Piping Days of Peace During the eleven months between al-Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole and the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden solidified his ties to Mullah Omar, while preparing his forces for war with the United States. Mullah Omar’s anger about the U.S. pressure he was under stemming from the Cole attack and bin Laden’s media appearances remained points of friction in their relations, but bin Laden worked to calm Mullah Omar, using a contrite manner and public praise. The Taleban leader, he said, had built a “strong fort for Islam” in Afghanistan and had “saved the jihad of the nation [ummah].”84 He also publicly pledged personal allegiance to the “Commander of the Faithful” and regularly urged others to do so. Bin Laden asked the scholars “to encourage people to wage jihad, to mobilize people in Afghanistan, and to issue ORGANIZER, 1996–2001 | 125 126 | OSAMA BIN LADEN fatwas on the legitimacy of the Emirate of Afghanistan.”85 Bin Laden called on the scholars to teach the Islamic nation that there is no Islam without a con- gregation, no congregation without an emirate, and no emirate without obedience. You are aware that at these diffi- cult days, God has bestowed on the Islamic nation the rise of an Islamic state that applies God’s sharia and raises the banner of monotheism, praise be to God, namely the estab- lishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan led by the prince of the faithful Mullah Muhammad Omar, may God protect him. It is your duty to call on the people to adhere to this emirate, to support it with souls and resources, and to back it in resisting the overwhelming currents of the world’s infidelism. . . . I take this opportunity to assert that it is God’s desire that I pledge allegiance to the prince of the faithful Mullah Muhammad Omar, that I have indeed given him my word of allegiance. I hope my action will serve only God the Almighty.86 Bin Laden did not, however, pledge to abstain from attacks or from using the media, and, in fact, was aggressively trying to force Omar into a public reconfirmation of al-Qaeda’s license to stay in Afghani- stan by repeatedly offering to take his men and leave the country. “Usama bin Laden,” one newspaper reported in late 2000, “has once again offered to Mullah Omar that he is ready to move to another country to save Afghanistan from foreign conspiracies and attack.”87 The offers embarrassed Mullah Omar and his ministers on several counts, for they implied that bin Laden did not think Mullah Omar could be trusted to handle U.S. pressure; that he doubted the Tale- ban’s commitment to the Pashtun tribal duty of protecting guests; and that he questioned whether the Afghan citizenship he was granted would be honored if it came to war with America.88 Omar had no choice but to reject bin Laden’s offer each time it was made. In reaf- firming his welcome to bin Laden, he announced that for all Taleban members “it was an issue of their [Afghan] honor and that they would sacrifice their lives to save their honor,” and added that it is clear “the United States was looking to attack Afghanistan” whether or not bin Laden was there.89 Checked by religious principle, tribal mores, nascent aspirations as leaders of Islam’s only Islamic emirate, and bin Laden’s clever tactics, Mullah Omar and his Shura Council settled down to solve their major problem, Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance. By the spring of 2001, al-Qaeda-supported Taleban forces had driven Massoud’s fighters into a pocket of territory in the northeast, amount- ing to less than 20 percent of Afghanistan. But his fighters were not defeated, and Massoud was masterfully securing financial and mili- tary aid from Iran, Russia, the United States, India, Uzbekistan, and some NATO countries, aid that might enable him to extend the war indefinitely. At this point the interests of Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden were fully aligned. Both knew that with his military talent, skill as a unifying leader among Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities, and charisma, Massoud could stop the Taleban from countrywide consolidation of power. For Mullah Omar and his advisers, the one way to avoid a long, bloody, and unpredictable battle with the Northern Alliance was to kill Massoud. He was the Alliance’s brain, heart, and soul and had prepared no successor. Bin Laden wanted to help the Taleban solve its Massoud problem, but not simply to please his hosts. By mid-2001, he knew what Mullah Omar did not: al-Qaeda attacks were sched- uled for later in the year in the United States. Banking on them to lure the United States into Afghanistan, at long last, bin Laden and his lieutenants decided Massoud’s demise would leave the Alliance lead- erless and susceptible to defeat by the Taleban before al-Qaeda struck in the United States. Should al-Qaeda kill Massoud and the Taleban eliminate the Alliance before the attacks, Washington would have no effective Afghan ally to assist its forces—making the Afghan cam- paign harder, longer, and more costly. Killing Massoud was therefore a win-win scenario, and Mullah Omar and bin Laden knew the act was religiously permissible because Salafi scholars in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere had long since named Massoud Islam’s enemy. “Unfor- tunately,” Shaykh Musa al-Qarni said in 2006, “most of the so-called ulema in the Islamic resurgence in our country [Saudi Arabia] here were against Massoud and on Hekmatyar’s side.”90 ORGANIZER, 1996–2001 | 127 128 | OSAMA BIN LADEN Massoud was killed by an al-Qaeda-sponsored suicide bomber on September 9, 2001, much later in the year than bin Laden intended, and a telling object lesson for anyone foolish enough to expect things to happen on time in Afghanistan. The al-Qaeda raids in New York and Washington struck on September 11, and George W. Bush’s administra- tion swallowed bin Laden’s lure lustily. Massoud was gone, but the Americans and their unlimited supply of greenbacks held the Northern Alliance together long enough to help the minimal U.S. forces deployed to take the major Afghan cities, and then loudly declare complete vic- tory over al-Qaeda and the Taleban. The assertion was premature.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 07:48:25 +0000
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