Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (66 page)

Earlier in December, people were already starting to think about Obama in the needy neighborhood of Mezuak. I was back doing fieldwork on Mamoun Street, where Rifaat “the Kid” once sold candies from his cart and listened to Kounjaa’ “the Afghan” praise the heroism of Sheikh Osama and the mujahedin, just across from Rue Boujmaa, where Jamal “the Chinaman” grew up, not far from the old home of his loyal buddies, the Oulad Akcha brothers, Mohammed and Rachid—before all these young men went to Madrid and blew up trains full of people, then themselves.

“Min huwa batal ‘andak?”
(So, who’s your hero?), I asked Muhsein Chabab, who worked with children in Mezuak.

“When I was an adolescent, it was John Travolta (an American actor) and Jacques Brel (a French singer), but now I have no heroes. ‘We live in a political world,’ like Bob Dylan sang, but political people are not good. Osama Bin Laden is not so good and Colin Powell is not so good. Barack Obama?
J’espère bien mais j’crois pas
[I do hope but don’t believe].”

Rarely do youth today cite “political people” as heroes. In Europe, the only “political” names you’ll hear repeated are the warrior Che Guevara and the peacemaker Nelson Mandela, and a few John Kennedys. But who is there today for global youth?

Barack Obama projects hope, but does he truly have the audacity of Abe Lincoln’s dream to turn the next generation of enemies into friends? It won’t happen by pushing policy from the top, but by attracting people to make their way toward one another, by inspiring uplifting action that can snowball through social networks and across traditional boundaries of culture, creed, and class. The novelty of Obama’s presidential campaign was to inspire and mobilize youth to canvass communities, to use science to understand the patterns of their beliefs and preferences, to find ways to fit those patterns to the candidate’s hopes, and to prod like-minded people to link up in neighborhoods and on the Internet to further connect and convince others. In the twenty-first century, this may be the way the future is won within that ancient frame of all human politics and social movement: “Cooperate to compete.”

DOWN THE STREET FROM THE CYPRUS BARBERSHOP, MEZUAK, MID-NOVEMBER 2008

A group of boys was playing soccer on a patch of dirt between a heap of garbage and the street. I guessed their ages to range from about ten to fifteen. They pretended to ignore me until I asked, “So what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“An archaeologist,” one boy said immediately, as he kicked the ball away and headed toward me. The others followed him and moved in my direction.

“Why an archaeologist?” I asked.

“To discover things,” he answered.

“Like treasure?” I pressed.

The boy laughed. “Our history.” I wasn’t expecting this.

“I want to be a doctor, to help people get better,” another boy chimed in.

Then another: “Policemen help people, too. That’s what I want to be. And to stop bad people from hurting good people.”

A short, roly-poly boy stuck out his chest. “I will be a player for Barça [probably the world’s most admired soccer team, which refuses commercial advertising but pays the United Nations to wear the logo of its children’s fund, UNICEF].”

“Who will you play like?” I asked.

“Eto’o” [Barça’s Cameroonian star].

“Is he the best?”

“Yes.”

“No, he’s not,” the archaeologist said.

“It’s Zinedine [the recently retired French-Algerian star of the World Cup and Real Madrid],” said the policeman.

“Zinedine,” said the doctor, too.

“Maybe Zinedine,” muttered the boy who would be Eto’o, bending to peer pressure.

“Ronaldinho!” shouted a younger boy, about eight, who had just joined the commotion.

“Zinedine! Zinedine!” insisted the policeman.

The little boy puckered his mouth and nodded his head in reluctant agreement.

“He’s my brother,” said the victorious policeman. “He’s going to be the garbage collector and clean up this mess,” pointing toward the heap.

The little boy shuffled back, as I witnessed the wonder of group dynamics.

“The best is Barack Obama,” said the archaeologist, flooring me.

“He doesn’t count,” protested Eto’o.

“He beat everyone in America, everyone in the world. A Muslim!” the archaeologist explained.

“His father is Muslim,” the policeman clarified.

“That makes him a Muslim,” deduced the doctor.

“Why does this matter?” I asked.

“Because,” reasoned the archaeologist, “he won’t want to kill Muslims.”

Mustapha, a journalist for the
Maghreb News (Al-Ahdath Al-Maghribia)
who had been running language interference between me and the kids, interjected:

“We were watching the elections until five o’clock in the morning. We cheered when Ohio voted for Obama. Just to make sure, we waited for Virginia, and we cheered again.”

Ali, the engaging owner of the Coiffure Cyprus barbershop, had been running some errands and crossed the street to greet us. We had talked just before about the young men he attended who died in Madrid, and the others bound for Iraq. He heard Mustapha, put down his bags, and explained: “Hope isn’t always reality. The Middle East is a rose, a flower so sweet that no bees can resist it for their honey. Bees, you know, have to work together, and Obama must as well. That’s the way of the world [
tariq al-’alam
].”

“But people can change things,” I protested. “The only true law of history is the law of surprises.”

The barber of boys who would kill for a cause—or become archaeologists, doctors, policemen, soccer stars, even Barack Obamas—lifted his eyebrows and then his whole face to the sky, stroked his beard, and sighed with a smile that said,
Maybe tomorrow, but not today.

We had the idea that Obama came with hope…. There is a difference between Obama’s words and actions…. It makes us desperate. Words now can have real effect only if followed by practical actions.

—KHALED MESHAAL, CHAIRMAN, HAMAS POLITICAL BUREAU, DAMASCUS, DECEMBER 16, 2009 (MEETING WITH AUTHOR)
⁶

“You can’t eat or pocket dreams,” preach the realists and the rationally pure, though it’s only they who really do. For faith in collective dreams and heroes, perhaps more than industry and hard power, gives impetus to lives and civilizations.

History says that our ancient tribal future is fired forward by faith in groups, their gods and glory, no matter how secular these may appear, as with notions of the nation and what’s noble. Faith makes fellowship a potent force for great virtue or for great vice: strong enough even to make vicious enemies into virtuous friends when sacred values can be shared. The trick to the turn is to be savvy about it, and maybe scientific, but also sincere.

Force and deception may be fine for war, but that is all you’ll get. Dare we dream of something more to do with our enemies? For wars are truly won when enemies become friends. Then let’s go out of the house, with whatever protection we need, and talk to the stranger before we shoot, or at least before we shoot again. On some things, we’ll find, we won’t change minds, and on some of these things we shouldn’t. But who knows what a world could be made if we listen and learn at the camps of fallen angels?
⁷

Then we must act to make it.

Author in front of the Palestine Polytechnic University in the Wad Abu Katila neighborhood of Hebron, which some of the suicide attackers from Hamas’s Al Jihad Mosque soccer team attended.

INDEX

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

Page numbers of illustrations appear in
italics.

Abas, Mohammed Nasir bin,
134,
136, 155, 156, 157, 162, 501n 12

Abbas, Mahmoud, 371, 387, 519n 6

Abd al Jabbar ibn Ahmed, 80

Abdel al-Rahman, Omar, 126

Abdelilah el Fadwal el Akil, 187, 188

Abdulmutallab, Umar Farouk, 274, 275–76, 477–78

Abrams, Elliot, 378

Absalam, Ami, 218–19,
219

Abu al-Hassan Ash’ari, 80

Abu Dujana, 501n 12

Abu Fatih, 146

Abu Ghraib prison, 115, 132, 221, 281, 391–92

Abu Hafs al-Masri (Mohammed Atef), 156, 159, 159–60, 161

Abu Qatada, 175, 178

Abu Rusdan, 134, 157, 501n 12

Abu Sayyaf group, 261

Abu Zubaydah, 175, 505n 3

Acebes, Ángel, 200

Achebak, Younes, 211, 215

Adams, John, 470

Adams, John Quincy, 470

Aden, 85

Adenauer, Konrad, 390

Adwan, Qais, 363

Aeschylus, 67

Afghan Alumni, 3, 56, 122, 130, 136, 143, 145, 156

Bali bombing (2002), 141, 144, 157

bombings, and role in JI’s mantiqi organization, 156–58

interview with Fahrin, 123–28

marriage/kinship ties, 162–67, 261

soccer and, 12–13

Afghanistan, 241–65

Afridis, 247

Al Qaeda and, 98, 99, 159, 175, 240, 253, 256–57, 473

assassination of Massoud, 253

author in, 1976, 241–45,
243

the British and, 247, 248–49

Buddhas of Bamyan, 243–44

corruption in, 262, 264

counterterrorism strategy for, 262–65

defusing Pakistan nuclear threat, 240

drug trade and, 259, 264

Durrani confederation, 246, 247, 253

ethnic groups in, 242, 250

first wave of jihad and, 112, 113

foreign Muslim fighters, 56, 130, 176

geography and social structure, 246

Ghilzai confederation, 246, 247, 253

governance, 246

history, 244, 245, 250–54, 260

honor and, 255–60

Human Terrain System experiment, 289

Indonesians fighting in, 3–4, 121, 122, 123–25, 141, 144

Karlandri confederation, 247, 253

McChrystal report, 263–64, 265

mujahedin in, 102, 251–52

Northern Alliance, 243, 253

Pashtun, 228, 244, 246, 247, 250, 251, 254, 255–60, 262, 264–65, 381

Pashtunwali and sacred values, 253, 255–58, 381, 431–32, 449

qawm
(clan), 251

social structure, 251, 255–56, 381, 508n 16

Soviet War, 99, 242, 247, 251–52

Taliban, 247, 252–60, 262–65

terrorist training camps, 136, 159, 208, 234, 473

third wave of jihad and, 114

Thirty Years’ War, 250–54

tribal areas,
249

unification to fight invaders, 248

U.S. mistakes in, 257–60, 263–65

U.S. war in, 243, 253–54, 257, 261

women in, 250, 255–56, 260

Agents of Innocence
(Ignatius), 168

Aglif, Rachid (the Rabbit), 189, 191–93, 192, 197, 202

Ahmad, Khurshid, 227–28, 484

Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 57, 394, 533n 6

Ahmed, Rabei Ousmane Sayed (the Egyptian), 182–83

Ahmedzay, Zarein, 269

Ahmidan, Hamid, 197

Ahmidan, Jamal (the Chinaman), 50, 54, 183–91, 193, 196–98, 202–4, 207, 208, 210, 213–16, 503n 3

Ahmidan, Mohammed, 202

Akhlifa, Hamza, 211, 211, 214–15, 218

Al Ansar,
175

Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, 24, 26,
26

Al Aqsa Mosque, 346, 362

Albright, Madeleine, 507n 4

Alderdice, Lord John, 388, 396