Through Our Enemies' Eyes

by Michael Scheuer

  Now, many Americans might find it counterintuitive for bin Laden and the Afghan Arabs to hate the United States after U.S. taxpayers provided several billion dollars to support the mujahedin—and they would be right. One senses bin Laden and his colleagues are troubled by the fact that America was on Allah’s side from 1979 to 1992, and that bin Laden himself once said, “We are in alliance with them [the Americans] now because we have common interests, but they are the enemies of Islam.” Since the mid-1990s, bin Laden has tried to make clear that the United States helped the mujahedin only to hurt the Soviets, and that Islamic history justified an “alliance” with Americans on the basis of cooperating with a lesser evil to defeat the greater threat to Islam.

  The Americans were not interested in our jihad. They were only concerned that the Soviets might gain access to warm water ports….80 I did not fight against the communist threat [in Afghanistan] while forgetting the peril from the West. For us, the idea was not to get involved more than necessary in the fight against the Russians, which was the business of the Americans, but rather to show our solidarity with our Islamist brothers. I discovered that it was not enough to fight in Afghanistan, but that we had to fight on all fronts against communist or Western oppression. The urgent thing was communism, but the next target was America.81

  We were doing our duty in support of Islam in Afghanistan, although this duty used to serve, against our desire, the U.S. interests. The situation was similar to the Muslims’ fight against the Romans [in early Islamic history]. We know that fighting between the Romans and the Persians has always been strong. So, no wise man can say that when the Muslims fought the Romans first at Mu’tah battle they were agents to the Persians, but interests met at this point. In other words, your killing of the Romans, which is a duty for you, used to please the Persians. However, after they [the Muslims] finished with the Romans, they began to fight the Persians. So, conversion [sic— convergence?] of interests without agreement does not necessarily mean relations or agentry.82

  In his 1994 article in the Beirut Review, Professor Anthony Hyman quotes an Arab Afghan fighter as saying that “the Afghan jihad does not need us [the Arabs]. We need the Afghan jihad.” Hyman goes on to note “to many Arabs the Afghan cause appeared to be the only successful example of an Islamic struggle against communism and atheism in a world where failure and disappointment was, to the Arabs, all too common.”83 Bin Laden, moreover, always has gone another step by declaring the demise of the USSR was the result of Islam defeating the Red Army in Afghanistan. Bin Laden and his colleagues hold as an article of faith the belief that the Soviet Union died, like Kipling’s Tommy Atkins, on “Afghanistan’s plains” and that belief makes many of them eager to take on the remaining superpower, Islam’s top enemy, the United States. “Having borne arms against the Russians in Afghanistan, we think our battle with America will be easy by comparison,” Readers’ Digest quotes bin Laden as saying. “We are now more determined to carry on until we see the face of God.”84 And the vivid prose of Issam Darraz again provides a good description of the importance of the Afghan experience to Sunni militancy worldwide.

  The Afghan model was a great lesson…. When I talk about Masadah [bin Laden’s activities in the Afghan jihad], I don’t talk about the past, I don’t talk about the place Afghanistan, [instead] I uncover the thread of hope in our lives…. I felt that I was in the cradle of a new historic movement and that those ardent young men were beginning to write a truly new page of Islamic history—a new and pure page written with the blood and lighted with the souls of the martyrs…. The youth [in Afghanistan] and similar Muslim youth will be this nation’s [the ummah’s] fortress and its defensive line against internal and external forces of destruction and devastation.85

  Combat experience, self-confidence, increased religious faith, ambitions for a borderless Islamic world, leadership skills, hatred for the United States—bin Laden and the Afghan Arabs emerged from the Afghan war with all these attributes. There is, however, another element gained in the jihad that made this mix a lethal threat to America, the West, Israel, and pro-U.S. Arab states. This factor is the international ties and friendships—a “militant brotherhood without borders”—forged by bin Laden and his colleagues in the years 1979 to 1992. “The leading figures in the [Egyptian] Islamic movement,” Al-Watan Al-Arabi said in 1998, “benefited enormously from the war in Afghanistan, because they were thus able to forge a wide network with Islamic movements throughout the world. A measure of the diversity of these contacts is that Palestinians and Syrians oversaw the training of the Egyptian Islamic groups.” For bin Laden, the French weekly VSD captured the importance of this aspect of the Afghan war when it reported bin Laden returned home “with an address book containing the names of everybody who was anybody in Islamic activism and guerrilla warfare in his pocket.”86

  8

  BIN LADEN AND THE SAUDIS, 1989–1991: FROM FAVORITE SON TO BLACK SHEEP

  Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.

  Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 19 December 1776

  Bin Laden left Afghanistan for home at the close of the spring 1989 Jalalabad battles. He meant his trip to the kingdom to be short, and it appears he fully intended to remain engaged in the Afghan jihad. Such was not to be the case—at least immediately—because on his return the Saudis marked his passport so that he could not reenter the kingdom if he departed. And therein lies a story.

  Saudi Arabia led the Islamic world’s hostile reaction to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and was the symbol of its determination to assist the Afghans as much as possible. “In a remarkable departure from their usual parochial self-absorption,” Eric Margolis has written in War at the Top of the World, “Muslims in various parts of the world became inspired and gripped by the remote struggle in Afghanistan.”1 This response was prompted by several factors. The perception that the invasion was an infidel attack on Islam was widely held. In such a case, the Koran sanctions a defensive jihad, calling on each Muslim to defend the attacked and making this aid a religious duty and an individual responsibility. There also was anger over a superpower seeking to brutally impose its will on one of the poorest countries on the planet. Finally, leading Islamic governments—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Emirates, and so forth—could make political points by sending material aid and dispensing rhetorical support for the Afghan mujahedin. From the war’s start, the mujahedin’s cause was universally popular on the “Arab street”; the rulers of the Arab world quickly took note and saw it was in their domestic political interest, as well as in the interest of ensuring their admission to paradise, to support the Afghans. Stories abound about the popular, grassroots support for the Afghan mujahedin. A senior Saudi prince, for example, estimated in the late 1980s that donations for the mujahedin on Fridays from the kingdom’s mosques amounted to nearly $80 million a year. For Muslims, the Afghan jihad was very much a people’s war.

  Another benefit accruing to these regimes was geopolitical in nature. The reaction of both the United States and the United Kingdom to the Soviet invasion was intensely negative. The usually dovish President Jimmy Carter demanded the Red Army’s immediate withdrawal, canceled U.S. participation in the Moscow Olympics, and began the decade-long U.S. policy of arming the Afghan resistance. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher regarded the Soviet invasion as the return of Stalinist barbarism, and when Carter lost the 1980 election, she and newly elected U.S. president Ronald Reagan became an Anglo-American team that defied their own senior diplomats and brooked no thought of a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan that permitted a continued Soviet military presence. The rulers of the Arab and Muslim worlds therefore saw that the two preeminent Western powers were quite literally on “the side of the angels” and so found their own support for the resistance—which wou
ld have been forthcoming in any event—would win them big points in Washington. Western support for the mujahedin, in some ways, also probably caused the Arabs to ratchet up official and unofficial support for the resistance. The Muslim world’s leaders, after all, could not be seen doing less to help Afghan Muslims than the “infidel” West.

  In addition to reasons of religion and state, some Arab rulers cynically welcomed the Afghan jihad for the opportunity it afforded to buttress their internal stability by refocusing the discontent of domestic Islamists. These rulers found the Afghan battlefield an excellent venue to which to export a slowly festering element of the population, youthful Islamists, that seemed destined to cause domestic instability. The regimes wrapped themselves and their young would-be mujahedin in the Prophet’s battle flag and sent them to war, while at home they taught the next generation, as Tariq Masud has written about Saudi Arabia, “that to take part in the just Afghan war—and to die in it—was a fate to which all Muslims should aspire.” In the starkest terms, these “Islamicly committed youth were allowed, and sometimes helped, to go to Afghanistan in the hope that they would be killed there.”2 The Saudi government even threw in a “jihad ticket,” its price reduced by 75 percent for Saudia Air flights from the kingdom to Pakistan, again validating the hoary truism that the al-Sauds are “always ready to fund Islamic militancy, provided it was as far away from the kingdom as possible.” In their wildest dreams, Arab rulers had not imagined the Russians would be beaten or that “any of the Arab youth would come out alive.”3 Beyond sending young men to help the Afghans, then, there “was another, officially undeclared interest also. Saudi Arabia was attempting to remove from the Near East radical anti-Western groups that had become increasingly active there. The idea of sending them to the ‘holy war’ against the Soviet contingent in Afghanistan proved a success. For a whole decade … the Soviet Union became the main enemy of the radicals.”4

  As in most of life’s actions, the decision of the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, and other Muslim states to encourage and help transport their young Islamists to fight in Afghanistan has encountered the iron and excruciatingly painful law of unintended consequences. Although Arabs and non-Afghan Muslims fought and died in the Afghan jihad, the Arab rulers, who, according to a retired U.S. intelligence official, had sent their young Islamists to Afghanistan “with the fondest hope that they would not come back … [found] that they didn’t die in great numbers. They died in tiny numbers, and they did come back.”5 Moreover, bin Laden’s formidable figure emerged as a leader of the non-Afghan Muslim fighters who did their Islamic duty by fighting the atheists but had failed to do their political duty by dying in the process.

  Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia as a well-known and admired guerrilla commander, construction engineer, and logistician in the narrow milieu of Arab Afghans; he was neither the Arab Afghans’ only leader nor an international figure. Bin Laden’s first Western press interview, in fact, did not occur until December 1993, when Robert Fisk met him for the Independent.6 So little did bin Laden regard himself as the Arab Afghans’ chief that he was surprised by two realities he encountered when he arrived in Saudi Arabia—sometime in July or August 1989—both of which flowed from his war record. The first reality was that he could not leave again because the Saudis had restricted his passport. Apparently, however, bin Laden took this in stride and “was not hostile to the regime at this stage,” and it seems that the government did not limit his activities or domestic travel. Bin Laden did not even mention the Saudis’ action when he told Fisk that in 1989 he had simply “returned to road construction in Taif and Abha [in Saudi Arabia]. I brought back the equipment I used to build roads and tunnels for the mujahedin in Afghanistan.”7

  It appears that senior Saudi officials first began to worry about bin Laden’s religious ardor, potential post-Afghan-jihad stature, and domestic popularity in the mid-1980s and tried at the time to deflect his focus from the Afghan war. Toward this end, King Fahd, according to an article posted on the Abdullah Azzam Internet site, offered bin Laden “the contract of expanding the Prophet’s mosque in Medina. This deal would be worth a net profit of $90m[illion] to Bin Laden.”8 Bin Laden is reported to have refused the offer because of his commitment to Afghan jihad and because he suspected that the offer was made not to acquire his construction acumen but “to distract him from the Jihad in Afghanistan and content him with the building of a mosque.”9 In 1989 the trigger for the Saudis’ decision to mark his passport was their fear that bin Laden wanted “to start a new front of ‘jihad’ in [Communist-ruled] South Yemen.” The Saudis’ suspicions were well founded, given that bin Laden is considered one of the founders of Yemeni Shaykh Abdel al-Zindani’s powerful al-Islah party, had worked with Zindani to move thousands of Yemenis to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, had been active “with the [Yemeni] mujahedin against the Communist party in South Yemen in the early 1980s,”10 and had built strong ties to many of Yemen’s senior Islamists during the Afghan jihad.11

  Indeed, the Yemeni government later claimed that “Yemeni Afghan groups executed several socialist figures and mounted 158 operations … between 1990 and 1994 on the strength of fatwas issued by Osama bin Laden, who gave Friday sermons in Mosques in Sana, Abyan, and Shabwah [in] which he engaged in incitement against ‘infidel communists.’” The Yemenis also claimed that bin Laden sponsored attacks on the country’s “petroleum installations.” Based on the Yemenis’ claims and bin Laden’s own words, the “eye” the Saudis kept on bin Laden after they banned his travel was far less than twenty-twenty, perhaps adding credence to Robert Fisk’s estimate that the Saudi “intelligence service is one of the most unintelligent in the Arab world.”12 Bin Laden himself told Al-Quds Al-Arabi in 1996 that in Yemen after the Afghan jihad,

  we fought the communist socialist party before the union and the union plan because they are atheist, communist, and oppressive socialists. They oppressed the people, destroyed everything, destroyed God’s religion and sanctified their party, saying nothing is louder than the party’s voice. I delivered a number of lectures in mosques inciting Muslims to fight them, which prompted the Saudi government to prevent me from making any speeches. But with God’s grace, the youths continued the jihad, and we continued to cooperate with them against the heads of atheism in the socialist party.13

  The second surprise bin Laden faced in the kingdom was that he “had become a celebrity.” French journalist Xavier Raufer, for example, has said bin Laden came home “trailing clouds of glory” from Afghanistan; the Village Voice has claimed “Bin Laden returned home as a celebrated hero and leader of the opposition movement to the House of Saud, claiming moral turpitude.”14 When he returned home, the Associated Press reported, bin Laden “was showered with praise and donations, and was in demand as a speaker in mosques and homes. Over 250,000 cassettes of his fiery speeches were distributed, selling out as soon as they appeared.” In the now-banned tapes, bin Laden flayed U.S. foreign policy and again called for a “boycott of American goods” to assist the Palestinians.15 An unnamed “Saudi analyst” has told Reuters—with a bit of tongue in his cheek—“in the old days before he was an outlaw Osama was popular with all sorts of people here [in Saudi Arabia]. He was from a rich family and this [also] opened many doors.”16

  Bin Laden’s popularity, his eloquent anti-American tongue, and the fact that the Saudis really did not know how many domestic followers he had—journalist Ahmed Rashid claims bin Laden resettled four thousand Arab Afghans in Mecca and Medina alone—also contributed to the authorities’ desire to keep bin Laden under watch. Palestinian journalist Sa’id Aburish has said that bin Laden was a special problem for the Saudi regime. “Osama bin Laden,” Aburish stresses, “is the prophet of these [fundamentalist] movements in Saudi Arabia. And Osama bin Laden is much more interesting than most of them because Osama bin Laden belongs to a family that is part of the ruling establishment and therefore it [bin Laden’s popularity] is an indication of how bad things have
got [in Saudi Arabia].”17 The above-mentioned “Saudi analyst” concluded that “the Saudi government wants him to go away and be quiet,”18 but, as shall be seen, even the al-Sauds do not always get what they want.

  The uneasy modus vivendi between bin Laden and the al-Sauds grew tenuous in 1990 in the run-up to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Before the attack, bin Laden angered Saudi authorities by making a public “prophecy … [that] Saddam was going to invade Saudi Arabia.” Sa’d al-Faqih claims bin Laden also sent “secret confidential letters to the King” about the Iraqi threat; according to al-Faqih, “he [bin Laden] was giving talks about it in the mosques. He was giving speeches in the mosques and talking about the dangers of the Ba’ath—which is a party of Saddam—having ambitions to invade Kuwait and Saudi Arabia…. And then his prophecy was correct. And he was never respected or rewarded for that. Instead he was advised to stay in Jeddah; he was put in sort of house arrest.” Bin Laden’s relations with the al-Sauds were ruptured beyond repair when King Fahd allowed U.S. and other Western troops into Saudi Arabia after convincing senior Saudi ulema that “Islam is in danger,” infidel forces were needed to defend the kingdom, and, most important, “non-Muslim troops would respect the kingdom’s Islamic traditions and leave as soon as they were not needed.”19