The American missiles then played a very strong role in sorting the controversy. After the American attack on Sudan and Afghanistan, it became almost shameful to criticize bin Laden. People inside Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries were full of anger toward America, and whoever could antagonize America would provide a fulfillment of their desire of discharging their anger. The American strike with the associated remarks by Clinton and American officials proved that bin Laden is a big challenge to America. In the mind of the average Arab and Muslim, bin Laden appeared as the man who could drive America so crazy that it started shooting haphazardly at unjustified targets. There was another factor that made people forget the scene of civilian casualties [in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam], the special nature of the Sudanese factory. Those who had reservations about the African bombings thought that this arrogance of the Americans is much worse than the embassy bombings. Their view was that while bin Laden and others can make [an] executive mistake because of their difficult circumstances, logistics, and communication, America is not suppose to do this mistake unless it is done on purpose.155
In the Islamic world, the image of the world’s greatest power using its military might to chase one man who is acting at the behest of Allah and His Prophet, who loudly champions the rights of Muslims, and who is working to purify and secure Islam’s holiest sites, strikes many Muslims as a demonstration of the resolve of the United States to punish any Muslim resisting its dictates. “He’s [bin Laden] a man on the run, whose only friends are the Taliban,” said Sahib Zada Khalid Jan Binuri, the head of Pakistan’s most influential Islamic seminary. “How can he be a threat to the world’s most powerful nation?”156
Others concluded that, although charges of U.S. persecution of Muslims were overdone, the attacks did increase bin Laden’s stature in the Islamic world. “Many Muslims,” wrote Yousef al-Khoei, “see the American strikes … as a huge arrogance of power. Muslims who carry out these attacks [the East Africa bombings] are the fringe. But those who applaud are the disenfranchised Muslims everywhere who see the double standard of the United States taking unilateral action against an Islamic nation. Now everyone who stands up to the U.S. becomes a hero.”157 It remains to be seen how much of a positive impact the ongoing U.S. military offensive in Afghanistan will have on al Qaeda and—if he has survived to this point—bin Laden. Much will depend on whether he can make America’s military look impotent—at least in the eyes of Muslims—by staging another major attack on U.S. interests.
Beyond hard-to-measure perceptions, statistics too seem to confirm the impression among Muslims that Washington is gunning for Islam. “When some ask about the reasons for the increased feelings of hostility toward the United States,” Cairo’s Al-Ahram noted in September 1998,
especially in the Arab and Islamic worlds—feelings that do not target America as a people as much as U.S. policy—a precise count of the U.S. military strikes in the last ten years show that they were only aimed against Arab or Islamic countries, wherein dealing with any emergency problems or incidents, Washington did not hesitate to use military force as an alternative to political effort. In such cases, Washington’s patience quickly ran out and discipline through military force was the first response and remedy, without compunction or notice of innocent civilian victims…. Thousands of civilian Muslim victims [in Iraq, for example,] find no one to shed a tear for them, for in the eyes of Clinton and Blair, they are not worth the price of the missiles that decimated them.158
A retired U.S. intelligence officer made the same point more concisely. “It is not missed in Friday prayers [across the Islamic world],” he told Frontline, “that we sent $75 million worth of missiles flying against the two poorest Islamic countries in the world, Afghanistan and Sudan.”159 We have since repeated that lesson on a massive scale in Afghanistan.
V
NO END IN SIGHT
14
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM AL QAEDA
Like the Old Testament warriors he admired and resembled, he yearned to carry the war into Babylon. He studied books on guerrilla warfare and slave revolts fascinated by the ability of small bands to hold off larger forces in mountainous terrain.
Historian James MacPherson on John Brown
(Battle Cry of Freedom, 1988)
In the wonderfully entertaining 1940 Warner Brothers’ swashbuckler titled The Sea Hawk, Queen Elizabeth I, played by the inestimable Flora Robson, angrily convokes her courageous, dashing, and exceptionally handsome band of privateers—known collectively in the movie as “the Sea Hawks”—for having had the temerity to sink in the English Channel a Spanish galleon carrying the new ambassador of Spain to her court. With the recently rescued, and presumably still soggy, Spanish ambassador looking on, the queen addresses herself to Captain Geoffrey Thorpe—played by the equally inestimable Errol Flynn—who is the leader of the Sea Hawks, the queen’s favorite, and the sinker of said galleon. “Do you imagine, Captain Thorpe, that we are at war with Spain?” the queen thunders. Thorpe, with due respect for his sovereign, responds firmly: “Madam, Spain is at war with the world.” Flash ahead sixty years and a similar question posed by any national leader in Christendom might accurately earn the response: “Madam (or Sir), Osama bin Laden is at war with the Christian world.”
The Sea Hawk, made in the second year of World War II by a film-maker eager for American intervention, was designed not only to entertain, but also to educate its audience about the threat posed by Hitler’s Germany. The movie’s depiction of the ruthless ambitions of Spain’s Philip II and his dream that, before his death, he would gaze at a map that had ceased to be the world and was instead simply a map of Spain was a none-too-subtle reminder of Hitler’s ongoing ransacking of Europe. If the exchanges above are reimagined to focus on Osama bin Laden, they would have little entertainment value, but their resulting unsubtle messages—that bin Laden has been at war with Christendom, and has longed to see a world map that is simply a map of the House of Islam—should be taken with deadly seriousness. Bin Laden has declared war on the United States, the leader of invading, barbarous Crusaders, and intends there to be a struggle to the death against the United States.
In early 1998 bin Laden warned the Muslim world that the Crusaders’ “fleets are plowing the seas of Islam. They are besieging and blockading the people of the region as a whole with a total disregard for pledges or charters, and are violating the sacred sites and draining all the wealth.”1 Faced with this threat, bin Laden said, “the highest priority, after faith, is to repel the incursive enemy which corrupts religion and the world…. We are all servants of God, praise and glory be to Him, and He has prescribed for us killing and fighting.” While “our battle with the Americans is larger than our battle with the Russians,” bin Laden told ABC in May 1998, “we are sure of Allah’s victory and our victory against the Americans and the Jews, as the Prophet promised, peace be upon Him…. The Muslim masses are moving towards liberating the Muslim worlds. Allah willing, we will win.”2
United States as Priority Target
What should be expected as Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda forces continue to attack what bin Laden has termed Crusader interests and incite Muslims worldwide to do the same? First, as should be obvious, the United States will remain the jihad’s priority target. “The United States itself,” bin Laden has said, “is the biggest mischief maker, terrorist, and rogue in the world, and challenging its authority will be a good deed in Islam in every respect.” U.S. policy in the Middle East and South Asia, if it remains even broadly consistent with the policy of recent decades, will provide a fertile environment for al Qaeda’s efforts.
As Professor Magnus Ranstorp has noted, bin Laden’s basic claim, that the United States is attacking the religion, sanctities, resources, children, and dignity of Islam, is a view increasingly held by Muslims around the world.3 Mostly unquestioning support for Israel; economic sanctions on Iraq; the basing of U.S. and U.K. forces in Saudi Arabia; U.S. pressure on Pakistan over nuclear, narcotics, t
errorism, and return-to-democracy issues; U.S.-enabled destruction of the Taliban; and the well-documented U.S. propensity to use of force against Muslim targets will all be used by al Qaeda and other Islamists as clear examples of the U.S.-led Crusaders’ contempt for Muslims and their survival.
It matters not a whit if bin Laden’s anti-American accusations have not been entirely accurate, and it matters even less if U.S. policies can be defended as being in U.S. best interests. In this case, perception is everything and then some, and the strengthening Muslim perception that Washington is prosecuting a systematic and brutal anti-Islamic policy has stacked the deck in al Qaeda’s favor. “Driving Islamic militants is a fear that the Christian West, abetted by the Jews, is bent on destroying and subjugating Islam,” Richard Mackenzie explained in the New Republic in September 1998. “Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi, one of the world’s most revered Islamic clerics, has written that ‘we [the Muslim ummah] are being confronted by the unrelenting hostility—and infiltration—of secularism, communism, Zionism, and Christianity’ and that Islam is the victim of a ‘devilish alliance of Zionist, Christian, and atheist powers for a vicious and united campaign against Islam and Muslims.’” Bin Laden could not have said it better, and Al-Quds Al-Arabi has suggested al-Qaradawi—and implicitly bin Laden—has spoken for much of the Muslim world. “We thank God for granting this nation ulema like Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi,” the London daily wrote when al-Qaradawi reconfirmed that suicide operations are religiously permissible, “who always stand in the trench and back everything that that uplifts the nation’s standing and restores its dignity and honor.”4
In addition, Russia, the United States, and Israel could not have given more credence to al-Qaradawi’s warning than they did by uniting to impose UN sanctions on Afghanistan in November 1999 and December 2000, and by the U.S.-led West failing to take similar action against Russia for its attacks on Muslim fighters and civilians in Chechnya—which Israel, India, and China also publicly said they “understood.”5 Needless to say, the membership of the U.S.-led coalition now waging war in Afghanistan again underscores the same perception.
Other Targets
The United States, however, will not be the only target of the forces bin Laden has incited. Those who take up jihad and attack any of the host of targets that fall under the catchall term “Crusaders” are, whether deliberately or not, pushing ahead bin Laden’s agenda. As this is written, there are Islamist insurgencies under way against the rump Communist governments in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, and Dagestan, as well as the threat of car bomb attacks in Moscow and other Russian cities. Likewise, Islamist insurgencies continue against the predominantly Catholic government in the Philippines, the secular government in Algiers, and the Hindu government in Kashmir. Islamist discontent and armed assertiveness are bubbling up in western China, parts of eastern India, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Yemen, Indonesia, and the Horn of Africa. And it is prudent to assume the last sectarian bloodletting in Bosnia and Kosovo has not been seen. Over the horizon, but perhaps not too far over, are prospects for increasing Islamist militancy and violence in southern Thailand, southern Africa, East Asia, and North America. Beyond such emerging flashpoints, there are also bound to be unexpected Islam-related causes célèbres that redound to al Qaeda’s favor.
Will the late-1999 UN mission to East Timor—which cinched the territory’s independence—ultimately be seen as the agent by which Catholics stole land from the world’s largest Muslim country? First Spain, then Palestine, now East Timor? In this vein, the Islamabad daily News already has contrasted the “criminal procrastination” of the United States in aiding Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims with its “rapid and robust response in [Catholic] East Timor.”6 Overall, al Qaeda’s mission to incite jihad against the Crusaders will, for the foreseeable future, have a receptive audience, no shortage of recruits, and worldwide opportunities for violence.
In targeting the United States, al Qaeda will kill as many Americans as possible in as many attacks as it can carefully prepare and execute. Al Qaeda’s attacks to date have shown increasing lethality and patient preparation. Its patience has been especially notable since 11 September 2001; it has not lashed out in response to heavy U.S. air attacks on its Afghan bases. Because bin Laden’s organization views military actions as a means to change U.S. policy, the next attack is likely to be bigger than the September 2001 attacks. Al Qaeda clearly is building up to the point where it will use a chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear (CBRN) weapon, but whether it is ready to use one the next time out is an open question. Al Qaeda may well try one or more conventional attacks before moving on to the CBRN arena, especially after seeing the amount of death, destruction, and economic dislocation caused by the conventional attacks on New York and Washington. “Bin Laden believes that what we [the United States] consider to be terrorism,” John Miller explained in February 1999, “is just the amount of violence needed to get the attention of the American people. His aim is to force us to consider whether continued support of Israel [or our presence in Saudi Arabia or the embargo on Iraq] is worth the bloodshed he promises.” Given that the 11 September attacks produced no change on any of these fronts, al Qaeda likely will once again escalate the casualty-causing potential of its next attack, keep the attack focused on America, and attack only when planning is complete.7 Bin Laden clearly believes that U.S., British, and other Western leaders cannot tolerate high casualties and—especially in America’s case—repeated public humiliations from attacks to which effective military responses are not possible. “We will keep moving on the path of God and the Holy Prophet,” bin Laden has written,
In reality the infidel powers are not as dangerous as they look. Only our fear [Muslims’s fear] makes them bigger. They are like an inflated balloon in front of which a needle looks inferior and minor, but this needle brings the balloon to its fate. The one who is afraid of God is not afraid of anyone, and no one can frighten him. But he who is not afraid of God is afraid of everyone. He is afraid of losing his life, money, luxury, and power. Islam attaches great importance to the fear of God.8
Jews and Israel
Israeli and Jewish interests also must be included high on the list of bin Laden’s future targets. “[T]he legitimate duty [of Muslims] toward Palestine,” bin Laden wrote in early 1995, “is jihad in God’s name and the nation’s [ummah’s] incitement against the enemy until Palestine is completely liberated and returned to Islamic sovereignty…. I believe that this issue cannot be resolved except by taking account of the Islamic issue, uniting in solidarity to rescue it and fighting the Jews through an Islamic jihad until the land is returned to its people and until the scattered Jews [are] back to their own countries.” Bin Laden referred to the Palestinian struggle seven times in his 1996 declaration of war on the United States, and then after the 1998 East Africa attacks, he told “the women of Palestine and its heroic children and patient old men … [d]o not worry. We have taken revenge for you on the American crusader criminal gang and, God willing, we will take revenge on their Jewish allies.”9
It has been a mystery to me as to why al Qaeda has so far refrained from attacking a specifically Jewish or Israeli target, especially because bin Laden has long supported the Palestinians—though not Arafat and the PLO—and praised “the sons of Muslim Palestine and their blessed Intifadah” who “despite the scale of the catastrophe … [have become] the glimmer of hope [that] has become a reality and hopes that are kept alive through the martyrs’ blood, and the bullets of those fighting for God’s cause.” Strategically speaking, a successful attack against a Jewish target in the name of alleviating what bin Laden describes as “the suffering of the Muslim people in Palestine who have been persecuted for more than a century” could have only a positive impact for al Qaeda in the Muslim world. Bin Laden has repeatedly praised Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) fighters for their attacks: “I also view with great esteem our brother cubs in Palestine who are teaching the Jews lessons in faith and the pride of the fai
thful,”10 and, theoretically, an anti-Israel attack by bin Laden would boost the morale of HAMAS, other fighters, and the whole population of “occupied Palestine,” as well as strike a blow against “the so-called Palestinian authority,” or “Arafat regime,” which is run by “those who sympathize with the infidels.”
It may be, of course, that bin Laden has tried and failed to attack Jewish targets. Bin Laden and al Qaeda, in this regard, may be like Ayman Zawahiri and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). When Palestinian journalist Jamal Ismail in late 1998 asked Zawahiri “why we have not seen anything and heard very little about its [the EIJ’s] operations against the Jews,” Zawahiri simply replied, “we have tried operations against the Jews. However, the Most High God has ordained that we not complete them.” The EIJ chief cited an aborted EIJ attack on Cairo’s Khan al-Khalil market as an example, one that would have killed many Israeli tourists if successful. In this vein, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that al Qaeda fighter Richard C. Reid—who tried to down a U.S. airliner in December 2001—scouted inside Israel in 2001 and found good targets for causing mass casualties but also found exceedingly tight security.11
Through Our Enemies' Eyes Page 38
