Customer Reviews

Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Loretta Napoleoni's Modern Jihad isn't just another discussion of Islam or 9/11: it is an informed and informative financial probe of the roots of terror networks, tracing the dollars behind them and how terrorism is funded. From the creation of illegal organizations and subverted international economic systems; to trafficing money to terrorist groups; to smuggling, Modern Jihad is quite a different take on global terrorism and is strongly recommended as a mainstay addition to any serious collection on contemporary terrorism.

I heard the author lecture at a bookstore in lower Manhattan, and although I initially hesitated buying her book - the beginning of her lecture began too "soft" - I later broached harder economic questions, which she deftly answered. Impressed, or at least positively engaged, I bought the book. I'm finding it well written and well researched, and I'm surprised that it weaves together much common, but fragmented, knowledge into a cohesive review of terrorist financing, without the partiality common to politically/ideologically oriented analyses.

I'm given Loretta Napoleoni's book on the finance of terror, "Modern Jihad", the once-over. It is sloppy in execution. She cites 100s of newspaper articles, with no effort to assess their accuracy or reliability. She also uses some academic papers and books, again uncritically. Her account has a breathless tonality - the activities of terrorists are reported with insufficient attention to balancing forces. In one example, she tells us that in one year, commercial ventures tied to efforts to expand Islamic influence expanded trade in Indonesia from $600k to $1.24M - surely small potatos. But the extent of the reports is sufficient to overcome uncertainty on the details as to her key point, the extent of terrorism and how closely it is tied to the international economy. Appropo to the point of the Times story, terrorists use the instruments and opportunities of international finance that where pioneered by states and corporations. The broad story she tells is that terrorism was often initiated by states as part of counter-insurgency plans; she begins with French and US activities in Vietnam, skims through Central America, Columbia, and Afgahnistan. The techniques developed and disseminated by these were appropriated and "privatized", and eventually developed and linked in a "new economy of terror." This includes investments in normal business enterprises as well as money-laundering and trafficking in drugs and arms. In some regions, the terrorist groups have established "state shells" which imitate some aspects of states in their monopoly on violence and control of the economy, often including the provision of social services to the population. Like fuedal lords, those controlling state shells can appropriate resources from the local economy (where they don't kill it) and collect taxes or impose duties on trade. There is sometimes collusion between these state shells and legitimate states.

Napoleoni leaves me with the impression that there are three possible courses of action:

1) Coordinated international action to force much stricter controls on flows of money, people, arms, and drugs, including anti-smuggling efforts in Central Asia and many other regions, and success in bringing state-shells back under the control of legitimate governments;

2) A surge of international justice, openess, and transparency, including redistribution of profits, alleviation of poverty, increased education, and reform of repressive governments, thus removing the conditions that foster terrorism;

3) Terrorism is going to be with us for the long hall as patchwork efforts in controlling it occasionally succeed and often fail.

The Bush administration believes strongly in policing, option 1, and gives limited recognition but little support to option 2. We're not powerful enough to police the world by ourselves, and the more we try the more the incentives for other nations to obstruct us in more or less covert ways. The outcome can only be 3.

I generally do not write reviews, but I decided to do it because Loretta Napoleoni book is one of the fews I have read recently which offer a global explanation of what is happening. I know the Middle East well and can say that her facts are accurate. She also writes beatifully, I could not put down the book.
i reccomend this book to those who want to find answers to the many questions of our complex world.

this is a masterpiece, it is a honest look at 50 years of history. I recomment it to everybody, especially to those one who do not know so much about our involvement in wars by proxy and terror sponsor in the war. I know a lot about the Middle East and I can say that Loretta Napoleoni Book is
excellent, well written and extremely well researched. It is well above the average production of books on terrorism which has flooded out bookshops since 9 11.

Loretta Napoleoni is a brilliant writer and thinker. Her knowledge of history and finance is encylopaedic.

She is true to her mission of not falling into the "trap of politics" and stays with the global economic analysis.

Brilliant analyses and brilliant syntheses.

If her suggested solution is simple, it is not simplistic. It is perhaps impossible because it appears that our economy is too dependent on the illicit economies--money laundering, drug money, arms deals, and so on.

It is a shame that there is not more interest in this book.

I feel like buying it for everyone I know.

If you get bogged down, start speed reading--you will quickly come to numerous passages that will be as revelations, and you will want to read them twice.

As a previous reviewer commented-it's the global aspect of this book that makes it significant.

The section on our government's conniving with the Taliban for the oil, as well as the explanation of the situation in Chechyna, even if it may be too quick and dirty for the scholarly, makes an excellent starting point for those of us who are in the dark.

I found much of it to be an astonishing revelation

Highly recommended.

Modern Jihad is an amazing book. I am overwhelmed by the amount of research that the author conducted to write this book. While reading it I have realised how ignorant I was of what is has taken place in the world for several decades.
I highly recommend this book to anybody who wants to have their eyes opened about their past, present and future

Behind the headline portrait of terrorism lies a more complex picture of the underground economy of its exemplars in the shadows of globalization and finance hybridized with organized crime and the backwash of the old left. This alarming reality with its ability to exploit stunningly large resources is acutely portrayed in this well-researched and eye-opening depiction of the 'state shell' phenomenon created by these interlocked combinations from Columbian guerillas to the IRA to the PLO and Islamist groups of the Middle East and beyond. Although we can and must indict these consequences of capitalist and colonialist social Darwinism (and state terrorism) we find no Robin Hoods or religious mystics in these cynical gangs gripped by the phantom of jihad and their ample investment portfolios.

This is a good book. Loretta Napoleoni is an economist who looks at the underside of international terrorist organizations from an economic point of view. The book begins with a short history of the evolution of terrorist organizations from the cold war to the present. The author argues that this period has seen an evolution of terrorist organizations from state sponsorship to economic independence. The most interesting part of the book, for me at least, may be her analysis of the relationship between terrorist organization and criminal organizations, principally narcotics trafficking organizations that developed after the end of the Cold War. The rest of the book is devoted to analyzing the basis of the economic independence of international terrorist organization in terms of geopolitical factors, sources of income, balance of payments, the maintenance of assets and liabilities, and other factors of economic importance.
A certain amount of economic determinism creeps into Ms. Napoleoni's arguments, but to be fair, she is an economist. Generally, the book is well thought out and well argued. The author is reasonably fair and balanced in her approach to her subject matter. It is clearly written and has the undisguised advantage of being short. In fact, the two hundred pages of this volume read much like a summary of a longer work. Though I have not yet read any of the other works by this author, I would guess that many of them focus on the same subject matter and follow the same logic and rhetorical pathways. This is not to say that this or Ms. Napoleoni's other works are repetitive and not worthwhile. Longer treatments of this subject are well worth the effort from this author. For anyone interested professionally or personally in the subject of terrorist finance this book provides valuable tools to help "connect the dots" of how terrorist organizations operate and even flourish in certain environments; tools that are not available from looking at terrorist organizations from an ideological, religious, or organized crime point of view.

On April 19, 1995, I was making photocopies of an article I had written about AIDS research as a science writer at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. As I stood at the copier, rereading my story on the advances made in fighting the plague of the century, I heard what sounded to me like someone slamming a door.
"Who the hell slammed that door?" I yelled from the copy room.
Soon I became painfully aware that a door had not been slammed in my office, but an entire office building had been brought down a few blocks away by terrorists. A different kind of plague erupted in my city and, like the first few cases of AIDS, an attempt to treat the symptoms was ultimately defeated until the true cause was discovered. Only now has the true cause of the viral nature of the world terrorist economy been reported.
The seeds of discontent with the ruling class, governments or even an autocratic boss have, since humans became "civilized", served as impetus for the disgruntled, disaffected and even psychotic to lash out with acts of terrorism. But acts of terrorism cost money. They are organizations with payrolls, "benefits" and material needs. Terrorists need dollars, and stopping the flow of dollars to the balaclava-clad "revolutionaries" could effectively end large-scale terrorism. Unfortunately, it could also send the world economy into a spiral of depression and even collapse.
Dr. Loretta Napoleoni sheds light on the global "economy of terror" in Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks (Pluto Press, October 2003, $24.95). In this well-researched, painstakingly-footnoted book, Italian economist and author Napoleoni identifies a $1.5 trillion "fast-growing economic system" comprised of illegal businesses such as arms and narcotics trading, diamond smuggling, charitable donations, profits from illegal businesses and yes, oil.
In Modern Jihad, Napoleoni reveals the interdependency between autocratic state-shell economies run by armed groups and "democratic" western economies, ranging from consumption of narcotics to the production of arms to laundering money and even to stock speculation, as occurred prior to Sept. 11, 2001.
Modern Jihad is a detailed examination of how the terrorist network is financed by an intricate economy that, like a parasite which has burrowed into the vital organs of the host, cannot be removed without serious risk of killing the patient. The revelation that terrorism on the Al Qaeda scale is not really about Islamic fundamentalism-as President Bush and Prime Minister Blair would have us believe--but what economist George Magnus describes as a "growing tension between a dominant western capitalist system and a populous Muslim nation in which an emerging class of merchants and bankers is finding development checked and frustrated." This fact is quietly excised from most "in-depth" examinations of the current "War on Terrorism."
The book is broken down into chapters which explain in detail the history of the modern terror economy, including a look at the politics behind the terrorist activities of the PLO, Chile, Iran-Contra, "Operation Mongoose" in Cuba and the long history of the United States' "quiet" manipulation of governments around the globe for the past century. Napoleoni supports this assertion with many disturbing examples and anecdotes, including evidence which could indicate that former American "Green Berets" trained the Libyan-based terrorists who brought down the Pan-Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
The blockbuster revelation in Modern Jihad has to be the thorough examination of the bearing oil brings on the economics of terror, as well as the influence and perhaps criminally negligent behavior of the Bush family.
Napoleoni traces the historical and economic significance of the oilfields of the region, and we see clearly why Halliburton's Dick Cheney, the ideological bulwark behind Bush, is drooling for control of the region.
Unocal has been for years a major player in creating this eventuality. The idea is known in Washington as the `Strategy of the Silk Route.' This strategy pursued the exclusion of Russia from the Asian pipelines and establishes a strong presence in these areas to effectively lock Iran and China out of the energy business in the region. The hiccup was, of course, the "squabbling warlords" of Afghanistan. They knew that this pipeline would never happen until a stable puppet government came to Afghanistan-one amendable to the Bush family friends of Unocal.
One need only look at the credentials of the new leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, a former lobbyist for Unocal, to see where this is going. Bush's envoy to the new Afghan government is Zalmay Khalilzad, another former Unocal employee.
Napoleoni details Bush family and friends' involvement in the whole plan through ties to Unocal, Enron and CentGas-ironically all tied to the bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia.
In Napoleoni's final analysis, however, there is a grim prognosis for the world economy. Even if there suddenly was an end to the global terror economy, the interdependence may already be too great, and the end of a yearly cash injection of $1.5 trillion dollars, along with the cheap Muslim-controlled oil, could wreck U.S. supremacy and hegemony. But something should change: "As long as we invest in corporations which meddle in the politics of independent states and take profit without regard to human cost, we engage in our own destruction."
Modern Jihad is well-researched, backing its disturbing and chilling assertions with detailed attribution. It provides a balanced and careful examination of the issue of financing world terrorism and gets very close to making the case for an independent counsel investigation of the Vice President of the United States at the very least.
Modern Jihad could be the "door slamming" on the ignorance of the American public about the actions their government is and has taken. Action which, in the long run, make them far less safe, far less secure from the plague of the twenty-first century: terrorism.