Until the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in 1998, very few people had heard of Osama bin Laden. Today, he may be the single best-known person in the world. Both the earlier obscurity and present fame are products of American policy. Before Nairobi, the US suppressed its knowledge about Osama because it feared that publicity would frighten the public and enhance Osama's reputation. After Nairobi, it decided that silence was more costly than exposure. Had it taken that decision earlier, the US might have prevented the bombing of the Khobar towers in Dhahran in 1995 and some, if not all, of the attacks that it has suffered since then. It would also not have tied itself up in knots trying to pretend that Sunni-Wahabi fundamentalism did not exist, and not gone through charades such as Clinton's Sharm-el-Sheikh conference against international terrorism in which he did not invite either India, its principal victim, or Pakistan, the nursery of the Sunni terrorists that executed the Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam bombings!
Yossef Bodansky's book on Osama bin Laden strips away the shades that have surrounded him. In the process, it shows with great clarity why the US considered it essential to go after him and his organisation, Al Qaeda, first. It also shows in chilling detail just how difficult it is going to be to 'root out terrorism' as President Bush has so rashly promised to do.
Who is bin Laden? How did he become a terrorist? What are his goals? Bodansky's book is an intriguing mixture of a superficial theoretical analysis underpinned by an awesome marshalling of information. The latter is the book's chief merit, for it is so comprehensive, and so honestly presented that it allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions on the more theoretical aspects of the new phenomenon of Global Terrorism.
Osama bin Laden was a typical adolescent from a well-to-do Saudi family. Born in Riyadh in 1957 to a small-time builder whose fortune grew by leaps and bounds because of the oil bonanza, he was one of his father's more than 50 children. He attended good schools and in his teens went frequently for his summers to the mountains above Beirut. There was nothing to distinguish him then from thousands of other children of the new Saudi moneyed class. The change began after the onset of the oil boom in the mid-'70s when Osama was at that most impressionable age of 18 or thereabouts. Enrolled in the prestigious King Abdul Aziz university, he came under the influence of prominent, dissident intellectuals from many Arab countries, notably Egypt, who were Islamic fundamentalists. Slowly his world-view began to coalesce.
The question to which Bodansky gives a less than satisfactory answer is, why did these dissident intellectuals turn away from secular forms of dissent towards fundamentalism? Why did they not follow an earlier generation of Arab scholars and intellectuals and become Nasserites or socialists or both? Bodansky provides an answer that comes straight from Huntington's Clash of Civilisations. Islam is by its nature an extremist religion—witness the public burning of books of the scientific-medical library in Cordova in 1192 (a few years before Bakhtiar Khilji burned Nalanda). But since the crusades, it has been under attack from Christianity. In 1789 Napoleon arrived in Egypt and that began a series of defeats at the hands of the Christian "West" that have irrevocably moulded the Islamic mindset ever since. Thus the present day confrontation of the West is only part of a continuing saga.
Bodansky's premise, that the world is made up of undifferentiated, antagonistic religious blocs does not leave us much hope of a better future. But since history shows that cultures and civilisations borrow freely from each other, it is necessary to ask why this did not happen in the Islamic, Arab world. The probable answer is that the changes they were rebelling against were brought on by the spread of capitalism speeded up and exacerbated by the oil boom; this had created new winners and losers and dizzying changes of status. Urbanisation added to this by loosening the bonds of custom and tradition. Urbanisation gave birth to individualism and a new freedom, and sometimes that freedom was abused. Intellectuals were among the losers both in relative wealth and in status much as they are in today's China or Russia. Nasserism and socialism had been discredited, and only Islamic fundamentalism, nourished by oil money, retained its vigour.
What was happening around Osama in the '70s was therefore no different from what has happened in every industrialising and commercialising country in the past 150 years. It has given rise to a variety of movements of protest and various types of extremism. Rejectionism is not therefore peculiar to Islam. It spawned La Ligue de la Jeunesse Patriotes in France in the 1890s, the Arrow Cross and the Iron Guard in Hungary and Romania in the '20s, National Socialism in Germany, and Fascism in Italy.
Osama's fundamentalism was thus not essentially religious, but social. It was not backward but forward looking. Only it looked forward to a different future. That explains the ease with which he and his followers have been able to merge Islamic fundamentalism with sophisticated modern technologies in the deployment of terror. The fact that he was deeply enmeshed with the university intelligentsia and part of a dissident movement from well before the Afghan war helps explain the ease with which he mobilised his Islamist network in later life.
Osama showed his full organising genius only after he joined the jehad in Afghanistan. Not only was he among the very first Arab Islamists to join it, but with Sheikh Abdallah Yussuf Azzam, the founder of what became the International Army of Islam—the 'dedicated core of international Islamic terrorism'—he established the Bait-ul-Ansar, the first receiving centre for the Islamic fundamentalists from Arab countries who came to fight in Afghanistan, and the Maktab-al-Khidmat—the Mujahideen Services Bureau. These not only became the conduit for funnelling mainly Arab Islamists into Afghanistan but also financing their travel to Peshawar. By the mid-'80s this bureau had cells in more than 50 countries. That is the network out of which Al Qaeda was ultimately born.
In 1989, he returned to Saudi Arabia a hero and would have retired into the family business had it not been for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. No sooner had it happened than he went to the government with plans to recruit special legions of "Afghans", as the returned mujahideen were called, and to use his construction equipment to build the same kind of defensive fortifications that had served the mujahideen in Afghanistan so well. But the Saudi government spurned him and opted for American troops. Under the Wahabi code, the mere entry of a non-Muslim into the holy land was sacrilege, but Osama remained loyal to the royal family because he believed US assurances that it would leave the moment the war ended. It was only when the US troops did not, and the royal family acquiesced, that he finally became their foe.
Over the next three years, Osama became one of the leaders of a new generation of young, grassroots clergy in Saudi Arabia which openly preached the removal of the royal family and the establishment of
an Islamist government. In 1994, the government finally stripped him of his citizenship. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Afghanistan, this time to stay.
In the next seven years, Osama built the largest and most powerful international terrorist network the world has known. He formed close connections with Ayman al Zawahiri of Egypt, and Hussein al Turaby of Sudan; he may have been involved and almost certainly knew of the attempt on Hosni Mubarak's life in Addis Ababa. In 1998, his total mujahideen fighting force in Afghanistan consisted of over 10,000 persons. Of them, according to an Egyptian estimate, 2,830 were Arabs. The rest were Pakistanis, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Chechens, Bangladeshis, and others.
Osama's worldwide network consists of three concentric rings. In the innermost ring are his closest associates, many going back two decades. Through them he controls or influences a very large number of terrorist organisations in the countries mentioned above and cells in as many as another 50 countries. Beyond them are thousands of individuals who swear loyalty to him, who belong to still other groups around the globe.
It is impossible to do justice to this book in the space of even a long review. But one other copiously documented piece of information deserves special mention. This is that Pakistan's isi was not simply training Afghan mujahideen for Afghanistan and not even for Kashmir but for acts of terror in the entire world. The terrorists who fanned out to the US, to Egypt, Algeria, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Philippines and Kashmir were not simply leftovers from the Afghan war, but were fresh recruits, whom the isi invited and began training as late as 1988. There were not one but two waves of jehadi fundamentalists who went through the isi training camps. The first, many of whom were Osama's proteges, numbered 16,000 to 20,000 and had already come by 1985. A second wave, also of around 16-20,000 recruits, began coming in 1988. This wave had nothing to do with the Afghan war, because by then the Soviets were already implementing their pullout plan.
Bodansky details how all through even the training of the first wave of recruits in the training camps, the isi successfully kept the cia out of them because it did not want its operatives to see that it was training terrorists destined for other parts of the world. Bodansky also highlights the continuing links between the isi and Osama in Afghanistan and through him with the "International Army of Islam". This part of the book lends strong credence to Indian intelligence's assessment that the components of this army were controlled till September by Gen Mohammed Aziz, the corps commander in Lahore. Bodansky's account underlines the Bush administration's folly in pinning all its faith on Pakistan, and makes the betrayal of Abdul Haq and numerous other American failures in Afghanistan in the past weeks far more comprehensible. Leopards do not change their spots.