The Looming Tower (37 page)

The Clinton administration still perceived bin Laden as a wealthy nuisance, not a mortal threat. His name had arisen as a financier of terror mainly because of his support of the blind sheikh. There was a consensus that he needed to be pushed out of his sanctuary in Sudan, because the country was overrun with Islamic terrorists, and they were far more dangerous with money than without. There was no real debate about the consequences of expelling him, however. Nor was there any point in forcing Sudan to hand him over to U.S. authorities, because there was no evidence so far that he had harmed American citizens. Administration officials briefly nurtured the fantasy that the Saudis would accept their wayward son and simply cut off his head. The president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, went to the Kingdom on hajj, and while he was there he met with Crown Prince Abdullah. Bashir offered to turn over bin Laden if the Saudis would guarantee that he would not be imprisoned or prosecuted. The crown prince rejected those terms. The Egyptian government, which held bin Laden responsible for financing the attempted assassination of Mubarak, also pressured the Saudis to bring bin Laden to justice. This time it was Prince Turki who demurred. There was no solid proof that bin Laden was involved in the operation, he contended. Ahmed Badeeb, Turki’s deputy, privately told the Egyptians, “Give us proof and we will kidnap him.” But the Saudis made it obvious to everyone that they were washing their hands of bin Laden. Bin Laden wasn’t yet a wanted man, but he certainly was an unwanted one.

The Americans continued pushing the Sudanese government. “Ask him to leave the country,” they told General Erwa. “Just don’t let him go to Somalia.”

“He will go to Afghanistan,” Erwa warned.

“Let him,” the Americans responded.

H
ASAN AL
-T
URABI
and bin Laden argued heatedly late into the night over a period of three consecutive days. Bin Laden said that after all he had invested in the country, the government had no right to throw him out. He had committed no crimes against Sudan, and there was no other place in the world that was ready to receive him. Turabi replied that bin Laden had only two choices: to leave or to remain and keep his mouth shut. Bin Laden said he couldn’t remain silent as long as young Islamists were unjustly imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. Finally, he agreed to leave.

But where in the world could he go? He no longer had a Saudi passport, which gave him entry anywhere in the world; now he was traveling as a rather notorious Sudanese businessman and alleged sponsor of terror. Some members of al-Jihad offered to arrange for him to have plastic surgery and then smuggle him into Egypt, but Zawahiri, who reportedly was lying low in Bulgaria, advised against it. He had always maintained that Egypt was too transparent and lacked the natural retreats—caves, mountains—where a revolution could nurture itself. Somalia was a possibility, but the hostility of the local population toward the Arabs made the country too untrustworthy.

As the Sudanese had warned, Afghanistan was the most obvious destination—perhaps the only one. Turabi did bin Laden the favor of calling the Sudanese ambassador to Afghanistan to ease bin Laden’s return. Then the rulers of Sudan sat down to divvy up bin Laden’s investments.

The government still owed him for the $20 million, 450-mile highway from Khartoum to Port Sudan. Bin Laden had agreed to accept the tannery, which the government valued at $5 million, as partial payment, but now he had to suffer the indignity of selling it back to the government at a fraction of its worth. He liquidated his other businesses as quickly as possible, hoping to regain some portion of his fortune, but he was forced to virtually give away nearly everything he owned. The government confiscated his heavy equipment—the Caterpillars, steamrollers, and cranes that were the key assets of his construction company, worth approximately $12 million by themselves. The spreading acres that he had cultivated with so much anticipation and pleasure were snatched away for next to nothing. He sold his horses to Issam for a few hundred dollars. The net loss, he ruefully admitted, was more than $160 million.
^*
Turabi’s Islamist party, bin Laden concluded, was “a mixture of religion and organized crime.”

The imminent departure of its leader threw al-Qaeda into a panic. Some members were invited to join bin Laden in Afghanistan in the future; others were told the organization could no longer support them. Each of them got a check for $
2,400
and a plane ticket home.

Having shorn bin Laden of most of his net worth, the Sudanese government thoughtfully chartered him an antique Soviet Tupolev jet. Saif al-Adl, later to become al-Qaeda’s military chief, sat in the copilot’s seat holding a map so he could direct the Russian pilot, who didn’t speak Arabic and whom they didn’t trust. Two of bin Laden’s young sons, Saad and Omar, were with him, and a couple of bodyguards. Bin Laden left on May
18, 1996.
His family was scattered and broken. The organization that he had built was torn apart. He held America responsible for the crushing reversal that had led him to this state.

13

Hijira

S
UDAN WAS BEHIND HIM.
Bin Laden flew across the bright, narrow sea, and soon Jeddah and Mecca passed below, and the al-Sarawat escarpment, and then the great yellow desert, marked only by the roads his father had built across it. He was thirty-eight years old. He had been famous, a hero, and now he was a refugee, forbidden to touch down in his own country. He refueled in the United Arab Emirates, where he was briefly greeted by emissaries of the government who may have given him money. He had been rich all of his life, but he had poured his savings into poor investments, which were, in any case, essentially stolen from him. Now he accepted the charity of those who remembered his name.

He flew over the suckling supertankers docked beside the massive refineries lining the ports of the Persian Gulf, the source of so much wealth and trouble. Beyond Iran lay the blank southern desert of Afghanistan, and then Kandahar, surrounded by the ruins of its irrigation canals and pomegranate orchards. Now there were only poppy fields, the last resource worth the risk of cultivating in a country so devastated by twenty years of warfare. The savagery of the Soviets was forgotten in the convulsion of the civil war. Authority had broken down everywhere. The roads were given over to highwaymen who demanded tolls and sometimes abducted children when money was insufficient. Tribes were fighting tribes, warlords against warlords; drug gangs and the transport mafia dominated the barren economy. The cities had been pounded so hard they were disaggregated into piles of bricks and stones. Electrical posts, turned to lace after two decades of flying armament and long since stripped of wire, ran along the roadsides as ghostly reminders of a time when Afghanistan had taken its first turn toward modernity. Millions and millions of land mines contaminated the countryside, having disabled 4 percent of the population, according to a UN survey, and rendering much of the arable land useless.

As bin Laden passed over Kabul, the capital was under siege once again, this time by the Taliban. They had arisen in 1994 as a small group of students, most of them orphans who had been raised in the refugee camps and who were outraged by the chaos and depravity of the rule of the mujahideen. The liberators in the war against the Soviets had turned out to be more barbaric rulers than their enemy. Stirred to action by the misery that victory had brought to Afghanistan, the Taliban arose with stunning swiftness. Thanks to the support of Pakistani intelligence, they were transformed from a populist militia into a formidable, highly mobile guerrilla army, on the verge of consolidating their rapid rise to power as they stood on the outskirts of Kabul, raining rockets into the ruins.

In the next valley, at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains, was Jalalabad. Bin Laden landed at the same airport that he had laid siege to in 1989. He was greeted by three former mujahideen commanders, then he moved into an old lodge above the river that had once served as a Soviet military post. A few weeks later he moved again, to a tumbledown farm five miles south of Jalalabad. It was owned by one of bin Laden’s old sponsors, Younis Khalis, an elderly warlord with a taste for teenage brides.

A
FGHANISTAN IS A LARGE AND RUGGED COUNTRY,
divided from east to west by the Hindu Kush Mountains, its population split into four major ethnic groups and numerous tribes and dialects. It is a difficult country to govern even in peacetime, although peace was such a distant memory that many Afghans had never experienced it. The longing for order was so great that almost any strong, stabilizing power would have been welcomed.

The Taliban rapidly captured nine out of Afghanistan’s thirty provinces. President Burhanuddin Rabbani tried to negotiate with them, but they simply demanded his resignation. The wily and experienced commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud, managed to push the young insurgents out of southern Kabul and then roll back their advance in some of the other provinces. After observing the anarchy that came with mujahideen rule and deciding that the Taliban offered the best chance to impose order, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan rebuilt the Taliban forces, providing training, weapons, and vehicles—mainly Datsun four-wheel-drive pickup trucks with heavy machine guns, cannons, anti-aircraft guns, or multiple-barreled rocket launchers mounted in the beds. The Taliban moved swiftly, in swarms, making up in speed and daring what they lacked in organization and discipline. They hired pilots and commanders from the former communist regime as mercenaries. Opposition leaders acknowledged the flow of events and used the opportunity to stuff their pockets with Taliban bribes. Jalalabad, which had fended off the mujahideen for months, suddenly surrendered to four Talibs in a jeep. The Taliban now commanded the gateway to the Khyber Pass. They also found themselves in charge of a famous refugee.

The Taliban had not invited bin Laden to return to Afghanistan and had no obligation to him. They sent a message to the Saudi government asking what they should do with him. They were told to hold on to him and keep him quiet. Thus bin Laden came under the control of a political hermit named Mullah Mohammed Omar, who had only recently declared himself “the ruler of all Muslims.”

Mullah Omar had lost his right eye in an artillery shell explosion in the battle of Jalalabad in
1989,
which also marred his cheek and forehead. Thin but tall and strongly built, he was well known as a crack marksman who had destroyed many Soviet tanks during the Afghan War. Unlike most of the Afghan mujahideen, he spoke passable Arabic, and he became devoted to the lectures of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. Piety, modesty, and courage were the main features of his personality. He was little noticed in Azzam’s lectures, except for the occasional shy smile buried within his heavy black beard and for his knowledge of the Quran and the hadith; he had studied Islamic jurisprudence in Pakistan.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, Omar returned to teach at a madrassa (religious boarding school) in a small village near Kandahar. The fighting, however, did not end, not even when the communist government finally fell to the mujahideen in April 1992. The violence had no limits. Warring tribes and bandits roamed the countryside. Ancient ethnic hatreds combined with mutual calls for revenge in the escalating savagery. A local commander orchestrated the gang rape of several young boys. Such indecencies were common. “Corruption and moral disintegration had gripped the land,” Omar later stated. “Killing, looting, and violence had become the norm. Nobody had ever imagined that the situation could get this bad. Nobody thought it could be improved, either.”

In this desperate moment, Omar received a vision. The Prophet appeared to him and instructed this simple village mullah to bring peace to his country. With the fearlessness of total religious commitment, Omar borrowed a motorcycle and began visiting students in other madrassas in the province. The students (the word in Pashtu is “taliban”) all agreed that something had to be done, but few were willing to leave their studies and join Omar in his risky quest. He eventually gathered fifty-three of the bravest of them. His old commander in the war against the Soviets, Haji Bashar, humbled by Omar’s vision of the Prophet, helped by raising money and arms, and personally donated two cars and a truck. Soon, with about two hundred adherents, the Taliban took over the administration of the Maiwand district in Kandahar province. The local commander surrendered, along with
2,500
men, a large supply of weapons, some helicopters and armored vehicles, and six MiG-21 fighter jets. Desperate for order, many Afghans rallied to the Taliban, who advertised themselves as fervent and incorruptible servants of God.

There were three streams that fed the Taliban, which flooded across Afghanistan with such extraordinary rapidity. One was the material support—money and arms—from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Some of the Taliban had been students in a vocational school that Ahmed Badeeb, Prince Turki’s chief of staff, had established during the war; so from the beginning there was an intimate connection between Saudi intelligence and the young insurgents.

The second stream drew from the madrassas across the Pakistan border, such as the one that Ahmed Badeeb had established, which were crammed full with the sons of Afghan refugees. Such schools were desperately needed because Pakistan, with one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world, had failed to create a public school system that would adequately instruct its own children, much less those of the three million Afghan refugees who had fled to Pakistan after the Soviet invasion. (There was an equal number of refugees in Iran.) Typically, the madrassas were funded by charities from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, which channeled the money through local religious parties. As a result, many of the indigenous Sufi shrines were closed down and turned into schools that taught the Wahhabi doctrine. Naturally, the madrassas created a powerful political constituency for the local Wahhabi parties, since they not only provided free room and board but actually paid a monthly stipend—a vital source of support for many of the students’ families.