War And Peace II
In the Moscow Declaration Against Terrorism, Prime Minister Vajpayee and President Putin have reiterated friendship between India and Russia during peace time and shared firepower in case of war with a third party.

Inside The Secret World Of Bin Laden
Exclusive excerpts from Peter L. Bergen's Holy War, Inc. Currently terrorism analyst for CNN, Bergen met bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1997. His book is a sprawling thriller on the world's most wanted fugitive and his empire of terror.

Clash Of Comrades
Bhattacharya's economic reforms are stymied by differences with Politburo purists.

COVER STORY:EXCLUSIVE BOOK EXCERPTS

	POINT BLANK: The morning of September 11 in New York saw a suicide jet crashing into the World into the World Trade Center

When he first turned his attention to holy war, bin Laden also applied business techniques picked up from his years working for the family company. During the 1980s Afghan war, he set up offices in Pakistan and the United States; raised funds in Saudi Arabia; recruited fighters from every country in the Muslim world; and used the resources of his family company to build bases inside Afghanistan for his holy warriors.

The older generation of Islamist radicals, such as Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, Egypt's Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, and Yemen's Sheikh Abdul Majid Zindani, studied at Cairo's al-Azhar University, the Oxford of Islamic learning. By contrast, the men attracted to bin Laden's standard, like so many of the newer generation of Islamist militants, are more likely to have studied technical subjects such as medicine and engineering, or had careers in business, than to have studied the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence.

So it should not be surprising that bin Laden's top aide is a physician from an upper-class Egyptian family, or that his former media representative in London was a Saudi entrepreneur, born in Kuwait, who worked in the import-export business. His military adviser in the United States graduated from an Egyptian university with a degree in psychology and worked as a computer network specialist in California. Egyptian militant Rifia Ahmed Taha, a co-signatory of bin Laden's 1998 declaration of war against Americans, is an accountant. Another top al-Qaeda official, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, studied electrical engineering in Iraq. Bin Laden himself studied economics in college and worked for his family's construction business in Saudi Arabia when he was a young man. During the early 1990s he set himself up as one of the most active businessmen in Sudan.

Indeed, al-Qaeda functions as an interesting analogue of the Saudi Binladin Group, the giant construction company founded by bin Laden's deeply religious father, which operates in countries across the Middle East and Asia. One of bin Laden's aliases is simply the Director, which is probably as good a description as any other of his role in al-Qaeda. Bin Laden formulates the general policies of al-Qaeda in consultation with his shura council. The shura makes executive decisions for the group. Subordinate to it are other committees responsible for military affairs and the business interest of the group, as well as a fatwa committee, which issues rulings on Islamic law, and a media group.

Once decisions on overall policy are made by bin Laden and his closest advisers, they are relayed to the relevant committee and then-at the appropriate moment-to lower-level members of the group. Many of these foot soldiers have had little or no contact with bin Laden himself. In 1997, for instance, the media information officer for bin Laden's Kenyan cell, who would later play a key role in the bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi, noted in a document on his computer that the cell's mission was to attack Americans, but added: 'We, the East Africa cell members, do not want to know about the operations plan since we are just implementers.' The suicide bombers in the Kenya embassy bombing were never directly given instruction by bin Laden, and some of his followers have not even met their hero. A case in point is Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, a Tanzanian who helped blow up the American embassy in Tanzania in 1998. In an interview with ABC News after that attack, bin Laden aptly summarized his role in al-Qaeda: 'It is our job to instigate. By the Grace of God we did that and certain people responded to this instigation.'

In short, it's fruitful to think of al-Qaeda as a sort of multinational holding company, headquartered in Afghanistan, under the chairmanship of bin Laden. The traditional structure of a holding company is a core management group controlling partial or complete interests in other companies. Holding companies are also sometimes used by criminals to disguise their illegal activities and are often based in countries where they can operate with little or no regulatory scrutiny. True to form, al-Qaeda incorporates, to various degrees, subsidiary militant organizations in Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Kashmir.

Al-Qaeda's Afghan training camps have also attracted a rainbow coalition of Jordanians, Turks, Palestinians, Iraqis, Saudis, Sudanese, Moroccans, Omanis, Tunisians, Tanzanians, Malaysians, Bangladeshis, Indians, Filipinos, Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chinese Uighurs, Burmese, Germans, Swedes, French, Arab-Americans, and African-Americans. The graduates of those camps have gone on to export terrorism and holy war to pretty much every corner of the world. As bin Laden himself put it: 'I would say that the number of brothers is large, thank God, and I do not know everyone who is with us in this organization.' Spoken like a true CEO.

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