In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan
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But the Taliban had struck a dangerous bargain with Osama bin Laden and his international jihadist network. As a Taliban official explained to a U.S. State Department representative, the Taliban considered bin Laden a “great mujahid” and supported his residence in Afghanistan.54 It was a fateful mistake. Bin Laden used his money and influence to support the Taliban regime and, in return, trained jihadists and planned operations on Afghan soil.55 If Mullah Omar had been willing to shy away from a relationship with bin Laden, the United States might have left the Taliban alone. Instead, Afghanistan became a nexus for the Taliban’s radical Deobandism and al Qa’ida’s global jihad.
CHAPTER FIVE Al Qa’ida’s Strategic Alliance
OSAMA BIN LADEN was fond of telling his students a parable, comparing the anti-Soviet War with the Christian assault against Mecca in 570 AD. The much-better-equipped Christian army employed war elephants, and their attack was fearsome enough to warrant mention in the Qur’an, appropriately enough in the chapter Al-Fil (“The Elephant”). The Christians tried to destroy the Ka’aba shrine in Mecca and divert pilgrims to a new cathedral in San’a, located in modern-day Yemen. But birds showered the invading Christian army with pellets of hard-baked clay, and the Arabs eventually defeated the invaders. To bin Laden and other al Qa’ida leaders, the episode exemplified that God would be on their side when they united against a common enemy.1
“In the training camps and on the battlefronts against the Russians,” Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote in Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, “the Muslim youths developed a broad awareness and a fuller realization of the conspiracy that is being weaved” by Christians and Jews. They “developed an understanding based on shari’ah of the enemies of Islam, the renegades, and their collaborators.”2 The Afghan-Soviet War triggered an epiphany among these fighters, who had trekked to Afghanistan from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, and other parts of the Arab world. Inspired by the defeat of the Soviet Union, they began to dream about internationalizing the jihad. The defeat had emboldened them, and many believed they were invincible.
“The USSR, a superpower with the largest land army in the world,” Zawahiri wrote, “was destroyed and the remnants of its troops fled Afghanistan before the eyes of the Muslim youths and as a result of their actions.”3 Saudi Arabia was crucial to the jihad, as significant amounts of money from Saudi government officials and private donors poured into Pakistan and Afghanistan. But, no matter who funded the movement, no country in the Middle East was more important to the birth of al Qa’ida than Afghanistan.
Ideological Origins
In 1745, in Saudi Arabia, Muhammad ibn Saud allied with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792). Inspired by a number of scholars, such as Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), Wahhab criticized the virulent “superstitions” that had adulterated Islam’s original purity. According to Wahhab’s reading of the Qur’an, the Ottoman pilgrims who traveled across Saudi Arabia each year to pray at Mecca were not true Muslims. Rather, they were blasphemous polytheists who worshipped false idols. They were Allah’s enemy, he said, and should be converted or eliminated. In its simplest form, Wahhab preached that the original grandeur of Islam could be regained only if the Islamic community would return to what he believed were the principles enunciated by the Prophet Muhammad.
The Saudis began to export Wahhabi philosophy by distributing money to build mosques. In the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when the Arab oil-exporting nations declared an embargo on oil destined for Israel’s Western allies, Saudi Arabia found itself in an enviable economic position. Its growing oil wealth could finance a wide-ranging proselytizing campaign among the Sunnis in the Middle East and in the broader Muslim world.4
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 came at an opportune time for the Saudis. Under the stewardship of Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, Saudi Arabia began active campaigns in Pakistan and Afghanistan, working closely with the CIA and the ISI to fund the Afghan mujahideen.
One of Saudi Arabia’s key facilitators in Afghanistan was Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian from Jenin. Azzam was born in 1941 and studied sharia between 1959 and 1966, in Damascus, where he joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Over time, he became an inspiring organizer, leading one writer to call him the “Lenin of international jihad.”5 After completing his studies at Al-Azhar University in Cairo in 1973, Azzam became a professor of sharia at the University of Jordan, while supervising the university’s youth sector for the Muslim Brotherhood. He was later evicted from his university post and moved to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where he taught at King Abdulaziz University. Osama bin Laden was one of his pupils.
In 1984, Azzam moved to Peshawar, a Pashtun city in Pakistan thirty miles from the Afghanistan border. A longtime stop on the ancient Silk Road, its bazaars have attracted visitors for centuries with their gold, silver, carpets, pottery, arms, and artwork in wood, brass, and semiprecious stones. It was here, at the age of forty-three, that Azzam founded the Maktab ul-Khadamat (Services Office), which coordinated support for the mujahideen with a range of non-governmental organizations under the guise of the Red Crescent of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He said the cause he “had sought for so long was the cause of the Afghan people,” and acted as the primary connection between the Arabs and Wahhabi interests in Saudi Arabia.6
Unlike some other radicals, Azzam was opposed to targeting Muslims and pro-Western regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But he wrote that jihad in Afghanistan was a requirement for all good Muslims, an argument he made in his book Defending the Land of the Muslims Is Each Man’s Most Important Duty. The novelty of Azzam’s work lies not in its content, since other writers had called for jihad before. Rather, his success was in his skill as an agitator, able to convince Muslims from abroad to come to Afghanistan and fight. Saudi Arabia donated millions of dollars to Azzam’s Services Office and provided a 75 percent discount on airline tickets for young Muslims who wished to join the jihad. In addition, Saudi Arabia became a ferrying port and station for Arab veterans and jihadis, such as Zawahiri, who were journeying to Peshawar on their way to Afghanistan.7 Other countries, including the United States, also played a critical role. U.S. President Jimmy Carter was in favor of the mujahideen insurgency, arguing that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan posed one of the most serious threats to peace since World War II.8 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, likewise noted that the “invasion of Afghanistan made it more important to mobilize Islamic resistance against the Soviets.”9
The Afghan jihad became the great inspiration that brought Islamic radicals together. Muslim ulemas issued fatwas interpreting the Soviet intervention as an invasion of the territory of Islam by sinners. This made it possible to proclaim a “defensive” jihad, which, according to sharia, obliged every Muslim to participate.10 These first-generation volunteers were mainly Arabs from various parts of the Middle East who had come to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. Once they reached Afghanistan, the Services Office generally divided them into small groups that formed entire operational units in eastern Afghanistan, along the Pakistan border.11 A report compiled for Osama bin Laden indicated that more than 2,300 foreign fighters “from eight Arab countries have died in the course of jihad in Afghanistan. Among these martyrs 433 were from Saudi Arabia, 526 from Egypt, 184 from Iraq, 284 from Libya, 180 from Syria, 540 from Algeria, 111 from Sudan and 100 from Tunisia.”12
In the late 1980s, elite foreign fighters began to congregate in a camp near Khowst, Afghanistan, called Al-Maasada (The Lion’s Den). Osama bin Laden was the leader of this group; he said he had been inspired to call the place Al-Maasada by lines from one of the Prophet’s favorite poets, Hassan Ibn Thabit, who wrote:
Whoever wishes to hear the clash of swords,
let him come to Maasada,
where he will find courageous men ready to die
for the sake of God. 13
The Russians attacked the Lion’s Den in 1987, and bin Laden fled, along with a g
roup that included Hassan Abdel Rab al-Saray, a Saudi who later carried out the November 1995 attack on a U.S. training center in Riyadh; Abu Zubayr Madani, who was killed in Bosnia in 1992; Ibn al-Khattab, who emerged later in Chechnya; and Sheikh Tamim Adnani, who lost a son when Abdullah Azzam was killed in November 1989.
Al Qa’ida emerged shortly thereafter. In August 1988, a group gathered in bin Laden’s house in Peshawar to form a new organization, which they referred to as al-Qa’ida al-Askariya (The Military Base). They created an advisory council and membership requirements. 14 According to notes taken during the meeting by one of the participants, “al-Qa’ida is basically an organized Islamic faction, its goal is to live the word of God, to make His religion victorious.” Al Qa’ida leaders separated their recruits into two components: those identified for “limited duration” would fight with Afghan mujahideen for the remainder of the war; those identified for “open duration” would be sent to a separate training camp and “the best brothers of them” would be chosen to join al Qa’ida. Members were expected to pledge loyalty to the leadership: “The pledge of God and His covenant is upon me, to listen and obey the superiors, who are doing this work, in energy, early-rising, difficulty, and easiness, and for His superiority upon us, so that the word of God will be the highest, and His religion victorious.” They agreed that their goal would be “to lift the word of God, to make His religion victorious” across the Arab world through armed jihad. But members were urged to be patient, pious, and obedient, since the struggle would be long and challenging.15
In 1990, bin Laden responded to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait by offering Saudi Arabia his band of jihadists to protect the kingdom and turn back Saddam Hussein’s army, which threatened Saudi Arabia. “I am ready to prepare one hundred thousand fighters with good combat capability within three months,” bin Laden promised Prince Sultan, the Saudi minister of defense. “You don’t need Americans. You don’t need any other non-Muslim troops. We will be enough.”16 But the Saudi government instead turned to the United States, which led a coalition of roughly 700,000 soldiers that defeated the Iraqi military in just over a month. The deployment of U.S. soldiers to Saudi Arabia was a shock to bin Laden and a clarion call for his movement. The land of Mecca and the birthplace of the Prophet, Saudi Arabia was a symbolic and political oasis for Islamic radicals everywhere. To have non-Arabs on Saudi soil was an affront, but for the Americans to lead the military assault was a grievous transgression.
The Arabs Disperse
For bin Laden, Saudi Arabia’s reputation was now severely compromised by its agreement with the Americans. A U.S. State Department intelligence report later reported: “Bin Laden’s terrorism represents an extreme rejection of the increased U.S. strategic and military domination of the Middle East—especially Saudi Arabia and the Gulf—that resulted from the Gulf war.”17 In May 1991, a group of Saudi preachers and university professors, including Salman al-Auda and Safar al-Hawali, signed a petition (or khitab al-matalib) to King Fahd. They condemned the Saudi family for its pact with the infidel Americans and triggered a movement among some Islamic radicals to target the Saudi government.18
By this time, many of the Arabs had dispersed from Afghanistan to other countries, such as Bosnia, Algeria, and Egypt. In each location, they attempted to transform domestic conflict into jihad. But in Bosnia, for instance, they failed to make their radical interpretation of Islam a relevant component of the civil war. In other countries, such as Algeria, they were more successful for a limited period. Most Arab states viewed the veterans of Afghanistan as a serious threat—a kind of decentralized army of several thousand warriors in search of a place to fight and hide. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and others established border controls against al Qa’ida.19 According to a CIA report, bin Laden also financed the travel of several hundred veterans of the Afghan War to Sudan, “after Islamabad launched a crackdown against extremists lingering in Pakistan. In addition to savehaven [sic] in Sudan, Bin Ladin has provided financial support to militants actively opposed to moderate Islamic governments and the West.”20
Those who remained in Afghanistan and Pakistan were initially scattered among a variety of groups. Some fought on the side of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar against Ahmed Shah Massoud, but the majority joined with local commanders, who were nearly all Pashtuns. In the Pashtun pocket around Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, there was a strong Arab presence in the Saudi-based International Islamic Relief Organization. In the midnineties, as the Taliban came to power, Pakistani organizations, such as the Harakat ul-Mujahidin, took control of a number of training camps for Pakistani militants in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province. Other camps were run by Harakat ul-Ansar (HUA) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The CIA believed that Harakat ul-Ansar—an Islamic extremist group used by Pakistan in its war against India in Kashmir—posed a particular threat to the United States: “Against the backdrop of possible declining support from Islamabad,” one CIA analysis concluded, “the HUA is discussing financing with sponsors of international terrorism who are virulently anti-U.S. and may encourage attacks on U.S. targets. The HUA may be seeking this assistance from such sources—including terrorist financier Usama Bin Ladin and Libyan leader Mu’ammar Qadhafi—in an attempt to offset losses resulting from the drop in Pakistani support.”21
Meanwhile, the Taliban entrusted to Osama bin Laden control of most non-Pakistani and non-Afghan militant groups. Bin Laden installed many of the senior Arab fighters in residential complexes near Jalalabad and Kandahar, including at the old USAID agriculture complex at Tarnak Farms, while the ordinary fighters were grouped together in cantonments in Kabul and Kunduz. The leaders were drawn almost entirely from the first generation of militants who had come to Afghanistan to fight the Russians.22 Disputes sometimes emerged between the Afghans and Pakistanis on one side and the Arabs on the other. For example, they held different opinions about praying over the body of a fallen comrade, or visiting cemeteries and honoring the dead. Foreign fighters, particularly the Arabs, considered some of the Afghan religious practices sacrilegious and tried to show them “the correct Salafi way.”23
In 1998, bin Laden formally announced the creation of a World Islamic Front for jihad against the “Crusaders” meaning the West and specifically the Americans—and the Jews. Most of those who signed on were leaders of peripheral factions who were beholden to bin Laden for financial support. They included Ayman al-Zawahiri of Egyptian Islamic Jihad; Rifa’i Ahmad Taha (also known as Abu Yasir) of the Egyptian Islamic Group; Sheikh Mir Hamzah of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan; and Fazlur Rahman of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh. The largest of these fringe movements was the Egyptian Islamic Group, but Taha did not speak for the jailed senior leadership of his group and was later forced to rescind his group’s participation. Zawahiri also caused a split within his own Egyptian Islamic Jihad, some of whose members preferred to focus on Egypt rather than the United States.24 Bin Laden even began to talk about using weapons of mass destruction against the United States. In 1998, the U.S. State Department had “reliable intelligence that the bin Laden network has been actively seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction—including chemical weapons—for use against U.S. interests.”25
Fighting on Multiple Fronts
Ayman al-Zawahiri and the rest of the al Qa’ida leadership were prepared for sustained struggle. In Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, Zawahiri called for a multifaceted battle to pursue three major goals. One was to overthrow “corrupt regimes” in the Muslim world. Another was to establish sharia in these lands. And a third was to inflict significant casualties on “the western crusader” and to “get crusaders out of the lands of Islam especially from Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.”26
As with any movement, there were differences among al Qa’ida leaders and jihadists across the globe. For some, the United States should be a secondary, not a primary, target of military escalation. There had been some entropy in the jihadist movement by the end of the 1990s, as the regimes in Egypt, Algeria, and other A
rab countries crushed their jihadist opponents.27 There were also conflicts among al Qa’ida’s national contingents. According to one of bin Laden’s former bodyguards, “there were rivalries among Al-Qa’idah members depending on their countries of origin. The Egyptians used to boast about being Egyptian. The Saudis, Yemenis, Sudanese, and Arab Maghreb citizens used to do the same thing sometimes.” This rivalry angered bin Laden, who argued that it sowed divisions and disagreements among al Qa’ida members.28 Lastly, there were disagreements about money. Zawahiri himself acknowledged the shortage of funds in a note to al Qa’ida colleagues: “Conflicts take place between us for trivial reasons, due to scarcity of resources.”29
Many of al Qa’ida’s leaders were inspired by such influential individuals as Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged in Egypt on August 29, 1966. Qutb argued that anything non-Islamic was evil, that only the strict following of sharia as a complete system of morality, justice, and governance would bring significant benefits to humanity.30 Modern-day Islam, he wrote in his book Milestones, had also become corrupt, and he compared the modern Muslim states with jahiliyya. As used in the Qur’an, the term describes the state of ignorance in which Arabs were supposed to have lived before the revelation of Islam to the Prophet Muhammad at the beginning of the seventh century.31 In two of his key works, In the Shadow of the Qur’an and Signposts on the Road, Qutb pleaded for contemporary Muslims to build a new Islamic community, much as the Prophet had done a thousand years earlier.32 This meant that most Muslims could not be viewed as true Muslims.