Through Our Enemies' Eyes

by Michael Scheuer

  On balance, I believe bin Laden decided to leave Sudan on his own hook because of the assassination attempts, because he saw a need to ease international pressure on al-Turabi’s new Islamic state, and because he had decided it was time to intensify his anti-U.S. guerrilla war from a redoubt that offered tremendous topographical advantages to the defender. Finally, bin Laden knew he had closer friendships of longer duration in Afghanistan and, for those friends, protecting guests was a matter of national pride, as well as an unavoidable tribal duty and religious obligation.

  IV

  WAR YEARS, 1996–2001

  11

  BIN LADEN RETURNS TO AFGHANISTAN: GETTING SETTLED AND POLITICKING

  Now I saw in my dream, that by this time the Pilgrims were got over the enchanted ground, and entering into the country of Beulah, whose air was very sweet and pleasant, the Way lying directly through it, they solaced themselves there for a season…. In this country the sun shineth night and day; where-fore this was beyond the valley of the Shadow of Death, and also out of the reach of Giant Despair, neither from this place could they so much as see Doubting-Castle. Here they were within sight of the City they were going to; also here they met some of the inhabitants thereof: For in this land the Shining Ones commonly walk, because it is on the borders of Heaven.

  The Lord of these mountains hath given us a Charge not to be forgetful of strangers, therefore the good of the place is even before you.

  The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678

  As always with bin Laden’s travel, the details of his return to Afghanistan are fuzzy. He arrived sometime between mid-May and mid-June 1996, but the means and place of arrival are unclear. The media report him arriving by aircraft in Kabul, then going by car to Jalalabad, and then southeast to the Hadda farm compound of Hisbi Islami leader Yunis Khalis; by an aircraft to Peshawar and then by car to Khalis’s farm; or by an assortment of other means that have him turning up variously at Khowst, Islamabad, Karachi, or Jalalabad.

  Bin Laden became no easier to track after he arrived in Afghanistan, notwithstanding efforts by more than a few governments to keep him in their sights, literally and figuratively. While the mode and route of travel from Sudan are unclear, what is plainly apparent is that bin Laden had no shortage of friends in Afghanistan. He was allowed into the country and given an Afghan passport by Jamiat Islami party leader and then-prime minister Burhanuddin Rabbani—an acquaintance of his youth and father-in-law of legendary Afghan commander Ahmed Shah Masood—and the then-foreign minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and was hosted on arrival by Khalis, thereby covering both sides of the country’s historic Pashtun/non-Pashtun ethnic divide and ongoing civil war. Because of the reputation he earned during and after the Afghan jihad, bin Laden, like Kipling’s Kim, was welcomed as “the little friend of all the world.” “When he [bin Laden] arrived there,” Frontline has noted, “the situation in Afghanistan was unsettled between the many factions, but he had very good relations with all the factions and all would protect him.” An August 1998 statement by Hekmatyar, leader of his own Hisbi Islami group and then a senior member of Masood’s anti-Taliban alliance, emphasized the accuracy of Frontline’s analysis. “Bin Laden has been in Afghanistan since the Afghan jihad era,” Hekmatyar said. “Although he is now under Taliban protection, we believe that no one has the right to expel him from Afghan territory or to hand him over to any foreign party. The Afghan people will not accept such a thing.”1

  Even the Taliban’s most dangerous Afghan foe, the late Northern Alliance chief Masood, demonstrated in 1998–1999 that he would not act against bin Laden, despite the aid bin Laden was giving the Taliban. In fall 1998, for example, Taliban media began accusing Masood of apostasy and trying to kill bin Laden. “Ahmed Shah Masood has decided to face two Qiblahs,” Taliban radio declared, “and now in addition to Moscow, he also worships the United States.” The broadcast claimed “the main focus of Masood’s agenda and the U.S. is the martyring of our mujahid guest Osama bin Laden,” and asked “[i]s Masood not aware that this action will hurt the feelings of a billion Muslims across the world.” These accusations were too much for Masood, who had earlier said that bin Laden was the Afghan people’s enemy and was harming “Islam’s reputation”; he also had derided bin Laden’s attacks in East Africa as too limited from the military perspective, saying “we cannot bring America down by these actions.” Reversing himself, Masood now said charges that he was cooperating with the United States to kill bin Laden were “a slander started by the Taliban.”2

  More recently, Masood kept an eloquent silence on bin Laden in interviews linguistically accessible to Afghans, Pakistanis, or Arabs, while continuing to tease the Western governments on his leash by promising European correspondents to turn over bin Laden “as soon as circumstances allow me to do so”—a meaningless promise if ever one was made. By stressing the Afghan tradition of protecting guests and bin Laden’s status as an Islamic hero, the Taliban put Masood in a corner. After decades of playing the West like a violin by shambling along in combat fatigues, wearing a wispy Dylan-like beard, and telling reporters in a world-weary French that “Victor Hugo is still the writer I prefer, but there is now little time to read,” the Taliban forced Masood to present himself as the strict Islamist he always has been, and not the media-manufactured new-age Muslim who would rather have put flowers in the muzzles of Soviet AK-47s than make war in Allah’s name.3

  To digress for a moment, Masood’s mystique is astonishingly pervasive in both its military and political manifestations, and much of it is based on his ability to con Western journalists and European politicians. Since 1996, Sebastian Junger wrote in early 2001, “the Taleban has fractured his [Masood’s] alliance and cut its territory in half. Masood was confined to the mountainous northeast, which, although easily defensible, depended on, long tortuous supply lines to Tajikistan.” Notwithstanding Junger’s graphic description of Masood in extremis, and that fact that he now depends on support from Afghanistan’s historic Russian, Iranian, and Indian enemies, there is an emerging view in the West—one that Junger inexplicably shares—that Masood can be the West’s military tool for ending the bin Laden and Taliban problems. “To really put Mr. Bin Laden out of business,” R. M. Gerecht another recent interviewer of Masood, argued in the New York Times, “America must shut down his operations in Afghanistan…. [I]t is not too late for America to play hardball. The Bush administration can give a small slice of the multibillion dollar counterterrorism budget to Mr. Masood. That might bring Mullah Omar down to earth.” And when Masood finishes dispatching Omar and bin Laden, Washington can have him defang Saddam and democratize Beijing’s bullyboys.4

  Masood also continues to thrive on the political front. In March 2001, for example, journalists from London’s Sunday Times visited him in Afghanistan and quoted him as saying that his alliance holds that “[Afghan] women should have the same rights as women in the rest of the world; the right to work, to go to school and vote.” After talking to Masood, the journalists toured his area of control and found reality different from the commander’s rhetoric. “Women must wear the burqa to cover the face,” the reporters wrote, “just as they do under the Taleban. Few find the courage to work: the social taboo is too great. There have been no elections.” Ignoring this snapshot of reality, a month later the European parliament invited Masood to give an address—in his “halting French”—before it in Strasbourg. Nicole Fontaine, the parliament’s president, told Agence France-Presse that Masood was asked to speak because of his liberal views on democracy and women. He would explain the situation in his country, Fontaine said, where Masood opposes the Taliban ban on women “working outside [the home] and … from the educational system.”

  Met “with open arms,” Masood’s April 2001 visit to Strasbourg, Paris, and Brussels was a masterful exercise in deceiving those eager to be deceived. As always, Masood cut a striking figure, playing to European biases against Pakistan, militant Islam, the Taliban, and bin Laden, and telling the media t
hings appropriate to his reputation as a liberal, erudite, and pro-Western insurgent commander. Masood told the Europeans that his forces “would work towards the return of democracy” in Afghanistan and that the Taliban “turned Afghan women into second class citizens.” He claimed that he would stop these “insults to Afghan women [which are] unprecedented in our history”; eliminate religious fanaticism and use Islam “to serve the people and help them improve their material and spiritual lives”; and ensure the Taliban “criminals [are] tried by the international community.”

  After addressing issues vital in Europe but irrelevant in the Afghan context, Masood turned in an exquisite performance as the Masood the gullible Europeans love best: the war-weary and sensitive aesthete. “My primary objective is to remind the world of Afghanistan’s great cultural and humanitarian heritage,” Masood told the fawning and presumably damp-eyed media, “Afghanistan was the cradle for several cultures that go back thousands of years. A large number of great poets and philosophers who have been immortalized by their humanitarian teachings and love of beauty were born in our country…. Without the war I would have been an architect. That is what I was trained as. I wanted to build beautiful things in Afghanistan.”

  Having artfully manipulated his audiences, Masood pocketed wide, positive and reality-defying commentary. The Belgian foreign minister, for example, said that Masood’s plan for his country “is in fact a republican model, with free elections” and that his “is a moderate Islamism, which of course recognizes the supremacy of free elections, human rights, [and] legal rights for men and women.” Masood also received promises of increased financial aid from France and the European Union, and probably pledges of clandestine military assistance from his wishful-thinking European hosts. As he selected the latest Parisian materials for new burqas for his housebound wives and daughters, one can picture Masood smiling in delight at having again hoodwinked the West.5

  Getting Settled

  After arriving in Afghanistan, bin Laden began building or refurbishing facilities near Jalalabad for himself, his family, and his followers. The Afghan civil war was continuing and he wanted to get his family and staff out of harm’s way. For example, Khalis’s farm—a compound about 150 kilometers east of Kabul—is well known and close to Pakistan’s border, and therefore did not give bin Laden much privacy from well-wishers and favor-askers, or security from those who meant him harm, a number that had presumably increased after the November 1995 attack on the Office of Program Management-Saudi Arabian National Guard (OPM-SANG) building and the June 1996 attack on a U.S. military residence in Dhahran. By late 1996, bin Laden had established bases at a place called Tora Bora, which had been a key base for Khalis’s guerrilla forces during the Soviet war, and at a site known as Malawi in approximately the same area. Both were about twenty-five kilometers from Jalalabad.6

  Despite these efforts to enhance security, there were several assassination attempts on bin Laden during the eight months he was in Nangarhar Province, including the assassination of engineer Mahmud, Hisbi Islami commander who had been charged by Khalis with helping bin Laden get securely settled. While media reports show that there may have been four or five attempts on bin Laden’s life, the two attempts in March 1997 appear to be the ones that prompted him to leave for southern Afghanistan. Since bin Laden’s arrival, Yunis Khalis had protected him; Khalis had a deal with the Taliban guaranteeing the safety of bin Laden’s people and facilities in Nangarhar. Of the major Afghan party leaders, only Khalis built productive ties to the Taliban; this was, in equal parts, because Khalis, like the Taliban’s leaders, is a Pashtun and a religious scholar; he was and is militarily and politically strong in Nangarhar, where the Taliban needed allies to take Jalalabad and Kabul; and because Taliban chief Mullah Omar was a Khalis commander in the jihad.7

  Notwithstanding the agreement with Khalis, the Taliban’s views about bin Laden were not clear until it took Jalalabad late in 1996. Then, Frontline’s unattributed biography says, bin Laden “was surprised when a delegation of Taliban came to meet him by order of Mullah Omar … with instructions to reassure him that he will have even better protection under the Taliban. The delegation expressed the Taliban honor of protecting someone like him who had sacrificed a lot for the sake of jihad.” For a time, bin Laden held the chit, but after the March 1997 assassination attempts he used it, and in May 1997 he moved to the Taliban’s headquarters in Kandahar.8

  Taliban Decision to Host bin Laden

  A pertinent question is why the Taliban decided to buy so much trouble from the West by hosting Osama bin Laden. The first two reasons are the most obvious and most often ignored by a secular and cynical West. As the Taliban delegation said when it visited bin Laden in late 1996, he had indeed “sacrificed a lot for the sake of [the Afghan] jihad.” For the Taliban, Frontline has reported, bin Laden “is a saint. He is a symbol of sacrifice for the sake of jihad. They see him as a very rich Arab from the Holy Land [of Saudi Arabia] who gave up his wealth and luxury to fight for the sake of his brother Muslims in Afghanistan.”9 Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) fighter Ibrahim al-Sayyid al-Najjar likewise recalls that during the jihad the mujahedin had “talked about [the] heroism and battles fought by the man [bin Laden] himself against the Soviet occupation.”10 Sa’d al-Faqih also captures the impression bin Laden left on his Afghan comrades in arms. “So he [bin Laden] was there,” notes al-Faqih, “moving from Saudi Arabia with all those advantages to Afghanistan and donating himself. Donating his money. Donating his reputation. Donating his history and family relations to the jihad.”11

  The second factor is that the Taliban, like all Afghans but especially the Pashtuns, believe hospitality to a guest is a top-rank moral and Islamic responsibility and that they are obligated to protect a guest with their lives, even if he is tainted. As Frontline explained in its program on bin Laden, the Taliban “see themselves as performing a double duty here, an Islamic duty of protecting the distinguished person and a tribal duty of protecting a descent [sic—decent?] refugee. The latter is a big value in Afghanistan.”12 From the jihad years, bin Laden knew this Afghan trait, and likewise knew he could count on it. “He [bin Laden] knows for sure,” Pakistan’s the News explained, “that the Taliban, who are mostly Pashtoon and known for even sacrificing their lives while protecting their guests, would never hand him over to the Americans.”13

  Beyond the obligation to protect a guest, bin Laden’s presence has over time appealed to other Pashtun character traits and, for that matter, character traits of most Afghans. Those familiar with the Afghan-Soviet war will recall the tenacity, endurance, stubbornness, fatalism, xenophobia, devoutness, and masculine pride Afghans take in their ability to absorb punishment and loss and still persevere to victory. The U.S.-led Western pressure to surrender bin Laden brought these characteristics to the fore. As a result, the once-simple issue of protecting an honored guest grew to an issue of national pride and dignity, and caused a decision to zestfully defy foreign pressure whatever the cost.

  In the male-dominated Afghan culture infused with the attitude of settling differences man-to-man, Washington’s pressure and especially the August 1998 U.S. cruise missile attack on Khowst earned the scorn of Afghans across the board. “Some Afghans were outraged that Washington had not challenged Mr. Bin Laden to a fair fight, and attacked without warning,” reported the Guardian. The paper quoted one Afghan as saying that “If America wants to fight let them bring their forces here. It is not the act of a brave man to attack from the back.”14 Bin Laden had earlier set the stage for this reaction by saying, “I want the Americans to proceed toward Afghanistan, where all their misconceptions and illusions will be removed. I am sure, however, that the Americans will not come because they are cowards. They attack [with soldiers] only the unarmed and weaker peoples,”15 and “God is the real superpower, so there is no need to be afraid of the U.S. We will die at the will of God, not at the will of the U.S.”16

  The missile strike also brought out the xenophobic
stubbornness of the Afghan character, what bin Laden has described as the reality that “Afghans do not bargain away their respect despite severe opposition. They shelter mujhadein despite difficulties.” The attack, Mullah Omar said, showed that foreigners were trying to take over the Taliban’s “decision-making process … [and] they are not even ready to listen to our view point.”17 Omar concluded by declaring, “as a proud Muslim nation we will make our own decisions on the basis of the principles of Islam.”18

  Bin Laden also has deftly and truthfully appealed to the Afghans’ perception of themselves as steadfast and pious Islamic rocks upon which infidel ships invariably founder. The United States, bin Laden told his hosts, is not attacking

  Usama, as there are thousands of Usamas in the Muslim world. Their real target is to eliminate the Islamic identity of Afghanistan. The United States should understand that Afghanistan cannot be intimidated. In the last century two of the world’s super powers faced defeat here: first the British Empire and then the Soviet Union. Countries that do not take a lesson from history face destruction. Afghanistan is a land of self-respecting Muslims. It cannot be pressured, allured, or intimidated into submission. Personally, I am extremely grateful to the people of Afghanistan and the Taleban that they have allowed me to live here despite facing difficulties. They have entertained me as a guest and taken care of me. It is true that only the Afghans could take this burden. God blessed them with power and ability.19

  Recognizing the centrality of these Afghan cultural and character traits, it is no surprise that in October 1998 Mullah Omar candidly told Al-Hayah that “if I expel bin Laden, it will be the end of me.” Buttressing Mullah Omar’s analysis, the Afghan paper Hewad indignantly noted it was absurd for the Americans to think bin Laden would be surrendered when “the mujahid Afghan nation tolerated every sort of hardship … and did not tilt even a hair breadth toward compromise in the struggle against the communist atheist ideology.”20