The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  Bin Laden’s fifteen-year-old son Omar was the only family member to travel in the small jet that flew the al-Qaeda leader from Sudan to Afghanistan (the rest of bin Laden’s family and other members of al-Qaeda would follow months later). Omar recalls that the expulsion from Sudan “hugely embittered” his father, who blamed it largely on the American government.

  Underlining that bitterness, bin Laden’s first public statement that he was at war with the United States was issued on August 23, 1996, three months after his expulsion from Sudan. It was titled “Declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places [Saudi Arabia],” the text of which was published within a few days in the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi. In the declaration, bin Laden mentioned that one of his gripes against the United States was the hounding of his group out of Sudan.

  Al-Qaeda was now officially at war with the United States, although only a handful of Americans were aware of this yet.

  As we have seen, one of the intellectual architects of that war was Sayyid Qutb, a nebbishy Egyptian writer with a Hitler mustache who arrived in the placid town of Greeley, Colorado, in 1949 to attend college. A priggish intellectual, Qutb found the United States to be racist and sexually promiscuous, an experience that left him with a lifelong contempt for the West. One evening, the puritanical Qutb went to a dance at a local church hall, where the pastor was playing the big-band hit “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The idea of a house of worship playing a secular love song crystallized Qutb’s sense that Americans were deeply corrupt and interested only in self-gratification.

  On his return to Egypt, Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He was arrested in 1954 for supposedly plotting revolution and was then subjected to the most dreadful tortures. Writing from his prison cell, Qutb argued that Egypt’s secular nationalist government was presiding over a country mired in a state of pre-Islamic barbarity known as jahiliyyah and, by implication, that the government should be overthrown. Qutb’s jail-cell manifesto, Milestones, would become the primer for jihadist movements around the Muslim world. In it he insisted that jihad should be conducted offensively against the enemies of Islam. Qutb wrote, “As to the persons who attempt to defend the concept of Islamic jihad by interpreting it in the narrow sense of the current concept of defensive war … they lack understanding of the nature of Islam and its primary aim.” In other words, fighting preemptive wars against Islam’s enemies is the very essence of the Islamic project.

  What was truly revolutionary was Qutb’s insistence that Islam’s enemies included Muslim governments that did not implement true sharia law. Qutb wanted secular Middle Eastern governments excommunicated from the Muslim community. That process of declaring other Muslims to be apostates, takfir, would become a key al-Qaeda doctrine.

  Qutb was executed in 1966, but he would profoundly influence the young Ayman al-Zawahiri, who set up a jihadist cell when he was only fifteen dedicated to the Qutbian theory that Egyptian government officials were apostates from Islam and therefore deserved death. In Zawahiri’s autobiography he repeatedly cited Qutb, saying that he “was the spark that ignited the Islamic revolution against the enemies of Islam at home and abroad.” And Qutb’s brother, Mohamed, the keeper of his brother’s flame after his death, occasionally gave lectures at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah in the late 1970s, which bin Laden would attend.

  Qutb’s claim that Muslim rulers who presided over countries in what he considered to be the state of pagan ignorance known as jahiliyyah were effectively non-Muslims provided the intellectual underpinning for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Sadat had signed Egypt’s cease-fire agreement with Israel two years earlier, thus effectively signing his own death warrant, too. In 1981, Zawahiri was arrested for his alleged role in Sadat’s assassination, then imprisoned and tortured by Egyptian authorities just as Qutb had been, an experience that further radicalized him.

  Sprung from jail, Zawahiri moved to Pakistan in 1986, where he eventually met bin Laden. For bin Laden, the slightly older, cerebral Zawahiri presented an intriguing figure, someone far more experienced politically than himself. For Zawahiri, bin Laden also presented an interesting opportunity: someone who was on his way to becoming a genuine war hero in the jihad against the Soviets and whose deep pockets were well-known. They would go on to embark on a marriage of convenience that would have hellish consequences.

  The conventional view of al-Qaeda’s war on America is that Zawahiri has really been the brains of the operation; a Machiavellian strategist like Karl Rove to bin Laden’s George W. Bush, an analysis that appeared in myriad post-9/11 accounts. But this analysis misses the fact that in making the most important strategic shift in al-Qaeda’s history—identifying the United States as its Main Enemy—bin Laden dismissed Zawahiri’s obsessive, single focus on overthrowing the Egyptian government, and for years kept him in the dark about al-Qaeda’s plans for the 9/11 attacks on America.

  Certainly when bin Laden first met Zawahiri in 1986, the slightly older Egyptian militant, who had recently served three years in Egypt’s notorious prisons for his jihadist activities, was far more of a hardened revolutionary than the shy son of a Saudi billionaire. Zawahiri already firmly believed that most of the modern Middle East had turned away from true Islam and that the correct response was to overthrow the “near enemy” Arab regimes run by their “apostate” rulers.

  Bin Laden took the next step, urging Zawahiri to see that the root of the problem was not simply the Arab “near enemy” regimes, but the “far enemy,” the United States, which propped up the status quo in the Middle East, a shift in strategy that took place when al-Qaeda was based in Sudan in the early 1990s. The al-Qaeda leader lectured to his followers there about the necessity of attacking the United States, without which the “near enemy” regimes could not survive. Noman Benotman, the Libyan militant who knew both of al-Qaeda’s leaders, recalled that, “Osama influenced Zawahiri with his idea: Forget about the ‘near enemy’; the main enemy is the Americans.” The intense Syrian jihadist intellectual Abu Musab al-Suri explains that bin Laden came to this strategic analysis because “Sheikh Osama had studied the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the dictator governments in Warsaw Pact countries and, as had happened in East Germany, Romania, Poland and other countries; he was convinced that with the fall of the United States, all the components of the existing Arab and Islamic regimes would fall as well.”

  Conceptualizing the United States as the Main Enemy was also useful for bin Laden because it was a big enough idea that it could unite several militant Islamist organizations with purely local agendas, such as Zawahiri’s Egyptian Jihad group, under al-Qaeda’s banner as the standard-bearer of Global Holy War. And it had a further benefit in that it blamed America rather than the jihadist organizations themselves for their failures from Algeria to Egypt to mobilize genuine mass movements capable of toppling the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.

  When Zawahiri first arrived in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 1997, following a six-month spell in a Russian jail, his relations with bin Laden were on a quite different footing than they had been a decade earlier. Bin Laden was emerging as something of a global celebrity, the emir or prince of jihad, while Zawahiri was the penniless leader of a relatively small Egyptian terrorist group, not especially well liked or well regarded even by his own followers. It was now bin Laden who took Zawahiri under his wing. And even then the al-Qaeda leader kept Zawahiri at some distance. It was only in the summer of 2001 that the al-Qaeda leader disclosed to Zawahiri the details of the coming attacks on Washington and New York, and that was only after Zawahiri’s Jihad group had formally merged with al-Qaeda in June. This merger was “more like the assimilation” of Zawahiri’s organization into al-Qaeda, according to Feroz Abbasi, the British-Ugandan militant training in al-Qaeda’s camps at the time.

  Bin Laden exercised near-total control over al-Qaeda, whose members had to swear a religious oath personally to him, so ensuring b
lind loyalty. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 operational commander, outlined the dictatorial powers that bin Laden exercised over his organization: “If the Shura council at al-Qaeda, the highest authority in the organization, had a majority of 98 percent on a resolution and it is opposed by bin Laden, he has the right to cancel the resolution.” Bin Laden’s son Omar recalls that the men who worked for al-Qaeda had a habit of requesting permission before they spoke with their leader, saying, “Dear prince: May I speak?” Even Zawahiri would ask the al-Qaeda leader for leave to speak.

  Before the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden was consolidating more power as the unquestioned, absolute leader of al-Qaeda. To his followers he was truly an extraordinarily charismatic man, someone who they knew had given up a life of luxury as the scion of one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families to live a life of danger and poverty in the cause of jihad. The way bin Laden lived his life was attractive to his followers. He had rejected all the comforts of the modern era, sleeping on the floor, eating little, a man of disarming personal modesty who displayed an almost freakish religiosity. The fact that he modeled his life of jihad on the life of the Prophet Mohammed was also not lost on them.

  Several of his followers have described their first encounter with the al-Qaeda leader as an intense spiritual experience, and when they explain their feelings for him it is with love. Abu Jandal, a Yemeni who became one of his bodyguards, described his first meeting with bin Laden in 1997 as “beautiful” and said he came to look on him “as a father.” Shadi Abdalla, a Jordanian who was also one of bin Laden’s bodyguards, explained his boss’s attraction: “A very charismatic person who could persuade people simply by his way of talking. One could say that he ‘seduced’ many young men.”

  Bin Laden’s appeal was especially strong for militant Muslims living in the West. Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian who was a professional soccer player in Germany, traveled to Afghanistan in 2000. When he first met with the al-Qaeda leader in Kandahar, he remembers, “I was so impressed when I saw him that I didn’t dare to speak to him. He asked me questions about my family and realizing that I felt uneasy he tried to cheer me up.” And Mohammed Abdullah Warsame, a Canadian citizen of Somali descent living in Minneapolis who attended al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, sat next to bin Laden during a meal and found him to be “very inspirational.”

  The special awe that his followers had for the al-Qaeda leader struck John Miller, an ABC News correspondent who interviewed bin Laden in 1998. Miller is one of the few outsiders to have spent several days in and around the al-Qaeda organization when it was based in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. He recalled bin Laden’s “charismatic aura or a scent … either you have it or you don’t. They spoke of him with godlike reverence and they talked with great excitement about the Sheikh.”

  Bin Laden carefully tends his public image as “the Sheikh,” a heroic warrior-monk who is not only fearless on the battlefield but can also recite the entire Koran from memory and writes his own poetry. When he invited the Al Jazeera correspondent Ahmed Zaidan to attend the wedding of his son Muhammad in Afghanistan in January 2001, bin Laden read a poem of his own composition celebrating al-Qaeda’s recent bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. The hundreds of guests at the marriage feast cheered him on with chants of “Allah Akbar!” as he declaimed his poem, a performance that was videotaped for Al Jazeera by Zaidan. Later, when bin Laden and Zaidan were alone, the al-Qaeda leader told him, “Ahmed, I don’t think my delivery was good.” Zaidan recalls, “He’s very much caring about public relations, very much caring how he would appear on the TV. And he said, ‘I didn’t like it. I’m going to deliver it again.’” Bin Laden repeated his performance and then watched both versions on tape, saying afterwards, “No, no. The first one was better.”

  Like many of history’s most effective leaders, bin Laden tells a simple story about the world that is easy to grasp, even for those of his followers from Jakarta to London who have not had a chance to sit at his feet. In bin Laden’s telling there is a global conspiracy by the West and its puppet allies in the Muslim world to destroy true Islam, a conspiracy that is led by the United States. This single narrative purports to explain all the problems of the Muslim world; for Muslims in the United Kingdom the real problems that many of them face are not caused by simple British racial discrimination but by the fact they are Muslim; the long-running war between Russia and the Chechens is not a centuries-old imperialist land grab by the Russians, but is rather a war against Islam; and the American attack on Saddam Hussein in 2003 wasn’t because he seemed to be flouting multiple United Nations resolutions aimed at disarming his supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, but rather it was a plot by America to take over a great Arab nation.

  This narrative is silent, of course, about the well-documented cases when the United States had provided large-scale help to Muslims, such as belatedly and finally halting the Serb massacres of Bosnians in the mid-1990s and providing massive aid to the hundreds of thousands of Indonesians made homeless by the 2004 tsunami. Bin Laden is never one to let facts get in the way of his narrative of American-led Muslim humiliation.

  Al-Qaeda’s leader and his followers are strongly motivated by the belief that the Muslim world has been collectively humiliated for decades, and in particular by Western powers. Three weeks after 9/11, as the United States began launching airstrikes against Taliban positions, a video of bin Laden sitting on a rocky outcrop was broadcast on Al Jazeera. On the tape, he said, “What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. The Islamic world has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for 80 years.”

  In his first public statement following 9/11, bin Laden emphasized the “humiliation” that the Muslim world had felt for much of the past century and the negative effect of Western policies in the Middle East. For bin Laden, the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the secret plan to carve up the disintegrating Ottoman Empire between the French and British, has the same resonance that the 1919 Treaty of Versailles did for Hitler. It must be avenged and reversed. In mid-February 2003, a month before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, bin Laden railed on an audiotape posted to jihadist websites against “a new Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Bush-Blair axis.”

  By bin Laden’s own account, it was U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world that was the reason al-Qaeda is attacking America. In all the tens of thousands of words that bin Laden has uttered on the public record, there were some significant omissions: he did not rail against the pernicious effects of Hollywood movies, or against the pornography protected by the U.S. Constitution. Nor did he inveigh against the drug and alcohol culture of the West, or its tolerance for homosexuals. Judging by his silence, bin Laden cared little about such cultural issues. What he has condemned the United States for is simple—its policies in the Middle East: its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; its support for regimes, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that bin Laden regards as apostates from Islam; and its support for Israel.

  Crucially, bin Laden blamed not just the U.S. government for its supposed campaign against Islam but also ordinary American citizens. In an interview a few weeks after 9/11 he explained: “The American people should remember that they pay taxes to their government, they elect their president, their government manufacture arms and gives them to Israel and Israel uses them to massacre Palestinians.” Bin Laden claimed this makes them legitimate targets for his campaign of violence, citing a doctrine of Koranically sanctioned reciprocity to justify killing ordinary Americans: “Allah legislated the permission.… Whoever kills our civilians then we have the right to kill theirs.”

  There is sufficient truth to aspects of bin Laden’s critique of American foreign policy for it to have real traction around the Muslim world. To cite three obvious examples: first, the U.S. government’s largely reflexive and unqualified support for Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people; second, the obvious American hypocrisy when it comes to promoting “democracy,” while also e
mbracing the absolute monarchy of the Saudis and the repressive Egyptian dictatorship; and third, of course, the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

  Bin Laden’s master narrative of a war on Islam led by America that must be avenged is embraced by a significant minority in the Islamic world. A Gallup poll in ten Muslim countries conducted in 2005 and 2006 found that 7 percent of Muslims said the 9/11 attacks were “completely justified.” Or to put it another way, given the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, around 100 million Muslims wholeheartedly endorsed bin Laden’s rationale for the 9/11 attacks and the need for Islamic revenge on the United States.

  In discussions of the “root causes” of Islamist terrorism, there is often little discussion of Islam. That is suprising because in the minutes of al-Qaeda’s first meetings in 1988 the group’s mission statement was explicitly religious: “Al-Qaeda is basically an organized Islamic faction; its goal will be to lift the word of God, to make His religion victorious.” Similarly, bin Laden was quite clear about the religious nature of his war in his post-9/11 interview with Al Jazeera: “This war is fundamentally religious…. Under no circumstances should we forget this enmity between us and the infidels, for the enmity is based on creed.” Living in societies that are largely postreligious, many Westerners find it hard to understand how someone might really believe in a war sanctioned by God, yet four centuries ago most European wars were fought over issues of religion.

  Al-Qaeda’s leader and his followers view themselves as part of a vanguard defending true Islam. Bin Laden bases justification of his war on a corpus of Muslim beliefs and he finds enough ammunition in the Koran to give his war Islamic legitimacy, often invoking the “Sword” verses of the holy book, which can be interpreted as urging attacks on infidels who won’t submit and convert to Islam. The Koranic verse 9:5 speaks for itself: “Once the Sacred Months are past (and they refuse to make peace), you may kill the idol worshipers when you encounter them, punish them, and resist every move they make. If they repent and observe the Prayers and give the obligatory alms-giving you shall let them go.” That verse was quoted approvingly by bin Laden in his 1996 declaration of war against the United States and again in a statement he made seven years later in the run-up to the Iraq War.