Al-Qaeda (32 page)

Saeed Rahmatullah, a young assistant at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spoke almost flawless English. He said he had trained as a computer programmer in Denmark. We talked about the Afghan economy. ‘We are hoping to encourage private sector investment and privatization and to utilize overseas investment to rebuild our economic infrastructure,’ he said. His taste for Western management-talk did not fit his black Taliban turban and dark grey shalwar kameez. After tea, sugared almonds and mulberries, he took me across to see the governor of Kandahar, Mullah Hassan Akhund, one of the founders of the Taliban and known as a hardliner with a fiery temper. The governor was in a conciliatory mood. We discussed bin Laden. I suggested that he was unpopular with many senior Taliban figures. The governor, tapping his wooden leg against a table, was diplomatic. There was no proof of the involvement of bin Laden, who was a guest in his country,
in the attacks on the two embassies, he said. No one should leap to conclusions. On the other hand, the governor said, the Taliban desired good relations with all nations. As we left, Rahmatullah asked me if I thought the Americans would bomb Afghanistan. I was genuinely surprised at the suggestion. No, I answered, they wouldn’t do anything so clumsy. Reassured, Rahmatullah returned to his office and I went off to buy some fruit in the bazaar. I was, of course, completely wrong. Even as I spoke, American warships were readying themselves in the Persian Gulf. At 10.30 local time, they launched around eighty Tomahawk cruise missiles. Three destroyed a medicine factory in the Sudan, the rest struck six training camps that US intelligence had linked to bin Laden in the al-Badr complex in and around Zhawar Khili near Khost.

I was in Kandahar to see a man who was to take me, after a long vetting process, to meet bin Laden. After the strikes, the meeting, which I had set up from Pakistan weeks earlier, was obviously unlikely to happen. For the next two days, with ten other UN employees, I waited to be evacuated. In Kabul, an Italian soldier on attachment to the UN was shot dead by incensed gunmen. Elsewhere, UN offices were attacked. Though the UN, inevitably, was well equipped with large, new land-cruisers, the roads were considered too dangerous to drive even though the Pakistani border, and thus safety, was a mere 50 miles away. At Friday prayers at the main mosque in Kandahar, the governor told an excited and angry crowd that according to Pashtunwali we were, though Westerners, their guests and thus must be protected. The Taliban suggested that we only travel at prayer time when the people most likely to harm us would be otherwise occupied. And so at noon prayer on the Saturday we drove at speed through the half-empty streets, through the checkpoints and out to the airport. There was a tense wait before we saw the slim white lines of the UN plane through the heat haze that hovered greasily over the desert. A Taliban helicopter gunship wheeled overhead as we boarded and took off.

Operation ‘Infinite Reach’, as the missile strikes were known, was meant to send a signal. That signal was received differently by different people. The intended audiences, in rough order of priority, were the domestic public in America, bin Laden and his associates, militants worldwide and any who wanted to join their ranks. The effect on the
broader Islamic world was not a major consideration. Domestically, the impact of the missile strikes was marred by their coincidence with the climax of the Monica Lewinsky affair, leading to the obvious charge that President Clinton was attempting to distract attention from his personal affairs. If the strikes were meant to intimidate bin Laden and his close associates, they failed. The attack merely confirmed to them, and others with similar views worldwide, that their conception of the world as a cosmic struggle between good and evil was the right one. For bin Laden and his followers it was clear that they had struck at
Hubal
, the grand idol that had been smashed by Mohammed at Mecca. Hubal, wounded, had tried to strike back but Allah had protected His followers from harm.

For bin Laden himself, the strikes were confirmation that his controversial decision to start targeting America before the munafiq rulers in power in the Middle East was the right one. To Islamic activists around the world, the bombings showed that bin Laden was not, as many had previously thought, merely a dilettante showboating rich kid who lived in safety in Afghanistan far from the tough struggle against the states’ security apparatus in Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Jordan or Algeria. For aspirant activists all over the Islamic world, bin Laden, of whom many had not heard previously, became the focus of their ambitions. This conversion to cult status dramatically emphasized to local groups the symbolic and material advantages that alliance with him could bring. In the Islamic world more generally, shock and disgust at the terrorists’ violence in east Africa was tempered with a genuine respect for, admiration of and identification with an undoubtedly charismatic individual who appeared to be standing up against America, a state that was widely seen as overbearing, exploitative and, at the very least, uninterested in the suffering of Muslims worldwide, if not indeed directly responsible for it. In Pakistan, Egypt and elsewhere, large demonstrations of angry young men protested against the missile strikes. Posters and stickers of bin Laden, portrayed with all the traditional iconography of an Islamic
ghazi
(holy warrior), appeared on coffee shop walls and taxi drivers’ dashboards from Malaysia to the Maghreb. Donations to bin Laden, which had been falling off for several years, increased markedly. Frustrated American intelligence officers revealed
that government audits in Saudi Arabia had shown that businessmen there had transferred millions of dollars through Islamic charities to bank accounts linked to bin Laden in late 1998.
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When he had arrived back in Afghanistan, bin Laden had realized the need to create a virtuous circle. Successful attacks would bring in recruits, money and prestige and mobilize and radicalize the ‘Arab street’. His enhanced capability would then allow more successful attacks, which would accelerate the process. His aim had always been to instigate. When the situation had become sufficiently radicalized, his own interventions would be unnecessary. The Muslim youth would have cast off their illusions, embraced the true Islamic path and launched their own attacks against the tyrannical oppressors. In late 1998, that process appeared to be unfolding according to plan.

The missile strikes also helped realize the second of the objectives he had formulated back in May 1996. Then, fresh from successive expulsions from Saudi Arabia and Sudan, bin Laden had wanted a secure base. The need for a safe haven was something that men like al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Atef, with their greater experience of the practicalities of Islamic militancy, had known all along.
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The attacks on the embassies had been a tremendous, if calculated, risk, gravely threatening bin Laden’s relationship with his Taliban hosts and thus his security in Afghanistan. The missiles, however, had assured that security.

Bin Laden’s relationship with the Taliban had never been easy. His Arab followers tended to look down on the Afghans as unlettered and uncivil, without the necessary experience, education and intelligence to understand contemporary politics. In a letter recovered from a computer used by senior ‘al-Qaeda’ figures, one complained that the Afghans ‘change their ideas and positions all the time’ and ‘would do anything for money’.
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For their part, Afghans, even Islamic activists, were generally resentful of the foreigners who had come to their country. Many senior Taliban figures were angry at the unwanted attention bin Laden was bringing them.
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Among the junior ranks of the Taliban, few fighters knew who bin Laden was. A few days after the bombs in east Africa, I asked the commander of the security detail
at the Ministry of Defence in Kabul for his view on the Saudi ‘master terrorist’. He had no idea who I was talking about.

Shortly after the Taliban captured Kabul, bin Laden sent a deputation to Mullah Omar in Kandahar. It received a cool reception. Several months later, in early 1997, Mullah Omar asked bin Laden to move from Jalalabad to Kandahar ‘for his own safety’. On the long drive down to the southeastern desert city, bin Laden spent two nights in Kabul with Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, the Taliban mayor of Kabul and the movement’s deputy leader. Rabbani met bin Laden in the
hujra
, or guestroom, of his requisitioned villa in the middle-class suburb of Wazir Akbar Khan. Ignoring the huge doctrinal and cultural gulf between them, bin Laden praised the Taliban’s achievements and offered his unconditional financial, and military, support. Bin Laden told his hosts that if they wanted him to leave so they could get international recognition then he was prepared to go. Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, head of the Kabul shura, agreed that recognition was unlikely if bin Laden remained but told his guest he should stay. ‘Allah will thank us,’ Rabbani said. Rabbani was ‘pleased and flattered’ by bin Laden, witnesses of the meeting say, and sent a relatively favourable report about the Saudi to Mullah Omar. Omar, however, remained unconvinced.
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Over the next months and years, bin Laden tried to repeat the tactics that had allowed him to develop a close relationship with al-Turabi in the Sudan and to build links with militant groups elsewhere. He made several large donations to the Taliban treasury and promised to fund a series of public works in and around Kandahar (including the renovation of a large residence for Mullah Omar). He organized the import of several hundred second-hand Toyota estates from Dubai to be given to the families of casualties in the ongoing fighting against the forces of Dostum, Massoud, Rabbani and the Iranian-backed Shia groups.
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But the gifts, though gratefully accepted, failed to overcome the fundamental differences between the worldviews of the worldly bin Laden and the parochial backwoods mullahs who led the Taliban. Mullah Omar was particularly irritated by bin Laden issuing fatwas.

Omar’s anger over bin Laden’s fatwas reveals key differences
between the radical international jihadi Salafism of bin Laden, with its fusion of Wahhabism and elements of contemporary political Islamism, and the parochial neo-traditionalism of the Taliban. For the Taliban, only the Deobandi ulema had the authority to give opinions on religious problems. For the political Islamists, most ulema are seen as stooges of corrupt and un-Islamic governments and thus can no longer be considered the guardians and interpreters of the Islamic tradition. The political Islamists, themselves largely educated in secular institutions, have adopted a far more flexible attitude to exactly who has the authority to practise ijtihad, or interpretative reasoning. Maududi, a journalist who viewed the Indian clergy as entirely corrupted by their links to the British Raj, said, ‘whosoever devotes his time and energy to the study of the Qur’an and the sunnah and becomes well-versed in Islamic learning is entitled to speak as an expert in matter pertaining to Islam’.
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Hassan al-Turabi, the Sudanese ideologue whose own Islamic credentials could qualify him as a traditional alim, has said something similar: ‘Because all knowledge is divine and religious, a chemist, an engineer, an economist, or a jurist are all ulema.’
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Al-Turabi is listing the professional groups from which many political Islamists are drawn.

Though autodidacts like bin Laden can issue a fatwa, he and his audience are well aware that it will lack authority. It is better, if at all possible, to find a fully qualified alim, untainted by connections with the state, who can provide the requisite opinion or endorsement. So, when, in the summer of 2001, bin Laden was criticized by the extremists of the Takfir wal Hijra strand within militant Salafism, he asked Omar Abu Omar, the Jordanian Palestinian scholar better known as Abu Qutada, for a definitive fatwa. Qutada has impeccable traditional and modern Salafist credentials and had acted as the in-house alim to radical groups, particularly in Algeria, from his base in northwest London since 1994. The basis for the Takfiris’ criticism was that bin Laden supported, and was protected by, the Taliban who themselves were ‘apostate’ because they wanted to be recognized by the United Nations, a kufr organization. Abu Qutada decided that the Takfiris were in error. His fatwa, running to sixty-eight pages of closely written Arabic, was widely circulated in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. It pointed out that the Takfiris were declaring ‘very senior and important
movements include Hamas, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Islamic Movement in Kurdistan’ as kufr. ‘Not just anyone can make such a decision, only Islamic scholars,’ Abu Qutada said, with no detectable irony. He then proceeded to bury the Takfiri position under an avalanche of textual references from the Qur’an, the hadith, their interpreters and sundry Islamic thinkers.
⁹
Qutada himself had become famous after issuing an opinion on an Algerian cleric’s fatwa in 1994, in which he backed the view that the killing of women and children by militants in Algeria was justified.

Extreme literalism, and a consequently fierce demand for fatwas, is typical of many modern Islamic activists. Every group needs its own ulema. Most set up their own fatwa committee, staffed by senior members of the organization whose task is to pronounce on the legality or otherwise of any projected action. Often the committee, its members not usually particularly learned themselves, refers to a particular authority for definitive answers. For the al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, that authority was Sheikh Abdel Omar Rahman. He was able to counter the slew of fatwas issued against the militants by ulema from the al-Azhar establishment in Egypt in the 1980s. According to French intelligence, telephone monitoring of Islamic militant cells in 1999 and 2000 revealed that more calls were made about minor points of Islamic observance than the terrorist activity the cell members were supposed to be engaged in. Chechen fighters have requested fatwas on the legality of telling hostages they were to be released and then killing them, even after the actual murders.
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In March 2000, the Lashkar Jihad group in Indonesia applied to Sheikh Moqbul al-Wadai’l at the al-Dammaj school in the Yemen to justify a campaign, backed by the Indonesian military, of ethnic cleansing. ‘The Christians have fanned the fires of conflict,’ the 70-year-old sheikh told them. ‘They have massacred more than 5,000 Muslims. That is why you, honourable people of one faith, must call all to total jihad and expel all the enemies of Allah.’
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