In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

CHAPTER FIVE Al Qa’ida’s Strategic Alliance

OSAMA BIN LADEN was fond of telling his students a parable, comparing the anti-Soviet War with the Christian assault against Mecca in 570 AD. The much-better-equipped Christian army employed war elephants, and their attack was fearsome enough to warrant mention in the Qur’an, appropriately enough in the chapter Al-Fil (“The Elephant”). The Christians tried to destroy the Ka’aba shrine in Mecca and divert pilgrims to a new cathedral in San’a, located in modern-day Yemen. But birds showered the invading Christian army with pellets of hard-baked clay, and the Arabs eventually defeated the invaders. To bin Laden and other al Qa’ida leaders, the episode exemplified that God would be on their side when they united against a common enemy.¹

“In the training camps and on the battlefronts against the Russians,” Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote in Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, “the Muslim youths developed a broad awareness and a fuller realization of the conspiracy that is being weaved” by Christians and Jews. They “developed an understanding based on shari’ah of the enemies of Islam, the renegades, and their collaborators.”² The Afghan-Soviet War triggered an epiphany among these fighters, who had trekked to Afghanistan from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, and other parts of the Arab world. Inspired by the defeat of the Soviet Union, they began to dream about internationalizing the jihad. The defeat had emboldened them, and many believed they were invincible.

“The USSR, a superpower with the largest land army in the world,” Zawahiri wrote, “was destroyed and the remnants of its troops fled Afghanistan before the eyes of the Muslim youths and as a result of their actions.”³ Saudi Arabia was crucial to the jihad, as significant amounts of money from Saudi government officials and private donors poured into Pakistan and Afghanistan. But, no matter who funded the movement, no country in the Middle East was more important to the birth of al Qa’ida than Afghanistan.

Ideological Origins

In 1745, in Saudi Arabia, Muhammad ibn Saud allied with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792). Inspired by a number of scholars, such as Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), Wahhab criticized the virulent “superstitions” that had adulterated Islam’s original purity. According to Wahhab’s reading of the Qur’an, the Ottoman pilgrims who traveled across Saudi Arabia each year to pray at Mecca were not true Muslims. Rather, they were blasphemous polytheists who worshipped false idols. They were Allah’s enemy, he said, and should be converted or eliminated. In its simplest form, Wahhab preached that the original grandeur of Islam could be regained only if the Islamic community would return to what he believed were the principles enunciated by the Prophet Muhammad.

The Saudis began to export Wahhabi philosophy by distributing money to build mosques. In the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when the Arab oil-exporting nations declared an embargo on oil destined for Israel’s Western allies, Saudi Arabia found itself in an enviable economic position. Its growing oil wealth could finance a wide-ranging proselytizing campaign among the Sunnis in the Middle East and in the broader Muslim world.⁴

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 came at an opportune time for the Saudis. Under the stewardship of Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, Saudi Arabia began active campaigns in Pakistan and Afghanistan, working closely with the CIA and the ISI to fund the Afghan mujahideen.

One of Saudi Arabia’s key facilitators in Afghanistan was Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian from Jenin. Azzam was born in 1941 and studied sharia between 1959 and 1966, in Damascus, where he joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Over time, he became an inspiring organizer, leading one writer to call him the “Lenin of international jihad.”⁵ After completing his studies at Al-Azhar University in Cairo in 1973, Azzam became a professor of sharia at the University of Jordan, while supervising the university’s youth sector for the Muslim Brotherhood. He was later evicted from his university post and moved to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where he taught at King Abdulaziz University. Osama bin Laden was one of his pupils.

In 1984, Azzam moved to Peshawar, a Pashtun city in Pakistan thirty miles from the Afghanistan border. A longtime stop on the ancient Silk Road, its bazaars have attracted visitors for centuries with their gold, silver, carpets, pottery, arms, and artwork in wood, brass, and semiprecious stones. It was here, at the age of forty-three, that Azzam founded the Maktab ul-Khadamat (Services Office), which coordinated support for the mujahideen with a range of non-governmental organizations under the guise of the Red Crescent of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He said the cause he “had sought for so long was the cause of the Afghan people,” and acted as the primary connection between the Arabs and Wahhabi interests in Saudi Arabia.⁶

Unlike some other radicals, Azzam was opposed to targeting Muslims and pro-Western regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But he wrote that jihad in Afghanistan was a requirement for all good Muslims, an argument he made in his book Defending the Land of the Muslims Is Each Man’s Most Important Duty. The novelty of Azzam’s work lies not in its content, since other writers had called for jihad before. Rather, his success was in his skill as an agitator, able to convince Muslims from abroad to come to Afghanistan and fight. Saudi Arabia donated millions of dollars to Azzam’s Services Office and provided a 75 percent discount on airline tickets for young Muslims who wished to join the jihad. In addition, Saudi Arabia became a ferrying port and station for Arab veterans and jihadis, such as Zawahiri, who were journeying to Peshawar on their way to Afghanistan.⁷ Other countries, including the United States, also played a critical role. U.S. President Jimmy Carter was in favor of the mujahideen insurgency, arguing that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan posed one of the most serious threats to peace since World War II.⁸ Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, likewise noted that the “invasion of Afghanistan made it more important to mobilize Islamic resistance against the Soviets.”⁹

The Afghan jihad became the great inspiration that brought Islamic radicals together. Muslim ulemas issued fatwas interpreting the Soviet intervention as an invasion of the territory of Islam by sinners. This made it possible to proclaim a “defensive” jihad, which, according to sharia, obliged every Muslim to participate.¹⁰ These first-generation volunteers were mainly Arabs from various parts of the Middle East who had come to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. Once they reached Afghanistan, the Services Office generally divided them into small groups that formed entire operational units in eastern Afghanistan, along the Pakistan border.¹¹ A report compiled for Osama bin Laden indicated that more than 2,300 foreign fighters “from eight Arab countries have died in the course of jihad in Afghanistan. Among these martyrs 433 were from Saudi Arabia, 526 from Egypt, 184 from Iraq, 284 from Libya, 180 from Syria, 540 from Algeria, 111 from Sudan and 100 from Tunisia.”¹²

In the late 1980s, elite foreign fighters began to congregate in a camp near Khowst, Afghanistan, called Al-Maasada (The Lion’s Den). Osama bin Laden was the leader of this group; he said he had been inspired to call the place Al-Maasada by lines from one of the Prophet’s favorite poets, Hassan Ibn Thabit, who wrote:

Whoever wishes to hear the clash of swords,

let him come to Maasada,

where he will find courageous men ready to die

for the sake of God.¹³

The Russians attacked the Lion’s Den in 1987, and bin Laden fled, along with a group that included Hassan Abdel Rab al-Saray, a Saudi who later carried out the November 1995 attack on a U.S. training center in Riyadh; Abu Zubayr Madani, who was killed in Bosnia in 1992; Ibn al-Khattab, who emerged later in Chechnya; and Sheikh Tamim Adnani, who lost a son when Abdullah Azzam was killed in November 1989.

Al Qa’ida emerged shortly thereafter. In August 1988, a group gathered in bin Laden’s house in Peshawar to form a new organization, which they referred to as al-Qa’ida al-Askariya (The Military Base). They created an advisory council and membership requirements. ¹⁴ According to notes taken during the meeting by one of the participants, “al-Qa’ida is basically an organized Islamic faction, its goal is to live the word of God, to make His religion victorious.” Al Qa’ida leaders separated their recruits into two components: those identified for “limited duration” would fight with Afghan mujahideen for the remainder of the war; those identified for “open duration” would be sent to a separate training camp and “the best brothers of them” would be chosen to join al Qa’ida. Members were expected to pledge loyalty to the leadership: “The pledge of God and His covenant is upon me, to listen and obey the superiors, who are doing this work, in energy, early-rising, difficulty, and easiness, and for His superiority upon us, so that the word of God will be the highest, and His religion victorious.” They agreed that their goal would be “to lift the word of God, to make His religion victorious” across the Arab world through armed jihad. But members were urged to be patient, pious, and obedient, since the struggle would be long and challenging.¹⁵

In 1990, bin Laden responded to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait by offering Saudi Arabia his band of jihadists to protect the kingdom and turn back Saddam Hussein’s army, which threatened Saudi Arabia. “I am ready to prepare one hundred thousand fighters with good combat capability within three months,” bin Laden promised Prince Sultan, the Saudi minister of defense. “You don’t need Americans. You don’t need any other non-Muslim troops. We will be enough.”¹⁶ But the Saudi government instead turned to the United States, which led a coalition of roughly 700,000 soldiers that defeated the Iraqi military in just over a month. The deployment of U.S. soldiers to Saudi Arabia was a shock to bin Laden and a clarion call for his movement. The land of Mecca and the birthplace of the Prophet, Saudi Arabia was a symbolic and political oasis for Islamic radicals everywhere. To have non-Arabs on Saudi soil was an affront, but for the Americans to lead the military assault was a grievous transgression.

The Arabs Disperse

For bin Laden, Saudi Arabia’s reputation was now severely compromised by its agreement with the Americans. A U.S. State Department intelligence report later reported: “Bin Laden’s terrorism represents an extreme rejection of the increased U.S. strategic and military domination of the Middle East—especially Saudi Arabia and the Gulf—that resulted from the Gulf war.”¹⁷ In May 1991, a group of Saudi preachers and university professors, including Salman al-Auda and Safar al-Hawali, signed a petition (or khitab al-matalib) to King Fahd. They condemned the Saudi family for its pact with the infidel Americans and triggered a movement among some Islamic radicals to target the Saudi government.¹⁸

By this time, many of the Arabs had dispersed from Afghanistan to other countries, such as Bosnia, Algeria, and Egypt. In each location, they attempted to transform domestic conflict into jihad. But in Bosnia, for instance, they failed to make their radical interpretation of Islam a relevant component of the civil war. In other countries, such as Algeria, they were more successful for a limited period. Most Arab states viewed the veterans of Afghanistan as a serious threat—a kind of decentralized army of several thousand warriors in search of a place to fight and hide. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and others established border controls against al Qa’ida.¹⁹ According to a CIA report, bin Laden also financed the travel of several hundred veterans of the Afghan War to Sudan, “after Islamabad launched a crackdown against extremists lingering in Pakistan. In addition to savehaven [sic] in Sudan, Bin Ladin has provided financial support to militants actively opposed to moderate Islamic governments and the West.”²⁰

Those who remained in Afghanistan and Pakistan were initially scattered among a variety of groups. Some fought on the side of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar against Ahmed Shah Massoud, but the majority joined with local commanders, who were nearly all Pashtuns. In the Pashtun pocket around Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, there was a strong Arab presence in the Saudi-based International Islamic Relief Organization. In the midnineties, as the Taliban came to power, Pakistani organizations, such as the Harakat ul-Mujahidin, took control of a number of training camps for Pakistani militants in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province. Other camps were run by Harakat ul-Ansar (HUA) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The CIA believed that Harakat ul-Ansar—an Islamic extremist group used by Pakistan in its war against India in Kashmir—posed a particular threat to the United States: “Against the backdrop of possible declining support from Islamabad,” one CIA analysis concluded, “the HUA is discussing financing with sponsors of international terrorism who are virulently anti-U.S. and may encourage attacks on U.S. targets. The HUA may be seeking this assistance from such sources—including terrorist financier Usama Bin Ladin and Libyan leader Mu’ammar Qadhafi—in an attempt to offset losses resulting from the drop in Pakistani support.”²¹

Meanwhile, the Taliban entrusted to Osama bin Laden control of most non-Pakistani and non-Afghan militant groups. Bin Laden installed many of the senior Arab fighters in residential complexes near Jalalabad and Kandahar, including at the old USAID agriculture complex at Tarnak Farms, while the ordinary fighters were grouped together in cantonments in Kabul and Kunduz. The leaders were drawn almost entirely from the first generation of militants who had come to Afghanistan to fight the Russians.²² Disputes sometimes emerged between the Afghans and Pakistanis on one side and the Arabs on the other. For example, they held different opinions about praying over the body of a fallen comrade, or visiting cemeteries and honoring the dead. Foreign fighters, particularly the Arabs, considered some of the Afghan religious practices sacrilegious and tried to show them “the correct Salafi way.”²³

In 1998, bin Laden formally announced the creation of a World Islamic Front for jihad against the “Crusaders” meaning the West and specifically the Americans—and the Jews. Most of those who signed on were leaders of peripheral factions who were beholden to bin Laden for financial support. They included Ayman al-Zawahiri of Egyptian Islamic Jihad; Rifa’i Ahmad Taha (also known as Abu Yasir) of the Egyptian Islamic Group; Sheikh Mir Hamzah of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan; and Fazlur Rahman of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh. The largest of these fringe movements was the Egyptian Islamic Group, but Taha did not speak for the jailed senior leadership of his group and was later forced to rescind his group’s participation. Zawahiri also caused a split within his own Egyptian Islamic Jihad, some of whose members preferred to focus on Egypt rather than the United States.²⁴ Bin Laden even began to talk about using weapons of mass destruction against the United States. In 1998, the U.S. State Department had “reliable intelligence that the bin Laden network has been actively seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction—including chemical weapons—for use against U.S. interests.”²⁵

Fighting on Multiple Fronts

Ayman al-Zawahiri and the rest of the al Qa’ida leadership were prepared for sustained struggle. In Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, Zawahiri called for a multifaceted battle to pursue three major goals. One was to overthrow “corrupt regimes” in the Muslim world. Another was to establish sharia in these lands. And a third was to inflict significant casualties on “the western crusader” and to “get crusaders out of the lands of Islam especially from Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.”²⁶

As with any movement, there were differences among al Qa’ida leaders and jihadists across the globe. For some, the United States should be a secondary, not a primary, target of military escalation. There had been some entropy in the jihadist movement by the end of the 1990s, as the regimes in Egypt, Algeria, and other Arab countries crushed their jihadist opponents.²⁷ There were also conflicts among al Qa’ida’s national contingents. According to one of bin Laden’s former bodyguards, “there were rivalries among Al-Qa’idah members depending on their countries of origin. The Egyptians used to boast about being Egyptian. The Saudis, Yemenis, Sudanese, and Arab Maghreb citizens used to do the same thing sometimes.” This rivalry angered bin Laden, who argued that it sowed divisions and disagreements among al Qa’ida members.²⁸ Lastly, there were disagreements about money. Zawahiri himself acknowledged the shortage of funds in a note to al Qa’ida colleagues: “Conflicts take place between us for trivial reasons, due to scarcity of resources.”²⁹

Many of al Qa’ida’s leaders were inspired by such influential individuals as Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged in Egypt on August 29, 1966. Qutb argued that anything non-Islamic was evil, that only the strict following of sharia as a complete system of morality, justice, and governance would bring significant benefits to humanity.³⁰ Modern-day Islam, he wrote in his book Milestones, had also become corrupt, and he compared the modern Muslim states with jahiliyya. As used in the Qur’an, the term describes the state of ignorance in which Arabs were supposed to have lived before the revelation of Islam to the Prophet Muhammad at the beginning of the seventh century.³¹ In two of his key works, In the Shadow of the Qur’an and Signposts on the Road, Qutb pleaded for contemporary Muslims to build a new Islamic community, much as the Prophet had done a thousand years earlier.³² This meant that most Muslims could not be viewed as true Muslims.

In Islamic doctrine, denying a Muslim his faith is a serious accusation, referred to as takfir. The term derives from kufr (impiety) and means that one is impure and should therefore be excommunicated. For those who interpret Islamic law literally and rigorously, takfir is punishable by death. Qutb’s philosophy allowed for no gray areas. The difference between true Muslims and non-Muslims was the same as between good vs. evil and just vs. unjust. According to his interpretation, the only just ruler is one who administers according to the Qur’an. There is no such thing as a defensive and limited war, he argued, there is only an offensive, total war.³³ Qutb’s work found an eager readership among some of the younger generation in the 1970s because of its stunning and drastic break with the status quo. One problem, however, is that he never clearly specified what the Prophet’s experience had been and how it should be replicated in the modern era.³⁴ After his execution, Qutb’s fiery ideology gradually emerged as the blueprint for Islamic radicals from Morocco to Indonesia. It was later taught at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah and Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.³⁵

According to Qutb, most leaders from Islamic governments were not true Muslims. “The Muslim community has long ago vanished from existence,” he wrote. It was “crushed under the weight of those false laws and teachings which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings.”³⁶ Like Qutb, Abdullah Azzam had argued that Islam’s main challenge was against jahiliyya.³⁷

In the minds of Qutb and the al Qa’ida leadership, any regime that did not impose sharia on the country and collaborated with Western governments such as the United States was guilty of apostasy. The Prophet argued that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, for marital infidelity, or for turning away from Islam. Zawahiri took this line of argument to its extreme, concluding that because regimes had departed from Islam and failed to establish sharia law, they were not truly Muslim countries and therefore subject to attack.³⁸ Indeed, even Muslims could be punished if they did not obey conservative Islamic law. Abdel Aziz bin Adel Salam (also known as al-Sayyid Imam), an Egyptian militant who was one of Zawahiri’s oldest associates, argued that Muslims who did not join the fight against apostate rulers were themselves impious and must be fought.³⁹

What constitutes sufficient justification for takfir has long been disputed among different schools of Islamic thought. The orthodox Sunni position is that sins do not prove that someone is un-Islamic, but, rather, denials of fundamental religious principles do. Consequently, a murderer may still be a Muslim, but someone who denies that murder is a sin must be a kafir, as long as he or she is aware that murder is a sin in Islam. The irony, of course, is that while Islamists argued that Allah’s law and rule must be made supreme, translating this into concrete political terms required human interpretation. There have long been deep and even violent differences among Islamists about how to do this.⁴⁰

This internal confusion explains the motivations of al Qa’ida leaders to overthrow successive regimes in the Middle East (the “near” enemy, or al-Adou al-Qareeb) to establish a pan-Islamic caliphate, as well as to fight the United States and its allies (the “far” enemy, or al-Adou al-Baeed) who supported them.⁴¹ As Zawahiri wrote, the “establishment of a Muslim state in the heart of the Islamic world is not an easy or close target. However, it is the hope of the Muslim nation to restore its fallen caliphate and regain its lost glory.”⁴² Zawahiri argued that “the issue of unification in Islam is important and that the battle between Islam and its enemies is primarily an ideological one over the issue of unification…. [it] is also a battle over to whom authority and power should belong—to God’s course and shari’ah, to manmade laws and material principles, or to those who claim to be intermediaries between the Creator and mankind.”⁴³

Like many Islamists, Zawahiri drew heavily on the Salafist teachings of Ibn Taymiyya, the thirteenth-century reformer who had sought to impose a literal interpretation of the Qur’an, which serves as the basis of sharia and lays out the commandments of God. Al Qa’ida leaders raised the status of militant jihad and put it on a par with the five pillars of Islam. For instance, bin Laden argued that “fighting is part of our religion and our sharia. Those who love God and the Prophet and this religion may not deny a part of that religion. This is a very serious matter.”⁴⁴ Bin Laden considered jihad an individual duty (fard ‘ayn) and a critical pillar of Islam. In addition, many Islamists argued that sharia law cannot be improved upon, despite fifteen centuries of social change, because it came directly from God. They wanted to bypass the long tradition of judicial opinion from Muslim scholars and forge a legal system that was untainted by Western influence or modernity.⁴⁵ As al Qa’ida members chanted at one training camp in Afghanistan:

We challenge with our Qur’an,

We challenge with our Qur’an.

Our men are in revolt, our men are in revolt.

We will not regain our homeland,

Nor will our shame be erased except through blood and fire.

On and on and on it goes.

On and on and on it goes.

We defend our religion with blood, with blood.

We defend our religion with blood, with blood.

Our Qur’an is in our hands.⁴⁶

Suicide operations could also be advantageous, even though the Qur’an prohibits suicide.⁴⁷ For some disillusioned bombers, martyrdom offered several attractions: honor and fame; the joys of seventy-two virgins; and paradise in “gardens of bliss” for seventy members of the suicide bomber’s household, who might be spared the fires of hell.⁴⁸ Yet many Muslims, including in Afghanistan, believed that suicide attacks were never justified.⁴⁹ Zawahiri had to overcome this taboo. Suicide bombers, he claimed, represented “a generation of mujahideen that has decided to sacrifice itself and its property in the cause of God. That is because the way of death and martyrdom is a weapon that tyrants and their helpers, who worship their salaries instead of God, do not have.”⁵⁰ In addition, Zawahiri regarded suicide bombing as effective: “Suicide operations are the most successful in inflicting damage on the opponent and the least costly in terms of casualties among the fundamentalists.”⁵¹

The United States was the most significant “far” enemy. “The white man” in America is the primary enemy, Qutb wrote. “The white man crushes us underfoot while we teach our children about his civilization, his universal principles and noble objectives…. We are endowing our children with amazement and respect for the master who tramples our honor and enslaves us.” The response to this enslavement, Qutb argued, had to be anger and violence. “Let us instead plant the seeds of hatred, disgust, and revenge in the souls of these children. Let us teach these children from the time their nails are soft that the white man is the enemy of humanity, and that they should destroy him at the first opportunity.”⁵²

Most jihadist leaders had long advocated attacking Arab regimes, not the United States or other Western regimes. Zawahiri had made this point in his 1995 essay “The Road to Jerusalem Goes through Cairo,” published in al-Mujahidin.⁵³ But after their defeat in Egypt, Algeria, and other Arab countries in the 1990s, jihadists began to focus on the West. For such leaders as Zawahiri, then, the United States only knew “the language of interests backed by brute military force. Therefore, if we wish to have a dialogue with them and make them aware of our rights, we must talk to them in the language they understand.” This language was violence and force.⁵⁴ Osama bin Laden repeated this message regularly. On the eve of the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, for example, he released a video clip in which he said that the goal of the United States was to wipe out Islam across the globe, and that he was left with no other recourse than to “continue to escalate the killing and fighting against you.”⁵⁵

The United States, and the West more broadly, was a corrupting influence on Islam. For Abdullah Azzam, this meant “expelling the Kuffar [infidels] from our land, and it is Fard Ayn, a compulsory duty upon all.”⁵⁶ In an article in Jihad magazine, Azzam wrote that “jihad in God’s will means killing the infidels in the name of God and raising the banner of His name.”⁵⁷ This was especially true when Western or other non-Muslim armies invaded Islamic lands such as Afghanistan.

Al Qa’ida leaders also accused the United States of propping up apostate Arab countries. Consequently, in order to reestablish the Caliphate, al Qa’ida had to target these countries’ primary backers.⁵⁸ The conflict with the United States, then, was a “battle of ideologies, a struggle for survival, and a war with no truce.”⁵⁹ This language was remarkably similar to Harvard University Professor Samuel Huntington’s argument in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Of particular concern, Huntington argued, was a growing rift between the Judeo-Christian West and Islamic countries, which was becoming pronounced and violent.⁶⁰ In an early publication, Loyalty to Islam and Disavowal to its Enemies, Zawahiri argued that Muslims must make a choice between Islam and its enemies, including the West.⁶¹ In Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, Zawahiri similarly wrote that the overthrow of governments in such countries as Egypt would become a rallying point for the rest of the Islamic world, leading it in a jihad against the West. “Then history would make a new turn, God willing,” he noted, “in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government.”⁶² In his mind, and in the minds of several of his followers, the United States was primarily interested in “removing Islam from power.”⁶³

In the early 1990s, the Saudi government’s decision to allow U.S. military forces on its soil following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait had been a major blow to the jihadists. In the late 1990s, Osama bin Laden’s statements began to legitimize violence against the United States. In August 1996, bin Laden issued the Declaration of Jihad against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places. This long-winded eleven-page tract was crammed with quotations from the Qur’an, hadiths of the Prophet, and references to Ibn Taymiyya. Then, in February 1998, bin Laden, Zawahiri, and others published a fatwa to kill Americans: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”⁶⁴ The fatwa cited three main grievances against the United States. One was the presence of American troops in the Arabian Peninsula, the second was America’s intention to destroy the Muslim people of Iraq through sanctions, and the third was the U.S. goal of incapacitating the Arab states and propping up Israel. Bin Laden accused the United States of plundering Muslim riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning U.S. bases into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

A Dangerous Alliance

Of particular concern to U.S. policymakers in the late 1990s was the growing collaboration between al Qa’ida and the Taliban. In response to bin Laden’s involvement in the August 1998 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the Clinton administration launched a series of cruise-missile strikes against al Qa’ida bases in eastern Afghanistan. But some classified U.S. assessments suggest that the attacks brought al Qa’ida and the Taliban closer together.⁶⁵ One State Department cable reported: “Taliban leader Mullah Omar lashed out at the U.S., asserting that the Taliban will continue to provide a safe haven to bin Laden.”⁶⁶ After all, bin Laden sometimes stayed at Mullah Omar’s residence in Kandahar.⁶⁷

In July 1999, U.S. President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 13129, which found that “the actions and policies of the Taliban in Afghanistan, in allowing territory under its control in Afghanistan to be used as a safe haven and base of operations for Usama bin Ladin and the Al-Qa’ida organization…constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”⁶⁸ The Taliban’s military structure included al Qa’ida members such as the elite Brigade 055, which consisted of foreign fighters.⁶⁹ The Taliban’s alliance with al Qa’ida took a toll on its relations with several countries, especially Saudi Arabia, which had initially provided support to the Taliban through its intelligence service.⁷⁰

Now that the United States had formally denounced al Qa’ida and, by extension, the Taliban, Saudi officials felt compelled to act. Bin Laden’s involvement in the August 1998 embassy attacks, as well as his derisive statements against Saudi officials, required an urgent response. On September 19, 1998, Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal met with with Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. The meeting began with a brief discussion about the strain between the Taliban and Iran. Turki argued that the Taliban should take steps to defuse the tensions, then he turned to the main topic of the meeting: to ask the Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden. Mullah Omar replied that the Taliban had no intention of surrendering bin Laden or any other Arabs to the Saudi government. Omar then questioned the legitimacy of a Saudi government that would allow U.S. troops to be stationed in the Persian Gulf. According to U.S. State Department accounts of the meeting, he then argued that “the Saudi government had no business interfering in Afghan matters since the whole Muslim ‘ummah’ (international community) was in the process of rising against [the Saudi government] because of its failed stewardship of the two holy sites.”⁷¹

Turki’s response was swift and forceful. He returned to Riyadh and cut off all Saudi ties with the Taliban. As a State Department cable explained, the Saudi government was even successful “in preventing private Saudi sources, including foundations, from dispersing money to the Taliban as they did in the past.”⁷² The Taliban-Saudi break angered a number of Taliban leaders, such as deputy leader Mullah Rabbani, who had pro-Saudi views. But neither the Saudis nor the Americans could derail al Qa’ida. In January 2001, eight months before the September 11 attacks, counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke wrote a classified memo to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice: “We urgently need…a Principals level review of the al Qida network.” He continued by pleading, “As we noted in our briefings for you, al Qida is not some narrow little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy.” What was required, Clarke argued, was “a comprehensive multi-regional policy on al Qida.”⁷³

Al Qa’ida had evolved from a myth to a reality. Indeed, its reputation had grown out of a fabrication that its early disciples had feverishly propagated across the Arab world. Arab jihadists, they claimed, played a critical role in defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan. “The USSR, a superpower with the largest land army in the world,” Zawahiri alleged, “was destroyed and the remnants of its troops fled Afghanistan before the eyes of the Muslim youths and as a result of their actions…Osama bin Laden has apprised me of the size of the popular Arab support for the Afghan mujahideen that amounted, according to his sources, to $200 million in the form of military aid alone in 10 years.”⁷⁴

But this self-aggrandizement was unwarranted. Though it is a common theme in al Qa’ida lore, the contributions of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other Arabs were negligible to the Soviet defeat. Mohammad Yousaf, head of the ISI’s Afghanistan bureau that trained the mujahideen against the Soviets, doesn’t even discuss the Arab jihadists in his account of the Soviet defeat.⁷⁵ As Lawrence Wright explained in his book The Looming Tower, “the presence of several thousand Arabs—and rarely more than a few hundred of them actually on the field of battle—made no real difference in the tide of affairs.”⁷⁶ The Afghan mujahideen would have won with or without their help, thanks in large part to the astronomical amount of arms, money, and other assistance provided by the governments of Pakistan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia.⁷⁷

In some respects, this al Qa’ida myth was probably irrelevant. What mattered was that some people—especially its own members—believed it. By 2001, al Qa’ida had evolved into a competent international terrorist organization that had conducted bold attacks against the United States in Tanzania, Kenya, and Yemen. Its goals were compatible with the Taliban’s ideology. Richard Clarke’s January 2001 memo to Condoleezza Rice asserted that al Qa’ida’s objective was to “replace moderate, modern, Western regimes in Muslim countries with theocracies modeled along the lines of the Taliban.”⁷⁸ From its base in Afghanistan, al Qa’ida also planned the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.