When it comes to conflict studies, essentially there are three kinds of writers. The retired bureaucrat reincarnating as an expert. The independent journalist with field experience and intelligence sources. The academic, sometimes a retired intelligence professional, straddling academia and think tanks close to establishment agencies. The practising professionals — spooks and terrorists alike — rarely write.
Rob Schultheis is a journalist — but seemingly not quite independent or objective. A veteran war correspondent, he has written about Afghanistan for over two decades for publications such as Time, New York Times and Washington Post. His credentials are impressive. But as you read the book you get to know him better — while being a journalist, he carried medical supplies to Afghans fighting the Soviet Union. In Iraq, he was an embedded writer who “lived and worked 24/7 with CAT-A 13 in order to write a book on how Civil Affairs teams operate.” To the uninitiated, Civil Affairs specialists are trained soldiers who act as intermediaries between the military establishment and the civilian population of an occupied nation.
Journalists covering conflict and internal security tend to rely excessively on intelligence agencies, which have a vested interest in planting stories in the media. At some point, they tend to lose their objectivity and begin to think like their establishment sources. There is this terrorism and internal security journalist reporting for a venerable Chennai-based national newspaper — many of the reports are nothing but a rehash of transcripts of confessions extracted from terror suspects during interrogation. Schultheis seems to be his American equivalent.
Once the writer’s background is known, many things fall in place. The book is written from a narrow US perspective, blending pro-establishment drivel with a modicum of criticism. His identification with the country is total — the book is replete with references to “we”, “us” and “our” which could put off non-American readers. For instance, he writes: “...we are less secure than ever; al-Qaeda is still out there, and our futile attempts to fight it have only multiplied the numbers of our potential enemies in the Moslem world... When we drove the Taleban out of Afghanistan, 95 per cent of the Afghan people loved us.” Yet, the book would make compelling reading, but for shoddy editing and proofreading. In the first half, the author recapitulates his experiences of Afghanistan’s wars. And that’s the best part of the book — adventures of a western war correspondent slugging it out in an Asian country’s hostile terrain. He narrates the entry of bin Laden into Afghanistan and the forging of al-Qaeda.
The author has had access to various mujahideen groups who facilitated his illegal sneaking into Afghan
war zones, officials of Pakistan’s ISI and, needless to add, US intelligence personnel. But he does not seem to have had access to the elusive leader. At one point he writes, “I think I remember seeing him (bin Laden) once, on the hill above Azrow, at dusk: a tall figure, driving a big yellow earth-mover, scraping out another section of switchback. I was alone, carrying an enormous pack, groggy with dengue fever... and in my dusty Afghan clothes I must have looked like just another Pushtun; we may have even traded “asalaam aleikum” as I trudged past him into the village.”
The second half of the book looks critically at al-Qaeda as a violent manifestation of Salafi jihadism and the US strategy to counter it. Schultheis’ thesis is that the US is fighting Iran, Iraq and Syria, while it should be fighting Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to win the war on terror. He quotes an army officer in Iraq saying, “It’s as if on December 8, 1941, we declared war on Brazil, Iceland and New Zealand, and announced that Japan, Germany and Italy were our closest allies in the conflict.”
There are also interesting nuggets on ISI collusion with al-Qaeda, money trails leading to the Saudis, speculation about Osama’s hideout and the nature of future al-Qaeda strikes. One problem with the book is that a good half of it revolves around the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation. To make it more marketable, the author and his publishers make a contrived attempt to repackage an Afghanistan-centric book by broadening its scope to include the war on terror.
There have been scores of books on Jihad, al-Qaeda, global terrorism and counter-terrorism by authors such as Rohan Gunaratna, Peter Bergen and Yossef Bodansky. In books of this genre, often authenticity is not conclusive and you simply go by an author’s claims and judge for yourself the quality of the information based on the writer’s credibility, access to key players and field work. The same would apply to Schultheis’ book. Keep, however, a salt sprinkler handy.
— Mohan teaches at Asian College
of Journalism, Chennai.
mohan.word@gmail.com
