The Enemy (2 page)

I here make what I hope is not a digression from the main argument. If I am right that the defeat and discredit of bin Ladenism is inevitable, then it ought to follow that panic measures, or measures taken in fear, are even less justifiable. The resort to extralegal methods of interrogation, for example, or any want of care in protecting civilians from the consequences of military action, are not to be excused in any case. But when considered in historical or cultural context, where it will be seen that patience and skill and long engagement are the requisites, they reveal themselves as a double offense. (It’s a relatively paltry point by comparison, but in more than one of his broadcast sermons, notably the one transmitted on election eve in late October 2004,  bin Laden does taunt the United States with its propensity for being stampeded into overreactions by even pin-prick attacks, and it is highly distasteful to think of this jeer being validated.)

Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368, unanimously passed, explicitly recognized the right of the United States to self-defense and further called upon all member states “to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of the terrorist attacks. It added that "those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of those acts will be held accountable.” In a speech the following month, the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan publicly acknowledged the right of self-defense as a legitimate basis for military action. The SEAL unit dispatched by President Obama to Abbottabad was large enough to allow for the contingency of bin-Laden’s capture and detention. The naïve statement that he was “unarmed” when shot is only loosely compatible with the fact that he was housed in a military garrison town, had a loaded automatic weapon in the room with him, could well have been wearing a suicide vest, had stated repeatedly that he would never be taken alive, was the commander of one of the most violent organizations in history, and had declared himself at war with the United States. It perhaps says something that not even the most casuistic apologist for al-Qaeda has ever even attempted to justify any of its “operations” in terms that could be covered by any known law, with the possible exception of some sanguinary verses of the Koran.

An old Spanish proverb has it that “no man is without his aspect of honor.” Having unambiguously said that bin Laden was the physical embodiment of an evil doctrine and a wicked set of actions, ought I not to inquire into whether there was a human pulse to be detected? Some element of redeeming idealism, conceivably, or at least some excuse or justification? I admit to having been struck, very early on, by a certain vague kind of nobility in his carriage and appearance. The widely spaced and liquid eyes, the long and fluted fingers, the relatively well-modulated voice: These are not typical of the hoarse, crude, brutal figures who lead the Taliban, say, or who organized the fantastically sadistic and homicidal so-called “insurgency” put together by the  Jordanian jailbird and psychopath Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, founder of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. (This ghastly individual was awarded the Iraqi “franchise” by bin Laden in 2004, but it seems that his awful, unslakable thirst for the blood of Shi’a Muslims was considered slightly excessive by both bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Zawahiri.)

Michael Scheuer, the head of the special CIA unit that supervised the search for bin Laden, was reporting not just the views of his enemy’s devoted adherents when he made the comparison to “a modern-day Saladin.” In his own words he described him hyperbolically as having demonstrated “patience, brilliant planning, managerial expertise, sound strategic and tactical sense, admirable character traits, eloquence, and focused, limited war aims. He has never, to my knowledge, behaved or spoken in a way that could be described as ‘irrational in the extreme.’” Not content with this portion of the recognition that might be due to a formidable adversary, Scheuer went on to conclude that

“There is no reason, based on the information at hand, to believe bin Laden is anything other than what he appears: a pious, charismatic, gentle, generous, talented and personally courageous Muslim. As a historical figure, viewed from any angle, Osama bin Laden is a great man, one who smashed the expected unfolding of universal post–Cold War peace.”

How does this verdict read now that we can match it against a finished life: a life that ended with bin Laden as a cosseted pensioner of the Pakistani national-security state, apparently insulated from any fighting, watching replays of himself on video and dying his beard to conceal the onset of grayness? The small elements of vanity here may not be vestigial or insignificant, and should be borne in mind as we proceed.

Osama bin Laden was the only son of a Syrian woman, who was one of the more than twenty wives of Muhammed bin Laden, an uneducated Yemeni who grew rich as a contractor by gratifying the whims of the Saudi Arabian royal house. The marriage did not last long, and the father died when Osama was ten, leaving him as one of fifty-four children. In Christian folklore there is a saying that “In the boyhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed,” and it is not difficult to imagine the young man suffering from a lack of attention. He certainly fulfilled the more predictable part of the pattern of neglected youth by replicating it in his own private life. The best estimate of Jean Sasson’s book
Growing Up bin Laden
is that Osama was married five times and fathered “at least” 11 sons and 9 daughters. The coauthors of the book are his fourth son, Omar, and his first wife (and cousin), Najwa. Omar claims that his father encouraged him to take part in a suicide "mission," treating him with contempt when he declined. They recall lives of sequestration and loneliness, being locked into the house all day in the case of the children to being kept in strict
purdah
and isolation—forbidden even to step into the garden—in the case of the spouse. According to the accounts of neighbors, these were also the prevailing conditions in the walled villa provided by the Pakistani dictatorship in Abbottabad.

In the 1970s, bin Laden attended courses at King Abd-al Aziz University in Jeddah, where he was taught among others by Muhammad Qutb. This instructor’s brother had been Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian fanatic (executed by the Nasser regime in 1966) whose paean of hatred against the United States, that Jew-dominated cesspit of incest, sodomy and fornication, has been the foundational text of al-Qaeda’s propagandists. Sayyid Qutb at least visited America and spent a little time there, whereas bin Laden has never evinced the least desire to learn about other cultures and societies from experience. However, he does seem to have developed a complex feeling of resentment and envy toward America and Americans. Though he spent some time on the Pakistan–Afghan border, helping to administer the distribution of Saudi-supplied aid and weapons to the mujahidin fighting against the Soviet occupation, he consistently denies credit to the United States for the decisive role it played in the demoralization and eventual defeat of the Red Army. This might be no more than an ordinary jealousy, except that it is suggestively replicated in the cases of Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina. When Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden asked the authorities in Riyadh to be appointed as a defender of the Saudi kingdom and the leader of an “Arab Afghan” contingent to fight against the godless Ba’athists. When this offer was rejected, he protested at the Saudi invitation to American troops to come and do the job instead. And, when a decade later it was proposed that Saddam Hussein be removed from the scene altogether, he threw all his weight into the opposite scale. If he himself was not to be the leader of the enterprise, it seems, then nothing would do. He loudly condemned Western inaction in the face of the “ethnic cleansing” conducted by Slobodan Milošević. But one would not know, from any of his extensive, rambling commentaries on world events, that the United States led two military expeditions to the Balkans, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, with the express purpose of preventing the mass expulsion and slaughter of largely Muslim populations. In the warped, selective world-view of bin Laden, it cannot be that the Satanic and Semitic United States has rescued or helped rescue several Muslim peoples—Afghans, Kuwaitis, Bosnians, Kosovars, and Iraqi Kurds and Sh’ites—from foreign occupation and/or genocide.

To describe this unstable combination, of extreme personal ambition and highly subjective “denial,” as “sound strategic and tactical sense,” in Michael Scheuer’s words, seems perverse at best. And especially so since it led bin Laden to commit the extraordinary error, based on the most egregious misreading, of launching a mass attack on American civilians on American soil. Consider for a moment the situation, from the point of view of jihad, as it was in the early fall of 2001. Having been expelled under American and Egyptian pressure from Sudan in 1996, when he was extremely fortunate to have avoided arrest and possible extradition, bin Laden had successfully relocated to Afghanistan, where he was to enjoy the patronage and protection of the newly installed Taliban. This put at his disposal the resources of a state, albeit a small and impoverished one, and allowed considerable scope for training camps and recruitment. In addition, he was favored by the Pakistani regime, which used the Taliban as its colonial proxy in Afghanistan, to supply “strategic depth” in the long-running confrontation with India. Within Pakistan itself, Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers were to be found even in the upper echelons of the nuclear program. Meanwhile the Saudis, loyal to the cynical pact that earned Wahhabi clerical endorsement of the ruling dynasty in return for heavy subsidy of Wahhabi clericalism, were putting billions of dollars at the disposal of madrassas and mujahidin alike. Spectacular attacks on a relatively ambitious scale, on the USS
Cole
in Aden harbor in Yemen, and on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, were carried out with near-impunity and did not succeed in evoking any very determined American response.

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that the thought of God’s existence was unbearable, because one could not aspire to
be
God. It can only have been some kind of theistic megalomania that persuaded bin Laden, in these otherwise highly propitious circumstances for his movement, that the next step should take the form of an insane gamble: an outright assault on the American heartland. And it can only have been under the influence of beliefs that were, indeed, “irrational in the extreme” that he further concluded that such an attack would constitute a knockout blow. He was to persist in this folly for some time after 11 September, telling Al Jazeera’s veteran correspondent Taysir Alluni, in an interview on 21 October 2001, that it would be very much easier to destroy the American empire than it had been to bring down the Soviet one. On the same occasion, he generalized wildly from some random stock-market reports to “prove” that the American economy would not recover from the damage the nineteen martyrs had inflicted on it. (An especially pathetic example of his style: “One of the well-known American hotel companies, Intercontinental, has fired 20,000 employees, thanks to God’s grace.”)

Whether it was because of the fantasy of divine endorsement or because he exaggerated the ignominious American scuttle from a relatively minor commitment in Somalia, bin Laden committed the sin of hubris on a colossal scale. I wrote at the time that he had done the West an enormous unintentional service, by in effect blowing the whistle on his own global plot. Wherever he went, immediately after Tora Bora in 2001, it cannot have been where he had wanted or expected to be. And he had lost his control over the Afghan state (running away even as his Taliban “hosts” took heavy casualties) while badly compromising his relations with the ruling circles in Riyadh and Islamabad. However, not even I was prepared, at the time, to believe that he had readied no follow-up strategy of any sort. Even the most low-level thug, from Northern Ireland to Lebanon, had learned by then to rig another car bomb at the other end of the square, to immolate the remaining civilians as they try to catch their breath, and to maim and kill the arriving medical personnel. (I was briefly convinced that the anthrax-laden packages in the U.S. mail had been designed for this psychological purpose.) But it seemed that there was to be no second wave and that bin Laden had indeed been duped by his own propaganda. Surveying that annoyingly serene visage of his, it turned out, I had been failing to understand that it was the expression of a man untroubled by doubt, and fanatically convinced of his own faultless rectitude. Such men are indeed a danger to us, but they are a deadly danger to those who blindly trust and follow them.  As James Fenton puts it in his poem
Prison Island
, “Fear the kerchiefed captain who does not think he can die.”

I now consider myself further vindicated by the findings from the Abbottabad raid (in which the awful words “Black Hawk down,” uttered in the first few minutes of the operation, led not to panic and despair and self-flagellation but to the cool and calm deployment of another helicopter). Internal discussions captured on disc and tape show bin Laden fretfully casting about for a way to duplicate the impact of 9/11, and again to take the war to “the far enemy,” while many of his deputies argue for lower-cost and lower-risk “operations” against softer targets nearer at hand; Afghan schoolgirls, perhaps, or Egyptian Christians. Or maybe another frontal assault on culture, like the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas and the treasures of the Afghan national museum. This sorry dispute, surely, was a dank and dismal way for the “pious, charismatic, gentle, generous, talented and personally courageous Muslim” to spend his final days. It also seems to have been the nearest he ever got to anything approaching self-criticism.

I also consider myself vindicated, this time not only against Michael Scheuer but against people like Bruce Lawrence, whose introduction to bin Laden’s collected speeches (printed by the publishing arm of
New Left Review
) compared him to Che Guevara: a comparison certainly not intended as critical. How often have we read, in an attempt to give a shallow patina of “liberation theology” to bin Ladenism, that he set himself against the numerous regional dictatorships that enjoyed an overwarm relationship with Washington? Yet of all these despotisms, is there a worse example than that of Pakistan? Part military dictatorship and part Islamic theocracy, merciless in its exploitation and neglect of the poor, callous in its discrimination against minorities such as the Baluchis, exorbitant in its corruption, a rogue system in respect of the illegal sale and active proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the paymaster and protector of Osama bin Laden. In return, he lent his forces to Pakistan’s Talibanization of Afghanistan and to the export of sectarian violence across the Kashmiri frontier with India. This sordid relationship was well known long before the exposure of the Abbottabad compound, which only reemphasized bin Laden’s parasitic client relationship with Islamabad, and showed him to be a villa-dwelling dependent and not an ascetic cave-dwelling guerrilla. If there is a nastier despotism than that of Pakistan, it is probably Sudan, with whose rulers bin Laden had an almost symbiotic business and ideological relationship, in his capacity as the chair of a crooked multinational corporation, until 1996. More recently, he threatened the use of deadly force against United Nations peacekeepers if any attempt was made to arrest Sudan’s flagrant campaign of racist murder against the African population of Darfur.