The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  But shrewder members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban felt otherwise. They realized that the 9/11 attacks might not be the stunning victory that al-Qaeda and many in the West took them to be at the time, and might in fact more resemble a kamikaze operation that would decimate their ranks. Vahid Mojdeh, a Taliban Foreign Ministry official, immediately understood that the game was up: “I was listening to BBC radio broadcasting news that several buildings in the States are burning and planes have crashed into those buildings, and it said that al-Qaeda is behind the attack. As soon as I heard the news, I realized that the Taliban were going to be terminated.”

  Abu Walid al-Masri, an Egyptian who was an early bin Laden associate in Afghanistan, explains that in the years before 9/11, bin Laden became increasingly deluded that America was weak. “He believed that the United States was much weaker than some of those around him thought,” Masri remembered. “As evidence he referred to what happened to the United States in Beirut when the bombing of the Marines’ base led them to flee from Lebanon.”

  Bin Laden’s belief that the United States was a “paper tiger” was based not only on the American withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983 following the Marine barracks attack there, which killed 241 American servicemen, but also the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia a decade later, following the “Black Hawk Down” incident, and the American pullout from the quagmire of Vietnam in the 1970s. Masri was not convinced by this paper-tiger narrative, though a number of bin Laden’s acolytes were: “Some young Saudi followers confirmed to bin Laden his delusions from the gist of the experiences they had gained from their visits to the United States, namely, that the country was falling and could bear only few strikes.” Bin Laden came to believe implicitly in his own analysis that the United States was as weak as the Soviet Union once was.

  There were others in al-Qaeda’s inner circle who worried that large-scale attacks on American targets were unwise. Saif al-Adel, a senior Egyptian military commander, and Abu Hafs the Mauritanian, a religious adviser, opposed the attacks because they feared the American response or were worried that the operation would alienate the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Abu Hafs the Mauritanian was also concerned that killing American civilians could not be justified on religious grounds.

  Other militants also warned bin Laden that attacking the United States would be counterproductive. Noman Benotman, a leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an organization that occasionally aligned itself with al-Qaeda, traveled from London in the summer of 2000 to meet with the group’s leaders in Kandahar. He told them bluntly that attacking America would be disastrous. “We made a clear-cut request for him to stop his campaign against the United States because it was going to lead to nowhere,” Benotman recalled, “but they laughed when I told them that America would attack the whole region if they launched another attack against it.” Benotman’s warning should have carried some weight because he had known bin Laden since they were both fighting the communists in Afghanistan.

  By early September 2001, al-Qaeda was at the height of its power; the group and its Taliban allies were on the verge of taking over Afghanistan entirely. Yet the curtain raiser for the 9/11 attacks had gone virtually unnoticed in the West; this was the assassination on September 9 of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the coalition of anti-Taliban groups known as the Northern Alliance, which was the only force that stood in the way of the Taliban’s total victory in Afghanistan.

  Bin Laden was well aware that key Taliban officials, such as the foreign minister, Wakil Muttawakil, wanted to rein him in because he was complicating the Taliban’s desperate and ultimately ill-fated quest for international recognition of their government. The Taliban put bin Laden on notice to stop his terrorist plotting and stop giving incendiary anti-American interviews on television networks such as CNN and Al Jazeera. At one point Mullah Omar, their strange, reclusive, one-eyed leader, even visited the al-Qaeda leader to tell him to leave Afghanistan. Bin Laden responded, “Sheikh, if you give in to infidel governments, your decision will be against Islam.” This argument was persuasive to Mullah Omar, a hyperdevout Muslim who had anointed himself “Commander of the Faithful” when he assumed total control of the Taliban movement in 1996.

  Bin Laden agreed to desist from plotting terror attacks and from his media campaign and he pledged a religious oath of obedience to Mullah Omar, in exchange for the continued shelter that the Taliban offered his organization. Bin Laden would not honor those pledges and he did not clue in Mullah Omar about his plans for attacking America. But he calculated that there was one gift he could give the Taliban that might temper any anger they might have about his coming attacks on the United States: the head of Ahmad Shah Massoud.

  Massoud, an intense, wiry warrior permanently dressed in fatigues, his gaunt face framed by a wispy beard, was one of the great guerrilla commanders of the late twentieth century. He had successfully resisted multiple Soviet offensives against his forces in northern Afghanistan during the 1980s and had taken Kabul from the communists in 1992. Four years later, as the black-turbaned Taliban appeared in force outside the capital, Massoud withdrew his forces to his bases in the north, where he continued to lead an intense resistance to the movement of religious warriors.

  Much of Afghanistan’s history over the past three decades, and even the events of 9/11 itself, were in some senses reflective of the ideological and military struggles between bin Laden and Massoud. Not only was there the personal enmity between the two men going back to the 1980s, but they were also both representative of the ideological civil war that was taking place in the Muslim world between those like bin Laden, who wanted to install Taliban-style theocracies from Indonesia to Morocco, and those like Massoud, who espoused a more moderate form of Islamism and an orientation to the West.

  By the summer of 2001 the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies had rolled Massoud’s Northern Alliance back to a small patch of northeastern Afghanistan, where his army, now down to one working helicopter, was on life support. At this point bin Laden knew that killing its charismatic leader would be the coup de grace for the Northern Alliance, and indeed it nearly proved to be.

  Al-Qaeda planned the Massoud hit with great care, tasking for the job two Tunisian-Belgian volunteers who disguised themselves as TV journalists eager to interview the heroic Massoud. The “journalists,” who had been hanging around his headquarters for weeks to secure the interview with the storied Afghan military commander, finally got their chance to speak with him on September 9. They set up their gear, saying they were interested in asking Massoud why he had earlier declared that bin Laden was a murderer who should be expelled from Afghanistan. As their videotape appeared to be rolling, one of the men asked the first question: “Sir, what is the state of Islam in Afghanistan?” Then one of them detonated a bomb hidden in the camera, killing himself and mortally wounding Massoud.

  Feroz Ali Abbasi, the British-Ugandan militant living in one of al-Qaeda’s training camps, remembers that he heard about the Massoud assassination on the radio. “When this happened I thought that at last the Taliban were going to take the whole of Afghanistan. Massoud was crucial to the Northern Alliance.” That assessment was shared by one of Massoud’s closest confidants, Dr. Abdullah, who worried that the Northern Alliance was finished: “When I heard about the assassination, I was one hundred percent sure that the resistance would be over in a matter of days.”

  Northern Alliance commanders kept Massoud’s death a secret for as long as possible, knowing that the news of their beloved leader’s assassination would undermine the morale of their troops. Indeed, absent the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban would have likely taken over Afghanistan permanently.

  Whatever the intensity of the internal debates within al-Qaeda about the wisdom of attacking the United States, and despite the fierce private criticism leveled at bin Laden by senior Taliban officials, the only person whose opinion really mattered in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks was Mullah Omar, the “Commander of the Faithful” who stood by
his Saudi “guest” both publicly and privately. Ten days after the assaults on Washington and New York, the Voice of America radio network interviewed Mullah Omar. When the interviewer asked if bin Laden would be handed over to the United States, the Taliban leader put the issue in the most cosmic of terms: “We cannot do that. If we did, it means we are not Muslims; that Islam is finished.”

  As it became obvious that the United States was readying an attack on Afghanistan, bin Laden attempted to stiffen Mullah Omar’s resolve with a letter written on an al-Qaeda computer on October 3, four days before the American bombing campaign against the Taliban began. In the letter, bin Laden explained, “A U.S. campaign against Afghanistan will cause great long-term economic burdens which will force America to resort to the former Soviet Union’s only option: withdrawal from Afghanistan, disintegration, and contraction.”

  Even if he indeed received this letter, its arguments do not seem to have been especially persuasive to Mullah Omar. He told a group of his companions a few days before the American bombing campaign began, “You may consider me weak or scared, but I have to send my family to Pakistan.” Up until this point, Taliban officials thought that even if Mullah Omar lacked other good qualities, at least he was both pious and courageous. But now he was showing the first sign of weakness.

  On October 7, the day that the American aerial bombardment began, Faraj Ismail, an Egyptian journalist, interviewed Mullah Omar in Kandahar. The cleric naïvely assured him that bin Laden had no role in the 9/11 attacks: “I have control over Afghanistan. I’m sure he didn’t do it.” The Taliban leader also invoked the canard that 9/11 was a Zionist plot, based on “the absence on the same day of the incident of 4,000 Jews who worked in the World Trade Centre.”

  That night American bombs began falling on Taliban targets in Afghanistan, the beginning of a campaign that would destroy Mullah Omar’s incompetent and brutal regime.

  It was the opening salvo of a long war, a war that has already lasted longer than any conflict in American history. In 2006 the Pentagon even enshrined the concept of “the long war” into its Quadrennial Defense Review, its blueprint for military planning, while al-Qaeda’s leaders and their allies fervently believe that their struggle with the United States and her allies could last for generations. Burning with the conviction that they have God on their side, members of al-Qaeda are generally not deterrable in the conventional sense, and their very relative weakness makes them far more willing to take on the United States than conventional state antagonists, who have good reason to fear American retaliation.

  Chapter 2

  Explaining 9/11

  When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.

  —Osama bin Laden explaining the purpose of the 9/11 attacks

  Khaled Batarfi was bin Laden’s closest buddy when they were teenagers living in the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. They met in 1973, when bin Laden was sixteen, three years older than Batarfi. The Musharifa district, where the two friends grew up, is a typical upper-middle-class Jeddah neighborhood dotted with white-walled villas and anchored by the small mosque in which they offered their daily prayers. Next door to the mosque was a scruffy playground where the two played soccer after school. The young Osama was so pious that the neighborhood kids didn’t swear or tell off-color jokes in his presence. Bin Laden even scolded Batarfi for wearing shorts to play soccer; he said they were immodest.

  As a teenager bin Laden fasted twice a week in imitation of the Prophet Mohammed, and when a group of friends assembled at his house it was to chant religious songs about Palestine. Batarfi says his solemn friend would often say, “Unless we, the new generation, change and become stronger and more educated and more dedicated, we will never reclaim Palestine.”

  Alia Ghanem, bin Laden’s Syrian mother, remembers her son fusing his religiosity with politics in his early teens: “He was frustrated about the situation in Palestine in particular and the Arab and Muslim world in general. He thought Muslim youths were too busy having fun to care about what they should do to propagate Islam and bring back the old glories of the Muslim nation.”

  Woven deep into the fabric of bin Laden’s religious zeal was the fact that his family owed a good deal of its fortune and standing in society to its role for decades as the principal contractor renovating and expanding the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. One of the largest public works projects in the history of the modern Middle East, it had begun under his revered father, Mohammed, in the 1950s and continued under his admired older brother Salem.

  While a student at the relatively progressive Al-Thagr High School in Jeddah, bin Laden fell under the spell of a charismatic Syrian physical education teacher who organized after-school Koran reading sessions and who may have inducted the teenager into the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Islamic movement that seeks to further Islamicize the Muslim world. Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden’s classmate at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, remembers that his college friend was religiously conservative already and wouldn’t listen to music or watch television.

  Bin Laden came of age as a deep religious current was sweeping through the Muslim world. The Sahwa, or Awakening, began swirling after the devastating and unexpected defeat of Egypt by Israel in the 1967 war, which called into question the then reigning orthodoxies of Arab nationalism and socialism. And this current was given an intellectual architecture by the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, who claimed that much of the Middle East was living in a state of pagan ignorance, and that the way forward for Muslims besieged by the Western ideologies of socialism, capitalism, and secularism was an Islam that informed every aspect of life. Jamal Khalifa says Qutb made a profound impact on his generation of fundamentalists because he explained that true Islam was more than just observing the traditional tenets of the religion; it should penetrate all facets of the believer’s life.

  This Islamic awakening peaked in 1979—the first year of a new century on the Muslim calendar—with a series of seismic events that would profoundly influence bin Laden and other future members of al-Qaeda: the overthrow of the Shah of Iran by the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, which demonstrated that an American-backed dictator could actually be eliminated by a group of religious revolutionaries; the armed takeover of Islam’s holy of holies, the mosque in Mecca, by Saudi militants protesting the supposed impiety of the Saudi regime, later a central theme of bin Laden’s; Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic cease-fire agreement with Israel, which Islamist militants saw as a sacrilegious stab in the back; and finally the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

  It was a thrilling time to be a deeply committed Muslim, as the 22-year-old bin Laden then was. At the time there wasn’t much remarkable about him; a priggish young man working in his family business, studying economics at university, married, with a couple of toddlers running around the house. He was admired by friends and family alike for his piety, although a good number of them found his religiosity a bit much, even by the conservative standards of 1970s Saudi Arabia.

  But this would all change with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979. It was the first time since World War II that a non-Muslim power had invaded and occupied a Muslim nation. For bin Laden it was the most transformative event of his life, uncoupling him from his tranquil domestic life of work and family in Saudi Arabia, and launching him into what would become a full-time job helping the Afghan resistance. His experiences in Afghanistan during the 1980s turned the pious, shy rich kid into a leader of men who fought the Soviets himself, and, at least in his own mind and those of his followers, he came to believe that he had helped to defeat the communist superpower.

  A key to this transformation was bin Laden’s relationship with the charismatic Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam. Azzam was the critical force both ideologically and organizationally for the recruitment of thousands of Muslims from around the world to engage in some way in the Afghan struggle against the Soviets. And Azzam would become
bin Laden’s mentor, the first and most important of a series of father figures that he would find to replace his own father, Mohammed bin Laden, who had died in a plane crash in Saudi Arabia when the future al-Qaeda leader was only ten.

  The influence of bin Laden’s revered father—a busy man who sired an impressive fifty-four children and also managed a business empire, and whom Osama rarely saw when he was alive—may have also helped to shape his desire to become a mujahid, or holy warrior. Bin Laden told Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, “My father was very keen that one of his sons should fight against the enemies of Islam. So I am the one son who is acting according to the wishes of his father.” Whether or not his father really wanted one of his sons to be a holy warrior is beside the larger point, which is that bin Laden increasingly fused together his own religious zealotry with the reverence and admiration that he felt for his father, and grafted it on to his self-conception as a heroic warrior defending Islam. Bin Laden was well aware that as one of the most junior of his father’s twenty-five sons, he was unlikely to follow in his father’s footsteps at the helm of the family business. But he could do something else of which his father would have approved: fight the enemies of Islam.

  Together with his mentor Azzam, bin Laden founded the Services Office in 1984, an organization based in the western Pakistani city of Peshawar that was dedicated to placing Arab volunteers either with relief organizations serving the Afghan refugees who had flooded into Pakistan after the Soviet invasion of their country, or with the Afghan factions fighting the communists on the front lines.