As Western security agencies intensify their search for possible cells of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terrorist group, reliable Arab diplomatic sources in Athens said yesterday that the network could have a very different and far more dangerous dimension. They claim that bin Laden's network is not made up only of illegal, dissident groups but has managed to infiltrate the military, the secret services and even government circles of Arab states, including the two leading countries of the Arab world, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. According to these sources, the heart of bin Laden's network is not in Afghanistan but in the country of his birth, Saudi Arabia. It is well known that bin Laden, a member of the Saudi economic elite, enjoyed close ties with the royal family during the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He clashed with the family when King Fahd allied himself with the United States in the Gulf War and after the bomb attack against US forces in Riyadh in November 1995. What is not known is that bin Laden never severed his ties with the strongest member of the Saudi royal family, Prince Abdullah, who, in effect, is ruling the kingdom as Fahd has been confined to a wheelchair.
For politicians simply to call all this "terror", and to promise to extirpate it with precision strikes and the denial of funds is a folly. As the equivocations of Saudi Arabia and a nuclear-armed Pakistan reveal, the Islamic nations know that it is the resurgence of Islam not "terrorism" which has prompted the West's call to action. These nations cannot afford to support this call wholeheartedly, no more than can any "good Muslim" spokesman in Britain, whatever Baroness Thatcher may expect of them. In every war, the first casualty is said to be truth. In this one, our politicians have not even begun to admit to us what it is really about.