Narcotics Trafficking
A final arena from which bin Laden presumably has derived funding, perhaps substantial funding, is the cultivation and trafficking of narcotics, primarily heroin, in South Asia. The information available on bin Laden’s involvement in narcotics is of varying quality, some obviously true, some analysis by assertion, and some propaganda meant to defame bin Laden. Quoting unnamed sources in South Asia in late 1998, for example, the Washington Times and London’s Observer claimed, “Osama bin Laden sees heroin as a powerful new weapon in his war against the West that is capable of wreaking social havoc while generating huge profits.”43 This utility of such a weapon is underscored by reports that 80 percent of the heroin consumed in Europe originates in Afghanistan, while the total in the United Kingdom is 95 percent. New Delhi’s Pioneer also has claimed that bin Laden “sees heroin as a powerful weapon of religious ‘jihad,’” and has used the money earned by his “opium syndicate” in western Afghanistan to fund Kashmiri insurgents. Russian officials also added to the story, telling Al-Hayah that bin Laden directed “the establishment of ‘mobile plants’ for producing narcotics in Chechen territory,” and Al-Sharq Al-Awsat has reported that Chechen political leader Shamil Basayev—whose fighters bin Laden supports—controls “the Abkhaz heroin road” on which the Taliban transported heroin from Afghanistan to Europe.44
While these claims are possible—like any talented guerrilla commander, bin Laden will use any weapon that comes to hand—they provide little hard fact on which to hang a hat. Other reporting during the past several years, however, draws a stronger and more plausible link between bin Laden and the income his Taliban hosts purportedly derived from the heroin business. In August 1998, for example, the Washington Post said that the Taliban was taking advantage of bin Laden’s talents as a financial adviser and manager by having him handle their “multi-billion dollar opium earnings.” A month later, Al-Watan Al-Arabi followed the Post’s lead, reporting, “Bin Laden administers the funds of this movement [the Taliban], which are estimated at $8 billion,” much of which is derived from the “narcotics trade.” By 2001, moreover, this revenue base had increased; the United Nations claims that in 1999 Afghanistan’s “poppy-based economy” accounted for nearly three-quarters of the world’s opium and involved 200,000 farmers. In addition, Afghan traffickers also refined a large amount of their opium into heroin, thereby cutting out middleman refiners and keeping more of the profits. It also is interesting to note the Financial Times claim that between 1995 and 2000, Afghanistan’s “normal agricultural economy” was transformed and became “80 percent … dependent on the drug industry.”45
This period approximates that in which the Taliban had access to the business, financial, and management acumen of bin Laden’s organization. It also may be that bin Laden contributed his talents as an agriculturist to the Taliban’s goal of doubling the Afghan poppy crop. Bin Laden has told the media that farming is his first love, and other reports show he invested in genetically improved seed in Sudan and that his farms there produced record crops of sunflowers.46
The soundest conclusion on bin Laden and narcotics is that where there is smoke, there is fire. The Taliban controlled the world’s most efficient heroin industry and it produced more than 70 percent of the world’s opium; they, bin Laden, and the Islamic insurgents that each supported in Central Asia, the Balkans, Kashmir, the Caucasus, India, and Western China need money to run their wars; and it would be Pollyannaish to think they would have refused to exploit the cash cow that bestrode the Afghan poppy fields like a colossus.
Outside Afghanistan, the most dangerous tie between bin Laden and narcotics traffickers has been the one that appears to exist between him and the Indian Muslim narcoterrorists Dawood and Annis Ibrahim and their allies Iqbal and Tiger Memon. The Ibrahim brothers’ criminal organization traffics in narcotics and smuggles gold, alcohol, silver, explosives, and electronic goods. It is based in Mumbai (formerly Bombay)—where the Ibrahims are known as Bombay “mafia dons”—and has an international network that includes other Indian cities, Pakistan, the UAE, Dubai, Nepal, Singapore, Thailand, and countries in eastern and southern Africa.47
Ibrahim and his senior lieutenant, Iqbal Memon, were responsible for twelve nearly simultaneous explosions in Mumbai on 12 March 1993. The attacks destroyed several buildings, killed more than three hundred people, and wounded about twelve hundred. The attackers are reported to have received small-arms training in Pakistan by “paramilitaries” and were processed through the country clandestinely so that their travel documents did not show a stay in Pakistan. Ibrahim’s attack was one of the most ambitious and sophisticated terrorist operations—in terms of planning, logistics, and coordination—of the 1990s. The attack responded to the Indian government’s decision to allow the demolition of the Barbri Masjid Mosque—a five-hundred-year-old Muslim holy site—and permit the construction of a Hindu temple, and was timed to occur on “the seventeenth day in the month of Ramadan. On this day, the Prophet won his first battle [in the Great Badr Raid].”48
Although New Delhi was quick to blame Pakistan’s intelligence service for the bombings, India Today reported that Indian investigators believed that “the prime movers of the operation were pan-Islamic fundamentalist groups working outside state control.” Recently, the Indian media reported that bin Laden may be using Ibrahim’s international network to move fighters and explosives, as well as to acquire travel and identity documents. Ibrahim’s smuggling network and those of the Afghan heroin traffickers afford al Qaeda multiple additional lines for nearly invisible communication and movement.49
4
GETTING TO KNOW BIN LADEN: SUBSTANTIVE THEMES OF THE JIHAD
Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to “bind me in all cases whatever,” to his absolute will, am I to suffer it? What signifies it to me, whether he does it as a king or a common man; my countryman or not my countryman: whether it be done by an individual villain or any army of them? If we reason to the root of things, we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in the one case and pardon in the other.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 19 December 1776
In 1993 Osama bin Laden began speaking in detail to Muslim and Western journalists about his beliefs, goals, and intentions, and began publishing commentaries on these matters in the media. The best known of the latter is bin Laden’s “Declaration of Jihad against the United States,” first published in the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia’s (MIRA) Al-Islah newsletter in September 1996. While bin Laden’s words have not been a torrent, they are plentiful, carefully chosen, plainly spoken, and precise. He has set out the Muslim world’s problems as he sees them; determined they are caused by the United States; explained why they must be remedied; and outlined how he will try to do so. Seldom in America’s history has an enemy laid out so clearly the basis for the war he is waging against it.
What bin Laden has said is central to each chapter that follows. Before proceeding, however, some analysis of the main themes outlined by bin Laden is warranted. In this chapter, bin Laden’s words are examined for substantive themes: who are Islam’s enemies, why are they attacking Muslims, what have they done, how should Muslims defend Islam, and so forth. In chapter 5, bin Laden’s statements are examined to show how they reflect character traits that play into his appeal and abilities as a leader.
The Main Enemy
For Osama bin Laden and, indeed, much of the Muslim world, the Christian West has been and still is Islam’s main enemy; bin Laden clearly sees himself as playing a role in what Professor Bernard Lewis has described as “the struggle between these two rival systems [that] has now lasted for some fourteen centuries.” Led by the United States and allied with Israel—and, more recently, with
India, Russia, and China—bin Laden identifies the U.S.-led West as “the Crusaders,” and as the primary and most vicious, aggressive, and rapacious enemy of the Islamic world. “America continues to claim that it is upholding the banner of freedom and humanity,” bin Laden has said, “while these deeds [atomic bomb attacks on Japan and attacks and sanctions on Iraq] that they did, you would not find that the most ravenous of animals would descend to.” For bin Laden, the United States is an inhuman and evil entity with a half-century record of humiliating Islam and devastating Muslims. “The thing that needs to be understood,” bin Laden has written, “is that the United States is threatening to use its power to impose a solution of its choice. It considers others as inferior. It feels proud of its arms, resources, and technology. Pride is something that God Almighty greatly dislikes, as it arouses a man to feel superior.” In his 1996 “Declaration of Jihad against the United States,” bin Laden addressed to the world’s Muslims—“his Muslim Brothers in the Whole World,” as Al-Islah termed them—the following detailed indictment of what he called the Crusaders.1
You are not unaware of the injustice, repression, and aggression that have befallen Muslims through the alliance of Jews, Christians, and their agents, so much so that Muslims’ blood and their money and wealth are plundered by their enemies. Your blood has been spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The image of the dreadful massacre in Qana, Lebanon, is still vivid in one’s mind, and so are the massacres in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, the Philippines, Fatani [sic—perhaps Thailand’s Muslim-dominated Pattani Province?], Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya, and Bosnia-Herzegovina where hair-raising and revolting massacres were committed before the eyes of the entire world clearly in accordance with a conspiracy by the United States and its allies who banned arms for the oppressed there under cover of the unfair United Nations. That alerted Muslims to the fact that they are the main target of the Jewish-crusade alliance aggression, and all the false claims [by the United States and the West] about human rights fell under the blows and massacres committed against Muslims everywhere.2
Bin Laden says proof of America’s barbaric international behavior is found everywhere. In addition to repeatedly referring to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples, he cites as U.S.-led anti-Muslim attacks the U.S. role in the bombing and sanctioning of Iraq; Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem; the stationing of U.S. “Christian” forces near Mecca and Medina; the prolonged UN sanctions on Libya, Syria, Iran, and Sudan; and America’s countenancing of Israel’s 1996 “massacre” of civilians at a UN refugee facility at Qana, Lebanon. In his rhetoric, bin Laden portrays Americans and their allies as inhuman creatures that thirst for Muslim blood, delight in gore, and aim to annihilate the Islamic world. This is particularly true when he cites the U.S.-orchestrated UN economic sanctions on Iraq, attributing to the sanctions casualties far greater than those caused by the atomic attacks.
In reviewing these U.S. actions, bin Laden has focused almost obsessively on the deaths of Muslim children. “Those [Westerners] who talk about the loss of innocent people didn’t yet taste how it feels when you lose a child, don’t know how it feels when you look in your child’s eyes and all you see is fear,” bin Laden ominously said in late 2001. “Are they not afraid that one day they [will] get the same treatment?”3
In this area, bin Laden’s language resembles that used by Arab historians to describe actions of the eleventh-century Catholic Crusaders. In his book The Crusades through Arab Eyes, Amin Malouf quotes the Arab historian Osamah Ibn Munqidh, who wrote, after reviewing the Crusaders’ behavior while sacking the Syrian city of Ma’arra in late 1098, that the consensus of “those who are well-informed about the Franj [the Crusaders] saw them as beasts superior in courage and fighting ardor but in nothing else, just as animals are superior in strength and aggression.” Malouf reminds his readers that the record of Crusaders’ depredations, such as the July 1099 sacking of Jerusalem and the attendant slaughter of Muslims, was “preserved and transmitted by local poets and oral tradition” and effectively “shaped an image of the Franj that would not easily fade.”4
Bin Laden’s public words demonstrate his deliberate stoking of the Islamic world’s historical memory of the Crusades, reminding Muslims, as Professor Manstorp has written, that today, as it did a thousand years ago, the Islamic world “stands at a critical juncture in history, threatened by a phased plan by the Judaeo-Christian conspiracy … to gradually de-Islamicize and occupy the Muslim holy places in the Arabian Peninsula.”
Somalia: “Some 13,000 from among our brothers, women, and sons in Somalia were killed [by the Americans] under the banner of the United Nations. Reports, corroborated by photographs, said that our Somali brothers were grilled as if they were sheep.”5
Kosovo and Bosnia: “This condemnation [by Washington of the 1998 East Africa bombings] is meaningless because it comes at a time when Muslim blood is spilled abundantly in Kosovo at the hands of the Serbian butcher, just like it was in Bosnia under the supervision of the U.S. and its allies. Mass graves that accommodated thousands of victims were numerous, and concentration camps, slaughtering, and rape were widespread…. America every time makes a decision to support them [the Serbs] and prevent weapons from reaching Muslims, and allow Serbian butchers to slaughter Muslims…. The evidence overwhelmingly shows America and Israel killing the weaker men, women, and children in the Muslim world and elsewhere…. [For example] there withholding of arms from Muslims of Bosnia Herzegovina leaving them prey to the Christian Serbs who massacred and raped in a manner not seen in contemporary history.”6
Palestine: “The West’s wolves, both Christians and Jews, have set upon them [the Palestinians], slaughtering them and massacring them, violating their honor basely and maliciously and expelling them from their country to be tossed around from country to country.”7
Lebanon: “The mention of the U.S. reminds us before anything else of those innocent children who were dismembered, their heads and arms cut off in the recent explosion that took place in Qana [referring to Israel’s attack on UN refugee facilities, killing 106]. The U.S. Government abandoned even humanitarian feelings by these hideous crimes. It transgressed all bounds in a way not witnessed before by any power or any imperialist power in the world.”8
The American People: “You may have heard these days that almost three quarters of the U.S. people support Clinton’s strikes on Iraq. The [Americans] are a people whose president becomes more popular when he kills innocent people. These are a people who increase support for their president when he commits one of the seven cardinal sins. They are a lowly people who do not understand the meaning of principles…. if the majority of the American people support their dissolute president, this means the American people are fighting us and we have a right to target them.”9
Bin Laden’s purpose in using Crusader-era imagery appears to have several possible explanations. First, of course, it is meant to describe Islam’s Christian enemies in the worst possible terms to make them appear inhuman and immensely dangerous. In this case, bin Laden’s rhetoric is a steeped-in-history siren call to make the Muslim world recognize that the threat from today’s Crusaders is as bloody and barbarous as that which they have been taught was posed by the original Crusaders. Second, by stoking memories of the original Crusaders’ barbarity, bin Laden is trying to deaden Muslim sensibilities to the killing of large numbers of what he has depicted as modern-day Crusaders—military and civilian, men, women, and children—with weapons of mass destruction. Again and again in public remarks, bin Laden returns to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples of America’s disregard for human life and as actions that justify Muslim responses of equal quality. “Did the U.S. forget today, while it is shedding crocodile tears over world security and peace,” bin Laden’s forces asked in the communiqués sent to Al-Hayah claiming responsibility for the August 1998 East Africa bombings, “what it did to the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and how it exterminated them in seconds with its ato
mic bombs?”10
Third, and most important, these descriptions have focused the Muslim world on what bin Laden has wanted to be seen as the main enemy and a single target. Before bin Laden attained prominence and began speaking publicly, Jane’s Intelligence Review noted, “the [Islamic] fundamentalist creed also believes that the secular Arab governments must be overthrown before the greater enemy, the West, can be tackled.” Professor Emmanuel Sivan also made this point in his 1998 analysis of the central role jihad plays in classical and contemporary Islamic theology. “Islamic movements in opposition,” Sivan wrote in the journal Orbis, “tend to concentrate upon its own state context, whose regime is the ‘nearest enemy’ in Muslim legal lingo. ‘Further away enemies,’ such as the state of Israel or the United States, are to be tackled later, after the seizure of power.”11 Bin Laden has labored in public and private to reverse the sequence and claims that “if the United States is beheaded, the Arab Kingdoms will whither away.” Bin Laden has given priority to attacks on the United States and argues that “there must be concentration on hitting the main enemy who has thrust the [Islamic] nation into whirlpools and labyrinths for decades since dividing it into states and statelets.”12 After al Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, Abd-al-Bari Atwan, editor in chief of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, told his readers that the attacks “were the logical results of the unjust and demeaning policies which the United States has been pursuing in the Muslim world.”
Through Our Enemies' Eyes Page 9