In the context of their professional experience, therefore, the media experts look at bin Laden through a lens yellowed with age and focused on a more easily understood time when state sponsors and their surrogates were the main terrorist threats to U.S. interests. That scenario is now invalid; as Anatol Lieven has written in the National Interest, “to deter a state … you have to be fighting against a state.”7 The experts, however, have tried to wedge bin Laden into that analytical framework. Regarding bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization, for example, the U.S. Secret Service’s former counterterrorism chief told U.S. News & World Report in October 1998 that “the tradecraft is just not there because they don’t have the support of a patron state’s intelligence service.”8 This analysis came eight weeks after bin Laden blew up two U.S. embassies, in two different countries, within minutes of each other, something even Hizballah has never done. In the same month, Dr. M. C. Dunn wrote in Middle East Policy that the West should not treat bin Laden as “the devil incarnate” and reminded his readers that bin Laden “lacks the protection and support of a major power.”9 As frequently seems the case, former U.S. State Department counterterrorism officials take the cake in underestimating bin Laden. “If he [bin Laden] had the wherewithal to kill Americans,” one such official told Frontline in April 1999,
and attack U.S. targets he would do so, but he doesn’t. He is not in the position; he’s not an army. He doesn’t have an arsenal of nuclear weapons; he doesn’t have an arsenal of chemical/biological weapons. He doesn’t have military forces in place ready to launch, because he’d then also need transportation to move them from point A to point B and once they get to point B, then he’s got to figure out how to get them back to point A…. He’s serious about wanting to kill Americans, but as long as he’s in Afghanistan, as long as he doesn’t have access to a cell phone, … his ability to plan and conduct terrorist operations is extremely limited.10
Perhaps it is more obvious in the post–11 September atmosphere that the dominance of the state-sponsor mind-set must be ended and replaced by the realization that organizations such as that led by bin Laden are a threat to U.S. national security precisely because, as Professor A. E. Wisgerhof argues, they are not “supported by or beholden to the good graces of one government, have their own financial and logistical resources, and are often immune to the need for traditional foreign relations.”11
The few hints of analytic hope on the horizon come mostly from working journalists, although they too largely ignore the motivating power of theology and look to helpful but incomplete analogies found in the world of modern business. “The new terrorist chiefs are more like international businessmen,” London’s Sunday Times wrote in August 1998. “All the resources of modern technology are at their disposal—and they are ruthless. Bin Laden surfs the internet and talks to his henchmen and investment managers by satellite phone from a cave … he depends on no state sponsor.”12 Almost simultaneously, the Financial Times made this crucial point more directly. “Until the advent of the Afghan Arabs,” the daily explained, “terror networks had generally depended on the patronage of ‘rogue’ states, upon which retribution could be visited. But the extensive international network built by Mr. Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi exile who has developed an operational capability equivalent to what state sponsorship can furnish, has tended to base itself in countries which barely qualify as states, overwhelmed by factional and tribal strife and which cannot easily be held to account.”13
Impatience
A simple, unalterable fact is that bin Laden and his compatriots are patient and Americans are not. To illustrate this point with a tale that may be apocryphal, in the 1980s a junior American diplomat attended a meeting in Peshawar, Pakistan, of the military coordinators of the seven main Afghan resistance parties. Arriving a bit before the appointed time of 1:00 p.m., this officer and his associates took seats near the stage, across which a wall-to-wall drape was drawn. Within an hour after the meeting was to start—a good hint of the Afghans’ non-Western sense of time—the mujahedin began to seat themselves at tables on the stage. The meeting began at 2:10, and just before it did, the drapes were opened to reveal a wall-to-wall map. All of Afghanistan and bits of Iran and Pakistan were on the map; all three countries were labeled appropriately. Across the top of the map ran a swath of what was then Soviet Central Asia and China’s Xinjiang Province. Neither was labeled that way, however. Instead, the area was boldly labeled “TEMPORARILY OCCUPIED MUSLIM TERRITORY.” The junior American diplomat chuckled on reading the label, chalking it up to wartime bravado. Chatting with English-speaking mujahedin after the meeting, the diplomat asked about the labeling of Central Asia and was told, in perfect seriousness, “Yes, Inshallah [God willing], the region will be won back for Islam one day.” The diplomat came away, it is said, believing his interlocutors’ sincerity, but convinced that if the Soviets left Afghanistan, the jihad’s fervor would wane and Moscow’s gates would never be darkened by the insurgents’ scruffy shadows.
These days one wonders if that junior diplomat was not too cynical. While the gates of Moscow are secure—though creaky after car-bomb attacks in 1999 left three hundred Russians dead—Islamist insurgencies are under way in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, and Dagestan, and portents of similar insurgencies are rumbling in Kyrgyzstan and western China. If the Afghan mujahedin had not fallen out with each other after the Soviets’ departure, it might be that the world would have several Islamist states aborning in Central Asia.
The foregoing is to stress that bin Laden’s movement and the Muslim world possess, from the Western perspective, superhuman and maddening amounts of patience. The Afghans who spoke of the map spanning that Peshawar stage did not say they would reclaim Central Asia for Allah, only that they were confident that through jihad it would be reclaimed, if not by them, then by their sons, grandsons, or great-grandsons. For bin Laden and those supported or inspired by him, the mind-set is identical; indeed, it appears bin Laden and the Arab Afghans not only acquired combat experience in Afghanistan but also acquired the patience, stoicism, and long-term approach to life that typify the Afghan character.
Bin Laden has never urged haste on his followers, although near-term victory is preferable to end Muslim suffering and liberate Islam’s sanctities. He has built his organization methodically, caring most about security, resilience, and lethality, and least about speed. In developing his organization, the Jordanian daily Sawt al-Ma’rah has said, bin Laden has displayed patience. “His favorite method,” the Amman daily explained, “is to gather full personal information on the members of security organs working in customs, port, airports, heads of sections in interior ministries; [and] in penetrating import and export companies operating in Arab countries.”14 Bin Laden’s success is seen in reports that his operatives have penetrated the military, security, and police services in Kuwait, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, Qatar, and Jordan. Bin Laden also asked God to give Muslims “patience and steadfastness” as they fight what he terms the Crusaders—the U.S.-led primarily Christian Western nations,15 and has sought to steel Muslim hearts for the long haul by reminding them that “he who abandons resoluteness is humiliated” and using in his fatwa the following passage from the Koran: “So lose no heart, nor fall into despair. For yea must gain mastery if yea are true in faith.”16 In addition, bin Laden’s public grooming of his eldest son as his successor is another sign that he suspects his goals may not be accomplished in his lifetime.17
Most eloquent, the communiqué claiming responsibility for the August 1998 East Africa bombings testified to the long-range endeavor on which bin Laden is embarked. “The days to come,” the message concluded,
are sufficient for the U.S., God willing, to see a black fate like the one that befell the Soviet Union. Blows will come down on the U.S. one after another from everywhere and new Islamic groups will emerge one after another to fight U.S. interests that are still based on stealth and usurpation. Islamic armies will set off one following the other to fight
the U.S. criminal forces. And you will see: As for the unbelievers, never will disaster cease to seize them for their ill deeds or to settle close to their homes until the promise of God has come to pass, for verily, God will not fail in his promise.18
That bin Laden is not alone in possessing a level of patience far exceeding the West’s chronically low norm is underscored by his colleagues’ words. They and bin Laden share the belief that their struggle is an integral part of Islam’s more than 1,400-year historical continuum in which the central feature is the defense of Islam against Christian aggression. They see themselves as part of this long defensive historical struggle—which Allah has not only blessed, but has also directed to be waged as part of the price of entering paradise—and are prepared, as President Ronald Reagan used to say, to stay the course. “The Americans should know,” Zawahiri wrote in late 1998, “that we have resolved to fight them fiercely in a long battle…. Generations will pass on the torch to the following ones so that the Prophet’s flag remains raised in victory till eternity.”19
In this context, the ingrained impatience and short attention span of the United States—its people, media, and government—are major obstacles to understanding the long-term nature of the al Qaeda movement’s threat and the intensifying confrontation between the Western and Muslim worlds, between Christianity and Islam. After five years of interviewing bin Laden about his motivation and intentions, for example, most Western journalists continue to treat him as a transient terrorist phenomenon. “The exiled Saudi millionaire,” the Economist wrote in the summer of 1998, “is fast becoming a cult figure to many of his more devout countrymen.”20 Cult figures are, of course, a dime a dozen in Western popular culture and generally have limited shelf life. Cults also generally consist of small groups of people who lean toward the wacky if not fanatical side, like those who committed suicide en masse only after ensuring they had a pocket full of quarters for car fare in the next life. The knee-jerk tendency to classify bin Laden as a cult hero is absurd and probably says more about the West’s impatience with things that require puzzling out or take more than ninety seconds of video to summarize.
Bin Laden made quite clear following the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings that he was patiently planning future attacks on U.S. targets. “The people involved in these explosions,” he said in January 1999, “have just given a slight warning to the United States. A full-fledged reply is still to come forth.”21
There it is, laid out by leaders and fighters in clear, precise language. And yet we still failed to appreciate the resolute patience of America’s Islamist foes. “Too often we forget,” the Washington Post said in 1998, “that if the terrorist has any outstanding quality besides vengefulness and cunning, it is patience; he may strike back next week, next month, or next year.”22 If true for a terrorist, how much truer must it be for a man dedicated to waging a worldwide insurgency on what he sees as God’s behalf?
Imperial Hubris
How can hubris be measured in its effect on an individual’s or a nation’s ability to understand foreign events, personalities, ideas, threats, and ideologies? Because science has yet to build such a device, any measuring must be more or less impressionistic. Regarding Osama bin Laden, Americans, and especially politicians, opinion leaders, academics, the “experts,” and most of the media, seem afflicted by a severe case of imperial hubris, an attitude that attributes the emergence of bin Laden to one or another U.S. action. Thus, Mary Anne Weaver writes in the New Yorker that bin Laden was produced by the Afghan jihad, which, in turn, was part of that “Pan Islamic effort whose fighters were funded, armed, and trained by the C.I.A., [and which] eventually brought twenty-five thousand Islamic militants, from more than 50 countries, to combat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The United States, intentionally or not, had launched Pan-Islam’s first jihad, or holy war, in eight centuries.”23 The often-acute Ms. Weaver seems here to be suffering from imperial hubris. For her, neither the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Red Army’s barbarity, nor the tenets of Islam that compel believers to defend their religion and territory against attack and assist those who are so doing, can account for the emergence of bin Laden and his colleagues and followers. The Islamic world, for Weaver, supported the Afghan jihad primarily because the U.S. president made the CIA available to arm, train, and fund non-Afghan Muslim volunteers who wanted to assist the Afghan mujahedin. Other prominent foreign policy commentators, such as the Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland, former senior CIA officer Milt Bearden, and terrorism expert Brian M. Jenkins, also have followed Ms. Weaver’s analytic line.
In many discussions of the Afghan jihad’s residual problems, the U.S. media seemed determined to establish U.S. aid to the mujahedin as the main cause of today’s growing Islamist militancy. The fact that there would have been no mujahedin—Afghan, Arab, or otherwise—if the Bolsheviks had not invaded and brutalized Afghanistan seems to escape their ken completely. Only recently, Walter T. Vollman, in one of the few balanced assessments of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, found it necessary to remind readers that Soviet actions gave birth to the mujahedin. “The deeds of the Soviets were unspeakable,” Vollman wrote. “They raped women in the name of emancipating them. In defense of national security, they machine-gunned illiterate peasants who couldn’t have found Moscow on a map. They burned people alive and drowned them in excrement. They razed villages, slaughtered livestock, and destroyed harvests. They even scattered mines disguised as toys to lure people to their maiming.”24 Beyond Vollman’s words, American journalists can do no better to appreciate Sovietized Afghanistan than by examining Moscow’s grizzly handiwork—which Eric Margolis describes as “the combined merciless destructiveness of Genghis Khan with the calculated terrorism of Stalin—in the photographs in Radek Sikorski’s Dust of the Saints and Robert Kaplan’s account of his travels with the mujahedin in Soldiers of God.25
All of the explanations offered by the U.S. media for the rise and influence of Osama bin Laden basically come down to the same idea, to the same universalist ideology: The United States is the center of the world; it is, in one way or another, responsible for what happens in the world; and anti-American international actors like bin Laden are violent, medieval, and unenlightened anachronisms because the overwhelming percentage of the world’s population shares our values and wants to be like Americans. This distorted America-centric vision of reality is leading to a clash of civilizations, as outlined by Professor Samuel P. Huntington in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.26 Some of Huntington’s critics, however, have concluded that the non-Western world is suffering not from too much American universalism but from too little. Thus, in Foreign Policy, Richard E. Rubenstein and Jarle Crocker argue that the civilizational conflicts predicted by Huntington—Christendom vs. Islam, China vs. the West, and so forth—“can be averted and can be resolved if they do occur.” More likely, according to the authors, is a “violent clash of civilizations [that] could well result from our continuing failure to transform the systems of inequality that make social life around the globe a struggle for individual and group survival—systems that feed the illusion that either one civilization or another must be dominant…. Satisfying basic human needs on a global scale will require a powerful movement for social change—a movement waiting to be born.”27 Surely the phrase “our continuing failure to transform the systems of inequality” means nothing more than that we have so far failed to remake the whole world on the American pattern and must try harder.
Though the delusion-producing nature of this ideological approach to international affairs is apparent—it can be argued that bin Laden and other Islamists similarly suffer from their ideological lens—the number of informed and learned people advocating it is astonishing, perhaps validating Gertrude Himmelfarb’s definition of cognitive dissonance as “the discrepancy between reality and ideology that only truly learned and clever people can achieve.”28 It is precisely because Huntington dared to challenge the domi
nance and indict the arrogance of the universalists that his essay and book on “the clash of civilizations” earned a torrent of condescending scorn from Western academics, journalists, and foreign policy analysts. Huntington was damned for using “simple visions or catch phrases,” for focusing on “the supposed revival of religion in the late twentieth century,” for suggesting a “Muslim cavalry” rode to the rescue of its Bosnian brethren, and for “his lack of political common sense and responsibility” that led him to “excessive simplification” and arguments that are “often incredibly one-sided and inflammatory.”29
Most strikingly, but most in character for Huntington’s critics, was Mark Huband’s denunciation of Huntington’s suggestion that there is a “Muslim conflict propensity.” On this issue, Huband claims, via the use of scientific-sounding percentages, Huntington’s work is “an obvious slur against perhaps the 75 or 80 percent of Muslims who do not consider themselves Islamists, and the far greater proportion who, Islamist or not, have never engaged in violence and have no intention of doing so.”30
Perhaps tellingly, non-Western scholars have paid more respect to Huntington’s ideas. In an essay in the Journal of Church and State, for example, Professor Mahmood Monshipouri wrote that even though Huntington overestimates the role of religion in international affairs and undervalues the impact of “the global resurgence of democratization and interdependence,” Huntington’s view that Western values are not universally applicable is on target. “The West must realize,” Monshipouri argues, “that its political and cultural experiences do not serve as a universal model and that other forms of political and cultural organizations may be just as valid and functional.”31 Similarly, Wang Gungwu, a former vice chancellor of the University of Hong Kong, wrote in the National Interest that Huntington was “admirably frank about the relative decline of the West.” “In doing so,” Professor Wang argued,
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