Manhunt

by Peter L. Bergen

  In his final days, bin Laden became doubly cautious, sometimes even paranoid in his thinking. He instructed that Hamza should throw out anything he had taken with him from Iran as it might contain a tracking chip and that he should avoid the company of someone named Abu Salman al-Baluchi because he had associates tied to the Pakistani intelligence services. Bin Laden also provided elaborate instructions about how Hamza might evade the surveillance of the American drones by meeting members of al-Qaeda inside a particular road tunnel near Peshawar.

  Bin Laden also reminded his deputies “that all communication with others should be done through letters” rather than by phone or the Internet. As a result, he had to wait up to two or three months for responses to his queries—not an efficient way to run an organization. Bin Laden also advised his lieutenants that when they kidnapped someone they should take many precautions during the negotiating process and throw away any bags of ransom money because they might contain tracking devices.

  In his isolated final years, bin Laden even became an inveterate micromanager, admonishing his group in Yemen that its members should always refuel and eat heartily before they embarked on road trips so that they wouldn’t have to stop at gas stations and restaurants that might be monitored by government spies. And he advised al-Qaeda’s North African wing to plant trees so they could later use them as cover for their operations. It’s safe to assume that this arboreal advice was simply ignored.

  Above all, bin Laden strategized about how to improve his public image, observing that “a huge part of the battle is in the media.” He instructed his media team: “The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack is coming and due to the importance to this date, the time to start preparing is now. Please send me your suggestions on this.” He suggested reaching out to the correspondents of both Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic and wondered if he could get a hearing on an American TV network: “We should also look for an American channel that can be close to being unbiased such as CBS.” Perhaps in response to this call for action, one of his media advisors—believed to be the American al-Qaeda recruit Adam Gadahn—suggested that bin Laden take advantage of the 9/11 anniversary in 2011 to record a high-definition videotape that could be given to all the major American news networks except Fox News, which Gadahn said “lacks neutrality.” It does not appear that bin Laden ever made such a tape.

  Until the end, bin Laden remained fixated on mounting another large-scale attack on the United States, prodding one deputy, “It would be nice if you could nominate one of the qualified brothers to be responsible for a large operation against the U.S. It would be nice if you would pick a number of the brothers not to exceed ten and send them to their countries individually without any of them knowing the others to study aviation.” Bizarrely, he complained that Faisal Shahzad, the American citizen of Pakistani heritage who had tried to blow up an SUV in Times Square, had broken the oath of allegiance he had sworn to the United States, and he tut-tutted that “it is not permissible in Islam to betray trust and break a covenant.” This seeming aversion to recruiting U.S. citizens to carry out such attacks narrowed the available options. In any case, Zawahiri pushed back, telling bin Laden it was much more realistic to attack American soldiers in Afghanistan than civilians in the United States.

  The fact was, bin Laden and his men hadn’t mounted a successful terrorist attack in the West since the July 7, 2005, transportation bombings in London. The terrorist network’s plots to set off bombs in Manhattan in 2009 and to mount Mumbai-style attacks in Germany a year later all fizzled out. And al-Qaeda never mounted a successful attack in the United States after September 11, 2001.

  This significant record of failure predated the momentous events of the Arab Spring—events in which al-Qaeda’s leaders, foot soldiers, and ideas played no role. Meanwhile, U.S. drone strikes had decimated the bench of al-Qaeda’s commanders since the summer of 2008, when President George W. Bush had authorized a ramped-up program of attacks in Pakistan’s tribal regions. After Zawahiri’s ascension to the top job in al-Qaeda, a CIA drone killed Atiyah Abdul Rahman, who, as we have seen, acted as bin Laden’s chief of staff for many years. The group could not easily replace someone with Rahman’s long experience, or the many other leaders of the group who had been picked off by drones during Bush’s last year in office and during the presidency of Obama.

  Zawahiri is unlikely to turn things around for al-Qaeda. Far from being the inspiring orator that bin Laden was, Zawahiri is more like the pedantic, long-winded uncle who insists on regaling the family at Thanksgiving dinner with accounts of his arcane disputes with obscure enemies. During 2011, Zawahiri’s half-dozen or so public disquisitions about the events of the Arab Spring were greeted by a collective yawn in the Middle East. Not only was Zawahiri a black hole of charisma, he was an ineffective leader who was not well regarded or well liked even by the various jihadist groups from his native Egypt.

  The death of bin Laden eliminates the founder of al-Qaeda, which has only known one leader since its founding in 1988, and it also eliminates the one man who provided broad, largely unquestioned strategic goals to the wider jihadist movement. A wild card is that one of bin Laden’s dozen or so sons—endowed with the iconic family name—could eventually rise to take over the terrorist group.

  JIHADIST TERRORISM WILL NOT, of course, disappear because of the death of bin Laden, but it is hard to imagine two more final endings to the “War on Terror” than the popular revolts against the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and the death of bin Laden.

  We do not, of course, know the final outcome of the Arab revolutions, but there is very little chance that al-Qaeda or other extremist groups will be able to grab the reins of power as the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East crumble. But while al-Qaeda and its allies cannot take power anywhere in the Muslim world, these groups do thrive on chaos and civil war. And the whole point of revolutions is that they are inherently unpredictable even to the people who are leading them, so anything could happen in the coming years in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, and much is unpredictable in Egypt.

  In Egypt, Islamist groups did very well in parliamentary elections after the dictator Hosni Mubarak was deposed. The Muslim Brotherhood and a Salafist party received about three quarters of the vote. These groups do not advocate violence, and al-Qaeda has long been critical of the Brotherhood for its willingness to engage in elections that members of al-Qaeda consider to be “un-Islamic.” But certainly the Salafists in Egypt want a society that looks much more like the Taliban in pre-9/11 Afghanistan than the one envisaged by the Facebook revolutionaries who first launched the revolt against Mubarak.

  Despite Zawahiri’s shortcomings and the serious institutional problems he has inherited, there are some opportunities for him to help resuscitate al-Qaeda. As the early great promise of the Arab Spring recedes, it is likely that Zawahiri will try to exploit the regional chaos to achieve his central goal: establishing a new haven for al-Qaeda. The one place where he might be able to pull this off is Yemen. Like bin Laden, many of al-Qaeda’s members have roots in Yemen, and U.S. counterterrorism officials have identified the al-Qaeda affiliate there as the most dangerous of the group’s regional branches. And the civil war now engulfing Yemen has already provided an opportunity for jihadist militants to seize towns in the south of the country. Surely al-Qaeda will want to build on this feat in a country that is the nearest analogue today to pre-9/11 Afghanistan: a largely tribal, heavily armed, dirt-poor nation scarred by years of war.

  OSAMA BIN LADEN long fancied himself something of a poet. His compositions tended to the morbid, and a poem written two years after 9/11 in which he contemplated the circumstances of his death was no exception. Bin Laden wrote, “Let my grave be an eagle’s belly, its resting place in the sky’s atmosphere amongst perched eagles.” But there was no spectacular martyrdom in the mountains among the eagles. Instead bin Laden died surrounded by his wives in a squalid suburban compound awash in broken glass and scattered children’s toy
s and medicine bottles—testament to the ferocity of the SEALs’ assault on his final hiding place. And on February 25, 2012, Pakistani authorities sent mechanized diggers to the compound that tore the complex down, erasing bin Laden’s six-year sojourn in Abbottabad over the course of a weekend.

  If there is poetry in bin Laden’s end, it is the poetry of justice, and it calls to mind President George W. Bush’s words to Congress just nine days after 9/11, when he predicted that bin Laden and al-Qaeda would eventually be consigned to “history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies,” just as communism and Nazism had been before them. President Barack Obama has characterized al-Qaeda and its affiliates as “small men on the wrong side of history.”

  For al-Qaeda, that history sped up dramatically, as bin Laden’s body sank down into the deep.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

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  Benjamin Runkle, Wanted Dead or Alive: Manhunts from Geronimo to Bin Laden (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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