Discrediting the King’s Scholars The most dramatic shift to date in bin Laden’s thinking involved the deterioration of his reverence for Islamic scholars, a deterioration that had started during the 1990–1991 Gulf War, increased in Sudan, and then accelerated in Afghanistan. The change is manifested in increas- ingly vitriolic rhetorical attacks on those he refers to as “king’s scholars,” the Islamic scholars and jurists employed by Arab rulers to deliver religious justifications for anything they wanted to do. As we have seen, bin Laden’s disillusion with leading Saudi scholars first became public in the ARC’s communiqués. As time passed, his disdain for the official scholars of the Arab regimes’ grew more acerbic. He said it should not be up to him to declare a defen- sive jihad. “I am a humble and weak Muslim,” he wrote from Kanda- har, in a high dudgeon, and “giving the call to holy war is not my responsibility but it is the responsibility of the real leaders of the Muslim world, the religious leaders, and they understand their responsibility well, when and what they have to do.”71 But they had not done so, bin Laden said, and Muslims were beginning to recog- nize that this failure had hurt them as much as “the most ardent enemies of the nation.”72 In particular, bin Laden emphasized, Muslims around the world were starting to see the American presence in Saudi Arabia was not “temporary.” The al-Saud family’s treason in this regard was bad enough, bin Laden said, but “what is worse is that this is what is being done by the [royal] court’s ulema who have aggrandized themselves with the sultan’s money, who have become arrogant with the sultan’s status, and who sought the protection of the sultan’s oppression, and have thus proceeded to trade the hereafter for the world of others and have written fatwas that permit what Allah has proscribed in order to entrench the infidels in the Arabian Peninsula. They have agreed with falsehood to defeat what is right.”73 Living with and Assisting the Taleban Simply having bin Laden agree to live under Mullah Omar’s authority and protection increased the Taleban regime’s standing in the Muslim world. Indeed, it is fair to argue that the decision to host bin Laden put the Taleban on the Islamic world’s radar and led to the Taleban leaders’ first glimmer of recognition that there might be a role for them beyond local Afghan affairs. Bin Laden is a “great Mujahid,” editorialized the Pakistani paper Jang in late 1998, and “by sheltering and protecting” him the Taleban government has done “great work.”74 A Jordan-based Salafi scholar, Dr. Ibrahim Zayd al-Kilani, praised the Taleban’s “strong and sincere” stance in the same way, but added a pointed warning: “We say the judgment of the Shariah is as follows: ‘Whoever delivers the mujahid leader, Usamah bin Ladin, to God’s enemies shall be con- sidered a non-Muslim and supporter of U.S. policy in striking God’s religion.”75 And one of the best analysts of Islamism, the Egyptian lawyer Muntasir al-Zayyat, wrote in July 1999 that there would be high political costs to the Taleban if it abandoned bin Laden, for by so doing it would “lose its unique character of commitment to Shariah and the protection of Islamic movements’ leaders.”76 Besides taking pride in their rising status among Muslims for shel- tering “the great Arab mujahid,” Mullah Omar and his lieutenants, as ORGANIZER, 1996–2001 | 123 124 | OSAMA BIN LADEN Pashtun tribesmen, were bound by the code of Pashtunwali and thus, as the journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai argues, could not conceive of betraying anyone who had “taken refuge with them and sought their protection.”77 Al-Qaeda saw things the same way. Abu Musab al-Suri wrote, for example, “the Taleban have until now fulfilled the duty of the neighbor toward him who seeks refuge. They have fulfilled the duty of the Ansar toward the Muhajarin, and they have been the best of neigh- bors.”78 Well before 2001, therefore, there were two powerful reasons— Islamic obligations and Pashtun tribal mores—to believe the Taleban would choose war with the United States over surrendering bin Laden. In more measurable terms, bin Laden substantially aided the Tale- ban. In the 1996–1997 period, he lent Mullah Omar veteran al-Qaeda insurgents who provided a leaven of combat experience and leadership to undertrained Taleban units. He also supplied funding for the Tale- ban’s successful bribing of some of Massoud’s commanders around Kabul to either switch sides or stand down as the Taleban moved toward the city. Further, bin Laden persuaded Jalaluddin Haqqani, Yunis Khalis’s most senior and powerful commander, to send veteran fighters to join the Taleban’s Kabul campaign. After the capital fell, moreover, to help the “student militia” (Taleban means “students”) in the north, where they had “recently suffered some major military set- backs,” he formed a unit of Qaeda mujahedin. The unit saw heavy fighting against Massoud’s Northern Alliance in the northern prov- inces as the latter sought to regain lost territory. Bin Laden also tried, through intermediaries, to bridge differences between Mullah Omar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and to bring the latter two men and their forces over to the Taleban.79 Bin Laden failed in this effort, but his relationship with Sayyaf and Gulbuddin stayed cordial, so much so that Gulbuddin told the media that bin Laden was “my brother.” About the al-Qaeda force, Roy Gutman has written in his excellent book How We Missed the Story that bin Laden’s men were “ready to fight to the death and were the most feared by Massoud’s commanders.”80 In fact, Massoud said his men could handle Taleban units, but found it much harder to take on the same units if they con- tained al-Qaeda fighters or al-Qaeda units alone. There also is some evidence that just as he had in Sudan, bin Laden spent funds on construction in Afghanistan. In Kandahar, for example, he financed a new market facility in the main bazaar, and paid for a center for Taleban administrators and a new mosque on the site of an old movie theater.81 The journalist Ahmad Zaydan has said that by 2000 bin Laden’s men were welcome in Kandahar and were becoming part of society there because they helped the Taleban and spent money. “I never sensed the Kandaharis were uncomfortable about the Arab presence,” Zaydan wrote. “I know for certain that everyone in Kandahar was pleased with the high rents paid by the Arabs and the revenue generated by Arab spending in the city, which moved the stagnant Kandahari economy.”82 Finally, bin Laden deftly used rhetoric to praise the Taleban and all Afghans, and to reinforce their status as Muslims who refused to cower before foreign threats and defended guests with their lives. “Afghani- stan,” bin Laden told the Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai in 1999, “[is] the only state in this age which has started to apply Islam and all Muslims should support it. . . . All Muslims should focus their efforts, in terms of relief, the call for God’s path, and in terms of knowl- edge in support of this state. . . . Thank God, our relationship with the Taleban is very strong and close. It is an ideological friendship based on faith and not on political and commercial interests. Many countries have tried to exert pressure on the Taleban through enticements and threats, but the Almighty God entrenched them.”83
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 07:48:13 +0000
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