The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  That same year, Azzam, a true religious scholar (unlike his younger protégé) with a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, issued an influential fatwa that was to provide the ideological underpinnings for the recruitment of Muslims from around the globe to the Afghan jihad. The fatwa ruled that to expel foreign aggressors from Islamic lands was a fard ayn, or a compulsory duty for all Muslims. In effect Azzam was saying that every individual Muslim had a religious obligation to fight in some way in the Afghan war. The radical call to arms would help ignite the first truly global jihadist movement, inspiring men from Algeria to Brooklyn to travel to Pakistan and Afghanistan to wage jihad against the Soviets.

  In all this bin Laden played only a financial role, helping to subsidize the operations of the Services Office, which served as the logistical hub for those who answered Azzam’s call to arms. Faraj Ismail covered the Afghan jihad for the Saudi newspaper Muslimoon during the mid-1980s. He remembered that the shy Saudi rich kid exhibited no leadership charisma and was instead totally overshadowed by Azzam. “The relationship between bin Laden and Azzam was the relationship of a student to a professor,” Ismail recalled.

  In 1984 bin Laden for the first time ventured into Afghanistan, an experience that transformed his life. He told a journalist, “I feel so guilty for listening to my friends and those that I love to not come here [to Afghanistan] and stay home for reasons of safety, and I feel that this delay of four years requires my own martyrdom in the name of God.” Bin Laden now began spending most of his time on the Afghan front lines, particularly with Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Pashtun commander based in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan.

  From 1986 on, bin Laden’s close relationship with his mentor Azzam would gradually fray as the young Saudi militant became preoccupied with personally fighting the Soviets rather than simply supporting the activities of the Afghan mujahideen, which was what Azzam saw as the most pressing task for the Arab volunteers. Abdullah Anas, Azzam’s son-in-law and also a close friend of bin Laden, says that the future al-Qaeda leader, fast approaching the age of thirty, was now starting to assert his independence from the charismatic Azzam.

  Khaled Batarfi, bin Laden’s childhood friend, continued to see bin Laden when he returned home to Saudi Arabia, but noticed that his old soccer buddy had changed: “He became more assertive, less shy.” Jamal Khalifa also noticed that his close friend, who had once enjoyed the give-and-take of a real discussion, would now no longer tolerate disagreement with his own views.

  The Afghan war changed bin Laden. The humble, young, monosyllabic millionaire with the open checkbook who had first visited Pakistan in the early 1980s would, by the middle of the decade, launch an ambitious plan to confront the Soviets directly inside Afghanistan with a group of Arabs under his command. That cadre of Arabs would provide the nucleus of al-Qaeda.

  Seeking martyrdom, in 1986 bin Laden established a base for several dozen Arab fighters close to a Soviet garrison inside eastern Afghanistan, located in Jaji, about ten miles from the Pakistani border. With the zeal of a fanatic, bin Laden told a journalist that he hoped his new base would draw heavy Soviet firepower: “God willing, we want [our base] to be the first thing that the enemy faces. Its place as the first camp visible to the enemy means that they will focus their bombardments on us in an extreme manner.”

  Jamal Khalifa was not impressed by his friend’s plans to set up a military operation right next door to a Soviet military post. Khalifa knew that bin Laden had absolutely no military experience, and he was also concerned that his friend was sending idealistic young Arabs to the Afghan front lines on kamikaze missions. He confronted bin Laden inside his base in 1986. “I told him, ‘Every drop of blood bleeds here in this place; God will ask you about it in the hereafter. Everybody is saying this is wrong, so Osama, please leave the place right now.’ Everybody was hearing our argument, our voices become hard.” The two friends rarely spoke again.

  From the Jaji base, bin Laden fought near suicidal battles over three weeks with the Soviets during the spring of 1987. Esam Deraz, an Egyptian film-maker who covered the battles in Jaji, explains that they were the making of bin Laden. “I was near him in the battle, many months, and he was really brave…. [bin Laden] fought in this battle like a private.”

  Bin Laden’s stand against the Russians at the battle of Jaji was lionized in the mainstream Arab press, turning him into an authentic war hero. A 1988 article published in the Saudi magazine Al-Majallah featured bin Laden, who was quoted saying, “We sometimes spent the whole day in the trenches or in the caves until our ears could no longer bear the sound of the explosions around us.” Bin Laden told the reporter from Al-Majallah, “It was God alone who protected us from the Russians during their offensive last year. … We depend completely on God in all matters.” By the late 1980s, bin Laden already saw himself as an instrument of God’s will in an epic struggle against the enemies of Islam.

  Jaji was bin Laden’s first brush with publicity and over time the shy millionaire would increasingly come to embrace the spotlight. But the battle of Jaji was only a morale booster for the scores of Arabs then fighting in Afghanistan. It was not a battle of any importance in the larger war against the Soviets.

  Bin Laden’s decision to found his own military force made no strategic sense and would be part of his pattern of strategic overreach that would culminate in al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11. Informed estimates of the total number of Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets ranged up to 175,000. By contrast, the largest number of Arabs fighting the Soviets inside Afghanistan at any given moment amounted to no more than several hundred. To assemble those fighters in one force did not make much sense from a military standpoint. Indeed, despite bin Laden’s subsequent hyperventilating rhetoric, his “Afghan Arabs” had no meaningful impact on the conduct of the war, which was won with the blood of the Afghans and the billions of dollars and riyals of the United States and Saudi Arabia.

  Abdullah Azzam was opposed to the idea of a separate Arab military force because he envisioned Arabs seeded throughout all of the Afghan militias functioning as morale boosters who could simultaneously teach the Afghans about true Islam, aid them with education and medicine, and bring news of the Afghan jihad to wealthy donors in the Middle East. A single Arab military force would end this effort, and in any event could have no impact on the conduct of the war. Bin Laden saw matters differently. He believed that an Arab military force would stand its ground against Soviet attacks because his recruits were more than willing to martyr themselves.

  Bin Laden’s military ambitions and personality evolved in tandem. He became more assertive, to the point that he ignored the advice of many of his old friends about the folly of setting up his own military force. That decision would also precipitate an irrevocable (but carefully concealed) split with his onetime mentor, Abdullah Azzam.

  During the mid-1980s, bin Laden had been careful to distance himself from the more radical Arab elements in Pakistan who wanted to overthrow the ruling regimes of the Middle East. In 1987, when King Fahd of Saudi Arabia traveled to Britain on a state visit, he was presented a medal in the form of a cross by Queen Elizabeth II. In the hothouse radical atmosphere of Peshawar, some militants said that by accepting the crosslike decoration, King Fahd was no longer a Muslim. Bin Laden was having none of this, telling the militants, “For God’s sake, don’t discuss this subject; concentrate on your mission.” And bin Laden continued to maintain cordial relations with the Saudi government. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the director of Saudi intelligence, met bin Laden on a number of occasions in Pakistan during the anti-Soviet jihad and remembered him as “a gentle, enthusiastic young man of few words who didn’t raise his voice while talking.”

  It was not an accident that bin Laden’s split from Azzam began around the time of his first meeting with the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 1986. Zawahiri nurtured a far more radical interpretation of jihad than Azzam’s vision of rolling back non-Muslims who had invaded Isl
amic lands, as the Soviets had in Afghanistan. The Egyptian doctor was a revolutionary who wanted regime change across the Middle East, something that Azzam would have no part of, as this was to engage in fitna: sowing discord within the Muslim community. Azzam did not approve of intra-Muslim violence. But Zawahiri gradually won over bin Laden to his more expansive view of jihad. Faraj Ismail, the Egyptian journalist who covered the war against the Soviets, recalls that it was Zawahiri “who got Osama to focus not only on the Afghan jihad, but regime change in the Arab world.”

  Osama Rushdi, a member of the militant Egyptian Islamic Group who had been jailed with Zawahiri in the early 1980s in Cairo, a few years later was living in Peshawar. There, he says, Zawahiri, a prickly intellectual, increasingly adopted the doctrine of takfir (declaring other Muslims to be apostates). Rushdi remembers that Zawahiri even told people not to pray with Azzam, “and that is a grave thing in Islam, because in Islam it is correct to pray with any Muslim.” The conflict between Azzam and the Islamist militants in Peshawar may have signed his death warrant. He was assassinated there by unknown assailants on November 24, 1989.

  A year earlier, Salem bin Laden, Osama’s oldest brother, had died in a plane crash in San Antonio, Texas. Within a year Osama bin Laden had lost both his most important mentor and the brother who headed the bin Laden clan. They were perhaps the only two people in the world who might have been able to pull him back from the project he was just beginning: the establishment of al-Qaeda as an armed jihadist group with large ambitions. A relative lamented, “If Salem had still been around no one would be writing books about Osama bin Laden. Salem had a volcanic temper. … Salem would have grabbed Osama by the lapels and taken him back to Saudi Arabia.”

  The minutes of al-Qaeda’s founding meetings did not mention the United States as an enemy but rather described the group’s goals in the broadest and vaguest of terms: “to lift the word of God, to make His religion victorious.” The minutes did note that the “work” of al-Qaeda commenced on September 10, 1988. Almost exactly thirteen years later the organization carried out the 9/11 attacks, inflicting more direct damage on the United States during a morning than the Soviet Union had done during decades of the Cold War.

  So what had changed in the meantime? Or to put it another way: Where did bin Laden’s anti-Americanism stem from? It was far from predictable that bin Laden would turn against the United States; several of his half brothers and sisters maintained vacation homes in the States and had substantial business interests there, while about a quarter of Osama’s fifty-three siblings had studied there at some point. And in 1979, when he was twenty-two, bin Laden himself traveled to the United States with his wife Najwa and their two infant sons. On the two-week trip the bin Ladens visited Los Angeles and Indiana. His wife recalled that the visit was uneventful: “My husband and I did not hate America, yet we did not love it.”

  Over the course of the 1980s, bin Laden’s indifference to the United States would gradually harden into hostility because of its support for Israel. The al-Qaeda leader explained that he made a speech in 1986 urging Muslims to boycott American products because “the Americans take our money and give it to the Jews so they can kill our children with it in Palestine.” Bin Laden stopped drinking Pepsi and Coca-Cola and his son Omar recalls that his father refused to let his kids consume American soft drinks. (They would drink them anyway, behind his back.)

  Bin Laden’s anti-Americanism, hardly uncommon in the Muslim world, blossomed into full-blown hatred, springing, famously, from the rejection of his offer to deploy his army of veterans from the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad to defend the Saudi kingdom following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait in August 1990. The head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki, recalled bin Laden’s offer of his men to help defeat Saddam’s army, which was then the fourth largest in the world: “He changed from a calm, peaceful and gentle man interested in helping Muslims into a person who believed that he would be able to amass and command an army to liberate Kuwait. It revealed his arrogance.”

  Bin Laden’s offer was summarily dismissed by the royal family and instead the Saudis sought the protection of Uncle Sam. Five hundred thousand American soldiers, including a number of women, soon arrived on Arabian soil, a force that bin Laden took to be “infidels” trespassing on the holy land. Omar bin Laden remembers his father ranting, “Women! Defending Saudi men!” The contemporaneous fatwas of the firebrand Saudi clerics Salman al-Awdah and Safar al-Hawali also had an important impact on bin Laden. Awdah and Hawali were among the first Saudi clerics to issue cassette tapes of sermons railing against the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia.

  By now bin Laden had become something of a thorn in the side of the absolute Saudi monarchy, not only because of his defiant stance against the American presence in the kingdom but also because he kept trying to insert himself into the affairs of neighboring Yemen. For bin Laden the first order of business as the Afghan jihad wound down was to dislodge the socialist government of southern Yemen, which had ruled over the bin Ladens’ ancestral land since 1967, when the British protectorate of Aden was replaced by a government that aligned itself with the Soviets. As he had in Afghanistan, bin Laden envisaged raising his own jihadist army to help overthrow the socialist Yemeni government. Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian militant close to bin Laden, recalled that during this period, “Osama’s main passion was the jihad in South Yemen.”

  As the Saudi government soured on bin Laden, he decided to flee his homeland in the spring of 1991. Abu Jandal, a Yemeni who became the al-Qaeda leader’s chief bodyguard in Afghanistan, says that his boss was given a passport to leave the country because of his connections with members of the royal family so that he could travel to Pakistan to liquidate his investments there. The passport was given on the condition that bin Laden would then return to Saudi Arabia and live there under house arrest. Instead the al-Qaeda leader traveled to Pakistan, never to return to his native land.

  Around the same time that bin Laden went back to Pakistan, increasing pressure was being exerted on the Pakistani government by a number of Middle Eastern states to expel the hundreds of Arab militants then living in the country, particularly in Peshawar. Bin Laden decided to pull his group out of Pakistan, sending a Sudanese member of al-Qaeda to find suitable property to purchase in Sudan so that he and other members of his organization could settle there. By 1992, bin Laden and his men had sold their properties in Peshawar and moved their operations to Sudan.

  It was in Sudan that al-Qaeda’s plans to attack American targets first matured. The presence of U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia continued to anger bin Laden deeply. In 1992, he gathered together his followers to tell them, “We cannot let the American army stay in the Gulf area and take our oil, take our money. We have to fight them.” And in December 1992, following the arrival of American troops in Somalia as part of a humanitarian mission to help starving Somalis, bin Laden became even more adamant, saying, “The Americans have now come to the Horn of Africa, and we have to stop the head of the snake.”

  Al-Qaeda saw the arrival of those troops—just two years after the United States had based hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Saudi Arabia—as part of a larger American strategy to colonize ever greater chunks of the Muslim world. In late December 1992, an al-Qaeda affiliate bombed two hotels in Yemen housing U.S. soldiers in transit to Somalia. The bombs killed a tourist but no Americans. It seems to have been the first attack against an American target by al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates anywhere in the world.

  Bin Laden also sent his men from Sudan to Somalia to explore ways that al-Qaeda could kill Americans there. In 1993, one of bin Laden’s military commanders, Mohammed Atef, traveled to Somalia to determine how best to attack U.S. forces, later reporting back to bin Laden in Sudan. On October 3 and 4, 1993, eighteen American soldiers were killed and a U.S. helicopter was brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) in an intense firefight in Mogadishu during a botched mission to try to snatch a Somali warlord. At l
east five hundred Somalis were also killed. Somalis trained by Arab veterans of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan had been taught that the most effective way to shoot down a helicopter with an RPG was to hit the vulnerable tail rotor. Within a week of the Mogadishu battle, the United States announced plans for its pullout.

  Given the fog of war, it remains unclear who exactly brought down the American helicopter in Mogadishu. But what is clear is that by 1993, half a decade after its founding, al-Qaeda now conceived its central mission to be attacking American targets. That year al-Qaeda started five years of planning to launch major attacks on U.S. targets in Africa, which resulted in the August 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden took a strong interest in the details of those plots. Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda, was dispatched by bin Laden to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, in late 1993 to conduct surveillance of the U.S. embassy. Ali Mohamed then traveled to Khartoum, “where my surveillance files and photographs were reviewed by Osama bin Laden.” After looking over the pictures of the embassy, bin Laden, who had spent years working in his family’s construction business, pointed out the best place to position a truck bomb.

  In 1996 the Sudanese government came under increasing pressure from the governments of the United States and Saudi Arabia to expel bin Laden and his small army of militants. Prince Turki, the head of Saudi intelligence at the time, recalled that the Saudi government had been carefully monitoring bin Laden’s training camps in Sudan, where he was “recruiting persons from different parts of the Islamic world, from Algeria to Egypt, from East Asia to Somalia, to get them trained at these camps. It was an unacceptable activity.”

  In mid-May 1996, under intense pressure from the Sudanese government, bin Laden left for Afghanistan, an exile—or in Arabic, a hijra—that the hyper-religious al-Qaeda leader no doubt interpreted as a distant echo of the hijra that the Prophet Mohammed had himself made fourteen centuries earlier to escape the pagans of Mecca and to build up his perfect Islamic society in the nearby town of Medina. Bin Laden would even come to refer to Afghanistan as the Medina of the new age.