In this hospitable environment, bin Laden and his lieutenants have labored to win the media’s favor and respect. After returning to Afghanistan, for example, bin Laden made himself available to Pakistani journalists far more regularly than to any others. In late 1998, bin Laden wrote to a Peshawar editor stressing the vital role of Muslim media in jihad. “We realize that successful journalistic work,” bin Laden wrote, “is one of the most important weapons which our [Islamic] nation is armed in its current battle.” The Islamic media, bin Laden said, must confront and defeat the West’s use of “the largest media machine against us to erase the facts and spread lies in order to deceive our new generations in regard to the nature of the battle and to distract them from the secrets of power.” Not willing to rely on moral suasion, there are reports that cash accompanies bin Laden’s arguments. Al-Hayah, for example, has said bin Laden is “buying off” Pakistani journalists, authors, and publishers to ensure full and favorable media coverage.46
Bin Laden also might have used money to influence Pakistani politics. In this realm, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto—herself a reputed past master of corrupt practices—has accused deposed Prime Minister Sharif of using funds from bin Laden to try to defeat her government. Bhutto claimed that bin Laden sent Sharif money in the 1980s “to buy parliamentary deputies for an unsuccessful no-confidence vote to oust her as Pakistani prime minister.” This claim was amplified in July 1999 when the Islamabad paper Al-Akhbar claimed, “before the elections in 1990, Osama bin Laden’s friends and relatives gave Nawaz Sharif one billion rupees.” While there is no definitive proof for the claims by Bhutto and Al-Akhbar, they are interesting. And it is true, at least from bin Laden’s perspective, that Sharif “always played an exemplary role in the Afghan jihad,” while Benazir trimmed and tacked as warranted by her political fortunes and the demands of her close American friends. Bin Laden also bitterly complained that Bhutto and her party prevented the Arab Afghans from fighting Indian forces in Kashmir after the Soviets left Afghanistan. “We wanted to go to Kashmir for a jihad after the Afghan jihad ended,” bin Laden told Pakistani journalist Abu Shiraz in 1998, “but the People’s Party Government in Pakistan did not allow us, but rather arrested a lot of our mujahid brothers from Peshawar and handed them over to the governments concerned on the instructions of the United States.”47 In addition, bin Laden has no use for the democratic system and it is safe to assume he had little use for the concept or reality of a female prime minister in a Muslim country.
With Pakistani public opinion already favorably disposed toward him, the 20 August 1998 U.S. attack on Khowst and the violation of Pakistani airspace it unavoidably entailed gave bin Laden’s popularity and anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan a substantial and enduring boost. In its 21 August 1998 Lahore edition, for example, the Nation said, “a large cross-section of Lahoreites describe him [bin Laden] as a Muslim Hero of modern times…. But perhaps in the wake of strong [post–cruise missile strike] anti-American sentiments, which prevail more strongly in the masses, the general perception was that in Osama’s taking up arms against the West, they see the resurgence of the era of the Sultan Salahud Din Ayubi [Saladin] who waged a holy war against evil forces.”48
After touching base with the public and media, bin Laden next sought strategic depth in Pakistan by seeking support from the country’s religious elders and most religiously motivated political leaders. The former seem to have been an easy sell, and bin Laden sent his number two, Mohammed Atef, to meet senior Islamic clerics in Muzafarabad, Peshawar, and Karachi to “coordinate positions … in the face of U.S. hegemony in the Islamic world.”49 Among the latter, bin Laden’s allies in the Harakat al-Mujahedin (HUM) helpfully “decided to spread the ‘message’ of Osama bin Laden all over Pakistan.”50 The HUM’s action was no surprise, because bin Laden had courted the group for years, visiting its senior leaders and exerting “a very powerful hold on the minds of the movement’s members.” Several HUM fighters had been killed in the 1998 U.S. missile strike on Khowst, where bin Laden has long supported HUM training camps. Bin Laden also sent cadre to join HUM forces in Kashmir, and violently denounced the U.S. government in 1997 when it placed the HUM—then known as the HUA—on its proscribed list of terrorist organizations. At that time, bin Laden said the U.S. action was expected because Americans always work “against an organization fighting for truth and justice.” He damned the United States for failing to “see the dishonoring of thousands of Kashmiri Muslim women by Indian security forces,” and asked the Muslim world to support the HUA because it “is a mujahid organization which played [a] commendable part in Afghanistan and in Kashmir [and] also is playing an important role in the [international] Islamic jihad.” Because of the HUM’s post-August 1998 efforts to spread bin Laden’s message, according to the News, “independent authorities confirmed that audio-taped Arabic speeches of Osama bin Laden with their translation in Urdu and Pashto were being distributed from some mosques in all major cities of the country.”51
Bin Laden’s courting of Pakistan’s religious establishment, which fathered the Taliban, had the benefit of keeping the Taliban and Pakistan’s politicians on the straight and narrow regarding his residence in Afghanistan. Mullah Omar and many senior Taliban clerics received theological training in Pakistani religious schools, or madrassas, and Pakistan’s senior Islamic scholars and jurists will not reject their successful offspring.52 After the Taliban leaders decided to host and protect bin Laden, their Pakistani mentors could be counted on to keep them up to mark. For example, Shaykh Mufti Nizam al-Din, whom Al-Quds Al-Arabi has identified as “the most outstanding authority on the Prophet’s sayings in Pakistan,” bluntly warned Sharif’s government that if it “or any other government helps the Americans against Shaykh Bin Laden, it will be necessary to call for a jihad against these governments and that Muslims should help to overthrow the rulers who help the Americans.”53 The leader of two Islamic universities in Pakistan that have produced at least 30 percent of the Taliban’s leaders and thousands of its followers, Maulana Sami al-Haq, also underscored religious support for bin Laden. “For each of the thousands of Pakistani and Afghan Taliban studying in my two universities,” Haq said, “Osama bin Laden is an ultimate hero. I can see that our youth are getting desperate to pay back the Americans in their own coin.”54 Finally, in July 1999, a panel of senior Pakistani religious scholars went to Kandahar to make “it clear to Supreme Leader Mullah Omar that [the] Taliban’s cooperation with the United States against Osama would affect the Taliban’s position.”55
Musharraf Reverses, bin Laden and Omar Stay the Course
Since the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf appears to have taken up permanent residence between the proverbial rock and a hard place. In an effort to avoid American ire and win Western aid for Pakistan’s failing economy, Musharraf provided bases from which the U.S. military has attacked bin Laden and took an array of policy gambles that would have stunned the most experienced riverboat gambler. In fewer than ninety days, Musharraf reversed twenty-two years of Pakistani Afghan policy and helped to unseat the first genuinely pro-Pakistan government in Kabul since partition of the subcontinent. He next announced steps to begin backing Pakistan away from its historic support for the jihad in Kashmir, in essence, according to the daily the Nation, reversing “54 years of the Kashmir policy” and throwing the “Kashmiris and the Kashmir cause to the wolves.”56 Finally, Musharraf embarked on a program to reduce the political power and armaments of the country’s religious parties and mandated changes that would moderate the content of the Islamic education presented by the vast, mujahedin-producing network of religious schools, or madrassas, in Pakistan.
With each of these steps, Musharraf struck at Islam—the core of Pakistan’s national identity and the glue that binds its multiethnic society—and he has not yet earned an even remotely acceptable return on his investment. He has won some economic aid, but not enough to stop the economy’s
deterioration. He also has not been able to pry loose from the United States Pakistan’s long bought-and-paid-for F-16s. Thus, his support for the U.S. war on terrorism has not won the expected large-scale benefits. His Afghan policy has been described as “earning Afghanistan’s enmity” and nothing else. “With an enemy already to the east of us [India], but now one to the West also,” Gauhar Humayun wrote in the Nation in November 2001, “Pakistan is the quintessential meat in the sandwich.”57 The goal of Musharraf’s moves to tame militant Islam in Pakistan have received some positive domestic response, but they are increasingly opposed because they are being characterized as kowtowing to the Americans, who, the prestigious daily Nawa-I-Waqt argued, “will try to target the jihadi organizations and the religious seminaries in Pakistan by declaring them as terrorist camps.”58 Adding to Musharraf’s troubles, New Delhi has befriended the new regime in Kabul—a historic Pakistani dread—and is trying to coerce Musharraf into placing more drastic and humiliating limits on Pakistan’s Islamists and the Kashmiris by staging an unprecedented military mobilization that has the subcontinent on the brink of war.
Can Musharraf make his changes stick, bring the country’s ardent, well-armed Islamists to heel, re-create an ally in Kabul, and avoid a war with India? Who knows? It is not even clear, given Musharraf’s survival and minimal civil unrest in Pakistan, that his radical policy shifts are pinching those they are aimed at as severely as is believed in the West. What is clear, however, is that bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and the Taliban are betting Musharraf’s policies are a stopgap that will fail and that he will end up backtracking or ousted. In a situation where bin Laden and Omar could rightly feel betrayed, they carefully have avoided condemning Pakistan for its actions and limited themselves to criticizing Musharraf in a nonthreatening manner. “We realize that Pakistan changed its Afghan policy under pressure from the U.S.,” the Taliban minister of education said more in sorrow than anger. “But we didn’t expect the Pakistani government to start a propaganda against the Taliban after remaining our friend for years.”59 Even the deposed Taliban leader sought only to shame Musharraf. “It is a matter of regret,” Omar said of Musharraf’s policies, “for those who have turned their backs on Islam and the proud history of their ancestors and turned their face toward the Americans.”60 Joining the Taliban to make sure no bridges to Pakistan are destroyed, bin Laden gently dismissed Musharraf—saying that he “disappointed us … and will receive punishment from God and the Pakistani people”—and asserted that the Islamization of Pakistan cannot be reversed and that he was sure Pakistanis remained on his side and the Taliban’s.61 He also reiterated that “Pakistan is the first line of defense of Islam in this region,” and reassured Pakistanis that “we will not let the ‘Pakistani land and its people’ stand alone” if they are attacked.62
12
BIN LADEN IN AFGHANISTAN: TARGETING AMERICA AND EXPANDING AL QAEDA
There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against them both.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 23 December 1776
As they did when they were based in Sudan, bin Laden and his lieutenants worked from their Afghan headquarters to expand al Qaeda’s international presence and to increase the range and lethality of its military capabilities. Central to this effort was bin Laden’s struggle to reorient the targeting of his allies, especially the Gama’at and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). In the 1980s and most of the 1990s, the ambitions of Sunni Islamist insurgent and terrorist organizations were overwhelmingly aimed against individual nations. The Egyptian groups wanted to overthrow the Sadat and Mubarak regimes, the Algerians wanted to destroy the secular government in Algiers, the Afghans wanted their country back from the Soviet and Afghan Communists, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and Abu Sayyaf wanted Mindanao for an independent Islamic homeland in the Philippines, and some of the Kashmiris wanted an independent nation, not an entity that would be folded into Pakistan. All the groups fought in the name of Allah, the Prophet Mohammed, and the Koran, but their goals were nation specific; they did not conceive or claim, at this stage, that they were fighting to restore the freedom and dignity of the ummah, the borderless worldwide Muslim community. That would come later, after the defeat of what the Koran described as the “near enemy.”
Refocusing on America
Bin Laden has long opposed the Islamists’ focus on defeating individual national governments and consistently has argued that for Muslims “geographical boundaries have no importance,” adding that it is “incumbent on all Muslims to ignore these borders and boundaries, which the kuffar have laid down between Muslim lands, the Jews and the Christians, for the sole purpose of dividing us.” In the context of these words, an “Arab intellectual” who claims to be a friend of bin Laden has said, “bin Laden himself comes from a generation that dreams of one Arab nation united by Islam. If he survives the next few years, he will be the most important example for the jihadist movement, equal to Khomeni. All revolutionary jihadist armies respect him.”1 In Afghanistan, then, after May 1996, bin Laden would prove he had moved past aiming for “an Arab nation united by Islam” and now aspired to unite the ummah and “remove Americans from all Muslim land.” In late 1996 bin Laden told Al-Quds Al-Arabi that “I am not addressing the sons of the [Arabian] peninsula only; U.S. interests exist throughout the Islamic world.”2
In reality, bin Laden started the framework for an international organization in the early 1980s when he began, as he told British journalist Robert Fisk, to move “not hundreds but thousands” of Muslim volunteers to fight in Afghanistan.3 As noted, bin Laden built a unique, multiethnic organization that includes not just Arabs but Muslims from the world over. When forging this organization, bin Laden first addressed the Egyptian Gama’at al-Islamiyya (IG) and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), his most militarily proficient allies.
Bin Laden began pushing for the unification of the IG and the EIJ during the Afghan jihad. By mid-1996, the two groups were talking, but unity remained elusive, as it does today. At that point, bin Laden’s efforts toward uniting the two organizations suffered a sharp blow when al Qaeda’s military commander, Abu Ubaydah, drowned in Uganda’s Lake Victoria. Abu Ubaydah had been bin Laden’s agent for resolving the IG-EIJ conflict and was the author of the concept of a multiethnic “Islamic Army” with the united Egyptian groups at its core.4
Faced with each group’s recalcitrance, and minus the solvent Abu Ubaydah brought to intra-Egyptian problems, bin Laden appears to have changed tack and to have tried to focus EIJ and IG attacks on U.S. interests, perhaps hoping that by doing so the groups would move closer together notwithstanding their divergent views on theology, leadership, and targets. According to EIJ leader al-Najjar, bin Laden put his point to the EIJ and IG leaders in a simple manner. “I myself heard bin Laden say,” al-Najjar told Egyptian authorities, “that our main objective is limited to one state only, the United States, and involves waging a guerrilla war against all U.S. interests not only in the Arab region but also throughout the world, and that this operation on the whole would ultimately force the United States and those gravitating within its sphere to review their policies toward the Islamic groups.”5 Al-Najjar said bin Laden believed
The Jewish lobby controlled the United States and [this] was the reason for the weakness of Muslim peoples and governments and that removing this [American] hegemony must be a principal objective. Therefore, one of the front’s primary objectives was to rid Arab and Islamic territories of U.S. hegemony by launching a guerrilla war targeting all U.S. interests, not only in Arab and Islamic countries, but worldwide. The
purpose of these operations was to compel the United States and those who help it to review their policies on Arab and Islamic issues. This meant that the front’s objective was to direct U.S. policy. Bin Laden also believes that the achievement of this objective, despite his weak resources and small forces compared to the Arab and Islamic resources and armies, will show the extent of these countries’ weakness.6
Al-Najjar’s description of bin Laden’s U.S.-focused policy is seconded by Abd al-Bari Atwan of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, who interviewed bin Laden after he returned to Afghanistan. In June 1999 Atwan told Qatar’s Al-Jazirah television
I felt that the man [bin Laden] had his own vision and special strategy. This strategy is based on his concept of the region. The first point in his strategy is that the U.S. administration or U.S. forces, which he considers occupation forces in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, are a prelude to a comprehensive Israeli-Jewish hegemony over the region with the aim of looting its wealth and humiliating its Muslim people. One senses that this is the essence of his creed and strategy. Therefore, he believes that expelling the U.S. forces from the Arab world is a top priority. He believes that the regimes [in the Muslim world] should be reformed or, more correctly, changed. The regimes immune to reform should be changed…. This is a summary of his strategy. Currently, he does not want to fight the regimes. That is what he told me. He wants to fight the Americans, who are protecting the regimes.7
Bin Laden pitched the America-first policy hardest and with most success to EIJ leader Zawahiri and his colleagues, particularly with EIJ military chief Muhammad Muhandis Zawahiri, Aiman’s younger brother and a popular, influential figure in the group. Still, the elder Zawahiri faced stiff opposition from many in the EIJ over his intention to drop the group’s historic Egypt-first orientation. “Some Jihad leaders,” Al-Hayah reported, “objected to al-Zawahiri’s insistence on cooperating with bin Laden, saying that that had caused the Jihad group to deviate from its main aim [establishing an Islamic state in Egypt through a military coup] and pushed the organization into battle with the United States, a battle whose results include the U.S. intelligence service’s pursuit of the organization’s elements over more than one state.”8
Through Our Enemies' Eyes Page 27