Kerry was able to negotiate the return of the tail of the downed ultrasecret stealth helicopter from the raid. He also arranged for the CIA to get access to the Abbottabad compound and to question bin Laden’s wives. While Kerry was still in the air on his way home, the CIA launched another drone strike into Pakistan’s tribal regions. This seemed to be the Agency’s not-so-subtle way of reminding both the Pakistanis and Kerry that it still ran the show in Pakistan.
The Pakistanis used female interrogators to debrief bin Laden’s ultrareligious wives, but they said very little about their lives on the run or in Abbottabad. The leader of the wives was the oldest, sixty-two-year-old Khairiah. Investigators described her as “very hard, very difficult.” Despite the comfortable house they were placed in, the wives told their Pakistani jailors they just wanted to go home. And when CIA officials finally interviewed bin Laden’s wives, all three women were quite hostile to the Americans. At this point in the tortured U.S.-Pakistani relationship, there were very few things that both sides agreed upon; one of them was just how difficult bin Laden’s wives were to deal with. Almost a year after bin Laden was killed, the Pakistani government announced that his three widows had been charged with “illegal entry” into Pakistan, for which they could be jailed for up to five years.
President Obama visited CIA headquarters in northern Virginia on May 20 to thank the intelligence community for its work on the bin Laden mission. Obama met privately with about sixty CIA officers and analysts who had been integral to the hunt for al-Qaeda’s leader, and then spoke to some one thousand employees who jammed the lobby of the Agency’s headquarters. “The work you did and the quality of information you provided made the critical difference,” he said. The president also noted wryly, “And we did something really remarkable in Washington—we kept it a secret.” The audience erupted with laughter, applause, and cheers.
A dog similar to Cairo, the Belgian Malinois brought by the SEALs on the bin Laden raid, jumps out of an aircraft with his Special Forces partner during a training drill. TECH. SGT. MANUEL J. MARTINEZ, U.S. AIR FORCE/DOD
Prospective Navy SEALs endure grueling training drills such as this one, in which recruits are shackled hand and foot in a deep pool. RICHARD SCHOENBERG
Card identifying bin Laden family members carried by the U.S. Navy SEALs who raided the compound in Abbottabad on May 1, 2011. COURTESY OF CHRISTINA LAMB
The other side of the card featured detailed information about “the Kuwaiti,” his brother, and their families. COURTESY OF CHRISTINA LAMB
The quiet, hilly city of Abbottabad, where Osama bin Laden resided for more than five years. AP PHOTO/ANJUM NAVEED
The high, opaque windows of the top floor, where bin Laden and his youngest wife lived, can be seen in this image of the family’s three-story house. AP PHOTO/AQEEL AHMED
The kitchen garden in which bin Laden, dubbed “the pacer” by CIA analysts, often took walks during the day. PAKISTAN STRINGER/REUTERS
Bin Laden wrapped in a blanket and sitting on the floor of a room in his Abbottabad compound watching a video of himself on TV. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
The Pakistani television network Geo News shows the burning wreckage of the crashed U.S. stealth helicopter on the night bin Laden was killed. AP PHOTO/GEO TV
The tail portion of the crashed U.S. stealth helicopter rests against an outer wall of the bin Laden compound on the morning after the raid. PAKISTAN STRINGER/REUTERS
The 97,000-ton aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, from which bin Laden’s corpse was dropped into the Arabian Sea. UNITED STATES NAVY
General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of staff of the Pakistan army and the most powerful man in the nation. Having helped to forge a “strategic partnership” with the U.S., he felt betrayed that no one in the U.S. government had warned him of the raid on the Abbottabad compound. AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The three children at left, Fatima, age five; Abdullah, age twelve; and Hamza, age seven, are grandchildren of bin Laden. The three on the right, Hussain, age three; Zainab, age five; and Ibraheem, age eight, are the youngest of bin Laden’s twenty-four children. Hussain and Zainab were born while bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. THE SUNDAY TIMES/NI SYNDICATION
A crowd built in front of the White House to cheer the news that bin Laden was dead. BILL CLARK/ROLL CALL
Activists of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan (JI) chanted slogans as they marched during an anti-U.S. protest on May 6, 2011, in Peshawar, condemning the operation that killed bin Laden. Protests like this one were limited to supporters of hardline religious groups and were not well attended. A MAJEED/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Bin Laden’s successor as the head of al-Qaeda, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a video released on November 16, 2011, in which he praises bin Laden for his kindness, generosity, and loyalty.
The stars on the Memorial Wall at CIA headquarters represent Agency employees who were killed in the line of duty, including two dozen who died in the decade after 9/11. CIA
Protesters wave Egyptian flags at Cairo’s Tahrir Square on March 11, 2011. Bin Laden’s men and his ideas were notably absent from the revolutions that roiled the Middle East in 2011. MAHMUD HAMS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
EPILOGUE THE TWILIGHT OF AL-QAEDA
JUST AS WE CANNOT understand why the French army risked marching to Moscow during the frigid Russian winter of 1812 without comprehending the ambitions of Napoleon, we cannot understand al-Qaeda or 9/11 without Osama bin Laden. It was bin Laden who conceived of al-Qaeda during the waning days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and he was its unquestioned leader from its inception in Peshawar in August 1988 until the day he was killed, more than two decades later. And it was bin Laden who came up with the strategy of attacking the United States in order to end its influence in the Muslim world—a strategy that ultimately fared about as well as the march on Moscow did for Napoleon. Instead of forcing the United States to pull out of the Middle East as bin Laden had predicted it would after the 9/11 attacks, the United States, together with its allies, largely destroyed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and later invaded Iraq, while simultaneously building massive American military bases in Muslim countries such as Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain.
If bin Laden’s strategy of attacking the United States was largely a failure, his ideas may have more lasting currency, at least among a small minority in the Muslim world. Like many of history’s most effective leaders, bin Laden told a simple story about the world that his followers—from Jakarta to London—found easy to grasp. In his telling there was a conspiracy by the West and its puppet allies in the Muslim world to destroy true Islam, a conspiracy led by the United States. Bin Laden very effectively communicated to a global audience this master narrative of a war on Islam led by America that must be avenged. A Gallup Poll in ten Muslim countries conducted in 2005 and 2006 found that 7 percent of Muslims said the 9/11 attacks were “completely justified.” To put it another way, out of the estimated 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, about 100 million Muslims wholeheartedly endorsed bin Laden’s rationale for the 9/11 attacks and the need for Islamic revenge on the West.
One of bin Laden’s most toxic legacies is that even militant Islamist groups that don’t call themselves al-Qaeda have adopted this ideology. According to Spanish prosecutors, the Pakistani Taliban sent a team of would-be suicide bombers to Barcelona to attack the subway system there in January 2008. A year later, the Pakistani Taliban trained an American recruit, Faisal Shahzad, for an attack in New York. Shahzad traveled to Pakistan, where he received five days of bomb-making training in the tribal region of Waziristan. Armed with this training, Shahzad placed a bomb in an SUV and tried to detonate it in Times Square on May 1, 2010, around 6 p.m. Luckily, the bomb malfunctioned, and Shahzad was arrested two days later.
The Mumbai attacks of 2008 showed that bin Laden’s ideas about attacking Western and Jewish targets had also spread to Pakistani militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which had previously focused only on Indian targets. Over a three-day pe
riod in late November 2008, LeT carried out multiple attacks in Mumbai, targeting five-star hotels housing Westerners and a Jewish-American community center and killing 170 people.
And al-Qaeda’s regional affiliates will also try to continue bin Laden’s bloody work. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was responsible for attempting to bring down Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 with a bomb hidden in the underwear of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian recruit. A year later, AQAP hid bombs in toner cartridges on planes bound for Chicago. The bombs were discovered only at the last moment at East Midlands Airport in the United Kingdom and in Dubai.
In September 2009, the Somali Islamist insurgent group Al-Shabaab (“the youth” in Arabic) formally pledged allegiance to bin Laden following a two-year period in which it had recruited Somali-Americans and other U.S. Muslims to fight in the war in Somalia. After it announced its fealty to bin Laden, Shabaab was able to recruit larger numbers of foreign fighters; by one estimate up to twelve hundred were working with the group by 2010. A year later, Shabaab controlled much of southern Somalia.
In Nigeria, a country with a substantial Muslim population, a jihadist group known as Boko Haram attacked the United Nations building in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, killing some twenty people in the summer of 2011. Since then the group has mounted a systematic campaign against Christian targets.
In 2008, there was a sense that Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was on the verge of defeat. The American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, said, “You are not going to hear me say that al-Qaeda is defeated, but they’ve never been closer to defeat than they are now.” Certainly AQI had lost its ability to control large swaths of the country and a good chunk of the Sunni population as it had in 2006, but the group proved surprisingly resilient, continuing to pull off large-scale bombings in central Baghdad. And in 2012, AQI sent foot soldiers into Syria to fight against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, who is from a Shia sect despised as heretics by the Sunni ultrafundamentalists who make up al-Qaeda.
These groups, as well as “lone wolves” inspired by bin Laden, will continue to attempt to wreak havoc, but their efforts will not precipitate a “clash of civilizations” as bin Laden had hoped to do on 9/11. Indeed, governments in Muslim countries from Jordan to Indonesia have taken aggressive actions against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, and al-Qaeda is now peddling an ideology that has lost much of its purchase in the Muslim world. In the two most populous Muslim nations—Indonesia and Pakistan—favorable views of bin Laden and support for suicide bombings dropped by at least half between 2003 and 2010. The key reason for this decline was the deaths of Muslim civilians at the hands of jihadist terrorists. Al-Qaeda and its allies have consistently targeted the vast majority of fellow Muslims who don’t precisely share their views. The trail of dead civilians from Baghdad to Jakarta and from Amman to Islamabad in the decade after 9/11 was largely the work of al-Qaeda and its allies. That al-Qaeda and its allies defined themselves as the defenders of true Islam yet left so many Muslim victims in their wake was not impressive to many in the Islamic world.
Despite the abject failure of al-Qaeda’s strategy on 9/11, a number of prominent writers, academics, and politicians in the West claimed that the attacks on Washington and New York were the beginning of a war with a totalitarian ideology similar to the murderous ideologies the United States had done battle with in the twentieth century. Certainly “Binladenism” shared some commonalities with National Socialism and Stalinism: anti-Semitism and anti-liberalism, the embrace of charismatic leaders, the deft exploitation of modern propaganda methods, and the bogus promise of utopia here on Earth if its programs were implemented. But Binladenism never posed anything like the existential threat that communism or Nazism did. Still, the conviction that “Islamofascism” posed as great a threat to the West as the Nazis or Soviets had was an article of faith for some. The influential neoconservative Richard Perle warned that the West faced “victory or holocaust” in its struggle with the Islamofascists. And the former CIA director James Woolsey became a constant presence on television news programs after 9/11, invoking the specter of World War IV.
But this was all massively overwrought. The Nazis occupied and subjugated most of Europe and instigated a global conflict that killed tens of millions. And the United States spent about 40 percent of its GDP to fight the Nazis, fielding millions of soldiers. Communist regimes killed 100 million people in wars, prison camps, enforced famines, and pogroms.
The threat posed by al-Qaeda is orders of magnitude smaller. Despite bin Laden’s hyperventilating rhetoric, there is no danger that his followers will end the American way of life. In almost any given year, Americans are far more likely to drown accidentally in a bathtub than to be killed by a terrorist. Yet, few of us harbor an irrational fear of a bathtub drowning. Al-Qaeda’s amateur investigations into weapons of mass destruction do not compare to the very real possibility of nuclear conflagration the world faced during the Cold War, and there are relatively few adherents of Binladenism in the West today, while there were tens of millions of devotees of communism and fascism.
Despite the relative insignificance of the threat posed by al-Qaeda and its allies, the War on Terror was a bonanza for the American national security industrial complex. On 9/11, the annual budget for all the U.S. intelligence agencies was about $25 billion. A decade later it was $80 billion; and by then almost a million Americans held Top Secret clearances, and six out of ten of the richest counties in the United States were in the Washington, D.C., area. If the War on Terror was, in the end, as much about about bringing bin Laden to justice as anything else, it is sobering to observe that American intelligence agencies consumed half a trillion dollars on their way to that goal.
SIX WEEKS AFTER the death of bin Laden, al-Qaeda announced his successor, the dour Egyptian surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri. The longtime deputy to bin Laden had his work cut out for him; his predecessor had gifted him a bit of a lemon. By the time bin Laden was killed, al-Qaeda was an ideological “brand” long past its sell-by date and an organization in deep trouble.
In the “treasure trove” of some six thousand documents retrieved by the SEALs from the bin Laden compound, there is ample confirmation of how profound al-Qaeda’s problems had become. In memos he never dreamed would end up in the hands of the CIA, bin Laden advised other militant jihadist groups not to adopt the al-Qaeda moniker. On August 7, 2010, he wrote to the leader of the brutal Al-Shabaab militia in Somalia, telling him that Al-Shabaab should not declare itself publicly to be part of al-Qaeda because to do so would only attract enemies, as al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate had done, and would make it harder to raise money from rich Arab donors.
Clearly, even bin Laden understood that the shine was long gone from the al-Qaeda brand. At the same time, he was troubled by the fact that the Obama administration had solved a branding problem of its own because it had “largely stopped using the phrase ‘the war on terror’ in the context of not wanting to provoke Muslims because they feel that saying ‘the war on terror’ would appear to most people to be a war on Islam.”
The spectacular set of self-inflicted mistakes by al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq played heavily on the minds of bin Laden and his top advisors. Among themselves, they grumbled that al-Qaeda’s campaign of attacks against Iraqi Christians had not been sanctioned by bin Laden. And bin Laden urged his followers in Yemen not to kill members of the local tribes, a tactic that al-Qaeda had frequently employed in western Iraq, which had provoked a tribal uprising against al-Qaeda that began in 2006 and dealt a large blow to the group’s fortunes in Iraq.
In October 2010, bin Laden wrote a forty-eight-page memo to one of his deputies that surveyed the state of al-Qaeda’s jihad. He began on an optimistic note, observing that for the Americans it had been “the worst year for them in Afghanistan since they invaded,” a trend he predicted would only be amplified by the deepening U.S. budget crisis. But bin Laden also worried that al-Qaeda’s longtime sanctuary in Waziristan, in Paki
stan’s tribal areas, was now too dangerous because of the campaign of American drone strikes there. “I am leaning toward getting most of our brothers out of the area.”
In the meantime, bin Laden advised his followers not to move around the tribal regions except on overcast days, when America’s satellites and drones would not have as good of coverage of the area, and he complained that “the Americans have great accumulated expertise of photography of the region due to the fact they have been doing it for so many years. They can even distinguish between houses that are frequented by male visitors at a higher rate than is normal.”
Bin Laden urged his followers to depart the tribal regions for the remote Afghan provinces of Ghazni, Zabul, and, in particular, Kunar, where he himself had successfully hidden after the Battle of Tora Bora, pointing out that the high mountains and dense forests of Kunar provided especially good protection from prying American eyes. Bin Laden fretted about his twenty-year-old son, Hamza, who had moved to the tribal regions in Pakistan after being released from house arrest in Iran, writing, “Make sure to tell Hamza that I am of the opinion he should get out of Waziristan.… He should move only when the clouds are heavy.” Hamza should decamp for the tiny, prosperous Persian Gulf kingdom of Qatar, bin Laden advised.
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