In Islamic doctrine, denying a Muslim his faith is a serious accusation, referred to as takfir. The term derives from kufr (impiety) and means that one is impure and should therefore be excommunicated. For those who interpret Islamic law literally and rigorously, takfir is punishable by death. Qutb’s philosophy allowed for no gray areas. The difference between true Muslims and non-Muslims was the same as between good vs. evil and just vs. unjust. According to his interpretation, the only just ruler is one who administers according to the Qur’an. There is no such thing as a defensive and limited war, he argued, there is only an offensive, total war.33 Qutb’s work found an eager readership among some of the younger generation in the 1970s because of its stunning and drastic break with the status quo. One problem, however, is that he never clearly specified what the Prophet’s experience had been and how it should be replicated in the modern era.34 After his execution, Qutb’s fiery ideology gradually emerged as the blueprint for Islamic radicals from Morocco to Indonesia. It was later taught at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah and Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.35
According to Qutb, most leaders from Islamic governments were not true Muslims. “The Muslim community has long ago vanished from existence,” he wrote. It was “crushed under the weight of those false laws and teachings which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings.”36 Like Qutb, Abdullah Azzam had argued that Islam’s main challenge was against jahiliyya.37
In the minds of Qutb and the al Qa’ida leadership, any regime that did not impose sharia on the country and collaborated with Western governments such as the United States was guilty of apostasy. The Prophet argued that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, for marital infidelity, or for turning away from Islam. Zawahiri took this line of argument to its extreme, concluding that because regimes had departed from Islam and failed to establish sharia law, they were not truly Muslim countries and therefore subject to attack.38 Indeed, even Muslims could be punished if they did not obey conservative Islamic law. Abdel Aziz bin Adel Salam (also known as al-Sayyid Imam), an Egyptian militant who was one of Zawahiri’s oldest associates, argued that Muslims who did not join the fight against apostate rulers were themselves impious and must be fought.39
What constitutes sufficient justification for takfir has long been disputed among different schools of Islamic thought. The orthodox Sunni position is that sins do not prove that someone is un-Islamic, but, rather, denials of fundamental religious principles do. Consequently, a murderer may still be a Muslim, but someone who denies that murder is a sin must be a kafir, as long as he or she is aware that murder is a sin in Islam. The irony, of course, is that while Islamists argued that Allah’s law and rule must be made supreme, translating this into concrete political terms required human interpretation. There have long been deep and even violent differences among Islamists about how to do this.40
This internal confusion explains the motivations of al Qa’ida leaders to overthrow successive regimes in the Middle East (the “near” enemy, or al-Adou al-Qareeb) to establish a pan-Islamic caliphate, as well as to fight the United States and its allies (the “far” enemy, or al-Adou al-Baeed) who supported them.41 As Zawahiri wrote, the “establishment of a Muslim state in the heart of the Islamic world is not an easy or close target. However, it is the hope of the Muslim nation to restore its fallen caliphate and regain its lost glory.”42 Zawahiri argued that “the issue of unification in Islam is important and that the battle between Islam and its enemies is primarily an ideological one over the issue of unification…. [it] is also a battle over to whom authority and power should belong—to God’s course and shari’ah, to manmade laws and material principles, or to those who claim to be intermediaries between the Creator and mankind.”43
Like many Islamists, Zawahiri drew heavily on the Salafist teachings of Ibn Taymiyya, the thirteenth-century reformer who had sought to impose a literal interpretation of the Qur’an, which serves as the basis of sharia and lays out the commandments of God. Al Qa’ida leaders raised the status of militant jihad and put it on a par with the five pillars of Islam. For instance, bin Laden argued that “fighting is part of our religion and our sharia. Those who love God and the Prophet and this religion may not deny a part of that religion. This is a very serious matter.”44 Bin Laden considered jihad an individual duty (fard ‘ayn) and a critical pillar of Islam. In addition, many Islamists argued that sharia law cannot be improved upon, despite fifteen centuries of social change, because it came directly from God. They wanted to bypass the long tradition of judicial opinion from Muslim scholars and forge a legal system that was untainted by Western influence or modernity.45 As al Qa’ida members chanted at one training camp in Afghanistan:
We challenge with our Qur’an,
We challenge with our Qur’an.
Our men are in revolt, our men are in revolt.
We will not regain our homeland,
Nor will our shame be erased except through blood and fire.
On and on and on it goes.
On and on and on it goes.
We defend our religion with blood, with blood.
We defend our religion with blood, with blood.
Our Qur’an is in our hands. 46
Suicide operations could also be advantageous, even though the Qur’an prohibits suicide.47 For some disillusioned bombers, martyrdom offered several attractions: honor and fame; the joys of seventy-two virgins; and paradise in “gardens of bliss” for seventy members of the suicide bomber’s household, who might be spared the fires of hell.48 Yet many Muslims, including in Afghanistan, believed that suicide attacks were never justified.49 Zawahiri had to overcome this taboo. Suicide bombers, he claimed, represented “a generation of mujahideen that has decided to sacrifice itself and its property in the cause of God. That is because the way of death and martyrdom is a weapon that tyrants and their helpers, who worship their salaries instead of God, do not have.”50 In addition, Zawahiri regarded suicide bombing as effective: “Suicide operations are the most successful in inflicting damage on the opponent and the least costly in terms of casualties among the fundamentalists.”51
The United States was the most significant “far” enemy. “The white man” in America is the primary enemy, Qutb wrote. “The white man crushes us underfoot while we teach our children about his civilization, his universal principles and noble objectives…. We are endowing our children with amazement and respect for the master who tramples our honor and enslaves us.” The response to this enslavement, Qutb argued, had to be anger and violence. “Let us instead plant the seeds of hatred, disgust, and revenge in the souls of these children. Let us teach these children from the time their nails are soft that the white man is the enemy of humanity, and that they should destroy him at the first opportunity.”52
Most jihadist leaders had long advocated attacking Arab regimes, not the United States or other Western regimes. Zawahiri had made this point in his 1995 essay “The Road to Jerusalem Goes through Cairo,” published in al-Mujahidin.53 But after their defeat in Egypt, Algeria, and other Arab countries in the 1990s, jihadists began to focus on the West. For such leaders as Zawahiri, then, the United States only knew “the language of interests backed by brute military force. Therefore, if we wish to have a dialogue with them and make them aware of our rights, we must talk to them in the language they understand.” This language was violence and force.54 Osama bin Laden repeated this message regularly. On the eve of the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, for example, he released a video clip in which he said that the goal of the United States was to wipe out Islam across the globe, and that he was left with no other recourse than to “continue to escalate the killing and fighting against you.”55
The United States, and the West more broadly, was a corrupting influence on Islam. For Abdullah Azzam, this meant “expelling the Kuffar [infidels] from our land, and it is Fard Ayn, a compulsory duty upon all.”56 In an article in Jihad magazine, Azzam
wrote that “jihad in God’s will means killing the infidels in the name of God and raising the banner of His name.”57 This was especially true when Western or other non-Muslim armies invaded Islamic lands such as Afghanistan.
Al Qa’ida leaders also accused the United States of propping up apostate Arab countries. Consequently, in order to reestablish the Caliphate, al Qa’ida had to target these countries’ primary backers.58 The conflict with the United States, then, was a “battle of ideologies, a struggle for survival, and a war with no truce.”59 This language was remarkably similar to Harvard University Professor Samuel Huntington’s argument in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Of particular concern, Huntington argued, was a growing rift between the Judeo-Christian West and Islamic countries, which was becoming pronounced and violent.60 In an early publication, Loyalty to Islam and Disavowal to its Enemies, Zawahiri argued that Muslims must make a choice between Islam and its enemies, including the West.61 In Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, Zawahiri similarly wrote that the overthrow of governments in such countries as Egypt would become a rallying point for the rest of the Islamic world, leading it in a jihad against the West. “Then history would make a new turn, God willing,” he noted, “in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government.”62 In his mind, and in the minds of several of his followers, the United States was primarily interested in “removing Islam from power.”63
In the early 1990s, the Saudi government’s decision to allow U.S. military forces on its soil following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait had been a major blow to the jihadists. In the late 1990s, Osama bin Laden’s statements began to legitimize violence against the United States. In August 1996, bin Laden issued the Declaration of Jihad against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places. This long-winded eleven-page tract was crammed with quotations from the Qur’an, hadiths of the Prophet, and references to Ibn Taymiyya. Then, in February 1998, bin Laden, Zawahiri, and others published a fatwa to kill Americans: “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 do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”64 The fatwa cited three main grievances against the United States. One was the presence of American troops in the Arabian Peninsula, the second was America’s intention to destroy the Muslim people of Iraq through sanctions, and the third was the U.S. goal of incapacitating the Arab states and propping up Israel. Bin Laden accused the United States of plundering Muslim riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning U.S. bases into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
A Dangerous Alliance
Of particular concern to U.S. policymakers in the late 1990s was the growing collaboration between al Qa’ida and the Taliban. In response to bin Laden’s involvement in the August 1998 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the Clinton administration launched a series of cruise-missile strikes against al Qa’ida bases in eastern Afghanistan. But some classified U.S. assessments suggest that the attacks brought al Qa’ida and the Taliban closer together.65 One State Department cable reported: “Taliban leader Mullah Omar lashed out at the U.S., asserting that the Taliban will continue to provide a safe haven to bin Laden.”66 After all, bin Laden sometimes stayed at Mullah Omar’s residence in Kandahar.67
In July 1999, U.S. President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 13129, which found that “the actions and policies of the Taliban in Afghanistan, in allowing territory under its control in Afghanistan to be used as a safe haven and base of operations for Usama bin Ladin and the Al-Qa’ida organization…constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”68 The Taliban’s military structure included al Qa’ida members such as the elite Brigade 055, which consisted of foreign fighters.69 The Taliban’s alliance with al Qa’ida took a toll on its relations with several countries, especially Saudi Arabia, which had initially provided support to the Taliban through its intelligence service.70
Now that the United States had formally denounced al Qa’ida and, by extension, the Taliban, Saudi officials felt compelled to act. Bin Laden’s involvement in the August 1998 embassy attacks, as well as his derisive statements against Saudi officials, required an urgent response. On September 19, 1998, Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal met with with Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. The meeting began with a brief discussion about the strain between the Taliban and Iran. Turki argued that the Taliban should take steps to defuse the tensions, then he turned to the main topic of the meeting: to ask the Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden. Mullah Omar replied that the Taliban had no intention of surrendering bin Laden or any other Arabs to the Saudi government. Omar then questioned the legitimacy of a Saudi government that would allow U.S. troops to be stationed in the Persian Gulf. According to U.S. State Department accounts of the meeting, he then argued that “the Saudi government had no business interfering in Afghan matters since the whole Muslim ‘ummah’ (international community) was in the process of rising against [the Saudi government] because of its failed stewardship of the two holy sites.”71
Turki’s response was swift and forceful. He returned to Riyadh and cut off all Saudi ties with the Taliban. As a State Department cable explained, the Saudi government was even successful “in preventing private Saudi sources, including foundations, from dispersing money to the Taliban as they did in the past.”72 The Taliban-Saudi break angered a number of Taliban leaders, such as deputy leader Mullah Rabbani, who had pro-Saudi views. But neither the Saudis nor the Americans could derail al Qa’ida. In January 2001, eight months before the September 11 attacks, counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke wrote a classified memo to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice: “We urgently need…a Principals level review of the al Qida network.” He continued by pleading, “As we noted in our briefings for you, al Qida is not some narrow little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy.” What was required, Clarke argued, was “a comprehensive multi-regional policy on al Qida.”73
Al Qa’ida had evolved from a myth to a reality. Indeed, its reputation had grown out of a fabrication that its early disciples had feverishly propagated across the Arab world. Arab jihadists, they claimed, played a critical role in defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan. “The USSR, a superpower with the largest land army in the world,” Zawahiri alleged, “was destroyed and the remnants of its troops fled Afghanistan before the eyes of the Muslim youths and as a result of their actions…Osama bin Laden has apprised me of the size of the popular Arab support for the Afghan mujahideen that amounted, according to his sources, to $200 million in the form of military aid alone in 10 years.”74
But this self-aggrandizement was unwarranted. Though it is a common theme in al Qa’ida lore, the contributions of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other Arabs were negligible to the Soviet defeat. Mohammad Yousaf, head of the ISI’s Afghanistan bureau that trained the mujahideen against the Soviets, doesn’t even discuss the Arab jihadists in his account of the Soviet defeat.75 As Lawrence Wright explained in his book The Looming Tower, “the presence of several thousand Arabs—and rarely more than a few hundred of them actually on the field of battle—made no real difference in the tide of affairs.”76 The Afghan mujahideen would have won with or without their help, thanks in large part to the astronomical amount of arms, money, and other assistance provided by the governments of Pakistan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia.77
In some respects, this al Qa’ida myth was probably irrelevant. What mattered was that some people—especially its own members—believed it. By 2001, al Qa’ida had evolved into a competent international terrorist organization that had conducted bold a
ttacks against the United States in Tanzania, Kenya, and Yemen. Its goals were compatible with the Taliban’s ideology. Richard Clarke’s January 2001 memo to Condoleezza Rice asserted that al Qa’ida’s objective was to “replace moderate, modern, Western regimes in Muslim countries with theocracies modeled along the lines of the Taliban.”78 From its base in Afghanistan, al Qa’ida also planned the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
CHAPTER SIX Operation Enduring Freedom
THE MORNING OF September 11, 2001, began like many others for Zalmay Khalilzad, who was serving as a special assistant to President George W. Bush at the National Security Council. He was sitting in a meeting run by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in the White House Situation Room when the first hijacked plane flew into the north tower of the World Trade Center, tearing a gaping hole in the building and setting it afire. “There was a TV screen hanging in a corner of the room,” he told The New Yorker. “When the first plane hit, we had a sense that, oh, maybe it had lost its way. As soon as the second plane hit, the meeting was called to an end and she rushed away. We went outside the White House to Pennsylvania Avenue and waited awhile till we got the all-clear sign. While we were out, there had been all sorts of rumors and reports, that Capitol Hill had been hit, and the Pentagon, obviously, had been hit. Then we started to look at the intelligence. I started looking at Afghanistan, tracing al Qa’ida.”1 The September 11 attacks opened another chapter in Afghanistan’s age of insurgency. Unbeknownst to most Americans, however, the struggle for Afghanistan had already begun. On September 9, 2001, two al Qa’ida terrorists, Dahmane Abd al-Sattar and Bouraoui el-Ouaer, had assassinated Northern Alliance military commander Ahmed Shah Massoud in Afghanistan. Posing as Belgian journalists, they had been granted an interview with Massoud in his bungalow near the Tajikistan border. After setting up their equipment, Bouraoui detonated explosives concealed in his camera, riddling Massoud with shrapnel. Massoud died shortly thereafter, along with one of his assistants, Muhammad Asim Suhail, weakening the already frail Northern Alliance.
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