How the CIA missed Jihad.

Understanding Terror Networks By Marc Sageman. University of Pennsylvania Press. 232 pages. $29.95.

Sleeping With the Devil. How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude By Robert Baer. Crown. 226 pages. $24.95.

The Future of Political Islam By Graham E. Fuller. Palgrave MacMillan. 256 pages. $16.95.

George Bush's Iraq War was a diversion from the real threat to the United States: Al Qaeda. These three books shed light on that threat.

In March 1989, shortly after the Soviet Union withdrew the last of its military regiments from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and a group of foreign Islamic volunteers, the so-called Afghan-Arabs, joined indigenous mujahedeen combatants in the battle for Jalalabad, the heavily fortified gateway to Kabul. The campaign got off to a good start for the anti-communist mujahedeen, who quickly seized several strategic targets on the outskirts of the city. Bereft of Soviet support, demoralized local government officials were in the process of negotiating their surrender and guarantees of safety in accordance with traditional Afghan ways of resolving such matters. Some government troops had already begun laying down their arms after putting up token resistance.

But foreigners such as bin Laden, who was slightly wounded during skirmishes near the Jalalabad airport, did not hold native Afghan customs in high regard. When about sixty government soldiers surrendered to an Arab volunteer contingent, the Arabs promptly hacked them to death and cut them into small pieces. A truck carted their remains to the besieged city, sending a stark warning as to what fate lay in store for infidels. This gruesome massacre brought an abrupt halt to negotiations between warring parties and stiffened the resolve of the besieged forces, resulting in the first major government victory since the Soviet pullout. The crazed outburst of bloodletting by Arab jihadists had the unintended effect of rejuvenating the fighting spirit of a regime that seemed on the brink of collapse. The Afghan civil war would grind on for another three years until Kabul belatedly fell to the rebels, who were already fighting among themselves.

In Understanding Terror Networks, Marc Sageman cites the fiasco at Jalalabad as an example of bow radical Islamic foreign legionnaires undermined the efforts of homegrown Afghan resisters and needlessly prolonged the conflict. A former CIA case officer who worked on a daily basis with mujahedeen units in the late 1980s, Sageman maintains that relations between Arab jihadists and traditional Afghan rebels were fraught with tension. Some Afghan fighters complained to their CIA handlers about the condescending attitudes and behavior of the Islamic volunteers, whose ranks swelled to more than 10,000 at the height of the anti-Soviet crusade. The sectarian Arabs often disparaged the Afghan tribesmen for not being good Muslims. Early on, they feuded over Islamic Sufi traditions that were prevalent in Afghanistan, which entailed the use of stones, flags, and other embellishments to mark the burial sites of fallen resistance fighters. Obsessed with rigid fundamentalist doctrine that forbids adornments and shrine worship, Arab jihadists went on rampages and destroyed Afghan burial markers, proclaiming that they encouraged the veneration of false idols. In at least a few cases, their ostensible Afghan allies attacked and killed these Arab graveyard marauders.

For all their self-righteous bluster, the foreign Islamic legionnaires rarely clashed with Soviet troops in Afghanistan during a decade of communist occupation. Bin Laden is said to have fought bravely during a fierce exchange with the Red Army, but this was the exception, not the rule. From a military standpoint, the Arab expatriates were mainly bystanders; their role in the mujahedeen triumph over the Red Army "was minimal at best," according to Sageman, "for they spread dissension among Muslim resistance ranks." Yet these foreign volunteers, by stoking myths of epic battlefield exploits ordained by Allah, were able to hijack the mujahedeen victory for their own apocalyptic cause, which aroused little enthusiasm among combat-weary Afghans. It's significant, Sageman contends, that only one Afghan native is known to have joined the Al Qaeda network, which attracted scores of zealots from throughout the Muslim world. Traditional Afghan mujahedeen would remain conspicuOus by their absence from bin Laden's fledgling organization.

While a number of CIA veterans have written about Islamic extremism, Sageman's treatise provides the most detailed account of how Al Qaeda emerged from the rubble of war-torn Afghanistan to become the vanguard of a Sunni Muslim revivalist movement known as Salafism (deriving from salaf the Arab word for "ancient one"), which calls for the restoration of "authentic Islam" through the violent overthrow of the established order. Social bonds have played a more formative role than ideology in the growth of "the global Salafi jihad," as Sageman calls it, which became leaner and meaner and increasingly radicalized.

The first crucial metamorphosis was precipitated by the end of the Afghan-Soviet war, when most foreign volunteers returned to their respective countries imbued with the spirit of Islamic revolution and ready to carry on the struggle. Some of the militant Muslims who remained in Afghanistan could not go home because they were fugitives wanted for crimes against their home countries. This self-selecting stay-behind network became the core of Al Qaeda, which was created to wage jihad beyond the borders of Afghanistan. An internal strategic debate over whether to target the "near enemy" (apostate regimes in the Muslim world) or the "far enemy" (the West, in general, and the United States, in particular) was already percolating among jihadists when bin Laden transferred his base of operations to the Sudan in 1991, which marked the next important transition.

Disagreeing over tactical issues, more militants parted ways with Al Qaeda when its leadership, dominated by Egyptian Salafists, decided to focus primarily on the "far enemy," the Western powers that were preventing the establishment of a true Islamic state. By a process of elimination, only the hardest of the hard core stayed with bin Laden when he and about 150 border-hopping Islamic radicals and their families moved back to Afghanistan in 1996. Shortly thereafter, bin Laden publicly declared holy war against the United States.

The U.S. intelligence community never saw it coming. The emergence of anti-American terrorist cadres from the bowels of the CIA's proxy war in Afghanistan took U.S. spymasrers by surprise. It was a blunder as colossal as the CIA's inability to predict the collapse of the Soviet empire. "Conceptually we failed," admits Robert Baer, a former officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, who was right in the thick of things in the Middle East and Central Asia during his twenty-one-year cloak-and-dagger career. "We didn't consider Sunni Islam to be a threat to the West. We didn't want to see it."

The CIA's willful blindness went hand in hand with the requisite American deference to Saudi Arabia, which forged a strategic partnership with the United States during the Cold War. The oil-rich Saudi monarchy became even more important to U.S. policymakers in 1979 when the Islamic revolution in Shiite Iran overthrew America's longtime partner, the Shah. Henceforth, Saudi Arabia would serve as a Sunni Muslim bulwark against Shiite radicalism while also matching the United States dollar for dollar in support of the Afghan mujahedeen. If the Ayatollah Khomeini and his Shiite followers were bad Muslims, then the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia were the good Muslims, as far as U.S. policymakers were concerned. "The shadow war against Iran had us facing entirely in the wrong direction," says Baer in his book, Sleeping with the Devil.

With its skyrocketing birth rates, falling per capita income, high rates of unemployed malcontents, and its wacky Wahhabi ideology (a strict Wahhabi believes the world is flat), Saudi Arabia is a powder keg waiting to detonate. To prevent being overthrown, Saudi rulers have channeled money to violent fundamentalists, including Al Qaeda. "We can't get around the fact that the House of Sa'ud underwrites the mosques and schools that turn out the jihadists, just as it administers the charities that fund the jihadists," writes Baer. "It channels the anger of the jihadists against the West to distract it from the rot in the House of Sa'ud."

CIA collaboration with Sunni extremists actually began many years before the Red Army rolled into Afghanistan, according to Baer, who emphasizes the role of the Muslim Brotherhood (the Ikhwan) in fostering Islamist militancy. Nearly all of today's radical Islamic groups trace their lineage to the Muslim Brothers. Founded in Egypt, this grassroots Salafist sect spread throughout the Muslim world, even though Egyptian President Gamal Abdal Nasser and other Arab nationalist strongmen jailed, tortured, and murdered tens of thousands of its members. Many of the Brothers took refuge in Saudi Arabia, where they got jobs as teachers and imams in mosques, schools, and government agencies. The Egyptian exiles touted the extremist ideology of Sayyid Qutb, the Brothethood's leading scribe and theorist, who was executed in an Egyptian prison in 1966. Qutb's harsh anti-American diatribes (he likened the United States to a "brothel") and his exaltation of violence as a regenerative force swayed many young Saudi militants, including bin Laden. Renegade members of the Brotherhood were instrumental in launching and leading Al Qaeda. (Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second in command, matriculated through the ranks of the Brotherhood and joined forces with Al Qaeda in the late 1980s.)

All this is known from other sources, but Baer adds a new wrinkle to the story by revealing that the devout and secretive Brotherhood was "America's silent ally" during a series of covert operations dating back to 1962, when the Saudi patrimony lavished funds on the Ikhwani who joined a CIA-backed insurgency against Arab nationalist forces in Yemen. "Like any other truly effective covert action, this one was strictly off the books," explains Baer. "There was no CIA finding, no memorandum of notification to Congress. Not a penny came out of the Treasury to fund it. ... All the White House had to do was give a wink and a nod to countries harboring the Muslim Brothers."

An off-the-shelf approach to nation-tampering was also employed by U.S. intelligence during the Afghanistan operation in the 1980s, as Washington funneled nearly $3 billion worth of aid and military equipment to the mujahedeen through Pakistani military intelligence, which served as a cutout for American and Saudi largesse. The CIA trained the Pakistanis, who in turn trained and supplied the Afghan resistance. Pakistan withheld support from the more moderate Afghan mujahedeen groups that blended their Muslim faith with the local pre-Islamic culture, while favoring the four Afghan mujahedeen groups led by radical Muslim ideologues. Pakistani military intelligence also took a shine to bin Laden. While Baer says the CIA never had official contact with the bin Laden network, the going assumption was that these bearded extremists could be revved up, manipulated, and covertly deployed when Washington needed "a cheap no-American casualties way to fight the Soviet Union." Baer acknowledges the blowback link to the 9/11 suicide bombings. It was, in his words, "the same crew we had used to do our dirty work in Yemen, Afghanistan, and plenty of other places. Only now we became their dirty work."

In The Future of Political Islam, retired CIA analyst Graham E. Fuller, who served as vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council in the 1980s, maintains that Islamist movements are more likely to resort to violence in countries where the government brutalizes its own citizens, as in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. "By far the greatest number of casualties of 'terrorism,'" Fuller asserts, "are the victims of terror--illegal violence--applied by the state." He argues that Al Qaeda and other Muslim terrorist groups comprise only a miniscule portion of the broad spectrum of outlook and behavior associated with political Islam, which encompasses diverse and contradictory elements that run the gamut from radical to reformist, traditionalist to modernist, fundamentalist to liberal.

Political Islam offers "the only realistic major alternative movement to most of today's authoritarian regimes," says Fuller. Unfortunately, while Muslim fanatics grab the headlines, most Americans know little about progressive Islamist thinkers and activists, who critique globalization, Western political and cultural imperialism, and the excesses of religious and secular extremists, and who advocate gender equality for Muslim women and full citizenship rights for non-Muslims. Some Islamists Fuller cites feel that the U.S. Constitution comes closer than any other legal document to embodying the principles of an ideal Islamic state.

Having spent much of his professional life in the Middle East, Fuller does not believe that most Islamist movements represent a dangerous ideological tendency that must be repressed. "A few by their actions do, but to stifle them across the board will only invite heightened confrontation and instability," he insists.

Fuller warns that it would be a serious mistake to focus solely on terrorism "while ignoring the overwhelming majority of Islamists who have nothing to do with terror and making them virtually irrelevant and stigmatized in Western political discourse.... To ignore the complexity of political Islam and tar all Islamists with the same brush of terrorism guarantees bin Laden's success."

It's a warning the Bush Administration and its successors need to heed.

Martin A. Lee, co-founder of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), is the author of "Acid Dreams" and "The Beast Reawakens."