by Max Boot
In frustration the Israeli cabinet authorized a limited ground incursion, eventually amounting to 15,000 troops, but the IDF found Hezbollah a tougher-than-expected foe—quite a change from the Palestinian rock throwers and ineffectual Arab conscripts it had gotten used to fighting. Before the conflict Hezbollah had constructed an elaborate system of bunkers, tunnels, and safe houses linked together by a private communications system and stocked with ample food, water, and ammunition. Once the battle started, its fighters were able to resupply themselves and to maneuver effectively under fire: always the crucial tests of any fighting force. With no front to defend, they were able to attack Israeli troops from unexpected directions, knocking out tanks and troop concentrations with missiles ranging from the older Sagger to the more modern Kornet. Hezbollah even fired a C-802 antiship missile, Chinese-designed and Iranian-supplied, which inflicted significant damage on an Israeli missile boat ten miles offshore.
Hezbollah’s ability to wage such sophisticated warfare led some analysts to suggest that it was at the forefront of a new trend—“hybrid warfare,” which combines conventional and unconventional tactics.42 There is something to this analysis, although one may doubt how new “hybrid warfare” actually is. Most successful insurgents of the past, whether the American colonists or Chinese Communists, combined guerrilla and conventional tactics. Many others, such as the FLN, IRA, and Vietminh/Vietcong, combined terrorism with guerrilla warfare as Hezbollah did.43 Where Hezbollah really excelled, however, was not in ground combat but in manipulation of the news media.
The turning point of the war was the July 30 Israeli air strike on suspected Hezbollah positions in the town of Qana. An apartment building was flattened, leading to the death of seventeen children and eleven adults. (Initial casualty estimates were much higher.) The resulting footage of mangled bodies being pulled out of the wreckage, which Hezbollah made sure received widespread distribution, increased pressure on Israel to halt its offensive, which was said to be “disproportionate.” Israelis could complain with some justification that there was no similar level of media scrutiny of counterinsurgency campaigns waged by nondemocratic powers such as Russia against Chechen separatists, Peru against the Shining Path, or Algeria against Muslim fundamentalists. But there was not much Israel could do about the existence of this double standard—or about the fact that, as a small, isolated state dependent on American support, it was especially vulnerable to international pressure. This was a weapon against which Israel’s Merkava tanks and F-16 fighters were powerless. Like the Greeks in the 1820s, the Cubans in the 1890s, the Algerians in the 1950s, and the Palestinians in the 1980s, Hezbollah had mastered jujitsu information operations, turning its enemy’s strength into a disadvantage in the battle for global sympathy. The efficacy of such efforts was all the greater because of the spread of the Internet and satellite television.
On August 14, 2006, a cease-fire went into effect. Israeli troops pulled back to their own border and Hezbollah filtered back into southern Lebanon. Thirty-four days of war had resulted in the death of 119 Israeli soldiers and 42 Israeli civilians. A total of 1,100 Lebanese civilians were killed; estimates of Hezbollah fatalities ranged from 250 (its own figure) to 650 (the Israeli figure), in either case only a small portion of Hezbollah’s total force of at least 15,000.44
IN SOME WAYS Hezbollah emerged chastened from this conflict. In December 2008–January 2009, when Hamas, a Sunni movement inspired by Hezbollah’s example, fought its own war against Israel in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah prudently refrained from establishing a second front in the north, suggesting that it had no desire for a repeat of 2006. By most measures, however, Hezbollah emerged stronger from the second Lebanon war. By 2010, having rearmed with Syrian and Iranian help, Nasrallah claimed to have 40,000 missiles, compared with just 13,000 at the start of the 2006 campaign.45 Hezbollah also spent hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild war-damaged areas, thus strengthening its hold on the Shiite population. In 2011 Hezbollah and its allies toppled Lebanon’s Sunni, pro-Western prime minister, Saad Hariri, and replaced him with a politician more to their liking.
Hezbollah’s ascendance was symptomatic of Israel’s inability over numerous campaigns since the 1960s to decisively defeat guerrilla foes, who could not be vanquished as swiftly or completely as regular Arab armies had been. In many ways Israel’s problems were analogous to those of the United States in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, France in Algeria and Indochina, and Britain in Cyprus and Aden. The difference, of course, was that Israel could not simply bring its forces home without worrying about the consequences of leaving unrepentant enemies only a few miles from its population centers.
To defend itself, Israel regularly launched punitive strikes that too often only strengthened the relationship between terrorist organizations and the civilians among whom they operated. Air strikes could damage movements such as Hezbollah or Hamas but could not prevent their regeneration. That would have required reoccupation, which Israel hesitated to do because it had no desire for another long and costly occupation of Arab territory; imperialism was no longer an acceptable option in the modern West of which Israel considers itself a part. Israel had some success in ending the terrorist threat from the West Bank, because it did undertake a partial reoccupation during the Second Intifada and because of the serendipitous emergence after Arafat’s death in 2004 of a more moderate Palestinian Authority leadership under Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad. But no such regime appeared in Lebanon, where an increasingly radicalized Shiite community was on the ascent. Thus the best Israel could hope for was an uneasy truce that could be broken at any moment.
DURING ITS FIRST quarter century of existence, Hezbollah had amply lived up to the description of a former American official who suggested in 2003, “Hezbollah may be the ‘A-Team of Terrorists’ and maybe al-Qaeda is actually the ‘B’ team.”46 Certainly Al Qaeda could not match Hezbollah’s quasi-conventional military capabilities, its wholly owned radio and television networks, and its ability to dominate and administer a substantial geographic region. Nor could most other Islamist groups. The vast majority of Islamic insurgents, like the vast majority of non-Islamic insurgents, failed miserably. They were repressed with considerable bloodshed in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern lands by unelected rulers who, unlike their Israeli or American counterparts, were largely impervious to public opinion. The war in Algeria was particularly ugly, leading to the death of at least 100,000 people in the 1990s.47 Of course, as we have seen, even the most illiberal counterinsurgents could still lose if they aroused the ire of the entire population, as the Nazis did in Yugoslavia or the Soviets in Afghanistan. But the most extreme Islamist groups never came close to claiming majority support, and their proclivity for targeting civilians, many of them Muslims, cost them in the court of public opinion. Thus Arab dictators were able to maintain enough legitimacy to crush armed Islamist uprisings, if not the more broad-based popular insurrections that broke out during the 2011 “Arab Spring.”
Islamists, predictably, fared no better in areas where Muslims were in the minority. From East Asia to Western Europe, from North America to South Asia, radicals plotted against the state with little success. Even Russia managed to defeat an insurgency in Chechnya, which declared independence in 1991. The Russians invaded in 1994 and pulled out in 1996, stymied by Chechen guerrillas who, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, resisted to the death. But the Russian army returned in 1999 to subdue the breakaway province using scorched-earth tactics. An estimated 100,000 Chechens were killed out of a prewar population of just a million—a death rate considerably greater than that suffered by Yugoslavia in World War II, if still less than that of Haiti during its War of Independence. Perhaps 20,000 Russian soldiers also perished.
Russia’s success in Chechnya, along with Sri Lanka’s success a few years later against the Tamil Tigers, showed that even in the twenty-first century a brutal approach could work as long as the counterinsurgents di
d not care about world opinion and were operating on their home soil, where they enjoyed a de facto level of legitimacy that Israel could never acquire in Lebanon or France in Algeria. Such a strategy could be stymied only if outside powers came to the rebels’ aid—as occurred not only in Afghanistan in the 1980s but also in Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991, and Libya in 2011, but not in Chechnya or Sri Lanka.48
Failing to overthrow their own regimes, Islamic revolutionaries from all over the world had to seek refuge in the 1990s in a handful of sympathetic, virtually ungoverned places, notably Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Pakistan’s tribal territories, and Afghanistan. Out of such unpromising conditions arose a terrorist group that would soon eclipse Hezbollah in notoriety, if not in effectiveness.
61.
THE TERRORIST INTERNATIONALE
Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, 1988–2011
AL QUDS AL ARABI, an Arabic-language newspaper in London, published on February 23, 1998, a statement it had received by fax. It was headlined, “Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders,” and it was signed by five men—two Egyptians, including a physician named Ayman al-Zawahiri, one Pakistani, one Bangladeshi, and, above them all, a Saudi styled as “Shaykh Usamah Bin-Muhammad Bin-Ladin.” In rich, almost poetic Arabic interspersed with quotations from the Koran and Muslim scholars, the authors laid out what would become a familiar litany of grievances against the “crusader-Zionist alliance,” which, in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, they held responsible for “occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.” Since the Americans had declared “war on God, his messenger, and Muslims.” the authors declared, they were issuing a fatwa, a legal ruling, that “to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim.”49
Even then, Osama bin Laden was hardly unknown in the West. The CIA had already formed a unit to track him: Alec Station. He had already been mentioned sixteen times in the New York Times, beginning in 1994.50 No stranger to American television, he had even been interviewed by CNN the preceding year, and he would do an interview with ABC News that year. But he was invariably described as a bankroller rather than a practitioner of terrorism. His organization, Al Qaeda, which had been formed in 1988, was still obscure. In 1998 Bin Laden was living in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. He was known to harbor a grudge against the United States, which he held responsible for expelling him from Saudi Arabia, but he was hardly seen as being in a position to do much about it. His declaration of war against the world’s mightiest nation was judged so inconsequential that it was not covered in a single American newspaper or magazine. It was as if a wild-eyed street-corner preacher had declared his intention to fight city hall.
Just six months later the world would have cause to reassess its opinion of Bin Laden. On August 7, 1998, Al Qaeda suicide bombers detonated explosives-filled trucks in front of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 213 people, including 12 Americans. The Clinton administration now took Bin Laden seriously enough that on August 20, American warships fired dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles against Al Qaeda training camps in eastern Afghanistan as well as against a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan wrongly suspected of manufacturing chemical weapons for Al Qaeda. The missiles, however, killed few fighters. Bin Laden escaped unscathed with his stature enhanced. This only increased his contempt for the United States (“too cowardly and too fearful to meet the young people of Islam face to face”) and confirmed to him the wisdom of the strategic choice he had made. In a fatwa released two years earlier, in 1996, he had written that, “due to the imbalance of power between our armed forces and the enemy forces,” the most “suitable means of fighting” was to use “fast moving, light forces that work under complete secrecy”—“in other words to initiate a guerrilla warfare.”51
Bin Laden was hardly novel in his determination to use asymmetric means to fight a more powerful foe: this was, as we have seen, an impulse as old as the state itself. Nor was his religious fanaticism rare among irregular warriors: the first terrorist groups, after all, were the Jewish Zealots and the Muslim Assassins. However, most guerrilla and terrorist groups in the past had confined their attacks to a single country or group of countries adjacent to one another and had generally modulated their violence to avoid a devastating backlash. Bin Laden had grander ambitions—he aimed at nothing less than “destroying” the United States as a prelude to toppling its allied states throughout the Middle East and ultimately making the “word of Allah . . . supreme” throughout the world.52 By 1998 Bin Laden’s organization had already been associated with attacks in Algeria, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Tanzania, and it was just getting started. In years to come few corners of the world would be spared the predations of jihadists inspired, trained, funded, directed, or armed—sometimes all of the above—by Al Qaeda.
The trend toward transnational terrorism had already been evident among the anarchist groups of the late nineteenth century and the leftist groups of the 1970s, but Al Qaeda took this tendency to new heights thanks to its skill in utilizing common yet sophisticated technologies. The passenger aircraft made it easy to travel the world. The telephone, fax, satellite television, and eventually the cell phone and Internet made it easy to raise funds, spread propaganda, recruit and deploy followers. The computer made it easy to run a complex organization. And cheap, reliable, mass-produced weapons such as the AK-47, rocket-propelled grenade, and, above all, explosives made it easy to kill. Bin Laden may have advocated a return to a medieval brand of Islam, but he showed a genius for using sophisticated technology and management techniques to marshal the first truly global insurgency. And he brought to his side many similar men who, like him, had little religious training but were well versed in technical subjects and familiar with the ways of the modern world. Like drug traffickers, computer hackers, and other international criminals, they represented the dark side of globalization in the twenty-first century.
OSAMA BIN LADEN’S rise to become the global face of terror—eclipsing earlier celebrities such as Carlos the Jackal, Abu Nidal, and even Yasser Arafat—was, to say the least, improbable. He was a shy child, soft-spoken and polite, forever in the shadow of his more dynamic and outgoing older brothers—and there were lots of them. Osama’s father, Muhammad, was a one-eyed Yemeni immigrant who had come to Saudi Arabia with nothing and built the kingdom’s largest construction company with the patronage of the royal family. He had no fewer than fifty-four children from twenty-two wives. Osama was the eighteenth son, born in 1957 to a simple Syrian girl. Muhammad divorced her two years later and conveniently married her off, as was his wont, to one of his executives. Osama grew up in awe of his father, whom he seldom saw. After the patriarch’s death in an airplane crash in 1967, leadership of the clan fell to Osama’s oldest brother, Salem, who was everything he was not—an irreligious, fun-loving, guitar-playing jokester who liked to spend time in Europe and America.
Osama grew up far removed from this jet-setter lifestyle. He lived in a staid middle-class household with his mother and stepfather in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. Even as a youngster Osama was religious but not to an outlandish degree by Saudi standards. He prayed five times a day but also watched television, loved to ride horses, and played soccer. As he grew older he became more puritanical, refusing to watch movies, listen to music, or take pictures: all activities he deemed “un-Islamic.” Unlike many of his siblings who were educated abroad, Osama attended the private Al Thagr School in Jeddah, where he was an average student, followed by economics studies at Jeddah’s King Abdul Aziz University, from which he never graduated. In college he was influenced by the radical writings of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian apostle of Islamism who had been executed by the secular regime of Gamal
Abdel Nasser in 1966, and whose brother was on the faculty.
In 1974, at seventeen, Bin Laden married a fifteen-year-old Syrian cousin. In subsequent years he would, in emulation of his father and in accordance with the teachings of the Koran, take more wives, including two teachers with doctorates. (He told wife number one that he was acting altruistically so that he could “have many children for Islam.”) In all he would produce at least twenty children. His family lived in a bizarre household where air conditioners and refrigerators were forbidden. The abstemious Bin Laden was happy to eat meager fare and wear drab clothes and expected his family to do likewise. They were forbidden American soft drinks, indeed all cold beverages, along with toys, sweets, and even prescription drugs, forcing his asthmatic children to sneak inhalers. Long hikes through the desert with little or no water were mandatory for the boys to toughen them up for the jihad. The girls were secluded at home with their mothers and not allowed to venture out without a male guardian. In this joyless household even jokes and laughter were forbidden; children caught laughing could expect a caning from the stern paterfamilias.
The major turning point in Bin Laden’s life occurred in 1979 with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. His first wife recalled that her “husband’s heart was burned to a crisp” by the suffering inflicted by the Red Army. He began to travel to Pakistan to provide funding and support to the mujahideen. At the time he was active in his family’s construction business; like his father, he was known for getting his hands dirty alongside his men. But in the 1980s he began to carve out a separate identity in the anti-Soviet jihad.
In Pakistan he met Abdullah Azzam, an older Palestinian cleric who was one of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, Hamas. No doubt eager to gain access to the Saudi’s fortune, Azzam became a mentor to Bin Laden. Together in 1985 they created the Services Office, the precursor to Al Qaeda, to help Arab volunteers fight the Soviets. The Services Office published a slick magazine, Jihad, and raised funds all over the world, including in the United States, thus creating the networks Al Qaeda would later utilize. There is no evidence that Bin Laden got any support from the U.S. government, but he did have connections with Saudi intelligence, which apparently used him to funnel aid to the muj.