Luck or Planning? There is a good deal of solid analysis of the escape of bin Laden and his fighters from the Tora Bora Mountains to Pakistan in December 2001, so there is no need to rehearse the entire episode.6 But it is worth evaluating what we did and did not know about bin Laden’s knowledge of the region he had to cross to reach safety. It began in early Novem- ber in or near Kabul, where bin Laden gave an interview to the Paki- stani journalist Hamid Mir just days before the capital fell on November 12, 2001. He then traveled to Jalalabad and on to his base in Tora Bora. “Tora Bora had a special significance for him,” Abdel Bari Atwan learned from an interview with bin Laden in 1996. “During the jihad against the Soviet Union it had been his main military base, but now he used it as a retreat—a place to think, plan, and relax.”7 Simi- larly, the journalist Muhammad al-Shafi’i has written that bin Laden went to Tora Bora in the summer of 1996 to complete work on his declaration of war on the United States.8 As Atwan said, bin Laden and his fighters had fought the Soviets in the Tora Bora area. They had built bases, caves, and tunnels there; and they had close ties to Yunis Khalis—the area’s principal mujahedin leader in the anti-Soviet jihad—and to his military commanders. Moreover, because of his experience with Azzam’s NGO and as a jihadi engineer and fighter, bin Laden was known and respected by Pashtuns on both sides of the border and could rely on their help. Finally, he knew that the force guarding Pakistan’s border—the Frontier Corps—was led by a Pakistan army general, but that the troopers were drawn from local tribes and in reality took orders from tribal chiefs. If the latter wanted bin Laden to escape, the Frontier Corps would not stop him. In 1998 bin Laden said that he and al-Qaeda had found “a sympathetic and giving people in Pakistan who exceed all our expecta- tions by their sympathy with us.”9 132 | OSAMA BIN LADEN Many in the West believed that bin Laden’s first inclination would not be to save his own skin. From youth, as has been shown, he aspired to martyrdom. He also spent an arduous apprenticeship learning insurgency skills and was extremely unlikely to forego using them. He also calculated that his men had the advantage in the coming fight. Having seen Washington panic after the bombing of the Marines’ bar- racks in Beirut in 1983, run after the loss of a few troops in Somalia in 1993 and the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, and fail to respond at all after the suicide attack on the USS Cole in 2000, bin Laden thought his mujahedin could outlast its offensive here, particularly on terrain he now knew well. Omar bin Laden said that while he and his father were in Tora Bora in 1996–1997, his father frequently hiked over the border into Pakistan. “Much to my dismay, he decided I should accompany him, telling me, ‘Omar, we never know when war will strike. We must know our way out of these moun- tains.’ Discontented unless he knew every inch of the path, he insisted ‘We must memorize every rock. Nothing is more important than knowing secret escape routes.’”10 Omar added that when he learned after 9/11 that his father went to Tora Bora, he concluded that, given his father’s knowledge of the area and ability to speak fluent Pashtu, he would be hard to find there. “No one knows those mountains like my father.”11 Bin Laden got away to fight another decade—and counting. Beyond mere concrete fact, however, bin Laden’s survival is important in a less measurable but probably more profound way. In Islamic history, heroes who prevail in wars to defend the faith often succeed against long odds, so long in fact that observers and chroniclers have seen signs of “divine help.”12 Muhammad’s victories at Badr and the Trench were over far larger and better-armed enemies. Khalid bin Walid’s defeat of a bigger Byzantine force at Yarmuk in Syria was enabled by a sudden wind shift that blew sand in the Byzantines’ eyes, blinding them as the battle began. Saladin’s besting of Richard the Lionheart in the Third Crusade provides another example. And, of course, the Afghans’ victory over the Soviet superpower’s forces is commonly described as an instance of God aiding those who fight in His name, proving “true faith can overcome godless power.”13 SURVIVOR AND PLANNER, 2001–2010 | 133 Bin Laden’s survival after 9/11—while owing much to luck, his sense of geography, and his ability to take advantage of enemy lapses—seems to many, many Muslims a tale of divine intervention. At Tora Bora, after all, the fight was not between a small but determined nation defending itself against a superpower; it was but one man and a few hundred com- panions taking on the West’s military forces, incompetently led though they were. For millions of Muslims, bin Laden’s escape represents unquestioned evidence of God’s love for mujahedin who defend Islam. And this was not the first time God seemed to have weighed in on his side. Bin Laden and a small Arab band turned back a large Soviet force at Jaji; he had fought and was wounded at Jalalabad, but survived; a Soviet shell once landed nearby but did not explode; he evaded assassi- nation attempts in Afghanistan and Sudan; he lived through a 1998 U.S. Cruisemissile barrage; and now he had emerged unscathed despite all that the U.S. and NATO forces could throw at or drop on him. The bin Laden who survived Tora Bora, therefore, is not just a brave man, but a brave man whom God seemed to have destined for greater things. This belief only deepened in the post–Tora Bora decade as bin Laden battles and baffles those he deems God’s enemies. And as each year passes, his status as a contemporary Islamic hero grows, as does the Saladin-like legend he will eventually leave in the annals of Islam’s history.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 07:48:47 +0000
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