Through Our Enemies' Eyes

by Michael Scheuer

  In October 1986, bin Laden established a base camp for non-Afghan Muslim fighters in the mountains southeast of Jalalabad; he and his colleagues called the site “Masadah,” or the “Lions Lair.” Even before the creation of the camp, bin Laden had attracted experienced “Arab ex-military men” to his organization. In particular, two former Egyptian servicemen and senior EIJ members, Abu Ubaydah al-Banshiri and Abu Hafs al-Masri, became training instructors at Masadah and led combat operations launched from the base. At Masadah in 1986–1987, bin Laden and his lieutenants had their hands full trying to control the ardor of the “brother young men.” Abu Mahmud al-Suri has said the would-be mujahedin “persisted in their request to stage military operations. Osama bin Laden tried to pacify and persuade them of the need to construct the site and complete the fortifications first.” Bin Laden, Ali-al Qazlan recalls, “preached patience to the brothers … [but it] was extremely difficult for the young men to keep on working and building shelters and fortifications for seven months without any operations. Therefore the brothers beseeched Osama to carry out operations even if only small ones.” Bin Laden successfully “trained them [the brothers] to be patient,” but his own words wearily testify to the energy spent in the effort. “Here [at Masadah],” bin Laden said, “many things collaborate against them [the Arab volunteers], including distaste for [the physical privations of] jihad, a foreign language, strange weather, and strange terrain. When one is with his brothers, one becomes patient.” The real problem, according to bin Laden, was that “Arab youth have been raised in their countries in a life that is far from the true glory of jihad and of defending the faith.”62

  In mid-April 1987, a Soviet-Afghan force that included two hundred Soviet Special Forces soldiers attacked an Arab unit trained by bin Laden and his lieutenants at Masadah. Bin Laden told Darraz that he and Abu Ubaydah set a trap for the Soviets in which bin Laden led a group of fighters that engaged the Soviet troopers while Abu Ubaydah led a second group to “outflank the Russian force and attack it from the rear.” Darraz reports the trap worked and the Soviets fell back. Bin Laden later recalled that “We were not military persons, we were civilians. No one hesitated, they all moved forward, God honor them. Each one of us ordered the brethren to carry their weapons and move forward. There were nine of them and myself. No one hesitated…. Each of us carried his weapon and moved forward…. While moving, I made sure there was a high hill separating us from the atheists.”63

  Formation of Al Qaeda

  There is little information on whether the fighters of the Lions’ Lair were active in combat between April 1987 and the April 1989 Jalalabad battles in which they played a prominent part. Given the penchant of the “young brothers” to push bin Laden to attack, it can be assumed that additional combat ensued. Whatever the fighting tempo, however, it was in 1988 that bin Laden, probably in cooperation with Abu Ubaydah al-Banshiri, began plans for a multinational insurgent organization that would survive the Afghan jihad and would come to be known as al Qaeda.64 From the sparse data pertaining to al Qaeda, al-Hayat offers, courtesy of the memory of bin Laden associate Abu Mahmud, a concise, coherent picture of what that paper calls “the romantic idea” bin Laden presented in a speech to the “Arab Mujahedin’s Shura Council in Peshawar.” According to Abu Mahmud,

  The al Qaeda idea ran through Osama’s mind for the first time in 1988, namely after the establishment of al-Masadah and after young Arabs began to join the jihad in large numbers with the emergence of the signs of victory in Afghanistan. Osama believed that he could set up an army of young men responding to the jihad call. When he presented the idea to us he did not speak of jihad against Arab regimes, but of helping Muslims against the infidel government oppressing them, as was the case in Palestine, the Philippines, and Kashmir, especially Central Asia, which was under Soviet rule then and no one dreamed that two years later it would be independent.65

  As the insurgents’ victory dawned, few thought about what that meant for the future. Amid the fawning kudos given Gorbachev for withdrawing from Afghanistan—something akin to presenting a medal, flowers, and a Mercedes to a raper when he concedes he is finished with his victim—three central facts were lost. First, in the words of a senior U.S. intelligence official, “[the] Afghans forced the Red Army to withdraw. And that’s a great victory … they knocked off a superpower.”66 Second, in the words of Shaykh Rahman’s adviser, Abdul Sattar, Muslims for the first time thought, “Yes, if I can defeat the evil empire, I can defeat anyone else.”67 Finally, RAND analyst Graham Fuller argued that Sattar’s point was vital for bin Laden and the Saudis who fought in Afghanistan. “What was really important,” he told CNN in April 1977, “was that the Saudis who went and fought became convinced that you simply don’t have to accept regimes as they were, that as a Muslim you could take action against a ruling government.”68

  By 1988 Moscow had more or less accepted its defeat by Afghan “bandit gangs”—the term Moscow derisively used for the Afghan mujahedin and that it now uses for Chechen insurgents—and on 1 February 1989 the last commander of the “Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan” theatrically walked solo across the Oxus River Bridge to Soviet territory. The world, then infatuated with new-look Bolshevik Mikhail Gorbachev, reacted by praising the Soviet leader for his altruistic and humanitarian efforts to end the Afghan war. Most were courteous and did not mention the Soviet military’s abject but barbarous failure in the ten-year struggle; almost none were prescient enough to realize the Soviets were beaten by the Afghans’ character, martial skills and aptitude, patience, valor, and religious faith, all of which inextricably intertwined. While external aid to the Afghan fighters was useful, it was not determinative. External aid simply helped the Afghans to kill Soviets and Afghan Communists more efficiently, using 1980s-vintage AK-47s instead of ancient British rifles left from Anglo-Afghan fracases a century and more ago.

  With the Soviets gone, the Afghan Communist regime defended itself as best it could with a huge and steady supply of arms from its now fair-weather Soviet friends. In his well-informed book, Bear Trap, retired Pakistani brigadier Muhammed Yousef—who managed the nuts and bolts of the Pakistani intelligence service’s support for the Afghans for much of the jihad—wrote that the Soviets gave the Afghan regime about $1.5 billion of military aid between January and June 1989, ensuring Kabul had a “tremendous superiority in the three A’s—artillery, and aircraft, and armor.”69

  The regime did not do too badly. By concentrating forces in major cities—Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif, Jalalabad, and a few others—the regime held off the increasingly factionalized insurgents until spring 1992. For purposes of examining bin Laden’s career, we need only look at the March–July 1989 battles near Jalalabad. These Pakistani-urged and Afghan-fought battles—which failed to capture the city—marked the high point of Arab participation in the jihad, and the actions are viewed by many Arabs, including bin Laden, as the point when Arab fighters began coming of age militarily. “The Arab brethren contributed greatly in these battles,” Arab Afghan Abu Salman told Issam Darraz. “The Afghani commanders became dependent on them … [and the] Jalalabad battles proved the capability of Arab fighters, they participated in numerous liberation operations.” Bin Laden has said that Jalalabad “was a long battle that continued forcefully for several months. During this battle the [Arab] brethren gained a lot of experience that was not possible in other previous battles.” Bin Laden also said that at Jalalabad “more Arab fighters died than the number of [Arab] deaths during the [rest of the] war in Afghanistan.”70 Al-Wasat has said 187 Arabs were killed from bin Laden’s unit alone.71 Bin Laden’s participation in the Jalalabad battles also strengthened his reputation for courage. During the fighting, Ali al-Jazlan has said, “Osama bin Laden was in continuous and direct contact with us. This has boosted our morale.”72

  In early July 1989 the insurgents almost took Jalalabad. Bin Laden and the Arab fighters reached the city airport’s runway, where bin Laden was wounded, but wer
e then soundly beaten by an unexpected counterattack.73 Part of the regime’s forces focused on bin Laden’s Masadah stronghold, bombarding it before sending in mechanized infantry. During the artillery attack, according to Issam Darraz, bin Laden moved his fighters out of Masadah “in order to minimize losses.” When the Afghan force failed to move into Masadah after the bombardment because night had fallen, “Osama bin Laden returned [to Masadah] with a group of youth after the morning prayer. He returned to the heart of the al-Masadah post, and decided to confront the commando force.” Darraz says bin Laden ordered an ambush against the regime forces that was executed “in a perfect fashion under the command of Abu Ubaydah and Abu Hafas [Mohammed Atef],” thereby preventing the capture of the main Arab base.74 Jalalabad also reinforced in bin Laden’s mind the necessity of thorough training, strong organization, and combat experience for his fighters.

  Managing a long battle for several months was a difficult task. The forces will be in a state of continuous pressure. You are in need of continuous logistical support, you also need facilities to evacuate the injured and to carry the dead persons, we pray to God to accept them as martyrs. Also there is a need for someone to stay in the observatories [observation posts] to monitor enemy movements and to properly direct fire at them. The brethren’s experience in using rockets, mortars and artillery has been broadened. Moreover, they used maps in order to determine the distance and direction of the target, so that it is fired on the basis of the [co]ordinates according to military terminology.75

  Despite keeping Masadah, bin Laden recognized the mujahedin had let victory at Jalalabad slip away. He also had learned that his Arab fighters still needed to improve many aspects of their combat performance. After the Jalalabad battles, Abu Salman recalls that in the Afghan border town of Towr Kham, bin Laden “stood between the youth and lectured them, saying: ‘It is possible that the enemy’s success in attacking the Mujahedin is due to our mistakes, we must learn from these mistakes.’” Abu Salman says the fighters took bin Laden’s words to heart and “started paying attention to matters they never paid attention to in the past, matters such as good hiding and camouflaging, and weapons and equipment hiding.” Bin Laden also says that after the battles, he and other Arab leaders used the captured “heavy long-range field guns … tanks and armored vehicles” to train their fighters. Issam Darrraz makes the point that Jalalabad served as an “independent school” for the Arab Afghans and that they emerged from it better able to fight as, and against, conventional forces. The current strength and vitality of the Islamist insurgencies battling conventional forces in Kashmir, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and the Philippines—each of which is leavened with veteran Arab Afghans—seems to validate Darraz’s judgment.76

  ”Lessons” Learned for bin Laden and Islamists

  The last of the 1989 Jalalabad battles marked the end of bin Laden’s first tour in Afghanistan. When it became clear that the city would not fall, bin Laden went to Saudi Arabia for what he intended to be a short visit. In his absence, the Afghan jihad continued, because the Afghan Communist regime proved much more durable than most in the West, including, alas, me, had anticipated. While for the rest of the world the nature of the Afghan conflict changed into a civil war after the Soviet withdrawal—with the West’s new goal being not a mujahedin victory, but a UN-brokered “broad-based government” installed by elections—the Afghan Islamist guerrilla leaders simply shrugged and continued the war. They had started the jihad against the Afghan Communists before the Soviets invaded, and they intended to fight until the Afghan Communists were eliminated.

  The Afghans’ faith in this clear path to victory is plain in an anecdote related by a then-junior foreign service officer. In 1988 this officer sat in on a meeting in Pakistan between a senior pro-mujahedin Western ambassador and the Afghan resistance chief Yunis Khalis. The diplomat opened by telling Khalis that because Gorbachev was showing a willingness to withdrawal, the mujahedin should reduce combat operations to ease the Soviet exit. Khalis quietly responded, “No, we will kill them until they go.” The diplomat then rephrased his argument, stressing that Moscow’s withdrawal was produced by pressure from the West and that this pressure would be stronger if the Afghans slowed attacks on the Red Army. Khalis, as he walked away, simply repeated, “No, they will leave because we are killing them, and we will kill them until they leave. If we keep killing them, they will go.” Bin Laden, it appears, took Khalis’s lesson to heart. Asked by journalist John Miller how U.S. troops would be removed from Saudi Arabia and the Islamic world, bin Laden simply said, “You will leave when the [Islamic] youth send you in wooden boxes and coffins. And you will carry in them the bodies of American troops and children. This is when you will leave.”77

  The war-must-go-on mind-set was starkly apparent to the relatively few Westerners who followed the thought processes of the only Afghans who genuinely counted between 1979 and 1989—those Islamist lads with the guns, the field commanders. To the rest of the West’s “Afghan watchers,” the idea that the jihad would be finished on the battlefield was anachronistic, unthinkable, and unfashionably barbaric. For these folks, the only solution was for the diplomats to take over and construct a popularly elected, all-party government—not unlike the attitude that prevails in 2005 among Western political leaders and diplomats. But the Afghan jihadists meant to finish with guns what they started with guns: establish God’s rule in Afghanistan and then sort things out. In fact, it is vital to recall that, next to the Soviets, the biggest losers in Afghanistan were the Muslim world’s Western-minded scholars, politicians, and intellectuals who had worked to build democracy and political pluralism in the Muslim world. These people had long ignored what Tarik Masoud has said is the basic political fact, that “there is no grassroots movement for democracy in the Arab world, largely because democracy does not resonate with the average Arab. It has no basis in the Arab past and is tainted by its association with the West.” Concurring, bin Laden has argued—like his mentor Sayyid Qutb—that popular participation is incompatible with Islam. “Consultation is very important in Islam,” bin Laden told the media in 1997, “but the consultation can be held only to appoint a pious and wise person as ruler.” The Afghan jihad confronted the theoreticians of democratic Islam with a hard reality. The Red Army was not defeated by a democratic revolution, but by an Islamist revolution grounded, guided, and steeled by God’s words as found in the Koran and explained by the Prophet. Driven by their faith, the mujahedin used bullets, not votes, to win one for Allah, and by so doing revalidated jihad as Islam’s normative response to attack.78 The experience and outcome of the Afghan jihad was of immense consequence to the future of Osama bin Laden and other Islamists. Bin Laden and many other non-Afghan mujahedin emerged from the jihad with some characteristics of the Afghan commanders—patience, stoicism, sound judgment, and unquestioning faith in Allah’s ultimate victory—and having lost traits typical of non-Afghan Muslims who had joined the jihad and haphazardly raced for martyrdom. The major non-Afghan Islamist leaders of the jihad, moreover, recognized the unprecedented opportunity for the rejuvenation of armed jihad across the Islamic world. “The [Islamic] nation is asleep and Afghanistan is the route,” Shaykh Azzam wrote. “It is the route of training and preparations and to build fighting cadres for this nation.”

  For Osama bin Laden and many Afghan and non-Afghan mujahedin, the jihad’s success against the Soviets and Afghan Communists was first and most important a victory for Islam—for Allah, for his Prophet, and for all Muslims—that would, as journalist Eric Margolis has written, illuminate “a path that would lead the downtrodden Islamic world to renewal and dignity.”79 Religion and the desire to serve and sacrifice in God’s name had been what motivated bin Laden and thousands of other Arabs and non-Afghan Muslims to come to Afghanistan.

  While the Afghan fighters and the Arab Afghans were equally ready to give their lives in God’s cause, the latter were much less confident that the jihad would end victoriously. The
re is a sense that the Afghan mujahedin always were completely confident that they would see the humiliating ouster of the Soviets, not only because Allah protects and ensures success for those battling infidels in his name but also simply because they were Afghans and therefore had long experience in defeating great powers, including a Macedonian named Alexander and the queen empress of the British Empire. The Arabs and non-Afghan Muslim fighters, in contrast, while confident in Allah’s promise of paradise for martyred holy warriors, had not beaten anyone militarily for centuries. They learned in school about the glories won by Saladin’s sword, but their most recent martial memories were of having seen Arabs whipped by Israelis on three occasions, and of likewise seeing Muslim Pakistan thrice whacked by infidel India. Like the young boy whose parents really do give him a BB gun for Christmas, the Afghan Arabs were surely delighted with the jihad’s outcome, but also must have been slightly disoriented by the reality of victory.