, D.C.?

THE LESSONS OF IRAQ

This is not the place to relitigate the question of Al Qaeda and Iraqi WMD, but I must make three points before we finish our review of what happened after 9/11. First, it was reasonable to conclude that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Second, it was reasonable to expect a certain amount of cooperation between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda. But, third, Saddam was nevertheless unlikely to share WMD with Al Qaeda.

Saddam Hussein was a bad man, and one of the reasons he was so bad was that he did have weapons of mass destruction and he used them against his own citizens. It is remarkable that even today otherwise reasonable people will parrot the line “Bush lied, people died,” as if George W. Bush and his team knowingly fabricated intelligence reports to justify invading Iraq. (The point of this deception, presumably, was to “steal their oil,” an accusation I find mildly amusing. If that were truly the case, wouldn’t we still be there siphoning off their oil wells?) This accusation can hold water only if you falsify the story. Saddam had WMD. We know it because he used them, only the second leader in history to do so (after Hitler).

The assertion that Iraq was still a WMD state, moreover, was not a uniquely American accusation or simply the product of the febrile minds of the dastardly “neoconservatives” working for George W. Bush. The determination that Saddam still possessed chemical weapons was shared by key U.S. allies in NATO. The Bush administration shared the intelligence with politicians on both sides of the aisle in Congress, who agreed with the assessment and voted in favor of the second Gulf War.

Now, what Saddam did with those weapons is another question entirely, but he flagrantly and repeatedly violated the terms of the 1991 ceasefire agreement and numerous United Nations resolutions, which required him to demonstrate that he was dismantling his WMD facilities and destroying or handing over his stockpiles for destruction.

If the assertion that Saddam Hussein, an evil dictator, was in possession of weapons of mass destruction wasn’t simply reasonable but almost unanimously agreed upon, was the decision to go to war a sound one? Not necessarily. Saddam may have been evil and clearly in breach of the agreement that ended the previous Gulf War. But that did not mean that he was an imminent threat to U.S. national interests or that he would be the man to provide mass-casualty weapons to Osama bin Laden.

Here it is important to dispel some erroneous conventional wisdom. The common assertion that Saddam Hussein would never assist the likes of Osama bin Laden is plainly incorrect. Although the Bush administration’s assertion prior to the invasion that men connected with the Iraqi intelligence service had met with Al Qaeda agents in Europe was based on unreliable information, there were nevertheless operational ties between the regime and the jihadist terrorist group.[1]

This relationship of mutual and tactical “back-scratching” is understandable. Saddam hated America, especially after the first Gulf War almost led to his demise, and Al Qaeda was dedicated to attacking the West, America in particular. So the old Arab adage of “my enemy’s enemy being my friend” applied to Saddam and bin Laden. But only up to a point.

Saddam Hussein, posing as a new Nebuchadnezzar, may have made a show of going to the mosque, but his regime was in fact a Stalinist dictatorship. Saddam’s objective was never to die a shaheed, a martyr in a jihad, nor to rebuild the theocratic empire and anoint himself the caliph. He was a secular Baathist at heart, ideologically godless, driven to obtain and maintain power. There was a limit, therefore, to his cooperation with any jihadist group such as Al Qaeda, with its theocratic mission and dreams of reestablishing a religious empire.

And one of the greatest obstacles to strategic collaboration between bin Laden and Saddam was the jihadist ideal of death in the way of jihad. Saddam was not informed by apocalyptic visions of the end of the world and Judgment Day, and he was clearly not eager to die as a holy warrior. Just look at the lengths he went to after the U.S. invasion of 2003 to evade capture and stay alive!

Consequently, we can assert one thing with complete certainty: If Saddam Hussein still had weapons of mass destruction at his disposal after September 11, 2001, it was exceedingly unlikely that he or his regime would have provided such weapons to Islamic extremists like Osama bin Laden. For bin Laden, sharing an enemy in America and cooperating at a low level with Baghdad was one thing. But in the long run, Saddam Hussein was as much his enemy as America, if not more so, since Saddam was not a “true” or devout Muslim.

And Saddam would have known that bin Laden viewed him as his eventual enemy. Giving bin Laden the ability to kill thousands or even millions in one attack would not have served Saddam’s goals of maintaining earthly power in Iraq. What if bin Laden turned around and used them against him and his regime?

President Bush and his advisors should have understood this, but they didn’t. Or their personal animosities left over from the first Gulf War—the desire for revenge and settling scores—outweighed their assessment of the likelihood that Baghdad would ever give Al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction. In any case, the Bush cabinet pressed on and made the case, Congress agreed, and America went to war for the second time since 9/11.

DEMOCRATIC FAILURE IN IRAQ

This time the commitment was even greater than in Afghanistan, but the number of allies far fewer, and NATO was left out of the picture. We deployed the air force to pound strategic sites. Then the ground forces attacked Saddam’s forces inside Iraq. Eventually the Baathist regime fell, and Saddam went on the run. In their place we erected the Coalition Provisional Authority, an American government of occupation headed eventually by Paul Bremer, a friend of the president. And then, as in Afghanistan, Washington fell into the trap of monumental mission creep. Instead of sticking to the simple objective of removing Saddam, ensuring that Iraq no longer had WMD capabilities, and putting in place a government that would be conducive to U.S. interests, the powers that be defaulted once again to “nation building,” the goal being to turn Iraq into a modern country with a representative government allied to America.

There were, however, several serious obstacles to achieving such a laudable objective, most having to do with culture and history. An artisan or an engineer is constrained by the materials available to him. It is impossible to make a baseball bat out of balsa wood or a sword out of aluminum. Likewise, it is impossible to establish a functioning market democracy in a society that has known only dictatorship, at least in the time frame the Bush White House had in mind.[2] The reality in 2003 was that Saddam may have been deposed, but his legacy was ingrained in the society of Iraq.

Decades of brutal Stalinist dictatorship had frayed the fabric of the society in ways that made stability and the healthy cohabitation of the various parts of the population unimaginable. This was so not just because of the tortures, executions, systematic rape, and genocide used by Saddam to cow the populations into submission, but because his regime generally favored Iraq’s minority Sunnis to the detriment of the majority Shia. Saddam may have had little time for worshipping Allah in the mosque, but he secured his government by surrounding himself with and favoring his fellow Sunnis, particularly the members of his own tribe from Tikrit, while targeting the Shia for special “attention” by the organs of state security.

Once Saddam was gone and the future of Iraq was up for grabs, members of the Shia community decided Baghdad was theirs by right, and in this they had a powerful ally: the Shia government of neighboring Iran. And so it was that instead of seeking peaceful coexistence, the oppressed became the oppressors.

Just as the Shia were coming into the ascendency after the fall of Saddam, U.S. policy and the decisions made by Al Qaeda combined to further destabilize Iraq. In a strange decision by “proconsul” Bremer, the Baathist apparatus was excised. Anyone who had been a member of the Baath Party under Saddam lost his job in the new Iraqi government. And this included the men best positioned to destabilize the nation, the officers of Saddam’s military. Men hardened in the wars with Iran and the United States in the 1980s and ’90s, men trained to fight, who knew not only the terrain of Iraq intimately but also where all the weapons were kept—these men lost their jobs, their prestige, and a way to feed their families.

Washington’s motivation for taking this step was clear: Saddam’s regime had been evil, one of the most evil in modern history. That regime had been Baathist, and a new Iraq should recognize the complicity of those who were members of the party. The analogy was the “denazification” of Germany after World War II.

But there was one problem with this analogy. The Allies had not excluded all card-carrying members of the Nazi Party from official positions in the governing apparatus of occupied West Germany or in the subsequently established Federal Republic. If they had, Germany would probably have taken much longer to recover from the ravages of World War II, if it ever recovered at all. This did not mean that the Allies didn’t draw a line between Germany’s Nazi past and its democratic future. That was the purpose of the Nuremberg Trials.

Nazism was evil, as all the world had seen with the liberation of the death camps of Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Treblinka. If Germany—and Europe—were to move forward, there had to be a reckoning for the people most responsible for the horror. Hitler was dead, but many of his senior leadership were in custody. The chief decision makers of the Third Reich were publicly tried for the war crimes and genocide committed in the name of the Nazi state. Once the verdicts were handed down and the death sentences carried out, the line had been drawn: those most guilty had been punished, and the Germans and the world could move on.

This kind of accounting is what Iraq desperately needed. But instead of symbolically punishing just the key members of Saddam’s machine, we punished all party members. This decision by Bremer and the Bush administration proved to be a time bomb, eventually destroying any chance of democratizing Iraq. In time it even contributed to the rapid rise of ISIS.

AL QAEDA IN IRAQ

With the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq became incredibly important to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Previously, Al Qaeda had focused its attentions on Afghanistan and then on terrorist attacks against the United States.

Afghanistan was the birthplace of modern jihadism. After the USSR invaded the nation in 1979 and assassinated its head of state, the plight of the Muslims of Afghanistan inspired a global effort to enlist other Muslims to come and fight the godless infidels who had invaded sacred Muslim territory. This is in fact how Al Qaeda was created.

A charismatic Jordanian cleric called Abdullah Azzam established the Maktab Khadamat al Mujahidin al Arab (MAK), or Arab Mujahideen Services Bureau, in neighboring Pakistan. Called the Services Bureau for short, this organization served as a clearinghouse for recruiting and training mujahideen from around the world. This was the earliest incarnation of Al Qaeda. As his deputy, Azzam hired none other than Osama bin Laden.

By the time the Soviets were defeated, after a decade of brutal fighting, this organization had recruited and deployed an estimated fifty-five thousand jihadist fighters. In November 1989, Azzam was assassinated in a car bomb attack in Peshawar, and bin Laden inherited the organization. Eventually he changed its name to the Base for Holy War against the Jews and Crusaders—the Base, or “Al Qaeda,” for short. And then he drastically re-purposed the organization.

Under bin Laden, Al Qaeda fighters were sent to conflict zones around the world to support local Muslims fighting infidels, be it in Bosnia, Kashmir, or Chechnya. At the same time, the fight for Allah’s glory was taken to the heart of the most powerful infidel nation of all: the United States of America. Al Qaeda trained and recruited—and simply inspired—a new type of jihadi. These were not soldiers versed in traditional guerrilla warfare but men—and eventually women too—who, disguised as tourists, students, or ordinary American citizens, plotted to kill and maim Americans around the world as well as on U.S. soil. This change of strategy would take Al Qaeda from the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan to Manhattan, Washington, Fort Hood, Boston, and beyond.

But after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Al Qaeda saw another opportunity. Just as the mujahideen had fatally weakened the USSR with their “war of a thousand cuts” in Afghanistan in the 1980s, so they could turn post-Saddam Iraq into an inferno of sectarian violence, which would demand ever increasing military deployments by the United States. The Soviet Union was no more. Now it was time to do the same thing to the last surviving infidel superpower by dragging it into a Dantean hell of car bombs and IEDs. And so it was that Al Qaeda sent its commanders and fighters into Iraq and the post-invasion insurgency was born.

To be clear, the distressing levels of violence in Iraq after 2005 were the result of several factors and actors, not just Al Qaeda. Former Baathists—out of power and out of a job—were motivated to destabilize the new system. As the U.S. occupational government handed over power to elected Iraqi officials and the power in Baghdad shifted to the Shiites, other actors were likewise spurred to subversion and violence. Al Qaeda simply added its own depraved vision of chaos to this explosive cocktail.

In the months that followed, Al Qaeda’s man in Iraq, a thug from Jordan by the name of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, fomented violence against U.S. and coalition forces and within the Muslim community of Iraq itself. As the situation deteriorated, with bombings and summary executions becoming a daily occurrence, the Bush administration argued that it was better to fight the jihadists “over there” than to fight them in America. As sensible as that argument sounded, it missed the point that the legions of jihadists, disaffected Baathists, and Iraqi Shia militiamen would not have been targeting U.S. servicemen in such great numbers had Iraq not been invaded in the first place.

Eventually the White House agreed to a “surge” in Iraq, following the model of the increased footprint it had approved previously in Afghanistan. This measure temporarily subdued some of the violence, coming as it did not long after Zarqawi was located and killed. Then, just as the surge was showing positive results in Iraq, U.S. forces got a new commander in chief.

NEW PRESIDENT, NEW MISTAKES

The young senator from Illinois who became the leader of the most powerful nation in the world had won the election of 2008 on a specific platform: the war in Afghanistan was America’s “good war,” and the war in Iraq was America’s “bad war.” This slogan was based on the assumption that Iraq wasn’t a threat to America, that its invasion was the product of a neoconservative obsession, and that Afghanistan was really the epicenter of Al Qaeda activity. But the realities of global jihadism weren’t quite that simple.

Al Qaeda had changed during the years following September 11, 2001. Previously an international guerrilla organization able to deploy its fighters around the world, it had evolved into a global terror network with cells in more than fifty countries. When the Bush administration had successfully targeted its camps and bases in Afghanistan, its leadership had gone into hiding, where it redefined Al Qaeda’s role in the world. Hiding in his various safe houses, the last being in the town of Abbottabad, around the corner from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point, Osama bin Laden chose—or was forced—to relinquish his operational control of global jihadism, becoming instead the symbol and ideological hub of the movement to destroy the infidel and initiate the rebirth of a cleansed and victorious Islam.

Through dozens of propaganda videos and audio recordings, bin Laden exercised a growing influence on how jihadism was understood by fundamentalist Muslims around the world. Most important, his deputy in Yemen, Anwar al Awlaki, a jihadist cleric born and raised in America, developed Al Qaeda’s newest deadly weapon: an online do-it-yourself jihadist magazine in English, Inspire. This slickly executed publication combined the ideological and theological justifications for attacks like 9/11 with the training material and technical knowledge to maintain a terrorist cell in the West and execute mass-casualty attacks. Inspire offered detailed instructions for turning an ordinary pressure cooker into an antipersonnel mine, a recipe that would be followed to the letter by the Chechen Tsarnaev brothers when they attacked the Boston Marathon in the name of Islam. Awlaki was involved with or the inspirational force behind attack after jihadist attack, including the Fort Hood massacre, the Christmas Day bomb plot, and the Times Square bomber.

President Barack Obama, a Democrat, did not prove as dovish as his supporters had expected. He may have been against large-scale military deployments in the cause of nation building, but he was more than ready to kill jihadists, or to have them killed. In 2011, both bin Laden and Awlaki met their maker—the former at the hands of a special operations force covertly helicoptered into Pakistan, the latter at the end of a missile strike from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In fact, President Obama resorted to targeted killings by UAV at a rate that outstripped President Bush’s by orders of magnitude. Not only was he far more willing to have America’s enemies killed remotely—often to the detriment of our relations with other nations, especially Pakistan—but he was willing to kill American citizens as well, citizens like Awlaki and Samir Khan, the editor of Inspire.

Did the president’s keenness for Hellfire missiles represent a better understanding of the threat to America and a greater commitment to winning the war against jihadism? Strangely enough, it didn’t. As one high-ranking special forces general shared with me, President Obama and his team see the “kinetic” options, such as drone strikes, as the “Easy Button.” The thinking has become: “So-and-So is a member of Al Qaeda? Find him. Launch a drone. Kill him. Then we will prevent the next 9/11.” Unfortunately, this logic is not only simplistic, it is dangerous.

America has demonstrated in the past fifteen years that it is preeminent in the use of overt force. As the same general told me, “If we know you are a high-value target, and I have your GPS coordinates, we can kill you in the next seventy-two hours.” But so what? The administration strikingly misunderstands the simple math of extremism. If you kill one jihadist and fifteen other fundamentalist Muslims volunteer to replace him the next day, your UAV strike or special operations mission can turn into a recruiting platform for the enemy, dooming you to endless rounds of “whack-a-mole” against the growing ranks of jihadists.

As to where those growing ranks are coming from, the Obama administration has a strange theory. I will dissect that theory and explain how it has endangered America in more detail later, but here is the abbreviated version. Terrorism is a natural response of uneducated human beings who have been disenfranchised politically and economically. If we can solve the “root grievances” of the poor and oppressed around the world, there will be no more terrorists, and Americans will be safe. This view is of course absurd.

If poverty, lack of education, and political disenfranchisement were the causes of terrorism, then much of India and most of China would be populated by terrorists. But they are not. And this is because terrorism is the violent expression of ideology, not objective conditions—what has famously been called “propaganda of the deed.” The terrorist’s ideology may be secular and political—communist or fascist, for example—or it may be religious—Christian, Islamic, or even Hindu. And here we encounter the second and greater problem with the Obama administration’s approach to the jihadist threat.

Since 2009, the doctrine of the American government has been that religion has nothing to do with the terrorist threat to the Republic and that Islam must not be seen to be connected to terrorism. This dogma, emanating from the White House, which imposes the euphemism “violent extremism” in place of global jihad, commands such thorough obedience at every level of government that when a man in Arab dress attempts to assassinate a peace officer in Philadelphia and declares himself a follower of the Islamic State, the mayor insists that the attack has nothing to do with Islam. And so we stumble blindfolded across the battlefield that is the world after 9/11.

Worst of all, the Obama government has allowed its ideological preferences and beliefs to infect the function of national security, the training of our warfighters and national security professionals. In 2011, with unclassified memos to the Pentagon and Department of Justice, the White House established a system of censoring and monitoring that still stands today. Under this system, if you train our military or the agents or analysts of the FBI, your training materials must be reviewed by an anonymous review board, which can demand changes or even have you barred from engaging with our brave men and women. The yardstick: mention of Islam or even jihad. You may disagree or wish to challenge the board’s decision, but there is no recourse, no method of appeal.

This is the Obama administration’s fantasyland, a world as absurd as the Bush-era belief that democracy is a “shake and bake” exercise that can be achieved through the barrel of a gun. But Obama’s fantasy is much more dangerous.

Today jihad is in the ascendancy. Bin Laden may be dead, but we have a new caliphate, an Islamic State larger than Great Britain, with a population of more than six million and a daily income of $4 million. People are being decapitated, crucified, and burnt alive in the name of Allah. British soldiers are being decapitated on the streets of England. Armed jihadists are inside the Canadian parliament. Concertgoers in Paris are being slaughtered at will by Kalashnikov-wielding mujahideen, and government employees attending Christmas parties in California are being mowed down in the name of the new emperor of Islam.

It is time for the America that vanquished the Third Reich and the Soviet Union to rise from its slumber. It is time for us to speak truthfully about those who wish to kill us or enslave us. It is time again to speak the words “evil” and “enemy.” And it is time to draw a plan for victory, calling on strategies that have proved themselves against other totalitarian foes.

This is one man’s plan based upon a plan that has worked before.

CHAPTER 2

THE STORY OF JIHAD

Before September 11, 2001, the average American knew little about Islam or Muslims. “Geography is destiny,” and America is a continent-sized nation with friendly neighbors to the north and south and isolating oceans to the east and west, keeping our interaction with Islam to a minimum. But fifteen years after 9/11, most Americans’ understanding of Islam has scarcely improved. That ignorance is both surprising and dangerous.

So what is Islam, and where does jihad fit into this religion of more than a billion adherents?

The story of this faith begins in the seventh century, when a man called Mohammed is said to have received the revelation of Allah from the angel Gabriel in a cave somewhere outside the city of Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula. A crossroads of caravan traffic, the bustling city of Mecca was a center of religious activity for pilgrims of many faiths, including Jews, pagan tribes, and local animists, who worshipped nature and inanimate objects.

But the man Mohammed (ca. AD 570–632) was to bring them a different message. According to the story of the founding of Islam, Mohammed was chosen to bring the people of the world back to the one true faith. There had only ever been one God, and his name was Allah. The Jews of the Old Testament had worshipped Allah and honored the prophets Abraham and Moses as the prophets of Allah. But the Jews had not been faithful, failing to submit themselves to the will of Allah (the word Islam in fact means “submission”). Mainstream Islam asserts that the Jews had distorted the revelations given to the great prophets by Allah, and so Allah sent another mighty prophet, called Jesus, to correct the mistakes of the Jews.

Islam recognizes Jesus as a great prophet but denies his divinity, regarding the notion of the Trinity as utterly blasphemous. Jesus’s mission was to bring the people back to Allah, and here there was a problem. If Jesus was merely a man, then Islam must propound an alternative to the Christian narrative of his death and resurrection, because human beings don’t come back from the dead. In fact, Islam is adamant that Jesus did not die on Good Friday. Instead, a man who looked exactly like him was executed in his stead, and on the third day a group of his disciples rolled away the stone from his tomb and stole the body of Jesus’s Doppelgänger, faking the resurrection. The account in chapter 4, verses 157–158, of the Koran reads:

They said in boast, “We killed Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah”—but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no knowledge, but only conjecture, for of a surety they killed him not—nay, Allah raised him up unto Himself.

According to Islam, therefore, Jesus never died here on earth but was bodily taken up to heaven. Christianity, therefore, is a man-made lie, a fabrication, a confidence trick engineered by a small group of men to gain power over millions of others. Six centuries later, Allah gave creation one more chance to come back to the one true faith, by sending his last prophet to the Arabian Peninsula with the final, authentic version of his word. This series of revelations would correct what the Jews had done to the original teachings given to Allah’s prophets Moses and Abraham and undo the lies of Christianity.

Over a period of twenty-two years, it is said, the man chosen by Allah would repeatedly go into the wilderness and each time receive a few more verses of God’s final revelation, which he would memorize. Returning home, he would dictate these verses to family and friends, who wrote them down for posterity. (According to Sunni Islam, Mohammed was illiterate and so there was no other way for the word of God to be memorialized.) Long after Mohammed’s death, these verses were collected in the work we know as the Koran.

From the beginning of these revelations, Mohammed would share what he was hearing with the pagan and polytheistic Arabs of Mecca, warning the tribes to stop worshipping idols and multiple gods and instead to follow the one true faith. Otherwise they risked eternal hellfire. This message was understandably unpopular with the people of Mecca, even among Mohammed’s own tribe, the Quresh, who ostracized him and tried to drive him out of the city. A great distance to the north, however, the city of Yathrib was engulfed in civil war, Arab killing Arab and Arab killing Jew. In the hope that Mohammed might in fact have some special power and could bring peace to the city, the elders of Yathrib invited him. In 622, he embarked on the dangerous journey across the desert now known as the hijra. (The numbering of years in the lunar-based calendar of the Arab world begins with Mohammed’s departure from Mecca for Yathrib, as the Christian calendar reckons years—anno Domini—from the Incarnation.)

Mohammed found a considerably more receptive audience for his preaching in Yathrib, where thousands of people converted to the religion of Islam. They renamed their city Madinat al Nabi, or City of the Prophet, or Medina, as we now call it. After several years of ruling over the city, Mohammed decided to return to Mecca and the Arab tribes who had previously rejected him.

Arriving at Mecca with thousands of followers armed to the teeth and committed to Allah and his messenger, Mohammed gave the pagans and the polytheists a simple choice: convert or die. This is why today we say that the Koran has two distinct—and contradictory—halves: the “peace verses,” sometimes referred to as the Meccan verses, and the “war verses,” or Medinan verses. The former are pacific and conciliatory, recognizing Jews and Christians as “People of the Book” (meaning the Old Testament) and exhorting Muslims to collaborate with them. The latter contain the kinetic or martial passages, such as chapter 9, verses 5 and 29, which command Muslims to kill infidels wherever they find them.

The victorious Mohammed established a new theocratic empire for the faithful of Islam, headquartered in Mecca, the city that had previously rejected him. It would grow rapidly, spreading from Spain in the west to India in the east, North Africa in the south, and central Europe in the north, a caliphate that was larger than the Roman Empire ever was.

The word “jihad” was used throughout the founding period of Islam, and it appears again and again in the Koran. Sometimes it refers to the struggle to be a good Muslim, “striving” internally against weakness and temptation. But far more often it refers to literal warfare, to the use of force against the infidel, and for many years “jihad” was also used to refer to fighting those Muslims who disagreed with the current emperor and to fighting those non-Muslims who refused to convert or submit to the rule of Islam.

The post-9/11 debate about Islam and the meaning of jihad has often suffered from a superficial understanding of the term. Some insist loudly that jihad simply refers to striving to be a good Muslim, while others say that it means only “holy war.” So what is the truth? Here we need some historical perspective, because, as with some other important words, the meaning of jihad has changed over the centuries.

Theologically, jihad encompasses four varieties of human activity defined by Islamic theologians and jurists. The first of these is the “jihad of the heart,” the so-called “greater jihad” of fighting evil within oneself. The second and third definitions involve the jihads of the “mind and tongue”—condoning “right” behavior in others and counseling those who, not having submitted themselves fully to the will of Allah, have gone astray. Finally, and most important to us, there is “jihad by the sword,” which has become in recent decades the foundation of the global jihadist ideology that most threatens America.

Repeatedly reinterpreted and redefined since the days of Mohammed, jihad by the sword has been used by believers again and again to rally their coreligionists in the pursuit of political objectives. Today Al Qaeda and ISIS use this concept to justify the direct targeting of civilians in terrorist attacks. But violent jihad predates 9/11 by centuries.

THE SEVEN SWORDS OF JIHAD

Since the earliest days of Islam and its theocratic caliphate, jihad by the sword has been shaped by seven historically influenced political conceptions of holy war. These appeared in the following order:

1.  Empire building

2.  The suppression of apostate subjects, or “false Muslims”

3.  Revolution against “false” Muslim leaders

4.  The anticolonial struggle and the “purification” of the religion

5.  Countering Western influence and jahiliyyah, or pagan ignorance of Allah

6.  Guerrilla warfare against infidel invaders

7.  The direct targeting of civilians in terrorist attacks

Each of these versions of jihad by the sword has been shaped by the specific political needs of a given age and in response to a specific enemy.

When Mohammed was building a new state, jihad was used to justify the expansion of Islam. Although the Koran does not refer to empire building in the military sense as “jihad,” chapter 25, verse 52, stipulates, “Obey not the disbelievers, but strive against them with the utmost endeavor.” Understood in the context of Mohammed’s return from Medina and the ensuing conflict with the Arabs of Mecca, it is clear that striving is in this instance connected to post-hijra combat, as the founder of Islam returned to violently enforce his new writ. This is the first offensive use of the concept, referring to the conflict to establish order among the unbelieving Arab tribes in and around Mecca through the use of military might.

When Mohammed’s successor, Abu Bakr (after whom the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, has named himself), faced similarly resistant tribes on the Arabian Peninsula threatening the order Mohammed had previously established, the second meaning of jihad was born: ridda, or the war against apostasy. This was war against rebellious subjects of the Islamic empire.

The third definition of jihad appeared centuries later, after the eclipse of the Abbasid caliphate’s strength, starting in the second half of the thirteenth century. It is this reworking of the meaning of jihad, most significantly by the fundamentalist scholar Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), that bears on the survival of America’s Sunni partners, like Jordan and Egypt, today.

Behind this redefinition was the need to provide Muslims with the right to revolt against their own leaders, specifically the Mongols. Islam had previously prohibited revolution against Muslim rulers. Ibn Taymiyya, to whom modern-day jihadists like Al Qaeda and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi appeal, argued that jihad is permissible against one’s own leaders if they do not live as true Muslims and if their rule does not conform to the requirements of the Koran and Sharia law. Sharia, literally meaning “the way,” refers to the whole system of religiously grounded laws and regulations based upon the Koran and Hadith.

Ibn Taymiyya issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, on the issue of rebelling against leaders. His Rulings of Fighting the Mongols states:

And it is known by necessity from the religion of the Muslims, and the agreement of all the Muslims, that whoever permits the following of a religion other than Islam, or the following of a Sharia other than the Sharia of Mohammed, then he is a kafir [unbeliever], and it is like the kufr [blasphemy] of one who believes in part of the Book [the Koran] and then disbelieves in another part of the Book.

At the time, Arab power was waning and the Mongol, Turkic, and Tartar forces were fusing to take control of Islamic land, their rulers often calling themselves Muslims. Seeing these “false” Muslim leaders as deadly threats to the purity of Islam, Ibn Taymiyya was explicit about how the “true” believers must respond:

Fighting the Tartars, those who came to the land of Shaam [the Levant],[1] is a religious duty according to the Book and the Sunna [traditions of Islam], for indeed Allah said in the Koran: “And fight them until fitna [schism or blasphemous upheaval] is no more, and the human way of life becomes all for Allah.”

In the Middle Ages, therefore, jihad came to convey on the people a right to denounce their rulers as un-Islamic and wage a legitimate religious revolution. Unilaterally excommunicating another Muslim, declaring him an apostate from the religion of Islam, came to be labeled takfirism, an ideological tool that is a primary weapon of today’s global jihadists such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. We will see presently how they use it.

The fourth political reconceptualization of jihad began four hundred years later. In the early eighteenth century, as the European powers pushed into North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, the threat to Islamic societies was twofold. The military and political might of empires such as Britain’s had to be physically resisted, as did the West’s growing cultural influence upon the purity of the Islamic faith. During this period jihad was redefined as resistance to the colonial forces of the West.

This new interpretation of jihad was typified by the pronouncements of the fundamentalist Islamic scholar Mohammed ibn Abd al Wahhab (1703–1792), the founder of the Wahhabi movement within Sunni Islam. The practical consequences of this new form of jihad were amply demonstrated during Abd al Qadir’s decade-long resistance to the 1830 French invasion of Algeria and by the Sudanese resistance to the British.

The nonmilitary element of this redefinition of jihad—what one author has described as Islam’s internal “housecleaning”[2]—was represented by Shah Waliullah Dehlawi’s call to spiritual revival and the purification of India’s Muslims as the Mughal (or “Mogul”) Empire faltered and weakened.

Dehlawi (1703–1762) was motivated by what he saw as the plight of Muslims on the Indian subcontinent and the dilution of the faith by non-Islamic influences, including Hindu and Western cultures and new alien ideas such as capitalism. By bringing the core tenets of Islam back to the forefront of dawa (proselytizing and religious education), and with his own translation of the Koran into Farsi (the lingua franca of the Middle East at that time), Dehlawi helped promote a general restoration of originalist Islamic teachings. His goal was to purify Islam and bring it back to “basics.” His idea that ignorance of Allah led to the majority of the ills suffered by Muslims around the world would become a central theme of later, far more violent, purification movements. These were all designed to purge Islam of jahiliyyah, that pagan ignorance of the one true faith that Mohammed had originally railed against among the tribes of Mecca and eventually eradicated through force.

This “purifying” version of jihad would lead directly to the next interpretation, one that relies heavily on the principles laid down hundreds of years earlier by Ibn Taymiyya, including his doctrine of takfirism. Fathered and developed over decades by another Indian Islamist scholar, Abul A’la Mawdudi, this fifth version of jihad was later transformed into the modern concept of jihad by the pivotal extremist writer Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, the intellectual grandfather of groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.

For Mawdudi (1903–1979), the founder of Jamaat e Islami, which would become the largest Islamic organization in Asia, it was imperative to politicize Islam, with the goal of establishing a truly Islamic state, whose subjects would live in accordance with the prescriptions of the Koran. His work led to the establishment of Pakistan, carved out of the territory of post-Raj India. He taught that Islam is universal in a wholly doctrinaire way: “Everything in the universe is ‘Muslim’ for it obeys Allah by submission to His laws.” The breadth of the faith is limitless:

Islam is not a “religion” in the sense this term is commonly understood.

It is a system encompassing all fields of living.

Islam means politics, economics, legislation, science, humanism, health, psychology and sociology.

The believer must be a “slave of Allah,” with “absolute obedience to Allah” representing a “fundamental right” of the Creator, since the believer does “not have the right to choose a way of life for himself.”

Although Mawdudi was never satisfied with the implementation of his vision in Pakistan, his emphasis on the need for utter purity, the global mandate of Islam, and the need to step out of the mosque and become political proved influential far beyond India and Pakistan. One man who read Mawdudi’s writings was the Egyptian writer and Muslim Brotherhood strategist Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), who believed that the leaders of the post–World War II Arab states and the influence of Western “soft power” had brought about a new jahiliyyah, another age of polytheism and ignorance. Just as the apostate Mongol and Tartar leaders were resisted in the Middle Ages, so the false Muslim leaders of the twentieth century would have to be replaced, by force if necessary. Only then could Islam be purified, a pure Sharia-based Koranic way of life be restored, and the empire of the caliphate be reestablished for the glory of God.

But the “near enemy” of un-Islamic Arab leaders was not the only target of Qutb and his accomplices in the Brotherhood. After being invited to the United States after World War II and living among the infidel Americans for two years, Qutb decided that the Arabs’ puppet masters had to be destroyed as well. And so he wrote Milestones, the most influential work on global jihadism in the twentieth century, a book that would not only shape the plans of the Muslim Brotherhood but would become an essential text of Al Qaeda and other key jihadi groups.

With the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979, jihad would no longer be limited to resistance against the cultural and political influence of the secular West or un-Islamic Arab rulers. The Afghans themselves required no theological motivation to resist the brutal Soviet domination of their country, but for the foreign fighters who joined them—the so-called Arab mujahideen—jihad was the battle cry, and so a sixth interpretation emerged, becoming, as it were, a global brand.

This modern version of jihad was propagated by the Jordanian cleric Abdullah Azzam (1941–1989), who traveled the globe convincing believers that they must leave their empty lives and join the fight to expel the infidel from the Muslim lands of Central Asia. Most important, Azzam got around the traditional requirement that a holy war be declared by the legitimate authority of a caliph by redefining military resistance as an individual duty. As he wrote in his introduction to the fatwa Defense of the Muslim Lands:

[I]f a piece of Muslim land the size of a hand-span is infringed upon, then jihad becomes a personal obligation on every Muslim male and female, where the child shall march forward without the permission of its parents and the wife without the permission of the husband.

Azzam warned his audiences of the price they would pay if they did not follow the path of military resistance, invoking Ibn Taymiyya by name to justify his version of self-declared jihad and quoting chapter 9, verse 39, of the Koran, the Sura at Taubah, the section on repentance:

If you march not forth, He will punish you with a painful torment and will replace you with another people, and you cannot harm Him at all, since Allah is able to do all things.

By the late 1980s, Azzam’s redefinition of jihad in a new political and geostrategic context was so successful that even in the West, Islamic holy war had become synonymous with guerrilla resistance to communist invasion and dictatorship. America itself would come to support the idea of a religious war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, covertly supporting the indigenous mujahideen.

After Azzam’s death in 1989, his organization of some fifty-five thousand guerrillas recruited from all over the world, the Arab Mujahideen Services Bureau, was taken over by his deputy, Osama bin Laden. He offered to send his jihadists to protect Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi army but was rebuffed. After the defeat of the godless Russians and the end of the Cold War, the bipolar world order was replaced by the hegemony of a victorious United States, which was invited to bring its infidel troops and influence into the Arabian Peninsula, the home of the holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina. This was an affront to Islam that the Saudi bin Laden would not accept, and so he repurposed his jihadi organization, renaming it Al Qaeda, the “base” for global jihad against the unbelievers.

Now the meaning of holy war was expanded for the seventh time since Mohammed built his empire all those centuries ago. The fight would no longer be focused exclusively on guerrilla warfare in countries where Muslims were under military attack but on the “far enemy.” With the East Africa embassy bombings, the assault on the USS Cole, and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, bin Laden successfully defined jihad as the use of terrorism against civilians in the land of the infidel. We arrived at the twenty-first-century version of jihad.

The meaning of jihad has been shaped during the centuries to fit the needs of those wishing to call their coreligionists to join battle against the unbelievers. Osama bin Laden’s great historical significance is that he managed to change jihad from guerrilla warfare in faraway lands to the mass murder of civilians on the soil of Western nations—especially America.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE CALIPHATE: THE EMPIRE OF ISLAM

As it evolved through the centuries, the concept of jihad was always tied up with that of the caliphate. Once the physical and political embodiment of Islamic power, the empire had waxed and waned as its capital moved from Mecca to Damascus, Baghdad, and finally the old Byzantine capital Constantinople, different ethnic and national elites controlling its center of power at one time or another. But it couldn’t last forever.

By the nineteenth century, Western civilization, Western empires, and Western armies were in the ascendant. Islam was ejected from Europe, and many of the regions that had originally been Christian before they had become Muslim were recaptured for Christendom. Other territories that remained Muslim were conquered and subsequently controlled by Western forces. Jihad was no longer an option in a world where the West dominated. The infidel was now in control.

In the twentieth century, as war became industrialized and Western nations targeted each other, Muslim civilization would again be drastically changed. Just a hundred years ago, there still existed a rump caliphate, but it wasn’t run by Arabs and its capital was not in the Middle East. The Western world referred to this iteration of the caliphate, run by Turks with its capital at Constantinople, as the Ottoman Empire. But the Ottomans made a bad decision at the onset of World War I, placing their bets on the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires. Ending up on the side of the losers, the Ottoman Empire faced the same fate as the Austro-Hungarian: dismemberment.

Hoping to salvage the remnants of his nation, a young Ottoman officer named Mustafa Kemal logically decided that the only way to survive the defeat was to convince the victors that his people, no longer posing a threat, should be allowed to join the Western “club” of nations. Adopting the name Ataturk, he became the head of a new secular republic called Turkey. Its population may have been Muslim, but its government was avowedly secular, and politics were most definitely separated from religion. To affirm this transformation, Ataturk himself deposed the last caliph in 1924, dissolving the thousand-year-old caliphate and unwittingly laying the foundation for the seventh version of jihad, which now haunts us.

Millions of believers, questioning Ataturk’s authority to dissolve the empire, despised his aping of the West and the imposition of the American concept of separation of church and state. For the next ninety years, organization after organization tried to restore the caliphate and revive Islam’s heyday, the glorious era of its power and prestige and dominance over the infidel. Sometimes these organizations pursued their goal through politics. But many, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, would resort to violence when nonviolence seemed inadequate, resorting to terrorism, assassination, and subversion. Holy war, no longer declared by the caliph against infidels who resisted the expansion of the caliphate, would be the means of cleansing the world of pagan disbelief and eventually reestablishing an empire that had been lost through the perfidy of false Muslims and collaborators.

In the second half of the twentieth century, jihad evolved into a series of campaigns directly targeting Western nations or other non-Muslim groups. These guerrilla activities took place around the globe, from the disputes over Kashmir on the Indian subcontinent to the civil wars in the Balkans and the Chechen wars of independence in the Caucasus. In each conflict, no matter how geographically remote, the ideal of jihad was given new life. Muslims from all the regions of the world were recruited to join the war to rebuild the caliphate for the glory of God.

This was the background from which Al Qaeda, an ideological child of the Muslim Brotherhood, emerged on the battlefields of Afghanistan, eventually becoming a global terror network with cells in more than fifty countries and affiliates and sympathizers in many more. Under the millionaire bin Laden and the prestige of the Al Qaeda brand, jihad was once again redefined to fit a new mission. After the irregular warfare campaigns of Afghanistan, bin Laden was emboldened to take the fight to the heart of the infidel, striking not military targets such as troop convoys or attack helicopters but civilians in downtown New York, Washington, Fort Hood, or Boston. The idea was to spread the attacks across infidel soil, striking fear into the hearts of those who refused to recognize the one true faith and emboldening those who were looking for meaning and purpose in the secularizing postmodern world.

Al Qaeda was able to establish offshoot organizations in key strategic areas, such as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and to ally with, leverage, and exploit preexisting Islamic insurgent groups such as the Taleban in Afghanistan and al Shabaab in Somalia. These groups were originally focused on national agendas and not motivated by the idea of the caliphate, but bin Laden changed that, skillfully manipulating and repurposing them to become parts of the new global jihadist movement.

And then 9/11 happened.

Up to that point, U.S. intelligence had regarded Osama bin Laden primarily as a financier of terrorism, not a mastermind or pivotal character in a global enterprise. But the events of that sunny Tuesday morning revealed to the world exactly who Osama bin Laden was—the new master of the new jihad. He had taken the seventh-century concept central to the empire-building warfare of an Arab community—a concept that had evolved over the centuries in different ways in the hands of different groups—and turned it into a universal ideology with a universal objective: the creation of a new caliphate that would span the globe and last until Judgment Day.

For more than a decade he succeeded in part because of the poor strategic decisions made by both the Bush and Obama administrations. Violence in the name of Allah would once again be a reality, especially after the series of events inappropriately dubbed the “Arab Spring.” The constricting effects of colonialism and the bipolar stasis of the Cold War were long gone, and now regime after Arab regime fell, with new jihadis unleashed daily, thousands of men and sometimes even women, who from the failure of their own political elites and the stultification of their backward societies were looking for purpose and higher meaning. And what better meaning than fighting for God?

Yet even Al Qaeda and bin Laden, the man who had made jihad a universal battle cry, were eventually eclipsed by a new player, a former franchisee of the Al Qaeda brand. The organization we came to know as Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Mesopotamian offshoot of the original Al Qaeda, eventually stole the limelight and redefined jihad yet again. But this time, these “holy warriors” would succeed where all the others had failed. Al Qaeda in Iraq would break from its mother ship, and the new Islamic State of Iraq and Al Shaam would then move into Syria, only to come back stronger than before. And finally ISIS would become the Islamic state that so many had been calling for ever since that day in 1924 when the original theocratic Islamic state had been done away with.

The caliphate, and the caliph, were back.

As I have noted, the etymological root of “Islam” in Arabic is “submission,” not “peace” as so many people seem to think. The only peace that “Islam” connotes is the peace of submission or surrender. Surrender or submission to what? To the will of Allah.

The rectitude or devoutness of a Muslim believer is measured by how fully he submits himself to the will of Allah. And how does one know the will of God? Well, naturally from the words of his best and final revelation to mankind, communicated to Mohammed and eventually collected in the Koran. In the nature of the relationship between the revealed and the believer and what reality that establishes here on earth, Islam is very different from the Christian faith.

The followers of Christ are also measured by their ability to follow the requirements laid down in Holy Scripture, with Jesus Christ and the New Testament being the fulfillment of the earlier laws and commandments of the Old Testament, yet the origins of Christianity and Islam and the political legacies of the two faiths are completely different.

The Christian Church was born after Jesus’s followers, having seen him executed by crucifixion and resurrected, saw him ascend into heaven. Islam, on the other hand, was forged in battle, its founder defeating his enemies in war and becoming the head of a new theocratic state, reigning over his followers here on earth. Islam cannot be fully understood unless one recognizes that its founder was at the same time a political leader, a military commander, and a self-proclaimed prophet. Islam, then, is by its nature and its origins a theocracy.

There can be no “separation of mosque and state” if one stays true to the religion practiced by Mohammed and his first followers.[3] There was no distinction between the political and religious in the original caliphate. In fact, there was no distinction between the religious, political, legal, or economic. Islam and the word of Allah regulated all of these spheres in a unitary whole. The political head of the community was also its religious leader.

By contrast, theocracy was never a fundamental element of the Christian faith. Jesus Christ himself articulated the “separation of church and state” when, asked if the Jews should pay taxes to the occupying Romans, he responded, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” These words, with St. Paul’s elaboration in the thirteenth chapter of his epistle to the Romans, have shaped the relationship between the spiritual and temporal authorities in the Christian world. This seminal Christian idea finds no counterpart in foundational Islam. The Koran is deemed the source of all law, and sovereignty, rather than being a function of the people’s will, is a quality of God to be realized in submission to his will.

This idea of Allah’s sovereignty expressed here on earth is the key to understanding why the control of territory has shaped not only the evolution of modern Islamic thought in general but the ideology of jihadists like Al Qaeda and ISIS in particular.

Islam insists that God is unitary. The Christian doctrine of three divine Persons in one God is utterly blasphemous to Muslims. The unitary nature of the Islamic Creator is expressed in Arabic as tawhid, “oneness,” and is part of the shahada, the declaration of faith that is the first pillar of Islam: “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger.”[4] This tawhid is also a characteristic of the umma itself. All Muslims belong to the same body and must act as one if Allah’s will is to be fulfilled here on earth. “Oneness above all” has become central to the modern jihadi message. All the earth must be unified for the glory of God, and all people must follow the one true God, Allah. In fact, in almost any given ISIS propaganda video, you will see jihadis making a hand gesture with one finger pointing up. Some have incorrectly interpreted this as pointing to heaven, to Allah. It is in fact an established Salafist-jihadi hand signal signifying oneness, tawhid. All people must be part of a unified umma or they must die. And in this unification there are parts of the world that are more important than others.

To begin with, there is, of course, the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam. Of all the places in the world, Mecca, where Mohammed is said to have begun his preaching, and Yathrib, or Medina, where he is said to have achieved his first large-scale conversions, are the most important. Right behind Mecca and Medina is Jerusalem in Palestine.

Why the importance of Jerusalem, the holy city of Jews and Christians? The answer is found in the story known as the Isra, or “Night Journey.” According to the Koran and the Hadith, Mohammed traveled on a flying horse from Mecca to the “farthest mosque,” in Jerusalem, seven hundred miles away, completing the journey in a single night. There he was lifted into heaven, where he met Moses, among others, and visited the seven levels of heaven. During his stay in heaven, he negotiated with Allah on the number of times a Muslim is required to pray every day, getting the number down to five. Then the flying horse, Buraq, took Mohammed back to Mecca. In the late seventh century, after Mohammed’s death, the caliph Abd al Malik built the Dome of the Rock shrine on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, supposedly marking the site of Mohammed’s ascension into heaven.

Jerusalem’s al-Haram ash-Sharif, the site of the Dome of the Rock and the adjacent Al-Aqsa Mosque, thus became the third-holiest site in Islam, and the ancient city has been the epicenter of religious-fueled clashes for centuries. But the twentieth century made it even more important, especially for the jihadists of ISIS, who today have reestablished the caliphate for Allah in the Middle East.

PALESTINE AND JIHAD

For most Westerners the issue of Palestine is wrapped up in the broader question of the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict. It is associated with figures such as Yasser Arafat and various Israeli prime ministers, the controversy over settlers, and recurring violence on the streets of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. But this appreciation misses the much deeper story of why exactly this relatively small piece of real estate in the Middle East is constantly contested and why the existence of the modern state of Israel is anathema to so many fundamentalist Muslims and jihadists today.

It is all too easy to forget that before 1948 there was no such thing as a Jewish state, and there hadn’t been one for centuries. If you were a Jew, you lived in someone else’s country because there was no homeland for the Jewish people. This all changed as a result of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust.

After more than six million Jews were murdered by the Third Reich, the modern movement to create a home for the Jewish people—a movement called Zionism, founded by the Hungarian Theodor Herzl—finally achieved critical mass. With the United Kingdom losing interest in maintaining, at enormous cost, the British Mandate Territories of Palestine, there was a window of opportunity, and the state of Israel was established in 1948. Almost immediately this tiny nation was attacked by five far larger and ostensibly more powerful Arab and Muslim neighbors: Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Incredibly, the Jewish state won the war. Not only that, it captured new territories, including parts of the Holy City of Jerusalem. Arabs and Muslims refer to this loss of territory and symbolic sites as the Nakba, or catastrophe. But why?

None of the nations concerned was demolished by Israel. None of them suffered devastation comparable to that of England or Germany in the Second World War. So what made the creation of the small state of Israel and the additional loss of lands in the Arab-Israeli War a “catastrophe”? The answer is complex, tied as it is to the twentieth-century fate of the Arab and Muslim world and intertwined with the history of Islam itself.

To begin with, Jerusalem—and Palestine more broadly—have qualified as dar al Islam, or sacred Muslim territory, ever since the Isra story was told and the caliphate established. The idea that infidels could carve out of Palestine a new non-Muslim nation and capture the Holy City of Jerusalem is shocking to those who believe that once a territory has been captured for the glory of Allah it must always be his.

Then there is the question of the psychological impact of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 and the later Six-Day War of 1967. In both cases, despite superior numbers, the Arab coalitions suffered humiliating defeats. Ironically, these victories for the new nation of Israel became propaganda victories for future jihadis like Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS.

The fathers of modern jihad, men like Qutb and Azzam, insisted that the umma, the global community of Muslims, had lost its way. The West was strong and the Muslim world weak, they taught, because Muslims had become unfaithful and allowed themselves to be corrupted by infidel values. Their leaders likewise had succumbed to heathen values. This condemnation of Muslim infidelity included a particular denunciation of the “Near Enemy,” Arab heads of state like Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and the Hashemite royal family of Jordan, who were deemed false Muslims, the worst of the worst: apostates. When these leaders banded together in an attempt to destroy the new Israeli state and recapture sacred Islamic territory, their abject failure was a sign, a final confirmation of their lack of true Islamic credentials. The jihadi logic is simple: if the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon were true Muslims then Allah would have vouchsafed their victory over the infidel Jewish state. But they lost—twice. Therefore they are the worst of the worst.

Palestine and Jerusalem have become battle cries within the larger jihadi call to arms. Groups like Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization would arise and focus their efforts on the short-term objective of Palestinian statehood, but these too, despite their terrorist activities, would be judged as apostate heretics and collaborators for eventually negotiating with the Jewish state. In the end, the only possible expression of Allah’s will is the caliphate. The territory where the prophet Mohammed walked must be incorporated into the fullest expression of Allah’s sovereignty: the caliphate reborn.

But for groups like Al Qaeda, the question of sacred territory such as Palestine was little more than an advertising gimmick, a hook to attract the young potential jihadi. The loss of Jerusalem, where Mohammed walked, and the plight of Muslims today in Gaza or the West Bank, was mercilessly exploited as a way to inflame the youth and recruit them to the cause of today’s holy war. It was only after Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and ISIS arrived that the possibility of the caliphate reborn became a reality. A reality that would expand until all the lands that had been Islamic were so once more, and until the whole world would submit to the will of the one true God, Allah.

CHAPTER 3

1979: ANNUS HORRIBILIS—MODERN JIHAD GOES GLOBAL

Three momentous events mark 1979 as the year in which modern jihad, having evolved over the course of the century, emerged as a global movement: the establishment of a theocratic regime in Iran, the siege of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. While the conditions for an Islamist explosion had existed for a long time, these events were the spark.

On April 1, 1979, following the overthrow of the shah and the return of the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini from exile in France, the Shiite populace of Iran voted in a national referendum to become an Islamic republic. A new constitution outlined the central role of divine revelation in determining Iran’s laws, which would be based on the Koran and the Sunnah, the traditions of Islam. Then on November 4, a crowd of student protesters who were loyal to Khomeini and committed to taking their revolution to the “great Satan,” America, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six Americans hostage. Most of them would remain in captivity until the day Ronald Reagan took Jimmy Carter’s place in the White House.

Focused on rescuing their imprisoned countrymen, Americans had a poor understanding of the broader picture in Iran. The elderly Khomeini was not seen as a serious alternative to the royal Pahlavi family, who were friendly to the United States. But the revolutionary cleric and his new guard of religious fanatics were able to exploit the ancient Persian reserves of pride and resilience, quickly imposing a Shia version of theocracy in which Islam and politics were totally reintegrated. The mullahs of Tehran became the center of political as well as religious power in Tehran.

The Shia of Iran thus demonstrated to the world—including the Sunnis, many of whom would be envious—that the theocratic caliphate was viable in the modern world. It also demonstrated that Muslims not only should but could reject the Western separation of politics and faith. Modernity’s separation of Allah’s writ and governance could be reversed.

Just as important, the success of the Iranian revolution and the embassy attack proved that the United States, and by inference all other great powers, was not invulnerable. The Muslim world did not have to be the powerless victim of Western machinations, such as interference in Iran’s domestic affairs and overarching control of the geopolitics of the Middle East.

Twelve days after the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran, about three hundred armed Islamists, inexperienced and ill-equipped, seized control of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, the holiest site in Islam and the equivalent of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. These men were interested in a holy war not against infidel Christians or Jews but against their fellow Muslims. Led by a man who would later declare himself the long-awaited mahdi—just as Mohammed Ahmad had done years before in Khartoum—these jihadists invoked the principle of takfirism to declare any Muslim who disagreed with them an apostate, a false Muslim, starting with the royal family, the house of Saud, whom they saw as puppets of the infidel West. Their war was first with their fellow Muslims who had fallen away from the path of purity. The militants managed to hold the Grand Mosque for almost two weeks, a stunning accomplishment. But it was only after the siege was finally broken and most of the jihadists killed—with the covert assistance of French commandos—that the implications of this jihadi attack and the breadth of the conspiracy became clear.

In his definitive account, The Siege of Mecca, Yaroslav Trofimov reports that the attackers were not simply a collection of embittered loners or isolated fundamentalists. They shared their hatred of the Saudi regime and their “apostate” countrymen with an influential group of Saudi clerics, key members of the ulema, the religious leaders of the country. These clerics lamented the loss of faith that had made the global community of Muslims, the ummah, weak, allowing it to be dominated by the infidel West. Recall that the Saudi state was founded on a compact between the house of Saud and the fundamentalist cleric Mohammed ibn Abd al Wahhab. In the eyes of these puritanical clerics, the behavior of the royal family and the spread of Western influence across the Arabian Peninsula were signs that it was time for that compact to be revoked. The clerics encouraged a turn to violence, offering a religious sanction for jihad against the house of Saud and the other “apostate” Muslims of Saudi Arabia.

After the siege of the Grand Mosque was put down, the jihadis’ connection to the influential Saudi clerics was unearthed and the individual imams were identified by Saudi intelligence. The king then invited them to the palace, where instead of having them incarcerated or beheaded, he made them an offer that was difficult to refuse. He proposed a new compact: The propagation of jihadist ideology within the country, on Islamic soil—dar al Islam—would be utterly haram, or forbidden. In exchange for a promise that the ideology would never again threaten the kingdom of Saudi Arabia or the house of Saud, the government would support its propagation in infidel lands (dar al harb) around the globe. This commitment, backed by a massive influx of petrodollars, made the kingdom the most important force behind the spread of fundamentalist and radicalized Islamic ideology around the world.

The third pivotal event of 1979 was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 24. The Marxist government of Afghanistan, a Muslim nation, was battling an internal threat from indigenous fundamentalist groups. Afghans had become increasingly discontent with the regime’s socialist reforms, and by December 1979 ancient clans and tribes of skilled warriors were attacking government institutions and assets. Having signed a treaty of friendship with the Afghan regime the year before, the Soviet Union decided it was time to step in and assist its “ally.” Thirty thousand troops rolled in on Christmas Eve, a number that would grow to a hundred thousand.

While the upheavals in Iran and Saudi Arabia had an important psychological effect on future jihadists, the conflict in Afghanistan had the most direct influence on modern jihad. It was there that the ideas of a global jihad were forged and the original jihadist army coalesced, in no small part because of the massive resources that poured in from America and Saudi Arabia to support the indigenous mujahideen. In his essay “Martyrs: The Building Blocks of Nations,” Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden’s boss and the real founder of Al Qaeda, attested to the importance of the Afghan holy war:

Some thought that the Earth had become devastated and that this ummah had been drained of the thirst for martyrdom. Therefore, Allah exploded the Jihad on the land of Afghanistan and groups of youths from the Islamic World marched forth to Afghanistan in search of Jihad and martyrdom.

The Jihad initially began as a few drops, until Allah decided to ignite the sparks within this blessed people and explode the Jihad, blessing with it the land of Afghanistan and the rest of the Muslims until its good encompassed the whole World.

Azzam, bin Laden, and their small band of Arabs—no more than a few hundred—transformed a conflict between Moscow and the tribes of Afghanistan into a global movement for Islamic jihad in which Muslims of different languages, cultures, and countries coalesced into one brotherhood in pursuit of one objective—the victory of Islam and the word of Allah across the earth. Without Azzam’s new ideas about jihad, legitimized by his scholarly prestige, and bin Laden’s access to millions of dollars in funding, Afghanistan’s jihad might have stayed within its borders. Together, these two men were able to take their enterprise global and start a fire that still rages today, more incandescent than ever.

ABDULLAH AZZAM: THE SCHOLAR MARTYR

Abdullah Azzam was born into a Palestinian family who had to flee the West Bank after the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. He became a disciple of the Muslim Brotherhood, studying during his formative years the incendiary works of its founder, Hassan al Banna (1906–1949) and those of Sayyid Qutb, finding in them the expression of his own rage and sense of victimhood. Studying in Syria and Egypt and teaching in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, he came into contact with the leading Islamist movements of the day, weaving their disparate intellectual threads together into a cohesive doctrine, which he eventually published in 1984 as a fatwa titled Defense of the Muslim Lands.

The foundational work for the global jihad of the twentieth century, Azzam’s Defense contains the key assertions at the heart of every jihadist enterprise:

•  Muslims have been humiliated at the hands of impure regimes and colonial powers.

•  Islam will suffer ultimate defeat if Muslims do not take on jihad as a personal obligation.

•  The only way for Islam to be saved is for the caliphate to be reestablished for the glory of Allah.

Muslims are the people who have been entrusted with the final revelation of God, Azzam writes, and Islam is the only religion destined for the whole of humanity. Yet Muslims have been humiliated and subjugated. The unclean, the polytheists, those who do not believe in Allah, he says,

have duped the dull masses of Muslims by installing their wooden-headed puppets as false figureheads of states that remain under their control.

Colonialism has taken on a new face.

They have come from every horizon to share us amongst them like callers to a feast. There is no greater humiliation for the people expected to lead humanity to redemption.

The unbelievers have thus joined together to humiliate the Muslims, and the only way Muslims can fight back is to come together under a unified caliphate “in order to make victorious Allah’s religion of Islamic monotheism.”

Defense of the Muslim Lands begins with an epigraph justifying violent jihad in the words of Mohammed: “But those who are killed in the Way of Allah, He will never let their deeds be lost.” If there were any doubt about Azzam’s emphasis on martyrdom in service to Allah, he clarified it in his “Martyrs: The Building Blocks of Nations”:

History does not write its lines except with blood. Glory does not build its lofty edifice except with skulls. Honor and respect cannot be established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses.

For Azzam, nothing is more honorable than for a Muslim to die fighting in the collective effort to reestablish the caliphate. In the short term, however, he was concerned about drawing more fighters to Afghanistan, so in Defense of the Muslim Lands he emphasizes the personal obligation of every Muslim to jihad. Insisting that his call for universal holy war is supported by a wide array of Muslim scholars, he details the lengthy process he went through to get this approval. During the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, he recalls, he delivered a lecture before more than one hundred scholars from around the Muslim world, “from whom there was not a single objection.”

This broad scholarly support of Azzam’s teaching was important for two reasons. The approval of the ulema, the learned men and scholars, established the validity of his fatwa before the Muslim world. At the same time, it showed that support for Azzam’s notion of jihad extended far beyond the “Arab mujahideen,” the foreign jihadis fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. The scholars Azzam consulted may not have joined him on the battlefield, but their approval allowed his call to jihad to resonate across the globe. As one scholar wrote in his endorsement of the fatwa, “Therefore it is incumbent upon every Muslim today, capable of carrying a weapon, to march forward to jihad to aid his or her Muslim brothers in Afghanistan and in every place in need, even though his or her parents do not permit it. . . .”

Azzam himself understood the crucial role of ideologues in the battle. He knew victory could not be achieved by the sword alone. Expounding on the Hadith, the stories and sayings of Mohammed, he stated that “the ink of the scholar is worth more than the blood of the martyr.” He continued:

Indeed nations are only brought to life by their beliefs and their concepts, and they die only with their desires and their lusts.

The life of the Muslim ummah is solely dependent on the ink of its scholars and the blood of its martyrs.

What is more beautiful than the writing of the ummah’s history with both the ink of a scholar and his blood, such that the map of Islamic history becomes colored with two lines: one of them black, and that is what the scholar wrote with the ink of his pen; and the other one red, and that is what the martyr wrote with his blood.

And something more beautiful than this is when the blood is one and the pen is one, so that the hand of the scholar which expends the ink and moves the pen, is the same as the hand which expends its blood and moves the ummah.

The extent to which the number of martyred scholars increases is the extent to which nations are delivered from their slumber, rescued from their decline, and awoken from their sleep.

Like other ideologues before him, Azzam appreciated the importance of ideas and beliefs on the battlefield. People, he knew, will not fight for territory or treasure alone; they have to believe in the righteousness of their cause. It was Azzam who would elaborate the ultimate justice of jihad and provide the rationale for thousands, indeed tens of thousands, to join the battle for Allah against the infidels.

Azzam’s influence stretched well beyond the Afghan war. Even after he was assassinated in Pakistan in 1989, his call to universal war strengthened and catalyzed Al Qaeda’s growth into a global brand, eventually spawning ISIS and, in 2014, the creation of the new Islamic State—the caliphate reborn.

Elaborating on the importance of Azzam in launching the global jihadist movement, the publishers of the English-language version of Defense of the Muslim Lands write in their introduction:

Abdullah Azzam was greatly influenced by the Jihad in Afghanistan and the Jihad was greatly influenced by him. To it he concentrated his full effort, that he ultimately became the most prominent figure in the Afghani Jihad aside from the Afghan leaders. He spared no effort to promote the Afghan cause to the whole world, especially throughout the Muslim ummah. . . . He changed the minds of Muslims about Jihad in Afghanistan and presented the Jihad as an Islamic cause which concerns all Muslims around the world [emphasis added].

Due to his efforts, the Afghani Jihad became universal, in which Muslims from every part of the world came to fight.

Azzam had dedicated his own life to jihad, and his clerical credentials were impeccable. His doctorate in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), which gave him full authority to issue fatwas, was from the most important theological institution in the Sunni world, the Al Azhar in Cairo. His prestige was one reason that Defense of the Muslim Lands, from the time it was issued until the summer of 2014, when ISIS reestablished the caliphate, was the modern jihadi movement’s most effective tool for mobilizing support.

Another reason was that the logic of Azzam’s fatwa was flawless.

Azzam had translated the geopolitical crisis of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan into a religious mandate for action. The USSR was a kuffar, an infidel nation, and the worst kind—driven by an atheist dogma that denied not only Allah but all transcendental truth. This infidel superpower had invaded dar al Islam, sacred Muslim land. The government in Kabul may have been made up of socialists, but the nation was part of the Khorasan, ancient Islamic territory. Its invasion by infidel forces demanded that the global community of Muslims wage a holy war to repel the kuffar invaders.

Azzam reasoned that because there was no caliph to declare jihad against the USSR or any other infidel group, Muslims could not wait for direction from the outside. No longer an action declared by an imperial leader, jihad was thus “democratized.” Azzam’s fatwa became the most important document sanctioning and requiring holy Islamic war for the next three decades.

While Abdullah Azzam forms one pillar of modern jihad, Osama bin Laden forms the other. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought Azzam into the foreign fighter movement, and the first Gulf War, a dozen years later, propelled his onetime deputy, bin Laden, to the leadership of a global terror organization targeting America and American interests around the world.

The scion of a prominent Saudi family—his father was one of the wealthiest building contractors in the desert nation and a friend of the king—Osama bin Laden was working for the family firm when radicals stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca. While he had likely come into contact with the ideas of Sayyid Qutb as well as with Azzam, he was not yet fully radicalized, and he saw the siege as a treasonous act against a legitimate Islamic government. But when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan one month later, something snapped. He later told an interviewer, “When the invasion of Afghanistan started, I was enraged and went there at once. I arrived within days, before the end of 1979.” Though it is improbable that he actually arrived in Afghanistan “within days” of the Soviet invasion, it is likely that he traveled there in great secrecy to deliver support for the mujahideen from wealthy Gulf donors, keeping his family in the dark about his mission.

Azzam was the older, revered scholar and teacher, while bin Laden was a twenty-three-year-old ascetic with access to many millions of dollars in funds from his own family and from donors throughout the Middle East. By the early 1980s, bin Laden was a conduit for external funding and a key figure in the recruitment of fighters, bringing thousands of men through Pakistan to Afghanistan in support of the holy war against the atheist Soviet Union.

The pairing of Azzam and bin Laden was critical to the success of the enterprise. Azzam was not the first to talk about jihad, but with bin Laden’s financial and operational assistance, he gave the ideology a longer reach than it had ever had before. The Saudis and many other Arab Muslims felt an obligation to support the jihad for religious purposes, and bin Laden could facilitate their support. At the same time, the United States was providing covert support to the indigenous mujahideen of Afghanistan to weaken the Soviet regime. For the time being, the interest of the capitalist West coincided with that of the Wahhabi fundamentalists. Both saw the Soviet Union as their enemy.

By the end of the 1980s, having lost more than fourteen thousand soldiers in a vicious unconventional war in a region that had brought defeat to invaders as disparate as Alexander the Great and the British Empire, the Kremlin decided that the war in Afghanistan was no longer worth it. American Stinger missiles, Pakistani intelligence, and small arms from China had made the local Afghan fighters a force to be reckoned with. In the view of the new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, they could not be defeated without inordinate cost to the USSR.

But the “Arab Muj,” who had come from outside Afghanistan to fight in this new holy war, especially Osama bin Laden, would draw another conclusion. Less than a year after the last Soviet troop convoy had left the territory of Afghanistan, Abdullah Azzam, the leader of the MAK, the organization that had recruited more than fifty-five thousand foreign fighters to come and wage war in Afghanistan, was dead, and bin Laden inherited the jihadi organization that would soon become Al Qaeda. But bin Laden had a different interpretation of what had just happened in Afghanistan—what it meant for the future of all Muslims and the fight against infidels everywhere.

For the wealthy Saudi, who had just spent a decade in a war zone fighting the overwhelmingly more numerous and better equipped Soviets, there was only one way to interpret the victory of the jihadists: they truly were warriors of Allah, true mujahideen, fighters in a holy war supported by God. There was no other way to explain the victory over the superior forces of a superpower. It would be inconceivable for bin Laden and his ilk to conclude that the war was in fact won because another infidel superpower, the United States, had facilitated the victory of the local Afghans through a covert program supported by his lazy countrymen safe and sound back in Saudi Arabia. His certainty that the Arab mujahideen were now vindicated as God’s own fighters eventually spurred bin Laden to broaden his jihadi horizons. But only after another war broke out.

The following year saw Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invade Kuwait. His occupation of the neighboring nation also put the Saudi kingdom and its royal family at risk, as many believed that after the fall of Kuwait, Saddam would next invade Saudi Arabia. By this point Osama was losing faith in the elite of his homeland, but the king had been a close friend of his father’s, and far more important than that, Saudi Arabia was the home to the holiest and most precious sites in all Islam, the cities of Mecca and Medina, where Mohammed had established the first caliphate. The kingdom had to be protected from Saddam Hussein, a Baathist thug who modeled himself more on Stalin than Mohammed.

Bin Laden met with King Fahd and the Saudi defense minister, asking them not to depend on non-Muslim (infidel) assistance from the United States and offering to defend Saudi Arabia with his own legion of seasoned Arab mujahideen. But the king declined and instead invited America and its allies to deploy their troops to the Arabian Peninsula. This deployment, however, required a fatwa, issued by the royal court’s domesticated clerics, the first of its kind in Islamic history. Although stationing infidel troops in the land of Mecca and Medina had been utterly haram, or forbidden, since the time of the first caliphate, now it was decreed permissible. For bin Laden, this meant the crusaders were back, but this time they had been invited by the king himself. Islam had been betrayed and sullied by its own royal leadership. This decision changed the world, moving bin Laden to turn his guerrilla band into an international terror organization that would bring jihad to the streets of America.

Bin Laden now began publicly to denounce the king, his father’s close friend, as a lackey of the infidels. Attempts to silence him failed, and eventually he was banished from the kingdom and stripped of his Saudi citizenship. After the Gulf War, he moved to Sudan and took his organization—renamed Al Qaeda, “The Base”—with him.

Al Qaeda now had a new target. Instead of killing infidels who had dared to invade Muslim lands, as with the Soviets in Afghanistan, the holy war would be taken directly to the infidel, either in his own land or in locations abroad that offered an easy target.

While the operations against the infidels were planned in secret, bin Laden decided to come out of the shadows and publicly issue a fatwa of his own, Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places, urging all Muslims, just as his mentor Abdullah Azzam had, to take up the fight and become jihadis themselves. Al Qaeda may have been born in the mountains and villages of Central Asia in a war with an occupying military, but now the enemy was everywhere, its ranks including office workers in New York, embassy employees in Africa, and off-duty American sailors in Yemen. The following decade would witness the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the suicide attack against the USS Cole in the Port of Aden in 1999.

Modern jihad had finally gone global. And then came September 11, 2001.

CHAPTER 4

THE ENEMY MASTERMINDS: THE GRAND STRATEGISTS OF MODERN JIHAD

Just as one must study Clausewitz, Machiavelli, and Napoleon to understand the modern Western way of war, so one must be intimately acquainted with certain key jihadi writers and thinkers if one wishes to defeat our current enemy. We have already mentioned Osama bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam, who, in the absence of a caliph with the authority formally to declare holy war against the Soviets, played a pivotal role in mobilizing Muslims to become jihadists with his fatwa Defense of the Muslim Lands.

To understand the strategy of today’s global jihadist movement, however, one must understand the work of a handful of other Islamists who wrote the most important strategic texts on war against the infidel—Sayyid Qutb; Ayman al Zawahiri, the current head of Al Qaeda; Brigadier General S. K. Malik; and the late American Al Qaeda leader Anwar al Awlaki. The works of these “big picture” Islamist thinkers shape the actions and plans of all of today’s jihadist terror groups, from Boko Haram to Al Qaeda, from the al Nusra Front to the Islamic State.

MILESTONES: ALL MUST FIGHT FOR THE CALIPHATE

Sayyid Qutb, a minor Egyptian government official, wrote the most influential modern text on jihad. His 1964 book Milestones (sometimes translated as Signposts along the Way) has become the field manual for jihadists everywhere and remains a core doctrinal text for the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Qutb was a key member.

Written after Qutb visited the United States on an exchange program soon after World War II, the book explains why Muslims have lost their preeminent position in the world and argues that the godless, infidel nation of the United States must be destroyed to rid the world of jahiliyyah, the pagan ignorance of Allah, which has once again infected the minds and souls of Muslims across the globe.

This violent purification of the world and the reestablishment of Islamic greatness in the theocratic empire that was the caliphate depend on holy war, or jihad. Qutb is quite explicit about his belief that Islam is not merely a religion but also a “revolutionary party” with a political mission to mobilize the masses and capture global power for the glory of Allah. Islam is more than a matter of personal belief. Again and again in this short book, Qutb insists that Islam has a mandate to re-create the caliphate, this time as a theocratic empire that will span the world.

It is not surprising, then, that Milestones lifts heavily and frequently from other revolutionary ideologies, especially fascism and communism. Qutb (and later bin Laden) often used Marxist terminology such as the “vanguard” to explain the special role of the small minority of “enlightened” religious revolutionaries.

Eventually arrested for his central role in the Brotherhood and involvement in a plot to kill President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Qutb was executed in August 1966. His ideas on jihad and religious war live on, however. Milestones is found all over the Middle East, in many Islamic “cultural centers” across the United States, and, significantly, in the possession of high-value jihadist targets on the battlefield and of terrorists apprehended here in America.

Qutb’s ideas link insurgent leaders like Abu Bakr al Baghdadi of ISIS with individual terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers, the Boston Marathon bombers, all of whom concur with the fundamental analysis of Milestones:

1.  Today’s Muslims are like the pagan Arab tribes of Mecca in the time of Mohammed.

2.  They have failed to submit to the will of Allah in part because their leaders are themselves false Muslims and puppets of the West, and also because they have been corrupted by the heretical values of the infidel.

3.  As a result, there is no true Islamic state today, only pretense and falsehood.

4.  The answer is a return to Allah and the reestablishment of his sovereignty on earth through the re-creation of his theocratic caliphate in a jihad.

For Qutb, being a Muslim is not a personal, theoretical, or individualistic exercise. You’re a true Muslim only if you join in eradicating the infidel and all his influences and do your part in the war to bring back the Islamic empire.

ZAWAHIRI: ONE SUPERPOWER DOWN, ONE TO GO

Ayman al Zawahiri (born 1951), who took over Al Qaeda after bin Laden’s death, has actually made a more important contribution to the canon of jihadi strategy than his former boss did.

A physician from a prominent Cairo family, Zawahiri was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood like Qutb but later became one of the leaders of the terror group Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Also arrested and imprisoned by the Egyptian authorities for his extreme beliefs and personal goal of bringing down the Cairo government, Zawahiri was eventually released and ended up in Pakistan during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, treating the mujahideen who had been wounded fighting the Russians.

In Pakistan, Zawahiri met Osama bin Laden and was drawn deeper into the world of the “Arab mujahideen,” eventually becoming a member of the MAK, or Services Bureau. After the head of the MAK, Abdullah Azzam, was killed in 1989 and bin Laden took over the organization, the puritanical Wahhabi ideology began to mingle with the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, transforming MAK into Al Qaeda—“the Base”—with Zawahiri as bin Laden’s new deputy.

Bin Laden and Zawahiri gave the renamed jihadi group a new and global mission. Instead of targeting only foreign invaders on Muslim soil or un-Islamic apostate Arab leaders and their governments in the Middle East, the Base would attack both. And, most important for America, Al Qaeda would now take the jihad into the heart of infidel lands. This move into “enemy territory” would eventually result in Al Qaeda’s managing to do what no other jihadist group had ever achieved.

Since the Muslim Brotherhood’s declaration back in the 1920s that the caliphate must be reestablished—by force if need be—scores of jihadist groups had been founded around the globe, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, from Africa to Central Asia. Some had been more successful than others, the Brotherhood itself jeopardizing the stability of several Arab nations through assassinations and sundry subversions and conspiracies. But each one was stymied by its shortsighted focus on the proximate infidel or apostate enemy. Whether it was Egyptian Islamic Jihad trying to take down the secular government in Cairo or jihadist groups fighting the “heathen” Indians in Kashmir, they were all limited by their operational parochialism. This would change under bin Laden and Zawahiri, as Al Qaeda became the self-appointed “vanguard” of a global movement that would eventually, on September 11, 2001, stun the world.

Al Qaeda now retooled itself along three fronts:

•  Exporting jihadists to new guerrilla theaters around the world;

•  Becoming the global face of jihad through propaganda; and

•  Establishing cells across the world to execute terrorist attacks against the infidel.

In the 1990s, Al Qaeda recruited new jihadi fighters and deployed them to Bosnia in the Balkans, Chechnya in the Russian Federation, Kashmir in India, and all significant war zones where Muslims were fighting non-Muslims. Bin Laden would periodically emerge from the shadows of the war in Afghanistan to record video and audio messages for a global audience of willing holy warriors, eventually becoming an international media personality, interviewed on CNN and ABC.

At the same time, bin Laden and Zawahiri were recruiting Muslim fundamentalists not only to become guerrilla fighters but to join clandestine terrorist cells embedded in Western infidel nations or places where there were enough infidels to make a target-rich environment. Establishing its network in more than fifty nations, Al Qaeda was able to take the holy war to the kuffar again and again in the 1990s. Bin Laden and Zawahiri were responsible for or connected with the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the bombings of American embassies in East Africa in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

Despite these successful attacks, the United States was utterly surprised on September 11, 2001, by the deadliest terrorist attack in history, an attack that catapulted Al Qaeda to a position of worldwide prominence that other jihadist groups had only dreamt of.

Throughout this period, and especially after the 9/11 attacks, when Al Qaeda was discussed it was bin Laden who garnered all the popular attention, and for obvious reasons, since he was the leader of the group, and also because he fit the stereotype of the ascetic jihadi warrior. But this focus on bin Laden obscured Zawahiri’s role as the real ideological master of Al Qaeda. It was the older Egyptian jihadist who had studied and honed his theological and rhetorical skills in the dock of the Egyptian court system and the prisons of Cairo. His efforts to engage online with other Muslims to explain and justify the new global campaign of terror were crucial to spreading Al Qaeda’s name among potentially sympathetic Muslims around the world.

Anticipating the reaction to the 9/11 attacks and the worldwide attention they would bring, Zawahiri penned a semiautobiographical book on his experience of jihad, making the case that the time had come for all to choose sides in the religious war to end all wars. Knights under the Prophet’s Banner appeared online two months after the attacks and was published in book form by an Arabic outlet in London, Ash-Sharq al Awsat. Also known colloquially as “Warriors under the Flag of Mohammed,” the book builds upon the themes of both Qutb and Azzam, reformulating them for the new age of holy war in which Al Qaeda is the global jihadi “brand” for the twenty-first century.

Zawahiri argues that Islam must rejuvenate itself with an assault on all that is un-Islamic and that this revival to greatness will come through each believer’s taking up the sword of jihad. The time has come for each man to choose which side of history he will live or die on. The Arab mujahideen of Afghanistan, the founders of Al Qaeda, have shown the way. In the 1980s, there were two global superpowers. One, the Soviet Union, was foolish enough to invade Muslim land when it deployed its troops in Afghanistan, inciting the “best Muslims” to fight in a holy war against the kuffar invaders. And despite being outnumbered and outgunned, the jihadists won, a feat possible only because they were fighting for Allah. Two years after the mujahideen’s victory in Afghanistan, their enemy imploded when the USSR was dissolved, on Christmas Day 1991. Now, at the dawn of a new century, there is only one infidel superpower left standing, the United States, and it too will fall to the sword of Allah’s army.

The final message of Knights under the Prophet’s Banner is very simple: God is on the side of the jihadists. Their eventual victory over all disbelief, including the destruction of America, is inevitable.[1] The members of the human race have one simple choice to make: join the “caravan of jihad” or be destroyed.

GENERAL MALIK: WAR AGAINST THE SOUL OF THE INFIDEL

The ideological and strategic thinker of greatest importance to the global jihadi movement today is one most people, even members of the American intelligence community, have never heard of.

In 1979, that year of turmoil in Tehran, Mecca, and Kabul, an astonishing book was published in Pakistan by Brigadier General S. K. Malik under the title The Quranic Concept of War. The book is remarkable not only for its direct connection to later events like 9/11 and its rationalization of such heinous acts but also for its highly original, indeed revolutionary, analysis. For The Quranic Concept of War is unlike any strategic work in the canon of Western military thought.

Malik destroys the central tenets of Western military thought, especially the seminal theories of Carl von Clausewitz. Ever since he analyzed the earth-shattering campaigns of Napoleon, Western military academies and war colleges have taught as holy writ the Prussian’s dictum that war is an instrument of the nation-state, a violent tool to be used in the furtherance of the national interest when all other tools fail. We teach that war is simply an extension of policy, that war is politics with a gun, or as Clausewitz originally put it, “the continuation of politics with an admixture of other means.”

Upending centuries of military doctrine, Malik states that war has nothing to do with the nation-state—which is in any case a heretical construct of the infidel West—or with serving the nation or earthbound politics. War serves only one purpose: the realization of Allah’s sovereignty here on earth. According to the Pakistani general, all war must serve only the objective of re-creating the caliphate, the theocratic empire of Islam, so that Allah’s writ may once again reign supreme.

Malik’s next challenge to Western strategic thought is his rejection of the way the infidel goes to war. When American or allied forces ready themselves for war, they perform what is called an “intelligence preparation of the battlefield.”[2] This analysis serves in part to identify what are termed “key vulnerabilities” or “centers of gravity” within the enemy’s forces and infrastructure—those targets whose destruction will most incapacitate the enemy or force his surrender. Malik states that the infidel’s concept of multiple centers of gravity or key vulnerabilities in war is just as fallacious as the idea that war serves political purposes. According to the Pakistani general, there is only one target of importance in war: the soul of the enemy. The infidel foe must be converted to Islam or crushed.

Lastly, since the only target that matters in war is the soul of the infidel, Malik concludes that the most effective weapon in war is terror. Here we see the relevance of his book to groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS. The enemy’s belief system must be utterly destroyed, and terror is the most effective way to do that. That is why 9/11 was so important. It is the highly symbolic suicide attacks, the crucifixions, the beheadings, the bombings of civilian crowds, and the videos of immolations that will destroy the will of the infidel to go on.

Lest anyone think The Quranic Concept of War was a product of the radical and disenchanted fringe of the Pakistani military, it must be noted that the book was published with a foreword by General M. Zia ul Haq, chief of the army staff and the president of Pakistan, who affirms that jihad in the cause of Allah “is not the exclusive domain of the professional soldier,” echoing Azzam’s fatwa declaring holy war an obligation of all Muslim believers.

The works by Qutb, Zawahiri, and Malik have been found on high-value targets and jihadi leaders in every theater of “holy war.” The ideas of these strategic thinkers and those of Ibn Taymiyya, Mawdudi, and Azzam have shaped the worldview and objectives of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and every jihadist terror group working today to restore the caliphate so Islam can reign supreme. But when it comes to the threat of jihadi violence here in the United States and the danger of American citizens’ becoming terrorists, there is one more figure we must discuss.

AWLAKI: LEAVE OR KILL

Born in New Mexico in 1971 to Yemeni parents, Anwar al Awlaki would become the spiritual leader for a new generation of terrorists. Nicknamed “the bin Laden of the Internet,” Awlaki was trained in Islamic theology and became the imam of the Falls Church mosque in Virginia. He ended his days as one of the most senior leaders of Al Qaeda, killed on the orders of the White House in a drone strike in 2011.

Awlaki, whose influence continues even after his death thanks to his scores of videos and audio recordings, applied his understanding of American culture and society to the challenge of recruiting young Americans to the cause of jihad, making holy war attractive to a post–Afghan War generation. His efforts were especially important after the 9/11 attacks provoked a robust American national security response, making the execution of similar attacks by Arabs from the Middle East traveling in the United States much harder.

Awlaki was in contact with Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood mass-murderer, and his influence can be found in the attempted Times Square bombing by Faisal Shahzad and the Christmas Day bomb plot of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. But his importance is illustrated best by his ideological and theological role in the Boston Marathon bombing, the deadliest post-9/11 terrorist attack until the San Bernardino massacre in 2015.

I had the honor to serve as an expert for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the preparations for the trial of the surviving killer, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. I was given access to the jihadi materials found on his hard drive, documents disclosed during the court proceedings that vividly reveal the living, breathing threat of jihadi terrorism in America.

Tsarnaev had multiple issues of the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire downloaded from the Internet, as well as a series of audio lectures by Anwar al Awlaki titled Hereafter, focusing on the rewards a devout Muslim will receive in heaven when he becomes shaheed, a martyr in the cause of the caliphate.

A 2010 issue of Inspire contains an article by Awlaki, “Shaykh Anwar’s Message to the American People and the Muslims of the West,” which includes this key statement:

I for one, was born in the U.S. and lived in the U.S. for 21 years. America was my home. I was a preacher of Islam involved in non-violent Islamic activism. However, with the American invasion of Iraq and continued U.S. aggression against Muslims, I could not reconcile between living in the U.S. and being a Muslim, and I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding upon myself, just as it is binding on every other able Muslim [emphasis added].

Most significantly, Awlaki offers an operational choice to Muslims living in un-Islamic countries such as America, a choice based upon the principle of al wala wal bara. Originally simply a call to do that which pleases Allah and reject that which Allah would not like, that principle, Awlaki tells the Muslims of America and the West, now has broader implications:

To the Muslims in America I have this to say: How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with a nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters? How can you have your loyalty to a government that is leading the war against Islam and Muslims?

Hence, my advice to you is this: you have two choices: either hijra [migration] or jihad. You either leave or you fight [emphasis added]. You leave and live among Muslims or you stay behind and fight with your hand, your wealth and your word. I specifically invite the youth to either fight in the West or join their brothers in the fronts of jihad: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia.

Awlaki was the catalyst for several of the most serious attacks and jihadi conspiracies on U.S. soil after 9/11. His message, transmitted in professional and attractive media, appealed to American citizens and immigrants in ways that the old-fashioned and stolid preaching of the senior Al Qaeda figures never could.

The message of holy war is alive. Its strength is evident in the decision of the Al Qaeda offshoot Al Qaeda in Iraq—now known as ISIS, the Islamic State—that the time for caliphate is here. ISIS will not stop until it is destroyed or it destroys us. There is no negotiating with totalitarians, especially religious totalitarians who see the rest of the world as infidels to be converted, enslaved, or killed.

We have been losing this war since 2001—spectacularly, in fact, with tens of thousands killed around the world in the name of Allah and now in the name of the new caliphate of ISIS and its new emperor, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. Jihad has become a threat to all that is decent in the world and above all to America, the nation that embodies the values of individual liberty that are antithetical to the global jihadi movement. So what is to be done? How do we win?

We learn from the lessons of the last war we fought against totalitarians, the Cold War we won against communism. Following George Kennan, we must first understand the threat, and then we must craft a strategic response, like Paul Nitze’s NSC-68, to crush our enemy.

CHAPTER 5

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? HOW AMERICA WINS AND THE JIHADIS LOSE

The year 2015 saw the highest number of jihadi plots on American soil since September 11, 2001.[1] And by far the greatest number of those attacks were connected to the Islamic State, the new caliphate.

After the carnage of recent years, it is clear that Abu Bakr al Baghdadi has a plan to destroy anyone who gets in the way of the caliphate or fails to submit to the new empire of Islam. His plan is an updated version of the strategies of Qutb, Azzam, and Malik, whose works helped establish the global jihadist movement of which Al Qaeda and the Islamic State are just the newest members. But this time the purveyors of holy war have leveraged the apocalyptic aspects of Islam in such a way as to turn their organization into a juggernaut of jihad. As a result, the Islamic State is the most powerful threat group of its kind in history, let alone among jihadi groups.

It is time to speak truthfully about the threat to America, as George Kennan did at the beginning of the Cold War, to understand who the enemy is and why it is so dangerous. Then we can finally draw a plan to destroy that enemy and secure the nation.

WHO IS THE ENEMY? A “LONG TELEGRAM” FOR THE JIHADIS

In the postwar world, the existential threat to America came from communism—in particular from the Soviet Union, the most powerful embodiment of that totalitarian ideology. The existential threat to America today comes from the global jihadi movement, of which the Islamic State is the most dangerous expression. In fact, it is by far the most dangerous irregular warfare organization ever, as we know from four unclassified metrics.[2]

1. The Islamic State: the world’s first trans-regional insurgency

In the years after 9/11, Al Qaeda, the group responsible for those attacks, never functioned as a true insurgency, mobilizing its own mass base of support. Instead it attached itself like a parasite to existing insurgencies, such as Al Shabaab in Somalia and the Taleban in Afghanistan, to further its own aims. ISIS is different. It has not relied on other, indigenous organizations.

After Abu Bakr al Baghdadi broke from Al Qaeda, he began to recruit his own group of fighters from the local populations in Iraq and Syria and also from all over the world. Latest estimates have the Islamic State at more than seventy-five thousand fighters, with half of those recruited from outside the region and coming from over a hundred nations. Six thousand of these jihadis have come to ISIS from Western nations on Western passports that afford them great freedom of movement.

Successful recruiting has enabled ISIS to capture territory in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. The land under ISIS control today is more extensive than Great Britain, encompassing more than six million persons and some of the biggest cities in the region.

More important, dozens of groups from all over the world, including the lethal Nigerian jihadi movement Boko Haram, have pledged bayat, or fealty, to the new caliph, Baghdadi. And after Boko Haram, which killed more than six thousand people in 2014 alone, was accepted into the caliphate, it changed its name to the West Africa Province of the Islamic State. The large swaths of land under Boko Haram’s control are now de facto part of the new caliphate (and also arguably de jure from the perspective of sharia law). The Islamic State is thus the first insurgency in human history to hold territory not only in multiple countries in one region but in multiple countries in multiple regions.[3]

2. The Islamic State: the richest jihadist group ever

The most successful insurgency in history is also the richest substate threat group of its kind we have ever seen. The Islamic State does not have to rely upon donations from sympathizers or rich donors as Al Qaeda did. It makes millions of dollars every day from its own criminal activities and from the caliphate’s governmental operations. Its major sources of funding are illicit sales from captured oil fields, hostage taking, racketeering, the sale of rare antiquities on the black market, and the formal taxation of the population living within the caliphate. The Financial Times, whose reporters have researched the “GDP” of the Islamic State, estimates that these income streams brought in $500 million in 2015, a figure that comports closely with the unclassified U.S. government estimates that the Islamic State makes $2 to $4 million per day.

To the income generated by those activities, we should also add the funds ISIS accrued from its earlier raids on the Iraqi National Bank. In 2014, in two operations, ISIS fighters stole a total of $823 million from the government of Iraq. A comparison with the finances of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks puts this figure in perspective.

The official 9/11 Commission report, which included an in-depth financial forensic analysis of the attacks, concluded that the whole operation—everything from student visas to living expenses for the nineteen terrorists in the United States, flight school tuition, and the purchase of the box cutters and plane tickets—cost Al Qaeda just $500,000. And with that amount of money, Al Qaeda managed to inflict a billion dollars’ worth of damage on U.S. financial markets and the national economy in just the first twelve months after the attacks. By comparison, the Islamic State’s two bank raids netted it 1,600 times what Al Qaeda spent on 9/11. Once ISIS consolidates its hold on the territory it has captured in the Middle East and Africa, it has the resources, should it focus its attention on America, to make the 9/11 attacks seem like a small incident.

3. A deadly combination: belief in Armageddon and social media expertise

The reason that ISIS has succeeded in reestablishing the caliphate is its paradoxical combination of the old and the new. ISIS believes it is different from the jihadi movements that have gone before it and has managed to convince tens of thousands of followers of the same.

To this day, people in Washington can’t even agree about what to call this group. Some refer to it as ISIS—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Others, such as President Obama, refer to it as ISIL—the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.[4] Yet in reality neither name is correct.

In war, names matter. An intelligence preparation of the battlefield does not describe enemies capriciously. The way we talk about our foes is a function of the raw intelligence we put into the system, and the names we give them are a reflection of what they call themselves. We called the Third Reich the Third Reich because that was what the Nazis called themselves. The same was true with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. If we wish to be accurate, we should refer to our current enemy as the “Islamic State.” That is what they have called themselves since Abu Bakr al Baghdadi declared the caliphate reborn in the summer of 2014. And indeed such major publications as the Financial Times and the Economist refer to the jihadi group as IS.[5]

But to truly understand our enemy and how it has been so successful, we must look to what it called itself before it became the Islamic State. Originally, this small group of jihadists was called Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Mesopotamian franchise of the original Al Qaeda, led by the Jordanian thug Abu Musab al Zarqawi until he was killed by U.S. forces. Then, after Abu Bakr al Baghdadi became its leader and the group left Iraq to fight and recruit in Syria, it gave itself a new name: the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Shaam.[6] But what is “Al Shaam,” and why is this phrase so important?

Al Shaam literally means “the land that rises from the sea.” On one level, it is simply a geographic designation for that portion of the Middle East that we would call Greater Syria or the Levant. This is the origin of Washington’s preferred names for the Islamic State, ISIS and ISIL. But this is only a fraction of the significance of Al Shaam.

Like Judaism, Christianity, or any other major religion, Islam has a well-developed eschatology—the story the community tells itself about End Times. Christian eschatology, based in part on the Book of Revelation, describes a series of battles before Judgment Day between the forces of an Anti-Christ and the last Christians on earth, culminating on the plains of Megiddo (Armageddon) in northern Israel.

In a distinct parallel to the Christian story of End Times, Islamic eschatology also teaches of a diabolic figure who will lead the forces of the infidel kuffar in a series of great battles against the last true Muslims on earth before Allah resurrects all men and judges them. The pivotal conflict will take place in Al Shaam, and the Megiddo for Muslims is actually the territory of Syria and Iraq. Not only has Abu Bakr al Baghdadi named his fighting force of holy warriors after a location with powerful religious significance for all Muslims, he and his men have managed to capture this land and rebuild the caliphate on it.

Every time Baghdadi gives a sermon on YouTube about his victories in Al Shaam or his propagandists around the globe refer to his organization as the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Shaam, they are sending a subtle but powerful message to every young Muslim man—and, increasingly, to every young Muslim woman—looking for meaning, whether in Cairo, Paris, or San Bernardino. The message is:

The final jihad has begun. Your father may have fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and your uncle may have fought for Allah in Bosnia against the Serbs and Croats in the 1990s. That indeed makes them mujahideen and they will see paradise.

But if you, young man, want to cleanse your soul and acquire for yourself the only guarantee of salvation as a martyred jihadi, the final opportunity has arrived.

I, Abu Bakr, the new caliph, have captured the land of Al Shaam, where the last holy war is now being fought.

There will be no other wars in which you may martyr yourself for Allah and reach paradise. The caliphate is finally back. Join us now!

It is impossible to explain the almost forty thousand young men who have left their homes to fight for the Islamic State unless you understand how it has leveraged the centuries-old eschatology of the religion and combined it with new propaganda platforms.

The peculiar contradiction is that the Islamic State is using the latest social media tools to propagate a vision of the end of the world that predates the telegraph, let alone the Internet. Today the Islamic State has a media presence online that makes the jihadi products of Al Qaeda look like the work of high school amateurs. Whether it is the English-language jihadi magazine Dabiq,[7] already on its thirteenth issue, or the videos it posts relentlessly on the web, the Islamic State is communicating in ways that perpetuate a constant stream of recruits. Dabiq itself is much more impressively produced and much deeper theologically than Al Qaeda’s original publication, Inspire. But that all pales in significance when compared with the propaganda videos produced by the Islamic State.

American audiences are familiar with the scores of decapitation videos that have been placed on the Internet by Alhayat, ISIS’s media arm. But these are always redacted for broadcast on mainstream media. Watched in their entirety, in addition to being stomach churning in their gruesome violence, they are masterly works of psychological warfare and propaganda.

As part of my own research, I watched one of the early ISIS videos with a graduate of one of America’s premier film schools. Halfway through, he paused the video, looked at me, and said, “This film was made by someone who went to one of the leading film schools in the world.” So professional was the editing and the use of unusual camera angles and slow motion that he was convinced that this film was the handiwork of someone trained in a Western university. This was, of course, completely possible. An estimated six thousand young Westerners have heeded the call to jihad, and many of them bring modern media skills to a theocratic entity predicated on seventh-century fundamentalist mores.[8] But this strange marriage of the ancient and the ultramodern is in part why the Islamic State has superseded Al Qaeda as the “brand leader” of the global jihadi movement. What is worse, American and allied efforts to counter this powerful media assault have been either wholly absent or woefully inadequate.

4. The empire is back: ISIS succeeds where all others have failed.

The fourth and most important reason that ISIS is a grave threat to America is what separates it from all other jihadi groups of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We cannot begin to defeat the most dangerous member and standard-bearer of the new global jihadi movement unless we understand the significance of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s reestablishment of the caliphate, or Islamic state.

As we saw in chapter 2, the caliphate existed for over a millennium. Though it took various forms over the centuries—and some of its rulers were more pious than others—the reality of the empire of Islam had a profound effect upon how Muslims understood the world in general and how to deal with the infidel in particular. But when Ataturk, hoping to bring his fellow Muslims into the modern world by separating political power from religious faith, dissolved the caliphate after World War I, he angered Muslims who believed that separation of mosque and state is blasphemous. For these followers of Mohammed—a figure who at one and the same time was a prophet of Allah, a great military commander, and an emperor—the only way to live was within a theocratic state in which the Koran was the constitution. This belief would be the driving force behind hundreds of Islamist groups in the ensuing century, organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Taleban, and Al Qaeda, all of them adamant that the caliphate must be brought back. But all these groups failed to re-create the empire of old. That is, until June 29, 2014, when Baghdadi declared the restoration of the Islamic State with himself as the new emperor of Islam, the new caliph.

Plainly put, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and ISIS have succeeded where all other jihadists have failed. And they have done so on the territory that all Muslims have been told is the land where the final holy war with the infidel will take place: Al Shaam. This historic victory brings a symbolic and practical weight to the Islamic State, giving it a momentum against us, the infidel, that more terrestrial and politically defined foes cannot match.

Russia may be a spoiler on the international stage and China may be our economic rival and cyber-adversary, but neither is driven by an immanent vision of apocalypse based upon a historic and theological idyll familiar to more than a billion people in the world today. Even the mullahs in Iran, despite having their own version of the caliphate and an apocalyptic narrative of the return of a mystically “hidden imam,” are limited in the threat they pose to America and the West. They are Shia, a minority in Islam, and the sense of Persian national identity still beating within Iranian society has no truck with suicidal ideas of Armageddon.[9]

Today no nation or other group poses a direct existential threat to America and the whole of Western civilization except the Islamic State. Even the otherwise unpredictable and nuclear-armed North Korea is constrained by demographics, economics, and its far more powerful northerly neighbor China. For the millions of fundamentalist believers who for decades have lamented the loss of the caliphate and railed against the perversions of Western culture and the subversion of originalist Islam, Baghdadi, the new caliph, and his mujahideen have redeemed the faith for a new age that will bring purity, salvation, and glory to Allah.

And the threat cannot be dismissed as a problem only for the Middle East and the Islamic world, eight thousand miles away. It is a threat to America and all Americans. Since the rebirth of the caliphate, plot after plot has unfolded in the United States. In less than two years, more than ninety people were killed or arrested in jihadi incidents connected to ISIS.

In the plots we have intercepted, what we have learned about the division of labor in the jihadist enterprise is especially disturbing.[10] Of the ISIS terrorists arrested or interdicted inside America since the Islamic State was declared, just over half had sworn bayat to the new caliph and were preparing to leave the country to fight for ISIS in the Middle East. Of the rest, 19 percent were acting as talent-spotters or facilitators, like those management-level terrorists who vetted the young men and bought them their plane tickets to Turkey so they could cross into Syria to fight for the new empire. But most shocking of all, 29 percent of the ISIS supporters caught or killed in the United States saw no need to go anywhere to become a jihadi. They had decided that the best way to serve the new caliphate and the new caliph is to kill Americans here at home.

Even when we have failed to identify concrete operational ties between the Islamic State and active jihadis here in America, the significance of Baghdadi’s accomplishment has been clear. We have yet to find evidence of communication between ISIS and the San Bernardino killers or the terrorist in Philadelphia who, dressed in traditional Arab garb, tried to assassinate a local police officer. But they had proclaimed their loyalty to ISIS and the new caliph.

The Islamic State is much more than a regional insurgency threatening the nations of the Middle East or Africa. It is not a “junior varsity” terror team. The Islamic State is the twenty-first-century brand of global jihad, admired and emulated from Paris to Philadelphia to San Bernardino. It is the center of a new religious revolution that will continue to murder and devastate those it sees as the infidel, expanding and inspiring mayhem here in America—unless it is stopped.

So how should we defeat it?

HOW TO DESTROY THE NEW TOTALITARIANS

The threat of global jihadism will not “run out of steam” if we ignore it. As an infamous communist once said, the question therefore is: What is to be done? What is the role of America, the vanquisher of the previous globalist totalitarianisms of fascism and communism? For guidance, we should turn to the exemplary work of George Kennan and Paul Nitze—Kennan’s Long Telegram, analyzing the postwar Soviet threat, and Nitze’s top-secret NSC-68, which proposed a strategy for winning the Cold War.

Kennan’s original classified telegram is easily summarized. The Soviet Union poses an existential threat to the United States because it is based upon the inherently undemocratic ideology of communism, which denies that Western democracy and communism can peacefully coexist. One must destroy the other. The USSR can never be our partner, only a deadly foe. It is not interested in peace or stability, because it sees its mandate as universal and unstoppable. According to the Kremlin, all the people in the world must eventually live under communism. The further spread of communism must be stopped, and the ideology must be undermined from within.

If George Kennan had been a senior diplomat in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad during the rise of ISIS in 2013 and had been asked to explain what was happening in the Middle East, his reply would have been practically the same as the Long Telegram. Only the names would be different. ISIS and the broader global jihadist movement pose an existential threat to the United States because they are based upon the inherently undemocratic ideology of takfiri jihad, which denies that Western democracy and Islam can peacefully coexist. One must destroy the other. The jihadists can never be our partner, only a deadly foe. They are not interested in peace or stability, because they see their mandate as universal and unstoppable. According to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and his Islamic State, all the people in the world must eventually live under the Islamic caliphate. The further spread of jihadism must be stopped, and the ideology must be undermined from within.

The fact that “jihadism” can be substituted for “USSR” in that threat analysis from seventy years ago without any loss of accuracy demonstrates what a serious threat the strategic masters of global jihad have created with their ideology of takfirism. The danger America faces today is simply another form of global totalitarianism, this time a religiously expressed one.

The similarities between groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State and USSR are too numerous and fundamental to be ignored. Both groups are driven by a totalitarian vision. The followers of Karl Marx envisioned a world transformed into a workers’ paradise in which all other classes had been destroyed and only one party, the Communist Party, was in control. Today’s jihadists also have a universal vision. They look forward to a global caliphate in which all have submitted to the will of Allah and live as Muslims, the infidels and apostates having been slain. Both visions are exclusive, absolutist, and totalitarian. They are predicated on a “them or us” vision of how the world must be. There is no possibility for peaceful coexistence with the “other.”

For Marxists, it was an article of faith that capitalism and democracy were antithetical to socialism and that the exploitation of the working class within “market democracies” would eventually lead to the collapse of such societies and their replacement, after a revolution, with one-party communist rule. The vision of the jihadists we are fighting today is equally gloomy for the free world. Allah’s sovereignty, in the form of a global caliphate, must be supreme. Coexistence with the kuffar, the infidel, is impossible, an affront to the Creator.

Like the communists, the jihadists lay the blame for the world’s troubles at our feet. In the eyes of the Marxists, the capitalists’ exploitation of the workers was the root of all evil. The West was the cause of injustice, which could be vanquished only by a revolutionary “vanguard” of true believers, to borrow a term from Lenin. The jihadists also find the West guilty. It is the West that has “declared war” against Islam by dominating the Islamic world, whether through military force in the first Gulf War and our actions in Iraq and Syria today or through our economic and cultural dominance and exploitation of Muslim and Arab lands.

As you can see, the similarities between the communists of the Cold War and the jihadists of today are multiple and fundamental. Both are ideologically driven, global in their strategic ambition, absolutist, and totalitarian. It seems more than obvious, then, that the tools used to defeat the ideological threat of communism could be extremely useful in today’s fight to defeat the likes of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. But before we employ them in a new strategy for a new enemy, we should carefully note the important differences between communism and jihadism.

The most obvious difference between the two ideologies is how they view religion. Communism is violently antireligious, seeing the church as a living symbol of the “reactionary” forces of the bourgeoisie. Of course, the Islamic State sees religion as the solution, not the problem, but it has in mind one religion and one religion only—the fundamentalist and puritanical Islam of the seventh century.

Secondly, the threat of communism was very much driven by the Soviet state, while we cannot tie the threat of global jihadism to one country. Yes, the ideology of Marxism did hold that eventually there would be no governments and the world would simply belong to the working class in one utopian and egalitarian global system, but the reality was different. Even at the height of the Cold War, when communism had spread to multiple regions of the world, the monopolistic power of Moscow to control its satellites and allies was unquestioned.

A number of governments have aided and abetted the jihadist groups that have proliferated since 1979, but in the post-9/11 world, no one nation controls the threat. The rise of the Islamic State, for instance, was the result of exploiting the weaknesses of two governments at the same time, Iraq and Syria. Any plan we devise to defeat this new foe will have to take into account that our enemy is not a monolithic nationstate but a global movement of fanatical believers.

IF KENNAN AND NITZE WERE ALIVE TODAY

When President Truman understood the full weight of Kennan’s analysis of the Kremlin, he made “containment” the label for America’s strategic approach to the threat posed by the USSR and its allies. But how would we win this war? What would it take not only to prevent the fall of other free nations to communism but eventually to destroy the credibility of the idea of communism itself? Those were the questions Paul Nitze addressed in his secret plan NSC-68, an objective analysis of the threat and the options available to America in the postwar world in which Soviet power was increasing. The options at the start of the Cold War were:

1.  Maintain current policies, which would lead to a weakening of our allies in Europe and their possible collapse or incorporation into the Soviet sphere.

2.  Isolation.

3.  Initiate a preemptive nuclear war, which was against our national principles.

4.  Strengthen America’s allies, promote democratic values, and encourage resistance to communism, which would eventually cause communist dictatorships to crumble from within.

The Truman administration and those that followed pursued the fourth option, of course, and four decades later the Soviet bloc collapsed.

Our strategic options in today’s struggle with the global jihadist movement are essentially the same. The first two are essentially to do nothing. In the wake of the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, most Americans now agree that attempting to establish functioning democracies in Muslim and Arab countries is not a good idea. But the consequences of allowing ISIS to overrun state after state in the Middle East and Africa would be horrific, both for the Muslims who do not subscribe to ISIS’s vision of Islam and for the Christians and other minorities who would be slaughtered or driven from their homes.

The third option is even worse. It is too late for a preemptive strike, as Osama bin Laden has already initiated the war, which Baghdadi is now continuing. But even if there had never been jihadi attacks on U.S. soil, using nuclear weapons against either the Sunni or Shia threat groups in the Middle East would be so gross a violation of American values that no president would contemplate such an option.

So what would America’s fourth option look like today?

THE PLAN TO DEFEAT THE GLOBAL JIHADISTS

We must begin as Paul Nitze began, with Sun Tsu’s cardinal rule of war: Know both yourself and the enemy if you want to win.

It is clear why we must go to war: because ISIS and the broader movement of which it is the new standard-bearer is globally ambitious and utterly totalitarian. But who are we? What do we represent? What are the stakes? Here we can do no better than invoke the opening passages of Nitze’s NSC-68:

The fundamental purpose of the United States is laid down in the Preamble to the Constitution: “. . . to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” In essence, the fundamental purpose is to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual.

Three realities emerge as a consequence of this purpose: Our determination to maintain the essential elements of individual freedom, as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights; our determination to create conditions under which our free and democratic system can live and prosper; and our determination to fight if necessary to defend our way of life, for which as in the Declaration of Independence, “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

That purpose has not changed in the past three generations. While there are powerful domestic forces at work that have pushed a collectivist political agenda, they do not have the power or the mandate to redefine America. How then will we protect that founding vision from the new totalitarians? We must attack them on three fronts.

1. Deploy the truth: you cannot win a war if you cannot talk honestly about the enemy

Since the 9/11 attacks, political correctness and ideological prejudice—under both Republican and Democratic presidents—have distorted our analysis of the enemy, preventing us from drawing an effective plan to defeat the likes of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

The Obama administration, blinded by its own preconceived ideas of why terrorism occurs, is influenced by malevolent actors who have an interest in censoring any talk of the religious aspects of the enemy’s ideology. At the highest level of the U.S. government, terrorism is deemed to be the result of poverty, unemployment, and lack of political enfranchisement. This fallacy must be jettisoned.

We are not at war with Islam. The people most immanently in danger, in fact, are the nonviolent and non-extremist Muslims of the Middle East, such as our allies in Jordan and the modern Muslims of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. They are on the most important front of this war, and they understand just how much religion truly matters. We do a great disservice to those brave Muslims when we try to convince the world that the threat will disappear if enough people have good jobs and sound educations.

The next president must initiate a strategic-level counterpropaganda campaign from inside the National Security Council that has two objectives. The first is to speak openly and truthfully about the enemy, acknowledging its true identity and ideological character. To eliminate any question about where America stands in this global fight, we must use the term “jihadist” to describe groups like the Islamic State, and we must paint them as unequivocally evil. Ronald Reagan demonstrated the clarifying power of such plain speaking when he called the Soviet Union and its satellites an evil empire.

This strategic communications stance should be supported by a massive counterpropaganda campaign coordinated by the NSC across the Defense and State Departments and the intelligence community, targeting, responding to, and delegitimizing the jihadist propaganda that is flooding the Internet.

The second objective of the plan is to strengthen the position of our allies and partners in their counterpropaganda efforts. Our regional Muslim partners, who are in the best position to speak for a version of Islam not built on the violent traditions of the religion or the martial parts of the Koran, are usually too busy fighting jihadis on their own territory to respond to jihadist propaganda. Yet there are hundreds of brave men and women across North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who, at risk to their lives, are arguing on the Internet against the seventh-century version of Islam that groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State represent. The United States must redirect some of its resources from purchasing weapons and hardware to the covert funding of the information warfare campaigns of friendly Muslim governments and private initiatives. Fewer drones, more psychological operations. During the Cold War, America established publishing houses in Europe with CIA funds, and it needs to do so again against a new foe.

2. Take a step back: help others fight their own wars

Afghanistan and Iraq should have taught us the folly of “nation building.” What does work, however, as we learned in El Salvador and Colombia, is what the Green Berets call “foreign internal defense.” Instead of our soldiers’ being the face of a war against an insurgency, we help other governments fight their own fight. We must reverse the decision made in 2011 to withdraw all our forces from Iraq, but our military should help the people of Iraq learn how to win by themselves.

The best use of our soldiers, Marines, and special operations units is as trainers and advisors to the governments that the Islamic State wishes to take down next. By embedding our junior officers and NCOs down to the brigade level within the armies of the most imperiled nations, supplying them with new technological tools, relevant intelligence, and modern methodologies of war, we can enable them to be the Muslim and Arab face of any victory over the fundamentalist jihadi Muslims.

This does not mean, however, that we have no role to play in directly engaging with the enemy. Our most precious units, such as those of the Joint Special Operations Command, can and should be used to locate and kill the worst of the worst at the highest levels of the jihadist movement. But such operations should represent only a fraction of our military’s role, which must be secondary and indirect.

In the final analysis, this is a war within Islam in which the fundamentalists also wish to eventually kill us. But we will win only when those Muslims who wish to be our friends are able to fight and destroy the jihadists.

3. Winning the war at home: education and human intelligence

The year 2015 was the deadliest for jihadist plots and attacks in America since September 11, 2001. We are losing this war both in the Middle East and on the streets of the United States. There will be more attacks like those in Boston and San Bernardino unless we change the way we think about the threat to the homeland.

There is no such thing as “lone wolf” terrorism. All jihadists are connected to the global jihadist movement by their shared ideology. It is irrelevant that Abu Bakr al Baghdadi himself did not direct Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, to kill Farook’s colleagues at their office Christmas party. The point is that Malik praised the new caliph and then swore allegiance to the Islamic State online. The enemy’s center of gravity is the ideology of holy war against the infidel, be he a Yazidi in Syria or a Christian in Boston.

The current U.S. policy of focusing domestic efforts on counter-radicalization of individuals before they become terrorists is utterly backward. In World War II, we did not try to dissuade individual Germans from joining the Waffen-SS. We had to destroy “Hitlerism” and all that it stood for. Unless the ideas of the enemy are delegitimized, he will always find more recruits.

Until the national counterpropaganda campaign succeeds, there will still be persons in this country who find meaning in the life of a jihadi and who will target their fellow Americans. In order to stop them, we will need to establish a nationwide program of education and training in the enemy threat doctrine of global jihadism across the armed services as well as federal, state, and local police forces and the intelligence community. All national security professionals must understand what the jihadists believe, what they wish to achieve, and how they propose to achieve it.

We should also apply the New York Police Department’s model of counterterrorism intelligence across the federal government. After the horrors of September 11, the NYPD decided never again to rely solely upon federal intelligence about terrorist threats. Under forward-thinking and risk-taking leaders, the city built a world-class counterterrorism intelligence capability, and instead of relying upon machines and technology, built it upon people.

In the war against an irregular enemy like the Islamic State, technology is useful but insufficient. Jihadi networks are built face to face in quiet backrooms as much as in cyberspace, if not more. These networks can be identified and penetrated only by other human beings, human beings who understand the cultures of those involved and speak their languages. We Americans adore our technology, and it does have a distinct role to play in today’s war, especially on the Internet. But the most important element of this fight, as in all wars, is the human element. The Internet is nothing to the Islamic State without the human authority, the leader, the theologian, or the scholar who can use that platform to propagate his very human message of honor and salvation. The federal government must look closely at what New York’s Finest have achieved and replicate their human intelligence success across the nation. Only then will we be able to identify and neutralize the next Malik and Farook or the next Tsarnaev brothers before they attack.

AFTERWORD

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO HELP DEFEAT THE GLOBAL JIHADISTS?

You don’t have to be a member of Delta Force or an intelligence analyst deep in the bowels of the CIA to be part of the effort to defeat the global jihadist movement. Every American citizen has a mission to execute if we are to win this war.

The most important contribution you can make, whatever your “day job” happens to be, is to be an educator. First educate yourself. Then educate your family members. Then broaden the circle and educate your friends, your colleagues, and even your neighbors.

This book is just a primer on why global jihadists are an existential threat to America and what we must do to defeat their brand of religious totalitarianism. There is much more we need to know as a nation about what 9/11 really means and what kind of enduring and robust threat Al Qaeda and the Islamic State represent to the Republic.

The lack of fundamental knowledge is still far too prevalent. Even within professional national security circles, I regularly encounter utterly basic questions like “What is the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam?” and clichéd conspiracy theories like America’s having “created” Al Qaeda. Such woeful ignorance might have been excused back in 2002 or 2003, but we are now in the fifteenth year of this war. If we don’t do better, we will be doomed to repeat the “whack-a-mole” approach to the threat, provoking greater problems instead of applying the right strategies now.

You the reader can help get us to the point where we know enough about our enemy to point local, state, and national policy in the right direction. Where to start? In the section that follows, I offer the bare essentials—a list of the most important works you should read and the most relevant websites that you can rely on to keep on top of the latest developments. But first, give yourself a refresher course on who you are and what America is, just as Paul Nitze did at the beginning of NSC-68. Read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. They represent the America the jihadists wish to destroy. These documents enshrine the eternal truths that the Founding Fathers recognized must be the bedrock of the United States of America. Only when we refresh our understanding of where we came from and what America means will we be fully equipped to restore our families’ and friends’ devotion to what so many of us have forgotten in recent decades.

For example, our Constitution’s separation of church and state never meant that religion could have nothing to do with the governing of our nation. The Founders simply intended that the United States would not have an established state religion and that no one could be sanctioned by the state for being of the wrong faith. Separation of church and state does not mean, as many people inside government believe today, that religion can never be discussed when investigating a threat or interrogating a suspect. And it definitely does not mean that a subject under surveillance as a threat to American lives cannot be recorded or otherwise monitored when he steps into a mosque. If someone is suspected of being a terrorist, it matters not whether he steps into a mosque, a church, or a temple; he is still a threat and should be treated as such.

Nor does separation of church and state mean that we cannot identify the religious motivation of a terrorist. If a man says proudly that he is a jihadi and that he has committed an act of violence in service to his faith, it is unconscionable for a politician to insist that the attack had nothing to do with religion, as the mayor of Philadelphia did after the attempted assassination of one of his policemen in January 2016. That is political distortion of the threat. If we understand how politics has perverted the practice of national security in recent years, we will be one step closer to diagnosing the actual threat to America and arriving at the correct response to that threat.

If we return to the principles enshrined in our founding documents, we will also defuse the hoary accusation that talking about “jihad” or “Islamic extremism” is promoting a war between Islam and Christianity. The simple and rather disarming reply to this accusation is that most of the jihadists’ victims are other Muslims. The question is whether the values of the people in question are opposed to the nonnegotiable values of our Constitution. If they are, it matters not one iota whether they are communists, fascists, or jihadis. They are all a threat to our way of life. This is not about “freedom of religion” or a war between religions. It is a war between America and anyone who threatens American values.

On a more operational level, all Americans need to understand and accept the reality that they are now on the front line of a war with an enemy that cannot be negotiated with or rationally deterred. This war’s battles are not simply fought on the streets of Fallujah or in the caves of Tora Bora. They are being waged here in America—on the streets of New York and Boston, at naval installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and on army bases in Texas.

As I hope I have made clear, the jihadists want to kill infidels here in America as much as they want to purge the “impure” from the territory of the caliphate they have established in the Middle East. This means that you, your loved ones, and your neighbors and colleagues are all potential targets of terrorist attacks here in the United States, and you should prepare accordingly.

If you believe you have the requisite mental fortitude and your local government permits it, consider applying for a concealed-carry permit. But do so only if you are prepared to spend the time (and money) for the training that goes with the heavy responsibility of carrying a gun in public. A gun is just a tool—nothing more, nothing less. Without the necessary training and mindset, it can be more a danger to the innocent than an asset to you and yours.

Even if you are not comfortable with legally carrying a weapon, you still have a role to play in this war. As we have seen, jihadists are not random in their actions. They follow a strategy laid out by the likes of Qutb, Azzam, and Malik, and they use tactics learned from jihadist publications such as Inspire and Dabiq. Terrorists prepare their attacks. They often take months, sometimes years, as in the case of the 9/11 attacks, to gather information on their targets, to surveil and understand patterns of life and security protocols before they finalize their plan and move into the final phase of an operation. It is not enough simply to engage them with force once they have initiated their attack. Often it will be too late, especially when they use covert means, such as the pressure-cooker bombs employed by the Tsarnaev brothers to attack the spectators of the Boston Marathon. It is far better to catch them in the act of collecting the intelligence they need to prepare their plan of attack.

All our citizens, therefore, should walk through life in a deliberate manner focused on what is happening around them, looking for that which is odd or out of place, as opposed to just staring at their mobile phone. This is not about being afraid but about being aware, of having your “head on a swivel,” as peace officers like to say. Take the motto “See something, say something” seriously. Do not be afraid to tell the local police if you notice something untoward—a person filming a building that is obviously not a tourist attraction or neighbors performing activities in their garage late at night with groups of strangers. If the locals of San Bernardino had acted when they saw similar behavior from the jihadi couple responsible for the Christmas party massacre in December 2015, that attack may have been thwarted. Be tactically aware and you may save lives.

OUTLINE OF A STRATEGY TO DEFEAT THE GLOBAL JIHADIST MOVEMENT

The president who succeeds Barack Obama will have to face a global jihadist movement that is stronger than ever. He or she will need to “hit the ground running” if Americans are to be kept safe and our allies and partners strengthened. Hoping that a new administration may decide to take the threat seriously, I have condensed the main conclusions of this book into short points that you can use to evaluate candidates for public office.

The Zero Phase

For Americans to properly understand the threat of global jihad, the politically motivated censorship of government analysis, training, and education must end. The White House must scrap the arbitrary rules about what materials can and cannot be used to educate our warfighters, our analysts, and our FBI agents about the jihadist threat. Each department, armed service, or unit should once again be allowed to employ and consult the experts and materials it deems necessary based upon objective standards of expertise.

At the same time, Washington must resist the continuous lobbying and subversive tactics of groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which purport to represent the Muslims of America but do not. These groups use the tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood—CAIR was even classified as an unindicted coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the biggest terrorist-financing case in U.S. history—to make honest discussion of the jihadi threat impossible inside government. They convinced the Obama administration to purge inconveniently candid trainers and training materials and helped establish “violent extremism” as the official label for jihadist terrorism, an act of misdirection meant to weaken our ability to identify and defeat the threat.

The new administration should collaborate with those members of Congress who have already drafted legislation to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, as other nations far more familiar with the Brotherhood, including the United Arab Emirates and even Egypt, have done. The Brotherhood is the progenitor of twentieth-century jihadism. It needs to be recognized as such, and its formal designation by America as a terrorist organization is a necessary but not sufficient step in winning this war.

At the same time, there must be a complete reappraisal of U.S. policy toward the theocratic regime in Iran. Unless conditions for Iranians inside that dictatorship improve and the mullahs reject their “death to America” stance, sanctions should increase instead of being lifted, and the regime should be further isolated, not embraced.

Once we have recognized the reality of the threat and removed politics from the practice of national security, we can take concrete measures effectively to protect the Republic and defeat ISIS and Al Qaeda where they are strongest. These steps would include the following:

Domestic Measures

•  Reinstate and expand the federal human intelligence counterterrorism methods pioneered by the New York Police Department after 9/11.

•  Build a curriculum on the enemy threat doctrine of global jihadism that all local, state, and federal law enforcement officers and analysts must be trained in, and fund such training through the Department of Homeland Security.

•  Do the same for the Joint Professional Military Education system used across the Defense Department, with short courses for all ranks and grades, and long courses at our academies and war colleges.

•  The Department of Defense and the intelligence community must hire subject-matter experts on Islam and jihadist ideology to inform threat analysis and advise theater commanders, including Theater Special Operations Commands.

International Measures

•  The policy elite and the Defense Department should once and for all reject counterinsurgency operations as an option to defeat jihadism. Documents such as FM 3-24, the official counterinsurgency handbook, known as the “Petraeus Manual,” should be recognized for what they are—rehashed collections of best practices from French and British colonial operations. America is not a colonial empire. The idea of forcing our political model upon others through the use of force is fundamentally un-American (and wholly unrealistic).

•  Return our special forces to their original missions of direct action, the targeted killing of enemy leaders, and foreign internal defense, the indirect assistance and training given to regimes that have a modicum of the requirements for success (as in El Salvador during the 1980s and Colombia in the 1990s and 2000s). We should be in the business of direct action and foreign internal defense, not counterinsurgency.

•  Use our military to provide the “spine” of a regional response to ISIS. Embed our soldiers and Marines in the national units of Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and the UAE, right down to the brigade level or lower, so as to provide the central core around which an international force can move out to destroy ISIS (and the like), with the frontline fighters being our Sunni allies, not American servicemen.

•  Initiate a strategic counter-messaging campaign from the White House itself, modeled on the Active Measure Working Group of the Cold War. Use this new interagency organization publicly to identify jihadi propaganda and the extent of the lies of groups like ISIS, starting with their professing to be fighting for Islam against the infidel while killing more Muslims than any other target group.

•  Provide large-scale financial and technical support to our partners best suited to continue this campaign in theater, especially the Jordanian and Egyptian governments.

•  Initiate a billion-dollar covert psychological warfare campaign to support Muslim reformers across the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa in their ideological war to delegitimize the message of holy war against the infidel and bolster modern interpretations of Islam.

If these or similar measures are taken soon after the next president takes office, we will be able to win the war against global jihadism.

RESOURCES AND FURTHER READING

Even with a new commander in chief and the implementation of an effective strategic response to the threat of global jihadism, victory in this war is unlikely to be swift. It is therefore incumbent upon all who cherish the liberty that democracy recognizes and protects to educate themselves and keep abreast of the latest developments in this ideological war.

Here is a short list of reading materials and other resources that will help the active citizen better understand our new enemy and allow him to educate his family, friends, and colleagues.

WEBSITES AND ORGANIZATIONS

TheGorkaBriefing.com

I aim to post all my publicly accessible materials on my own website, The Gorka Briefing, as soon as they become available.

Here you will find all my media interviews, lectures, and analyses, including clips from my regular appearances for Fox News, the Fox Business Network, WABC’s John Batchelor Show, Sam Sorbo Show, Lars Larson Show, and others.

My site also includes unique video lectures on important aspects of the global jihadi movement, including a series on the rise of the Islamic State and what the ISIS threat to America really is, as well as free PDF versions of the key jihadi texts discussed in this book.

Sign up at The Gorka Briefing to receive regular updates on what the enemy is doing and what it means to you and the Republic.

ThreatKnowledge.org

If you are a national security professional—a local peace officer, a first responder, an intelligence analyst, or a uniformed member of our armed forces—you will want to visit and bookmark the Threat Knowledge Group (TKG) website.

TKG is the company my wife and I created after we started to receive more and more requests to support national security professionals across the United States. With our team of experts in all areas of counterterrorism and irregular warfare, we are constantly on the road briefing local units and agencies on the latest developments in the domestic and international threat environment.

Use this website to access our unclassified reports on the Islamic State and other terror groups or to request a special briefing for your own organization or unit.

CouncilonGlobalSecurity.org

The global jihadist movement came out of the Middle East. Born in the minds of Muslim Brotherhood ideologues like the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and refined by the likes of Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden, the movement still finds its most fertile soil in this area and the broader region of North Africa and South Asia.

The Council on Global Security (COGS) is a not-for-profit foundation run by my wife, Katharine Gorka, that is focused on monitoring and understanding the evolution of the totalitarian ideology of global jihadism and the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in undermining democracy both in the Middle East and elsewhere.

If you work in the national security sector, or simply want to know more about how the philosophy of jihad is growing and spreading to new areas, you will want to visit the council’s website regularly and also subscribe to the COGS distribution list. Start with my wife’s paper explaining how the Obama administration’s policies are built upon fallacious analyses and prejudices. It is titled The Flawed Science Behind U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy and is downloadable for free at http://councilonglobalsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Flawed-Science-Behind-US-CT-Strategy.pdf.

www.Westminster-Institute.org

One of the greatest untold stories of the post-9/11 world is the systematic killing and persecution of religious minorities by jihadist groups. The Western media, concentrating on the shocking attacks in European and American cities, tend to ignore the massacres and enslavement meted out in those regions where jihadist groups are ascendant. The plight of ancient Christian communities like the Copts and Assyrians, of the Yazidis of the Middle East, and of the Christians of West Africa deserves much greater attention in an age when crucifixion and sex-slavery are once again tools in a religious war.

The Westminster Institute of McLean, Virginia, is a not-for-profit foundation whose mission is to highlight the suffering of these minorities at the hands of new totalitarians such as the Islamic State and to advocate upon their behalf within NGO and policy circles here in America.

Visit the institute’s website for studies on the situation in these regions and what it means for religious freedom globally, and consider coming to hear one of their regular guest speakers or watch their world-class lectures online.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)

Six years before September 11, 2001, before Operation Enduring Freedom, and before the Patriot Act, there was the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT).

Under the skillful leadership of Steve Emerson, IPT has become one of the greatest collections on jihadi terrorism anywhere in the world, either inside or outside of government.

Visit www.investigativeproject.org for a treasure trove of concrete information on the plots, organizations, and individuals who are trying to destroy or subvert the United States. Please support this nonprofit foundation if you can.

MEMRI and the Clarion Project

The best way to start to understand groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State is to read and listen to their propaganda.

The English-language Al Qaeda Internet magazine Inspire included the recipe for the pressure-cooker bombs used by the Tsarnaev brothers in the Boston Marathon bombing. The Islamic State’s magazine Dabiq is even more important, detailing as it does the theological reasons for why the caliphate had to be reestablished and why all Muslims must join the jihad against the infidel before the final Judgment Day.

These publications and the associated, often horrifically gruesome, video pronouncements made by jihadist groups are stored and maintained on the websites of the Clarion Project at www.clarionproject.org and the Middle East Media Research Institute, www.memri.org.

Use these sites to familiarize yourself with the beliefs, strategies, and tactics of America’s new enemies.

The Al Muslih Foundation

The final victory in the global war against the jihadists will be won by America’s Muslim allies, led by statesmen such as King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Sisi of Egypt. When those nations that wish to be our friends and want to live in peace with the West can make their modern version of Islam the dominant version, America will be safer than at any time since September 2001.

Such a victory can come only if brave Muslim reformers have voices louder and more influential than those of the barbaric Islamists. Today there are already a handful of modernizing thought-leaders across the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia who are aggressively pushing back on the ideology of jihad, often with little or no help from the United States. Al Muslih (the Reformer) Foundation was established to give these voices an international platform. At www.almuslih.org you will find a bilingual collection of some of the most important current writings on Islam, modernity, and democracy found anywhere in the world. If you wish to see a final victory against the Islamic State and its ilk, read and support Al Muslih, the Reformer.

BOOKS

For those who like the feel of paper and cloth in their hands, there are some “old-fashioned” books that are essential reading in this war against the “New Totalitarians.”

First, since September 11, 2001, every American should own a Koran. There are no excuses. Every day you can switch on the television or the radio or open a newspaper and hear or read pronouncements about “what Islam is” and “what the Koran says.” Most of it is wrong—very wrong. You owe it to yourself, your family, and all the Americans killed on 9/11 and since to know the truth. Do not take anyone’s word for it. Find out for yourself by reading the actual Koran. One of the most reliable and recognized versions is the The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, available at Amazon.com.

Once you have a Koran and start to read it, take care to note the enormous differences between the half reportedly communicated to Mohammed in the beginning in Mecca, when he was weak and without followers, and the latter half, allegedly written after he returned from Medina with thousands of followers, the leader of a mighty military force. It is the post-Medina chapters of the Koran that are naturally favored by groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. They are not in fact “perverting” religious texts but skillfully applying those alleged revelations that best support their cause.

For history buffs with a spiritual bent, there is no better book on where Islam went astray than Robert Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, from ISI Books. In fewer than three hundred pages, Reilly, the former director of Voice of America and a former special assistant to President Reagan, explains how the religion of Islam became the victim of a perverted theology that excised natural law and demoted the role of human reason within the faith. The long-term effects of this de-Hellenization of Islam can be seen today in the general development indices of Arab and Muslim nations, and also plays a central role in the renewed strength of the global jihadist movement.

To put all this in the broader context, I strongly recommend any of the works of Bernard Lewis, America’s greatest historian of the Middle East and the Arab world, but especially one of his shortest works, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, from Oxford University Press.

For a more personal approach to the issues raised by Islam and modernity, I recommend the wonderful books of Ibn Warraq. Start with Why I Am Not a Muslim, from Prometheus Books, before working your way to his more academic texts such as Virgins? What Virgins?

A similarly personal book is Tawfik Hamid’s Inside Jihad: How Radical Islam Works; Why It Should Terrify Us; How to Defeat It, from Mountain Lake Press. Dr. Hamid was a medical student in Egypt when he met the future head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, and was indoctrinated into the jihadi movement. His story is one from the inside of this pathological worldview, which Dr. Hamid is tirelessly working to undermine.

In this book I have discussed how a secret analysis coupled with a top-secret plan, both from the Cold War, can be reengineered today to defeat the new totalitarian threat posed by groups like the Islamic State. Those who want to go to the next level should read Fighting the Ideological War: Winning Strategies from Communism to Islamism, edited by Katharine Gorka and Patrick Sookhdeo. This collection of essays from Isaac Publishing brings together the greatest minds from within the Reagan administration, the people who helped bring down communism, and the best experts on jihadi ideology today. Sharing lessons learned from our victory in the Cold War with the analyses of those who best understand America’s ideological enemies today, the book provides more details on how America can win again.

One of that book’s contributors, Stephen Ulph, ranks as perhaps the foremost expert on Islamic extremism alive today. The founding editor of Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst and editor of Jane’s Terrorism Monitor, Ulph recently published his magnum opus on the ideology of Salafi jihadism. Titled Towards a Curriculum for the Teaching of Jihadist Ideology, the book is available electronically and for free through the Jamestown Foundation. Part one is at www.jamestown.org/uploads/media/Ulph_Towards_a_Curriculum_Part1.pdf.

If you want to venture further afield and understand how much the mullahs of Iran represent a Shia version of the Sunni extremism typified by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, there is no better expert than Dr. Michael Rubin. His shorter analyses are available, again free of charge, from the American Enterprise Institute, https://www.aei.org/scholar/michael-rubin/, but I also recommend his book-length works, starting with Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes, from Encounter Books.

For an entertaining, if at times depressing, read on how political correctness in the post-9/11 world has attacked the immune system of Western civilization, there is no better book than the British author Melanie Phillips’s The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power, again from Encounter Books. Her account of how the eternal truths upon which the West was built have been subverted, denied, and usurped in the United Kingdom and Europe should stimulate any American to ensure the same does not happen here.

Lastly, if you want to know just how far and wide the totalitarian ideology of global jihadism has spread, and where it is spreading to next, visit the website of the American Foreign Policy Council.

Under the excellent editorship of Ilan Berman, himself a world-class expert on jihadism, the Almanac of Islamism charts the various movements around the world that share a belief in holy war and gives fascinating details on how they are strengthening their positions in the face of political correctness and ignorance. Go to http://almanac.afpc.org/ for more.

APPENDIX A

KENNAN’S LONG TELEGRAM ON THE SOVIET THREAT TO AMERICA

Here and on the following pages you can read the original secret telegram written at the onset of the Cold War by the American diplomat and Russia expert George Kennan.

In an incredibly frank and clear-sighted analysis, Kennan explains how the behavior of the Soviet Union cannot be understood unless you understand the totalitarian ideology that drives it. This “fanatical” ideology of communism is absolutist and global and will not countenance peaceful coexistence with America or any democracy, exactly paralleling the situation of the United States today, faced by the “new totalitarians” of the global jihadist movement.

APPENDIX B

NSC-68: THE TOP-SECRET PLAN TO WIN THE COLD WAR

Once America had a clear understanding of the scale of the existential threat the Soviet Union and the spread of communism represented, it fell upon Paul Nitze and his team to provide the plan to defeat the Kremlin and its allies.

Based upon Kennan’s superb analysis of Moscow’s totalitarian ideology, the top-secret National Security Council document provides the detailed strategy on how to undermine the USSR from the outside by strengthening the Western alliance of nations, and how to weaken it internally so that the ideology would be delegitimized and communism would implode, as it did in 1989.

NSC-68 was declassified by Henry Kissinger in 1975, so we can now read the strategy that defeated our Cold War enemy. I have selected the key parts that have the most relevance to today’s new threat of totalitarian jihadists. Note especially in this first part, the passages on page 5 on what America is and what it represents. Clearly Nitze had read his Sun Tsu and knew that to win a war you must first understand who you are, what is at stake, and why you must fight.

In this next section of NSC-68, Paul Nitze and his team provide the details of what would become America’s “containment policy” to limit the spread of communism around the world, and they roundly reject the option of isolationism as viable in the face of a globally ambitious enemy. Here we can also read what it is that fundamentally separates democracies from totalitarian systems such as communism that are based on “force, fear and favor.”

Again the parallels with today’s threat are many and various. Nitze warns that “[a] free society is vulnerable in that it is easy for people to lapse into excess—the excesses of a permanently open mind wishfully waiting for evidence that evil design may become noble purpose.”

Demonstrating an understanding of the subtlety of the threat to America beyond the obvious specter of a nuclear war with the Soviets, this section of the top-secret strategy explains the indirect and nonviolent methods the Kremlin could use to win an ideological war.

Here NSC-68 details how the enemy will use subversion, infiltration, and intimidation to ensure that American institutions no longer serve the interests of the nation, to “confuse” our culture and political system and “cast dishonor on our country.”

Given what has happened on the continent of Europe in recent years, as well as the recent actions of pro-jihadist front organizations in America, this warning is just as applicable today against our current foe as it was at the beginning of the Cold War.

The concluding sections of NSC-68 provide the possible options open to an America facing the global totalitarianism of the communist USSR. These are: no change in U.S. policies; isolationism; preemptive nuclear war; and, lastly, strengthening the West and containing and undermining communism everywhere. Of the four possible scenarios, only that last is viable and in accord with the founding principles of the Republic.

The top-secret strategy closes by telling the president that the nation and his government must recognize that this cold war is in fact “a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.”

Today with global jihadism growing across the globe, America once more faces an existential and totalitarian threat to all that our nation represents. We can lose this war if we do not recognize that we are in fact at war and that the enemy has a plan to defeat us through subversion or by force if necessary. Paul Nitze’s plan worked against communism. We need another NSC-68 to defeat the “new totalitarians” represented by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1: THE LONG WAR

1.   For incontrovertible evidence of the duration and depth of these ties, I suggest the sterling work of Tom Joscelyn and his colleague Bill Roggio at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ inestimable website longwarjournal.org.

2.   I was told by the former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s comptroller, the man who actually signed the checks to pay for the war, that he had been instructed by the secretary to make no budgetary plans for Iraq beyond six months after the fall of Baghdad because by then “Iraq would be functioning as a free and stable nation.” I trust this source implicitly and share his horror at such hubris.

CHAPTER 2: THE STORY OF JIHAD

1.   ISIS in fact called itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Shaam before it declared the new caliphate in the summer of 2014. The term Al Shaam, bearing great religious significance, has much to do with ISIS’s success in recruiting jihadis. But more on that later.

2.   Noor Mohammad uses this phrase in his article “The Doctrine of Jihad: An Introduction,” Journal of Law and Religion 3, no. 2 (1985).

3.   The Arabic word for original ancestor is salaf, and this is where we get the word “Salafists.” Today, a Salafist is a Muslim fundamentalist who believes true Islam is expressed in living as the original followers of Mohammed lived, in a theocratic caliphate that combines religion, politics, and jihad, and where the Koran guides all.

4.   If one makes that statement in front of Muslim witnesses, one is formally recognized as a member of the global community of Muslims everywhere.

CHAPTER 4: THE ENEMY MASTERMINDS: THE GRAND STRATEGISTS OF MODERN JIHAD

1.   It is fascinating to compare this theme of the “inevitability of victory” to Marxist totalitarianism, which took it as an article of faith that communism will destroy capitalism and democracy. All that men must do is choose whether they will join and build the “workers’ paradise” or end up on the “ash heap of history.”

2.   In recent years the phrase “intelligence preparation of the battlefield” has fallen victim to political correctness within the Pentagon. Today it is most often replaced with the new official phrase “intelligence preparation of the environment,” lest someone have the impression that we actually are at war. Much the same thing happened when our information warfare professionals at Fort Bragg were told that they will no longer perform “psychological operations” (PSYOP) against our enemies but instead will execute “military information support operations” (MISO). Welcome to the Alice-in-Wonderland world of euphemisms in a time of war.

CHAPTER 5: WHAT IS TO BE DONE? HOW AMERICA WINS AND THE JIHADIS LOSE

1.   See the first chart, titled “Muslim-American Terrorism Suspects and Perpetrators Since 9/11,” in the Charles Kurzman, Muslim American Involvement with Violent Extremism, 2015 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2016), https://kurzman.unc.edu/files/2016/02/Kurzman_Muslim-American_Involvement_in_Violent_Extremism_2015.pdf.

2.   For full details see my presentation to the Marine Corps University, “From Al Qaeda to ISIS: The New Deadlier Face of Jihad,” http://thegorkabriefing.com/from-aq-to-isis-the-new-deadlier-face-of-jihad/.

3.   Any historical insurgent group you examine has one strategic objective: the overthrow and replacement of the government it is fighting. This is true across the spectrum of modern insurgency, from Mao in China after World War II to the FARC in Colombia. ISIS is the first insurgency that wishes to replace all government, not just one government in one country. So far it is winning.

4.   Some say that President Obama has chosen to call them “ISIL” and not “ISIS” to avoid a reference to Syria that might remind his audiences of the “red line” he categorically drew with regard to President Assad’s potential use of chemical weapons, a red line that in practice had no consequences for Assad’s regime.

5.   Having made the point, I nevertheless refer to the group in this book as ISIS, the name that is most familiar to American readers.

6.   The Arabic acronym of this name is DAESH, the name preferred by our Muslim allies in the region. Daesh sounds very much like the Arab word for stomping or stepping on, an act of disrespect in Arab and Muslim culture, and thus an effective insult to the jihadis.

7.   Even the magazine’s name is part of the End Times theology that ISIS has so proficiently exploited. According to the Hadith—Islam’s stories about Mohammed—the founder of the faith prophesied that the city of Dabiq, in northern Syria, will be the site of the pivotal battle between the last true Muslims and the forces of the infidel, a battle that would mark the beginning of the Apocalypse. The city of Dabiq is today under ISIS control and part of the new caliphate.

8.   To see just how impressive ISIS media products are, look no further than the video released in late January 2016 under the title Kill Them Wherever You Find Them. The film opens like a Hollywood action movie, with editing and visuals reminiscent of the television show Homeland. Using the latest video animation techniques, Western news footage of the Paris attacks is mixed with images of the British prime minister, the French president, and U.S. naval vessels seen through the targeting sight of a missile or drone. All this before we hear from the eight jihadis who perpetrated the massacre in Paris as they proceed to execute ISIS hostages. Al Qaeda never made propaganda products of this quality even at the height of bin Laden’s fame.

9.   Of course, the threat posed by the apocalyptically minded mullahs of the minority community of the Shia will not be trivial if Tehran ever acquires nuclear weapons. But that is a topic for another book.

10.  For all the data on what the Islamic State is doing in America, see Sebatian L. Gorka and Katharine Gorka, ISIS: The Threat to the United States (Threat Knowledge Group, November 2015), available online at: http://threatknowledge.org/isis-threat-to-usa-report/.

INDEX

A

Abbottabad, Pakistan, 49

Abdulmutallab, Umar Farouk, 108

Abu Bakr, 61

Afghanistan, Afghans, 38, 46, 90, 95, 104, 109, 112

Soviet invasion of, 48, 66–67, 71, 81, 84–95, 104, 117

Afghanistan War, the, 23, 27–28, 34–35, 37–39, 43, 48–49, 102, 107, 127, 131. See also Operation Enduring Freedom

Africa, 34, 36, 96, 101, 114, 122, 127

Ahmad, Mohammed, 83

Al-Aqsa Mosque, 76

Al Azhar, 91

al-Haram ash-Sharif, 76

Alhayat, 118

Allah, 44, 116

jihad and, 18, 29, 46–47, 52, 60, 62–65, 67, 72–76, 78–79, 82, 85–90, 94, 98–100, 104–6, 109–10, 117, 119, 121, 124

Mohammed and, 55–58, 76

Allies, the, 1, 17, 21, 45

al Nusra Front, 98

Al Qaeda. See also Base for Holy War against the Jews and Crusaders, the Base

history and evolution of, 49–50, 60, 64, 66–68, 71–72, 96, 98, 100–4, 107–8, 111–13, 115, 118–19, 130

Iraq and, 46–48, 110, 115

Iraqi WMD and, 39–42

ISIS and, 36, 60, 63, 72–73, 106, 109–10, 113, 115, 118

9/11 and, 33–34, 49, 112, 114

as totalitarians, 18, 34, 119, 125, 129

war in Afghanistan and, 27, 35–37, 39, 44, 48–49

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, 71

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, 71

al Shabaab, 71, 112

American Revolution, 32

Andropov, Yuri, 15

Arabian Peninsula, 56–57, 61, 67–68, 71, 75, 84, 95

Arab-Israeli War, 76–78

Arab Mujahideen Services Bureau, a.k.a. Services Bureau, 46, 67, 101. See also Maktab Khadamat al Mujahidin al Arab (MAK)

Arab Spring, 72

Arafat, Yasser, 76, 79

Art of War, The (Sun), 27

Asia, 27, 33–34, 64, 66, 96, 101, 130

Ataturk, 69–70, 119

Auschwitz, 45

Austria, 3, 14

Austro-Hungarian Empire, 5, 69

Awlaki, Anwar al, 49–50, 98, 107–9

Ayatollah Khomeini, 81–82

Azzam, Abdullah, 46, 66–67, 78, 85–93, 96–97, 101, 103, 106, 111

B

Baath Party, Baathists, 41, 43–44, 47–48, 95

Baghdad, 42, 44, 47, 69, 123

Baghdadi, Abu Bakr al, 61–62, 78–79, 99, 110–16, 119–21, 123, 127, 132

Banna, Hassan al, 86

Barbary Wars, the, 19

Base for Holy War against the Jews and Crusaders, the Base, 46, 68, 95, 101. See also Al Qaeda

bayat, 113, 121

Berlin, 17, 21, 33

Berlin Wall, 22, 29

bin Laden, Osama, 34, 36–42, 46, 49–52, 67–68, 71–72, 78, 85–86, 92–97, 99–103, 107, 127

Birkenau, 45

Boko Haram, 98, 113

Bosnia, 46, 102, 117

Boston Marathon bombing, 34, 47, 49, 71, 99, 108, 132

Bremer, Paul, 43–45

Brezhnev, Leonid, 15

British Empire, the, 32, 38, 93. See also England; Great Britain

Budapest, Hungary, 1–2, 5, 10–12, 14

Buraq, 76

Bush, George W., 35, 37–42, 45, 48–50, 52, 72

C

caliphate, 73, 79, 82, 87–88, 95, 108

history of the, 59–61, 66, 68–73, 77–78, 98–101, 105, 120

ISIS and the, 36, 52, 73, 76, 79, 90–91, 107, 110–24

caliphs, 41, 70, 73–74, 76, 91, 97, 113, 117, 119–22, 132

Cambridge Spy Ring, 3

Canada, 36–37, 52

capitalism, capitalists, 8, 10, 17, 64, 93, 124

Carter, Jimmy, 82

Caucasus, 70

Central Asia, 66, 96, 101

Central Europe, 3, 5, 59

Chattanooga, TN, 35–36

Chechnya, 46, 49, 70, 102

Cheney, Dick, 39

China, Chinese, 4, 26, 35, 51, 93, 120

Christianity, Christians, 2, 7, 16–17, 51

Islam versus, 56–58, 69, 73–75, 83, 116, 127, 132

CIA, 37, 130, 135

Clausewitz, Carl von, 26–27, 97, 105

Coalition Provisional Authority, 43

Colombia, 131

colonialism, 63, 72, 86–87

communism, communists. See also Communist Party, the; Marxism, Marxists

in Hungary, 1–15

invasion of Afghanistan, 67

similarities with Islam, 99, 124–26

strategy to defeat, 15–19, 22–26, 28, 33, 51, 110, 112, 122–33

Communist Party, the, 124. See also communism, communists; Marxism, Marxists

of Hungary, 7, 9, 13–14

of the Soviet Union, 17

Constantinople, 69

containment, 22, 24, 33, 59, 126

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), 140–41

D

Dabiq, 118

Damascus, 69

Danube River, 2, 11–12

dar al Islam, 77, 84, 91

Declaration of Independence, the, 28, 32, 128

Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places (bin Laden), 96

Defense of the Muslim Lands (Azzam), 66, 86–88, 90–91, 97

Dehlawi, Shah Waliullah, 64

Dome of the Rock, 76

E

East Africa, 68, 102

Eastern Europe, 4

Economist, 115

Egyptian Islamic Jihad, 100–1, 119

El Salvador, 131

End Times, 116

England, 15, 52, 77. See also Great Britain

F

Falls Church, VA, 107

Farook, Syed Rizwan, 132–33

Farsi, 64

fatwas, 62, 66, 88, 91–92, 95–97, 106

Financial Times, the, 114–15

Ford, Gerald, 25

Foreign Affairs, 22, 24

Fort Hood, TX, 47, 49, 71, 107

France, French, 35–36, 63, 81, 83

G

Garland, TX, 35

Gaza Strip, the, 76, 79

Good Friday, 56

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 15, 93

Gorka, Geza, 5

Gorka, Paul, 1–15

Gorka, Susan, 14–15

Grand Mosque, 83–84, 92

Great Britain, 3–4, 15, 32, 52, 63, 113. See also England

Greece, 24, 32

Green Berets, 38, 131

guerrilla warfare, 47, 49, 60, 67–68, 70, 95, 102

Gulf War, the, 39–42, 92, 95, 124

H

Hadith, 62, 75, 89

Hasan, Nidal, 107

Hereafter, 108

Herzl, Theodor, 77

hijra, 58, 61, 109

Hinduism, 51, 64

Hitler, Adolf, 1, 16–17, 21, 33, 40, 45, 132

Hizbollah, 18

holy war, 59–60, 66–70, 79, 83, 85, 88, 91, 93–95, 98, 102–4, 106–7, 110–11, 117, 120, 132

Hungarian Revolution, 12, 15

Hungary, Hungarians, 1–15, 77

Hussein, Saddam, 35, 39–47, 67, 94–95

hybrid totalitarianism, 18, 33

I

Ibn Taymiyya, 61–62, 64, 67, 107

Inspire, 49–50, 108, 118

Iraq, Iraqis, 67, 77–78, 112. See also under Al Qaeda

invasion of Kuwait, 39, 94

ISIS and, 112, 116, 126

Iraqi National Bank, 114

Iraq War, the, 23, 28, 34–35, 39–48, 108–9, 124, 126–27, 131. See also Operation Iraqi Freedom

Iron Curtain, 3–4, 33

Islam

eschatology of, 116–17, 120

history of, 55–79, 89, 94–95, 119, 129–30

ideology and, 51

political correctness and, 37, 51–52

theocracies and, 36, 41, 59–60, 73–74, 81–82, 86–87, 92, 98–101, 105

violence and, 18, 34, 37, 49, 53, 55–79, 83–87, 90–92, 97–99, 104, 106, 108–9, 111, 123–24, 127, 129–31

Islamic State, the. See Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)

Islamic State of Iraq and Al Shaam, 72, 116–17. See also Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 34–35, 45, 52, 73, 76, 78, 90, 98–99, 110, 120–21

plan to defeat, 111–33, 135–44

relationship with Al Qaeda, 36, 60, 64, 74, 90–91, 106–7, 110, 112, 114–15, 119

social media and, 114, 117–18

territory controlled by, 34, 79, 113

as totalitarians, 18, 63, 75, 110, 119–20, 127–28

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), 115

Isra, 75, 78

Israel, 76–78, 86, 116

J

jahiliyyah, 60, 64–65, 98

Jamaat e Islami, 64

Jerusalem, 75–79

Jesus, 56–57, 73–74

Jewish, Jews, 56–58, 74–79, 83, 116

jihad, jihadism. See also individual jihadist organizations and scholars evolution of, 46–49, 55–79, 81, 85–96

jihad by the sword, 60–61

jihad of the heart, 59

martyrdom and, 41–42

Saudi Arabia’s financing of, 84

similarities with communism, 24, 29, 33, 123–25

technology and, 133

as threat to America, 18–19, 23, 33–36, 49–53, 107–13, 123, 127, 132, 136–44

war against, 34–37, 49–53, 119, 125, 127, 140–44

Joint Special Operations Command, 131

Judgment Day, 42, 72, 116

K

Kabul, Afghanistan, 37, 91, 105

Kashmir, 46, 70, 101–2

Kemal, Mustafa, 69

Kennan, George, 21–29, 110, 112, 122–23, 126

Khan, Samir, 50

Khartoum, 83

Khorasan, 91

Khrushchev, Nikita, 33

Kissinger, Henry, 25

Knights under the Prophet’s Banner (Zawahiri), 103–4

Koran, the, 56–59, 61–67, 73–75, 82, 119, 130

Korean peninsula, 24

Kremlin, the, 2, 17, 22, 24, 26, 28, 93, 123, 126

kuffar, 91, 102, 104, 116, 124

L

Lebanon, 77–78

Long Telegram, the, 22–23, 26, 29, 122–23

M

Machiavelli, 97

Madinat al Nabi, 58, 61, 68–69, 75, 94–95. See also Medina

Maktab Khadamat al Mujahidin al Arab (MAK), 46, 66–67, 88, 94–95, 100–1, 104. See also Arab Mujahideen Services Bureau, Services Bureau

Malik, S. K., 98, 105–6, 111

Malik, Tashfeen, 132–33

Mao Zedong, 4

Marshal Tito, 13

“Martyrs: The Building Blocks of Nations” (Azzam), 85, 88

Marx, Karl, 4, 10, 124

Marxism, Marxists, 11, 33, 37, 84, 99, 124–25. See also communism, communists; Communist Party, the

mass-casualty terrorism, 39, 41

Mawdudi, Abul A’la, 64–65, 107

Mecca, 56–59, 61, 64, 68–69, 75–76, 81, 83, 88, 92, 94–95, 99, 105

Medina, 58, 61, 68–69, 75, 94

Megiddo, 116

Middle Ages, 63, 66

Middle East, 34–36, 63–64, 69, 76, 82, 93, 99, 101, 107, 114, 116, 121–23, 127, 129–30, 132

Milestones (Qutb), 66, 98–99

MI6, 3

mission creep, 28, 43

Mogul Empire, 64

Mohammed, 64, 68, 75, 79, 87, 99, 103

founding of Islam and, 55–62, 73–75, 89, 94–95, 119

Night Journey of, 75–76

Mongols, 61–62, 65

Moscow, 2–3, 13, 17, 21, 33, 85, 125

mujahideen, 46–47, 53, 66–67, 83, 88, 92–95, 100, 104, 117, 121

Muslim Brotherhood, 65–66, 70–71, 86, 98, 100–1, 119

Muslim Public Affairs Council, 140–41

Muslims, 55, 58–59, 64–65, 73, 75–77, 102, 127

in Afghanistan, 46, 68, 104

allies of the West, 37, 129–31, 144

End Times and, 116–17, 120

“false” Muslims, 42, 60–63, 66, 70, 78, 82–85, 91–95, 98–101, 124, 127

fundamentalists, 49, 51, 76, 86–96, 102–3, 106, 108–9, 127

in Iraq, 48

Israel and, 75–79

loss of caliphate, 69–70, 78, 119

oneness and, 75

N

Nakba, the, 77

Napoleon, 27, 97, 105

Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 78, 99

National Security Council (NSC), 22, 129

nation building, 43, 50

Nazis, Nazism, 1, 16, 18, 32, 34, 36, 45, 115

New Testament, 73

New York Police Department (NYPD), 133

9/11, 16, 19, 23–24, 28–29, 34, 36, 39, 42, 49–50, 52, 55, 59–60, 71, 101, 103, 105–109, 111–12, 114, 125, 129, 132–33. See also September 11, 2001, attacks

Nitze, Paul, 25, 28, 110, 122, 126–28

North Africa, 33, 59, 63, 130

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 24, 38, 40, 43

Northern Alliance, the, 37

NSC-68, 22–23, 25–26, 28–29, 110, 126, 128, 130

O

Obama, Barack, 37, 50–52, 72, 115, 129, 140

Old Testament, the, 56, 58, 73

On War (Clausewitz), 27

Operation Enduring Freedom, 35. See also Afghanistan War, the

Operation Iraqi Freedom, 35. See also Iraq War, the

Ottoman Empire, Ottomans, 69

P

Pakistan, 46, 49–50, 65, 86, 90, 93, 100, 105–6

Palestine, 76–79

Palestine Liberation Organization, 79

Philadelphia, PA, 52, 121–22

Philby, Kim, 3–4

Poland, 11, 33

Politburo, the, 5, 22

Protestantism, Protestants, 7

Putin, Vladimir, 35

Q

Qadir, Abd al, 63

Quranic Concept of War, The (Malik), 105–6

Quresh, 58

Qutb, Sayyid, 64–66, 78, 86, 92, 98–100, 103, 106, 111

R

Reagan, Ronald, 15, 82, 130

Roman Empire, the, 32

Rulings of Fighting the Mongols (Taymiyya), 62

Rumania, 13

Russia, Russians, 12–13, 17, 22, 28, 35, 67, 100, 102, 120. See also Soviet Union, Soviets; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)

Russian Federation, 102

S

Salafi Islam, Salafists, 75

San Bernardino, CA, 24, 34, 36, 108, 117, 132

Saudi Arabia, 67, 81, 84–86, 94–95

Second World War, 5, 77. See also World War II

September 11, 2001, attacks, 33, 35, 42, 49, 55, 68, 96, 101, 103, 111, 132–33. See also 9/11

shaheed, 41, 108

Shahzad, Faisal, 108

Sharia law, 62, 113

Shia Islam, Shiites, 44, 47–48, 81–82, 120, 127

Siege of Mecca, The (Trofimov), 81, 83

Six-Day War, the, 78, 86

socialism, socialists, 6, 8, 10, 13, 15, 84, 91, 124

Somalia, 71, 109, 112

“Source of Soviet Conduct, The” (Kennan), 22

Soviet Union, Soviets. See also Russia, Russians; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)

collapse of, 28–29, 33, 47, 53, 127

gulags of, 33

in Hungary, 2–4, 11–14, 17

invasion of Afghanistan, 38, 46, 66–67, 81, 84, 88, 91–95, 97, 100, 104, 117

mutually assured destruction and, 17

NSC-68 and, 25–26, 28, 122

threat to America, 21–22, 33–34, 112, 115, 122, 125–26, 130

Spain, 37, 59

Stalin, Joseph, 21–22, 33, 41, 43, 95

State-Defense Policy Review Group, 25

Sunnah, 82

Sunni Islam, Sunnis, 44, 57, 63, 82

Sun Tsu, 26–28, 127

surge, the, 48

Syria, 34–35, 73, 77–78, 86, 113, 115–16, 121, 124, 126, 132

T

takfirism, 63–64, 83, 123

Taleban, the, 35, 37–38, 71, 112, 119

Tartars, 62

Tehran, Iran, 22, 82, 105

Temple Mount, 76

Third Reich, the, 16, 21, 33, 45, 53, 115

Tikrit, 44

Times Square bomber, 49, 107–8

totalitarianism, totalitarians, 1, 6, 12, 15–19, 22–23, 28–29, 33–36, 53, 110, 112, 123–25, 128–29

Treblinka, 45

Trinity, 56

Truman, Harry, 22, 24–25, 28, 126–27

Tsarnaev brothers, 49, 99, 108

Turkey, 70, 121

Turkics, 62

U

Ukraine, 13

ulema, 83, 88

ummah, 83, 85, 89–90

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 3–4, 12–14, 17, 21–22, 24–26, 28–29, 33, 35, 38, 46–47, 53, 66, 84, 91, 93, 100, 104, 112, 120, 122–23, 126, 130. See also Russia, Russians; Soviet Union, Soviets

United Arab Emirates, 129

United Nations, 40

unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), 50–51

U.S. Congress, 22, 24, 40, 42

U.S. Constitution, 28, 32, 128

U.S. Department of Defense, 25, 130

U.S. Department of Justice, 52

U.S. Department of State, 25, 130

U.S. Pentagon, 33, 52

USS Cole, 68, 96, 102

V

vojvodas, 9

W

Wahhab, Mohammed ibn Abd al, 63, 83, 93, 101

Wahhabi movement, 63, 93, 101

Washington, D.C., 21–22, 24, 28, 34, 39, 43–44, 71, 115–16

weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 39–40, 42–43

West, the, 8, 11–12, 14, 17–18, 22, 34, 37, 41, 45, 49, 60, 63–70, 78, 83, 93, 99, 105, 108–9, 120, 124

West Bank, 76, 79, 86

workers, working class, 9–10, 12, 19, 33, 96, 124–25

workers’ paradise, 10, 15, 124

World Trade Center bombing, 96, 102

World War I, 5, 119

World War II, 9, 21, 45, 65–66, 77, 98, 132. See also Second World War

Y

Yalta conference, 1, 3

Yathrib, 58, 75

Yemen, Yemeni, 49, 96, 102, 107

YMCA, 7, 11

YouTube, 116

Z

Zarqawi, Abu Musab al, 48, 115

Zawahiri, Ayman al, 98, 100–4, 106

Zionism, 77

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

PROLOGUE: ONE MAN AND HIS CHOICES

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: THE WAR SO FAR

CHAPTER 2: THE STORY OF JIHAD

CHAPTER 3: 1979: ANNUS HORRIBILIS—MODERN JIHAD GOES GLOBAL

CHAPTER 4: THE ENEMY MASTERMINDS: THE GRAND STRATEGISTS OF MODERN JIHAD

CHAPTER 5: WHAT IS TO BE DONE? HOW AMERICA WINS AND THE JIHADIS LOSE

AFTERWORD

RESOURCES AND FURTHER READING

APPENDIX A: KENNAN’S LONG TELEGRAM ON THE SOVIET THREAT TO AMERICA

APPENDIX B: NSC-68: THE TOP-SECRET PLAN TO WIN THE COLD WAR

NOTES

INDEX