by Ahmed Rashid
‘The war,’ wrote Samuel Huntington, ‘left behind an uneasy coalition of Islamist organizations intent on promoting Islam against all non-Muslim forces. It also left a legacy of expert and experienced fighters, training camps and logistical facilities, elaborate trans-Islam networks of personal and organization relationships, a substantial amount of military equipment including 300 to 500 unaccounted-for Stinger missiles, and, most important, a heady sense of power and self-confidence over what had been achieved and a driving desire to move on to other victories.’4
Most of these radicals speculated that if the Afghan jihad had defeated one superpower, the Soviet Union, could they not also defeat the other superpower, the US and their own regimes? The logic of this argument was based on the simple premise that the Afghan jihad alone had brought the Soviet state to its knees. The multiple internal reasons which led to the collapse of the Soviet system, of which the jihad was only one, were conveniently ignored. So while the USA saw the collapse of the Soviet state as the failure of the communist system, many Muslims saw it solely as a victory for Islam. For militants this belief was inspiring and deeply evocative of the Muslim sweep across the world in the seventh and eighth centuries. A new Islamic Ummah, they argued, could be forged by the sacrifices and blood of a new generation of martyrs and more such victories.
Amongst these thousands of foreign recruits was a young Saudi student Osama Bin Laden, the son of a Yemeni construction magnate Mohammed Bin Laden who was a close friend of the late King Faisal and whose company had become fabulously wealthy on the contracts to renovate and expand the Holy Mosques of Mecca and Medina. The ISI had long wanted Prince Turki Bin Faisal, the head of Istakhbarat, the Saudi Intelligence Service, to provide a Royal Prince to lead the Saudi contingent in order to show Muslims the commitment of the Royal Family to the jihad. Only poorer Saudis, students, taxi-drivers and Bedouin tribesmen had so far arrived to fight. But no pampered Saudi Prince was ready to rough it out in the Afghan mountains. Bin Laden, although not a royal, was close enough to the royals and certainly wealthy enough to lead the Saudi contingent. Bin Laden, Prince Turki and General Gul were to become firm friends and allies in a common cause.
The centre for the Arab-Afghans was the offices of the World Muslim League and the Muslim Brotherhood in Peshawar which was run by Abdullah Azam, a Jordanian Palestinian whom Bin Laden had first met at university in Jeddah and revered as his leader. Azam and his two sons were assassinated by a bomb blast in Peshawar in 1989. During the 1980s Azam had forged close links with Hikmetyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the Afghan Islamic scholar, whom the Saudis had sent to Peshawar to promote Wahabbism. Saudi funds flowed to Azam and the Makhtab al Khid-mat or Services Centre which he created in 1984 to service the new recruits and receive donations from Islamic charities. Donations from Saudi Intelligence, the Saudi Red Crescent, the World Muslim League and private donations from Saudi princes and mosques were channelled through the Makhtab. A decade later the Makhtab would emerge at the centre of a web of radical organizations that helped carry out the World Trade Centre bombing and the bombings of US Embassies in Africa in 1998.
Until he arrived in Afghanistan, Bin Laden's life had hardly been marked by anything extraordinary. He was born around 1957, the 17th of 57 children sired by his Yemeni father and a Saudi mother, one of Mohammed Bin Laden's many wives. Bin Laden studied for a Masters degree in business administration at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah but soon switched to Islamic studies. Thin and tall, he is six feet five inches, with long limbs and a flowing beard, he towered above his contemporaries who remember him as a quiet and pious individual but hardly marked out for greater things.5
His father backed the Afghan struggle and helped fund it, so when Bin Laden decided to join up, his family responded enthusiastically. He first travelled to Peshawar in 1980 and met the Mujaheddin leaders, returning frequently with Saudi donations for the cause until 1982 when he decided to settle in Peshawar. He brought in his company engineers and heavy construction equipment to help build roads and depots for the Mujaheddin. In 1986 he helped build the Khost tunnel complex, which the CIA was funding as a major arms storage depot, training facility and medical centre for the Mujaheddin, deep under the mountains close to the Pakistan border. For the first time in Khost he set up his own training camp for Arab Afghans, who now increasingly saw this lanky, wealthy and charismatic Saudi as their leader.
‘To counter these atheist Russians, the Saudis chose me as their representative in Afghanistan,’ Bin Laden said later. ‘I settled in Pakistan in the Afghan border region. There I received volunteers who came from the Saudi Kingdom and from all over the Arab and Muslim countries. I set up my first camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis. I discovered that it was not enough to fight in Afghanistan, but that we had to fight on all fronts, communist or Western oppression,’ he added.6
Bin Laden later claimed to have taken part in ambushes against Soviet troops, but he mainly used his wealth and Saudi donations to build Mujaheddin projects and spread Wahabbism amongst the Afghans. After the death of Azam in 1989, he took over Azam's organization and set up Al Qaeda or Military Base as a service centre for Arab-Afghans and their familes and to forge a broad-based alliance amongst them. With the help of Bin Laden, several thousand Arab militants had established bases in the provinces of Kunar, Nuristan and Badakhshan, but their extreme Wahabbi practices made them intensely disliked by the majority of Afghans. Moreover by allying themselves with the most extreme pro-Wahabbi Pashtun Mujaheddin, the Arab-Afghans alienated the non-Pashtuns and the Shia Muslims.
Ahmed Shah Masud later criticized the Arab-Afghans. ‘My jihad faction did not have good relations with the Arab-Afghans during the years of jihad. In contrast they had very good relations with the factions of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Gulbuddin Hikmetyar. When my faction entered Kabul in 1992, the Arab-Afghans fought in the ranks of Hikmetyar's forces against us. We will ask them (Arabs) to leave our country. Bin Laden does more harm than good,’ Masud said in 1997 after he had been ousted from Kabul by the Taliban.7
By 1990 Bin Laden was disillusioned by the internal bickering of the Mujaheddin and he returned to Saudi Arabia to work in the family business. He founded a welfare organization for Arab-Afghan veterans, some 4,000 of whom had settled in Mecca and Medina alone, and gave money to the families of those killed. After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait he lobbied the Royal Family to organize a popular defence of the Kingdom and raise a force from the Afghan war veterans to fight Iraq. Instead King Fahd invited in the Americans. This came as an enormous shock to Bin Laden. As the 540,000 US troops began to arrive, Bin Laden openly criticized the Royal Family, lobbying the Saudi ulema to issue fatwas, religious rulings, against non-Muslims being based in the country.
Bin Laden's criticism escalated after some 20,000 US troops continued to be based in Saudi Arabia after Kuwait's liberation. In 1992 he had a fiery meeting with Interior Minister Prince Naif whom he called a traitor to Islam. Naif complained to King Fahd and Bin Laden was declared persona non grata. Nevertheless he still had allies in the Royal Family, who also disliked Naif while he maintained his links with both Saudi Intelligence and the ISI.
In 1992 Bin Laden left for Sudan to take part in the Islamic revolution underway there under the charismatic Sudanese leader Hassan Turabi. Bin Laden's continued criticism of the Saudi Royal Family eventually annoyed them so much that they took the unprecedented step of revoking his citizenship in 1994. It was in Sudan, with his wealth and contacts that Bin Laden gathered around him more veterans of the Afghan war, who were all disgusted by the American victory over Iraq and the attitude of the Arab ruling elites who allowed the US military to remain in the Gulf. As US and Saudi pressure mounted against Sudan for harbouring Bin Laden, the Sudanese authorities asked him to leave.
In May 1996 Bin Laden travelled back to Afghanistan, arriving in Jalalabad in a chartered jet with an entourage
of dozens of Arab militants, bodyguards and family members including three wives and 13 children. Here he lived under the protection of the Jalalabad Shura until the conquest of Kabul and Jalalabad by the Taliban in September 1996. In August 1996 he had issued his first declaration of jihad against the Americans whom he said were occupying Saudi Arabia. ‘The walls of oppression and humiliation cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets,’ the declaration read. Striking up a friendship with Mullah Omar, in 1997 he moved to Kandahar and came under the protection of the Taliban.
By now the CIA had set up a special cell to monitor his activities and his links with other Islamic militants. A US State Department report in August 1996 noted that Bin Laden was ‘one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world’. The report said that Bin Laden was financing terrorist camps in Somalia, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Egypt and Afghanistan. In April 1996, President Clinton signed the Anti-Terrorism Act which allowed the US to block assets of terrorist organizations. It was first used to block Bin Laden's access to his fortune of an estimated US$250-300 million.8 A few months later Egyptian intelligence declared that Bin Laden was training 1,000 militants, a second generation of Arab-Afghans, to bring about an Islamic revolution in Arab countries.9
In early 1997 the CIA constituted a squad which arrived in Peshawar to try and carry out a snatch operation to get Bin Laden out of Afghanistan. The Americans enlisted Afghans and Pakistanis to help them but aborted the operation. The US activity in Peshawar helped persuade Bin Laden to move to the safer confines of Kandahar. On 23 February 1998, at a meeting in the original Khost camp, all the groups associated with Al Qaeda issued a manifesto under the aegis of ‘The International Islamic Front for jihad against Jews and Crusaders’. The manifesto stated ‘for more than seven years the US has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian peninsular, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbours, and turning its bases in the peninsular into a spearhead through which to fight the neighbouring Muslim peoples’.
The meeting issued a fatwa. ‘The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to.’ Bin Laden had now formulated a policy that was not just aimed at the Saudi Royal Family or the Americans but called for the liberation of the entire Muslim Middle East. As the American air war against Iraq escalated in 1998, Bin Laden called on all Muslims to ‘confront, fight and kill’ Americans and Britons.10
However, it was the bombings in August 1998 of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 220 people which made Bin Laden a household name in the Muslim world and the West. Just 13 days later, after accusing Bin Laden of perpetrating the attack, the USA retaliated by firing 70 cruise missiles against Bin Laden's camps around Khost and Jalalabad. Several camps which had been handed over by the Taliban to the Arab-Afghans and Pakistani radical groups were hit. The Al Badr camp controlled by Bin Laden and the Khalid bin Walid and Muawia camps run by the Pakistani Harakat ul Ansar were the main targets. Harakat used their camps to train militants for fighting Indian troops in Kashmir. Seven outsiders were killed in the strike – three Yemenis, two Egyptians, one Saudi and one Turk. Also killed were seven Pakistanis and 20 Afghans.
In November 1998 the USA offered a US$5-million reward for Bin Laden's capture. The Americans were further galvanized when Bin Laden claimed that it was his Islamic duty to acquire chemical and nuclear weapons to use against the USA. ‘It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims. Hostility towards America is a religious duty and we hope to be rewarded for it by God,’ he said.11
Within a few weeks of the Africa bombings, the Clinton administration had demonized Bin Laden to the point of blaming him for every atrocity committed against the USA in the Muslim world in recent times. In the subsequent indictment against him by a New York court, Bin Laden was blamed for the 18 American soldiers killed in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993; the deaths of five servicemen in a bomb attack in Riyadh in 1995 and the deaths of another 19 US soldiers in Dhahran in 1996. He was also suspected of having a hand in bombings in Aden in 1992, the World Trade Centre bombing in 1993, a 1994 plot to kill President Clinton in the Phillipines and a plan to blow up a dozen US civilian aircraft in 1995.12 There was a great deal of scepticism, even amongst US experts that he was involved in many of these latter operations.13
But the Clinton administration was desperately looking for a diversion as it wallowed through the mire of the Monica Lewinsky affair and also needed an all-purpose, simple explanation for unexplained terrorist acts. Bin Laden became the centre of what was promulgated by Washington as a global conspiracy against the USA. What Washington was not prepared to admit was that the Afghan jihad, with the support of the CIA, had spawned dozens of fundamentalist movements across the Muslim world which were led by militants who had grievances, not so much against the Americans, but their own corrupt, incompetent regimes. As early as 1992-93 Egyptian and Algerian leaders at the highest level had advised Washington to re-engage diplomatically in Afghanistan in order to bring about peace so as to end the presence of the Arab-Afghans. Washington ignored the warnings and continued to ignore Afghanistan even as the civil war there escalated.14
The Algerians were justified in their fears, for the first major eruption from the ranks of the Arab-Afghans came in Algeria. In 1991 the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won the first round of parliamentary elections taking some 60 per cent of the seats countrywide. The Algerian army cancelled the results, declared Presidential rule in January 1992 and within two months a vicious civil war began which had claimed some 70,000 lives by 1999. FIS itself was outmanoeuvered by the more extreme Islamic Jihad, which in 1995 changed its name to the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). GIA was led by Algerian Afghans – Algerian veterans from the Afghan war – who were neo-Wahabbis and set an agenda that was to plunge Algeria into a bloodbath, destabilize North Africa and lead to the growth of Islamic extremism in France. Algeria was only a foretaste of what was to come later. Bombings carried out in Egypt by Islamic groups were also traced back to Egyptian veterans trained in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden knew many of the perpetrators of these violent acts across the Muslim world, because they had lived and fought together in Afghanistan. His organization, focused around supporting veterans of the Afghan war and their families, maintained contacts with them. He may well have funded some of their operations, but he was unlikely to know what they were all up to or what their domestic agendas were. Bin Laden has always been insecure within the architecture of Islam. He is neither an Islamic scholar nor a teacher and thus cannot legally issue fatwas -although he does so. In the West his ‘Death to America’ appeals have been read as fatwas, even though they do not carry moral weight in the Muslim world.
Arab-Afghans who knew him during the jihad say he was neither intellectual nor articulate about what needed to be done in the Muslim world. In that sense he was neither the Lenin of the Islamic revolution, nor was he the internationalist ideologue of the Islamic revolution such as Che Guevera was to revolution in the third world.
Bin Laden's former associates describe him as deeply impressionable, always in the need for mentors – men who knew more about both Islam and the modern world than he did. To the long list of mentors during his youth were later added Dr Aiman al-Zawahiri, the head of the banned Islamic Jihad in Egypt and the two sons of Shaikh Omar Abdel Rehman, the blind Egyptian preacher now in a US jail for the World Trade Centre bombing and who had led the banned El Gamaa Islamiyya in Egypt. Through the Afghan jihad, he also knew senior figures in the National Islamic Front in the Sudan, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas, the radical Islamic Palestinian movement in Gaza and the West Bank. In Kandahar he had Chechens, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Algerians, Kenyans, Pakistanis and African-American Muslims with him – many of whom were widely r
ead and better informed than Bin Laden, but could not travel outside Afghanistan because they were on US wanted lists. What they needed was financial support and a sanctuary which Bin Laden gave them.
After the Africa bombings the US launched a truely global operation. More than 80 Islamic militants were arrested in a dozen different countries. Militants were picked up in a crescent running from Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan, Yemen, to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and the Phillipines.15 In December 1998, Indian authorities detained Bangladeshi militants for plotting to bomb the US Consulate in Calcutta. Seven Afghan nationals using false Italian passports were arrested in Malaysia and accused of trying to start a bombing campaign.16 According to the FBI, militants in Yemen who kidnapped 16 Western tourists in December 1998 were funded by Bin Laden.17 In February 1999, Bangladeshi authorities said Bin Laden had sent US$1 million to the Harkat-ul-Jihad (HJ) in Dhaka, some of whose members had trained and fought in Afghanistan. HJ leaders said they wanted to turn Bangladesh into a Taliban-style Islamic state.18
Thousands of miles away in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania in West Africa, several militants were arrested who had also trained under Bin Laden in Afghanistan and were suspected of plotting bomb explosions.19 Meanwhile during the trial of 107 Al-Jihad members at a military court in Cairo, Egyptian intelligence officers testified that Bin Laden had bankrolled Al-Jihad.20 In February 1999 the CIA claimed that through monitoring Bin Laden's communication network by satellite, they had prevented his supporters from carrying out seven bomb attacks against US overseas facilities in Saudi Arabia, Albania, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Uganda, Uruguay and the Ivory Coast – emphasizing the reach of the Afghan veterans. The Clinton administration sanctioned US$6.7 billion to fight terrorism in 1999, while the FBI's counter-terrorism budget grew from US$118 million to US$286 million and the agency allocated 2,650 agents to the task, twice the number in 1998.