Logistics Bin Laden’s Afghan experience as a benefactor, engineer, and fighter taught him that the mujahedin would always be under “continuous pressure” from a much more powerful enemy and so would be “in need of continuous logistical support.” “You need to have ammunition at the right time,” as he put it; “you need launchers for the rockets, you also need facilities to evacuate the dead persons, may God accept them as martyrs.”97 Determining that “the two elements of fighting are money and souls,” bin Laden and his senior lieutenants would later build al-Qaeda into an organization that could amply and reliably supply both, for their own operations as well as for the Islamist insur- gencies they chose to support in various parts of the world.98 APPRENTICESHIP, 1979–1989 | 69 70 | OSAMA BIN LADEN Media Near the end of the anti-Soviet jihad, bin Laden told Isam Darraz he was “convinced of the importance of the media in serving Islamic causes.”99 He also later recalled the deep impression made on him by the power of the official Saudi media to help the Afghans’ cause. Across the Arabic-speaking world, he said, the Saudi media “would cover the topic [of the Afghan jihad] in its five daily broadcasts, speaking about the heroic stand of the Mujahedin fighters.”100 He came to see the media as not just a fundraising vehicle during a war but also as a means for teaching Muslims that jihad was a religious duty, one that they must be prepared to undertake whenever and wherever there was a threat to Islam. “It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods [of warfare],” bin Laden told Mullah Omar before 9/11. “In fact its ratio may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for battles.”101 Jihad Bin Laden and his colleagues learned in Afghanistan that Islam’s only means of survival from foreign attacks is jihad. “Does the crocodile,” he asks, “understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon?”102 He learned this in part from Shaykh Azzam, who wrote, “Anyone who looks into the state of the Muslims today will find their greatest misfortune in the abandonment of jihad.”103 As a practicality, he learned it by fighting Soviets who had no interest in negotiations and left Afghanistan only because victory was not in sight and their economy was being ravaged by the cost of war. “There can be no dia- logue with [infidel] occupiers,” bin Laden argued, because they seek to eliminate Muslims and the Islamic identity, and “to deter them by any other means than [jihad] we would be like going in circles.”104 From Moscow’s withdrawal to this day, bin Laden has demanded Mus- lims recognize that there is but one relevant historical model to ensure their survival: that of Saladin and his use of jihad.105 Whether the issue is ending infidel occupation of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia, there is just one remedy. “Palestine and its people have been suffering a great deal for almost a century at the hands of the Christians and Jews,” bin Laden wrote. “Both opponents have not captured it from us through negotiations and dialogue, but by iron and fire, which is the way to regain it. Iron can only be cut with iron.”106 Al-Qaeda Odd as it might seem, given how universally it is spoken and written of, one issue that has arisen from work on Osama bin Laden is whether or not al-Qaeda actually exists. Given the documents captured in Afghanistan and Iraq and subsequently published; the testimony of the group’s (reluctant) defectors Jamal al-Fadl and Abu Jandal; the words and actions of bin Laden and his lieutenants; and the ample media coverage of all the efforts to root it out, the questions seems silly. Yet asked it is. In his useful book Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, Jason Burke recounts every possible event in which al-Qaeda might have been involved, and yet wasn’t. In general, of course, Burke is correct that al-Qaeda cannot possibly have done everything that has been attributed to it. But Burke continues to view al-Qaeda as a tradi- tional terrorist organization, which it certainly is not. Flagg Miller, a professor of religion at the University of California-Davis, has studied 1,459 audio tapes by two hundred “leading Islamists from around the world” and concluded there is “no indication that the term al-qaeda was used before 2001 to denote a specific group or organization.”107 Indeed, Miller haughtily berates Peter Bergen for denouncing as “non- sense” previous claims that there is no al-Qaeda organization, arguing that “Bergen’s aggressive editorial interventions—not unusual for such trade books—prevent closer analysis.”108 Miller’s smug and highly selective use of evidence represents a microcosm of the contribution social science has made to the study of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Finally, Gilles Kepel, an expert on Islamism, has recently written that al-Qaeda is a “hypothetical organization.”109 Does it or does it not exist? My conclusion is that al-Qaeda surely does exist, that it was founded by Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, and that to this day they direct its operations. I also believe that many others—Burke, Flagg, and Kepel among them—have not found it because they are looking for a more conventional terrorist group, something al-Qaeda is not. Neither is it what Steve Coll and Lawrence APPRENTICESHIP, 1979–1989 | 71 72 | OSAMA BIN LADEN Wright, respectively, refer to as a “small incubating cult of martyrdom” or a “death cult.”110 What did bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s other founders intend when they first organized it in 1988? They were, first off, trying to maintain momentum for the nascent worldwide Islamist movement into the post-Afghan jihad era. The multinational nature of the Afghan jihad only began in the last years of the war against the Soviets, and al-Qaeda was meant to keep Muslim attention on the jihad project after it lost the focus provided by the Red Army. Al-Qaeda was also intended to provide support for jihad through its own media activities, military operations, and assistance to like-minded Muslims. It was to provide a base from which the ummah-wide Islamist movement and potential adherents could be organized, trained, paid, and generally inspired. Al-Qaeda, bin Laden would explain, was founded to give jihad “the status of worship.”111 Bin Laden has stressed that it is an organization open to all Muslims, not only Arabs. He added, however, that in the contemporary Muslim world this is easier to say than accomplish. People often speak of Islam in “simple terms, but there are differences in terms of customs.”112 He has argued that such differences must be made irrelevant because “in God’s faith, people are treated as equals” and that “the crucial factor is not a person’s mistakes but his good deeds and righteousness.”113 In al-Qaeda, bin Laden declared, “we [will] have no discrimination on the basis of color or race. We coop- erate with people on the basis of piety and righteousness . . . because we are one nation and one qiblah.”114 To accomplish these goals, bin Laden modeled al-Qaeda on the Afghan insurgent organizations with which he was most familiar. These happened to be the most militantly Islamist as well as the most militarily effective groups, including Yunis Khalis’s Hizbi-Islami, Jalaluddin Haqqani’s organization, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf’s Islamic Union, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizbi-Islami. A key point often lost on Western analysts is that neither bin Laden nor his colleagues ever intended to build a terrorist organization; they intended to con- struct an insurgent organization that could absorb substantial punish- ment from always far more powerful foes and endure. Is it an insurgent organization or a terrorist group? This is not a mere matter of semantics but rather represents a fundamental difference. Terrorist groups are small; obsessively secretive; aim at publicity, not victory; constitute a lethal nuisance, not a national security threat to the nation-state; and are subject to defeat by decapitation or attri- tion. Insurgent groups, on the other hand, are much larger; balance the need for secretiveness with the need for propaganda; aim at victory and define what constitutes victory; pose genuine security threats to nation-states; and put so much effort into succession-planning that neither decapitation nor attrition is likely. Bin Laden also brought a new dimension to insurgency. Whereas historically most insurgencies are specific to nation-states, al-Qaeda is the first to have a substantial international presence. There were four basic components to the organization of “al- Qaeda” at its inception. The first was a military component, which would field fighters—as individuals or in small groups—for training, advising, and/or combat purposes to places where local Islamists were fighting insurgencies. The initial areas of interest were Kashmir, Tajik- istan, and Mindanao; Chechnya would soon be added to the list. The military component also included a cadre of veterans to keep training non-Afghan Muslims at camps in Afghanistan. Interestingly, no decision had yet been made to use al-Qaeda fighters to attack targets of the group’s choosing, be they Arab regimes, the United States, or Israel. Al-Qaeda was not looking for a war of its own in 1988–1989. The second component was broadly administrative to deal with finances—acquiring, budgeting, and dispensing funds—arms procure- ment, documentation, and logistical matters. When al-Qaeda began operations in September 1988, Tawil noted, nine of the group’s fifteen founders were administrative specialists.115 The third would deal with religious matters: issuing fatwas and developing religious training courses for members of the organization and those its camps trained. The fourth was a media/propaganda wing that would build on the MK’s propaganda programs. All these components would be overseen by a Shura Council chaired by bin Laden. When it was later decided that al-Qaeda would run its own military operations—the first a 1992 attack on U.S. troops in Aden, Yemen—a higher military committee was formed to handle insurgency support, as well as to approve, support, and fund al-Qaeda APPRENTICESHIP, 1979–1989 | 73 74 | OSAMA BIN LADEN operations whose “planning, execution, and method of attack were all undertaken by commanders in the operational field [geographic area],” as Abu Jandal told the journalist Khalid al-Hammadi.116 Al-Qaeda’s method of operation has remained fairly constant since 1988. For example, its military component was not meant to foment insurgencies in the Muslim world, but to assist them. While insti- gating Muslims to jihad worldwide would be al-Qaeda’s main task, the organization’s primary military task would be to help local Islamic insurgencies become better trained, financed, and led. Based on the founders’ experience in the anti-Soviet jihad—during which they found that Afghans reacted violently to Arab attempts to assume mili- tary or religious leadership—they concluded that any Islamic insur- gency must be started and led by the nationals of the country in which it was to occur. The necessary corollary to the rule was that al-Qaeda members sent to offer assistance would be subordinate to the locals. This was a lesson al-Qaeda members took a long time to learn, but that they did is evident today in Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, the North Caucasus, southern Thailand, Palestine, and Somalia, where Islamist insurgent forces are overwhelmingly local and led by locals. Al-Qaeda’s one major departure from this doctrine was in Iraq under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. As will be discussed, the al-Zarqawi deviation yielded disaster for al-Qaeda and came nearer than anything else since 9/11 to destroying it. That al-Qaeda learned this lesson thoroughly is seen in the quiet, subordinate, and generally effective performance by al-Zarqawi’s first successor, the late Abu Hamza al-Muhajir. Revealing how al-Qaeda was patterned after Islamist Afghan insurgent groups gives an opportunity to refute what has become a common refrain from many who write about bin Laden, and one that I allude to above; that is, that he claims that he and “his men” defeated the Red Army in Afghanistan, and that the Afghans played a support- ing role. These writers use this to reduce bin Laden to a windbag, braggart, and fantasist. I would agree wholeheartedly that such would be an apt description of bin Laden had he made such a claim—but he has not. In the twenty-some years since the Soviet defeat, bin Laden has attributed the mujahedin victory first to Allah and then to the Afghans. When he speaks of “we” when discussing the Afghan war, he invariably speaks in terms of “Muslims.” There are two main reasons he does this. First, because it is true; the Afghans drove the Red Army out and they would be the first to publicly denounce anyone who made a contrary contention. To my knowledge, no credible Afghan has called out bin Laden on this point, although many Western experts have done so. And second, because bin Laden views Afghanistan as a God-given opportunity for Islam to revitalize itself, and is grateful for the Afghans’ heroism and for allow- ing Arabs and non-Arab Muslims to play a bit part in their epic saga. He believes that he and all Muslims needed the Afghans much more than the Afghans needed them. The Afghan mujahedin saved not only their country but also Muslim holy sites, the Arab Gulf states, and much of the Islamic world. When the world looked to the Afghans, bin Laden writes, “they found a population whose morale was high and who were committed to fighting the Russians. The Afghans had in their possession the rifles their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had used to fight the British. The Afghans were even selling their sheep in order to buy ammunition for their rifles. . . . Therefore, Allah blessed the mujahedin leadership with the ability to raise the banner of Jihad. . . . The Afghans were able to repel the largest invasion of recent times by the forces of disbelief against Islam. We ask Allah to reward them with the best rewards. . . . Had it not been for the grace of Allah and the people of Afghanistan, the Arabian Gulf states would have fallen into the hands of Communism.”117
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 07:45:39 +0000
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