The 9/11 Wars (6 page)

Al-Qaeda had been founded by bin Laden and fourteen associates in a series of long meetings at a rented house in a western suburb of the noisy, dusty Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar in August 1988.
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The meetings had stretched into the small hours as discussions ranged over the aims of the group, its composition and hierarchy. The ‘organized Islamic faction’ that was eventually created was not big – of its fifteen members, nine sat on the leading council – but it had grand ambitions.
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Little thought appears to have been given to the name the founders chose for their group, but it was an appropriate and useful one nonetheless. ‘Al-Qaeda’ is a commonly used word in Arabic and, though often simply translated as ‘the base’, in fact has a range of other meanings too. This variety and consequent flexibility, itself a departure from the style of names adopted previously by militant groups, was to prove key in the coming years.

Bin Laden was thirty-one in the summer of 1988 and had spent the preceding years shuttling between his native Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, raising funds and organizing everything from medical care to earth-moving equipment for the Afghan
mujahideen
. In around 1987 he had actually seen combat in a series of skirmishes, later vastly mythologized, around the village of Jaji in Afghanistan. The legend of bin Laden’s warrior prowess is linked to another myth: that the war against Soviets was fought and won by men like him who were backed – even ‘created’ – by the CIA. In fact, with tens of thousands of Afghans in the field at any one time and only a few hundred Arabs, the contribution of the latter, especially as they were largely inexperienced and untrained, was negligible. As for the support, the CIA did not enter Afghanistan nor instruct any Arab fighters nor disburse funds or weapons to them. Any US contact with
mujahideen
of any background was indirect, as the Pakistani ISI acted as intermediaries for all assistance, deciding which of the seven Afghan factions would receive what proportion of aid. Techniques taught by the ISI on the basis of US manuals and instruction from the CIA did bleed into the world of the Arab volunteers, but no direct contact took place. Indeed, the foundation of al-Qaeda was not the consequence of American intervention in any way but of bin Laden’s frustration with the deep parochialism, national chauvinism, jealousy and feuding that marked relations between different Arab – as well as Afghan – factions during the war against the Soviets.

For what marked Al-Qaeda out among the multitude of other militant groups active across the Islamic world at the time was its avowed internationalism. Its founders’ aim was to unite the disparate groups of militants who had fought in the war in Afghanistan to focus their collective energies on new targets. The fragmented factions that composed the world of radical Islamic activism would not restrict their activities to ‘liberating’ their respective homelands from ‘despotic, hypocrite, apostate rulers’ but would fight together, directed, coordinated and assisted by al-Qaeda. Their campaign would take two main forms: irregular warfare waged against the ‘enemies of Islam’ on ‘open fronts of conflict’, effectively guerrilla wars like that that had defeated the Soviets, and a series of spectacular and violent actions which would radicalize and mobilize all those who had hitherto shunned the call to arms, eventually provoking a mass uprising that would lead to a new era for the world’s Muslims. The two strategies would be mutually reinforcing.

Though focused on the contemporary ‘plight’ of the world’s Muslim community, the founders of al-Qaeda were drawing heavily on a long chain of militant scholars and strategists. Each had attempted to formulate a response adapted to his time. They included key Middle Eastern thinkers from the colonial period as well as strategists from the 1960s and 70s such as the Egyptians Syed Qutb and Abdelsalam al-Farraj. However, the most significant was Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinan ideologue, organizer and propagandist who had become the key point of reference for international radicals drawn to the war in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Azzam had not just theorized the duty of each individual Muslim to wage jihad, in this context defined as a violent effort to defend Muslims under attack, but had also been able to practically put it into effect too. As Soviet troops prepared to pull out of Afghanistan, Azzam had called for ‘a vanguard that gives everything it possesses in order to achieve victory … [and] constitutes the solid base [
al-qaeda al-sulbah
] for the expected society’.
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The founders of al-Qaeda aimed to be that vanguard and that base.

When al-Bahlul arrived in Afghanistan in 1999 al-Qaeda was reaching the peak of its capabilities. The eleven years since its foundation had not been without trouble. In 1990, with the war in Afghanistan descending into chaos, bin Laden, like the vast bulk of the foreign militants who had been fighting there, had gone home, returning to the city of Jeddah, where he had passed a comfortable youth as the seventeenth son of an immensely wealthy construction magnate. His welcome there was chilly, however, and, after a personal offer to the Saudi royal family to raise an international militant army to defend the kingdom from invasion by Saddam Hussein had been peremptorily rejected, it became clear that if he was to stay he would have to abandon his radical activities.
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Bin Laden headed for Sudan, where the Islamist regime of Hassan ul-Turabi was in power. Khartoum was the destination of choice for those Arab veterans of the Afghan war who were increasingly unwelcome in Pakistan or in their native lands. Re-creating the atmosphere of Peshawar during the 1980s, Algerian, Libyan, Tunisian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Yemeni and other groups all co-existed in a constant stew of petty jealousies, temporary alliances and noisy boasting. Few among the groups and activists in Sudan at the time had heard of bin Laden, even fewer of al-Qaeda. Their attention was captured by developments elsewhere: the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center orchestrated by Pakistani-born militant Ramzi Yousef, the ‘Black Hawk Down’ episode in Somalia, which saw the effective defeat of US forces sent to secure the delivery of humanitarian assistance in the country, the terrible violence of the campaign by local militants against authorities in Algeria, the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chechnya, the Philippines and in Egypt.
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In 1996, bin Laden had been expelled from Sudan when the regime decided that offering a haven to international militants was doing them more harm than good and had fled to Afghanistan. The next years finally saw al-Qaeda, already the vanguard, finally become the ‘base’ or ‘foundation’ too, as originally envisaged. Working with a growing group of experienced collaborators, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri set up or appropriated dozens of training camps, guesthouses and other facilities which provided them with a pool of ready volunteers for various ongoing projects. At the same time they launched a sophisticated outreach programme, sending emissaries to groups throughout the Islamic world offering cash and technical help in return for a degree of fealty. Such bids were often unsuccessful, with groups in Algeria, Indonesia, Chechnya, Uzbekistan and elsewhere jealously guarding their independence, but they were accepted frequently enough for a ‘network of networks’ to begin to emerge. The basic strategy remained the same: a series of spectacular violent actions to radicalize and mobilize potential recruits, to weaken the enemy economically and morally and to eventually provoke a mass uprising that would lead to a new era for the world’s Muslims.

The idea for the September 11 attacks originally came from Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, an experienced and capable Kuwait-born Pakistani militant who travelled to seek out bin Laden shortly after the latter’s arrival in Afghanistan.
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Building on schemes he had tried to implement in the Far East, Mohammed’s ambitious plans for hijacking dozens of aircraft to strike American targets was initially rejected by bin Laden, but then dusted off, revised and finally accepted after a series of heated meetings of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in the spring of 1999.
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The volunteers for the plan could be found simply by scouring the various training camps, either those offering basic training for foreigners arriving to fight with the Taliban or those where more advanced candidates were being trained by al-Qaeda instructors in techniques of urban terrorism. Though most in the camps were there simply to gain combat skills for battles elsewhere in the Islamic world, senior al-Qaeda leaders had little difficulty in finding suitable candidates for a spectacular martyrdom mission. Many recruits were found in one particular camp – al-Farooq near Kandahar – where around 100 volunteers were undergoing basic and advanced training. Investigators later said that al-Farooq was where al-Qaeda sent its top operatives to be prepared for their missions, but for David Hicks, an Australian convert who spent time in the camp in 2001, it was where ‘all the oddbods’ who did not already belong to any particular group ended up and thus was full of more cosmopolitan, Westernized militants of diverse origins. The proof, he said, was the ease with which he found fellow English-speakers. It was in al-Farooq that a team of volunteers who would be able to evade detection in America was assembled and trained.
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One of them, a highly committed Egyptian called Mohammed Atta, was designated the operational commander of the attack in the USA. The video that Ali al-Bahlul was so proud of was the ‘will’ of another team member, his former housemate Ziad Samir Jarrah.

The summer of 2001 passed in final preparations as the hijacking teams arrived in America. By the end of August Atta signalled that the attacks were planned for the second week of September. In his compound in Kandahar bin Laden warned his entourage to prepare to move as an operation was imminent and ordered the evacuation of al-Qaeda’s training camps.
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One preparatory strike by al-Qaeda, repeatedly postponed, was finally carried out with only forty-eight hours left before the operation in America was due to be launched. On September 9, two Tunisians killed both themselves and Ahmed Shah Massood, the main military leader of the Afghan opposition, with a bomb hidden in a TV camera during an interview at the veteran guerrilla leader’s headquarters in the northern town of Taloqan.
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The delay had largely been due to the target’s busy schedule.
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On the day of the assassination of Massood, bin Laden and a handful of trusted and well-armed followers left Kandahar in a convoy of four ordinary cars and headed north to Kabul. On the 11th, they left the Afghan capital early and headed east, towards the Pakistani border, and by three o’clock were high in the hills of Logar province, not far from the villages where bin Laden had fought the Soviets over a decade before. Ali al-Bahlul, now appointed bin Laden’s personal media technician, was driving a beige Toyota minibus that he had converted into a mobile media centre, fitting it with a satellite receiver, a monitor, a Toshiba computer, a VCR and a video camera. By late afternoon, the van was parked with the other vehicles in the convoy in a remote complex of run-down houses and cement buildings in one of the less-well-known training camps.
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Before leaving Kabul, bin Laden had told al-Bahlul that ‘it is very important to see the news today’ and had asked if he could get US networks on the satellite receiver. In the hills of Logar, however, the mountainous terrain blocked the signal. Instead al-Bahlul tuned a short-wave radio to the BBC Arabic Service. The presenter finished a report and then broke off scheduled programming. A plane, he said, had just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. Bin Laden’s entourage erupted into cheers, some prostrating themselves on the ground. It was 8:48 a.m. New York time, 17.18 in Afghanistan. Bin Laden held up a hand to quiet them. Half an hour later came the news, broadcast immediately this time, that another plane had hit the second of the twin towers. Again bin Laden calmed those around, this time holding up three fingers. The men wept and prayed. Almost exactly an hour later came news of a third strike, this time on the Pentagon. Bin Laden held up four fingers.
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The final attack never came. A fourth plane, aiming for Washington’s Capitol Hill, had crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after a desperate attempt by passengers to wrest back control. The final death toll from the attacks would be just under 3,000. By nightfall, bin Laden and his followers and al-Bahlul’s media van were gone.
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2
9/11, Before and After

THE REACTION TO 9/11

In the hours after the attacks world leaders received briefings from their security agencies about who might be responsible and what threats the perpetrators might still pose. The immediate fear was of a second or even third wave of strikes. Before the third plane had even hit the Pentagon, the White House ‘counter-terrorism coordinator’, Richard Clarke, had told Condoleezza Rice, the former academic who was national security adviser to the Bush administration, and Dick Cheney, the vice president, that America had been attacked by al-Qaeda. By early afternoon, individuals known to have links with bin Laden’s organization had been identified on the passenger manifests of the hijacked planes.
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In London, ‘everyone seemed to think it was bin Laden’.
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Blair was briefed by Stephen Lander, the head of MI5, the domestic intelligence service, and John Scarlett, the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the government body tasked with aggregating the product of the British intelligence community for decision-makers. Both made it clear that bin Laden and al-Qaeda were the only people capable of such an attack. Scarlett pointed out that the strike was ‘less about technology and more about skill and nerve’. Lander stressed that the US would be under enormous pressure to respond quickly and that Iran, Iraq and Libya were potential targets as well as Afghanistan. Both men told Blair that they ruled out ‘the involvement of any other governments’.