The Making of a Terrorist
24/10/2011 10:35:00
Jonathan Randal is a former Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post. Here, from the revised edition of Osama: The Making of a Terrorist, Randal looks at how and why the United States finally found their man.
I am an old retired reporter who covered wars for a living and often sleeps poorly. In the hours before dawn I regularly turn on the radio to the BBC World Service, which for many decades before the digital age was the foreign correspondent’s most reliable and constant friend. But just before 5 a.m. Paris time on May 2nd, vestigial habits of a professional lifetime jolted me wide awake; the World Service was reporting that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most elusive terrorist, was dead, killed in Pakistan in a daring night-time helicopter raid carried out by elite U.S. Navy commandos known as SEALs.
As I made my first coffee of the day, my head still a jumble, I listened to President Barack Obama inform my fellow Americans and the world about the high-risk operation ending the longest and most expensive manhunt in modern history. I confess I had my own very personal reasons for celebrating the death of the man whose name is destined to remain associated with the hijacked airliners sent crashing into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
Starting in late 1998, I had spent more than five years chasing down many a blind alley researching and writing, indeed rewriting, a book on Osama. (I had all but completed a manuscript on 9/11, but decided to start all over again and that exercise took almost three more years.) But now I was shot of him. I prayed an emboldened president would seize on Osama’s death to accelerate the inevitable recessional from Washington’s endless wars with the Muslim world and start winding down the fighting in Afghanistan. Barack Obama certainly risked his presidency, as is evident in photos of the tense White House situation room as he and his aides anxiously awaited the SEALs’ terse thumbs-up message: Osama’s thrice-repeated codename, “Geronimo”, a curious choice given the Apache chief ’s long defiance of the U.S. Army in the late-nineteenth century, followed by “E” for enemy and “KIA” for killed in action.
My mind raced back to April 1980 when, as the Washington Post’s correspondent in Iran, I covered an earlier risky military mission, a botched operation in the Iranian desert to rescue 52 American diplomats held hostage by Iran’s Islamic Revolution. That failure doomed the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Now by killing Osama, the president could turn conventional wisdom on its head and call the self-serving bluffs of our often unreliable and corrupt Afghan and Pakistani partners who have manipulated our national obsession with the Al-Qaeda leader to keep us subsidizing their own agendas.
Americans have a weakness for personifying their enemies. That explains why Osama at large was such a problem. By killing Osama, in American parlance, the president had“nail(ed) the coonskin to the wall”— President Lyndon Johnson’s vain plea to his troops during the Vietnam War—and provided Americans with a cathartic sense of immanent justice for 9/11. Nearly ten years later Americans were not just getting even for that day’s nearly 3,000 dead. Osama’s death also helped repair the trauma inflicted by the breaching of Fortress America (especially its financial and military citadels) for the first time since the British burned the White House in 1814.
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In the high stakes world of South Asian realpolitik, concerned with what the Pakistanis call “ground facts,” the game had changed after 9/11. Osama alive remained important, but arguably less as a player in his own right and more as a chip to be bargained away at the right time. Perversely, the more the Americans pursued Osama, the more he became a Pakistani pawn and kept American dollars flowing. Only the Americans, for “coonskin” reasons, had attached paramount importance to killing Osama to justify the elaborate SEAL Team Six raid, complete with state-of-the-art stealth helicopters and dangerously exposed CIA surveillance operatives operating from a nearby safe house.
A detached observer might have questioned such zeal (and looked askance at some aspects of the official American version of the raid which almost certainly were fudged to protect still secret tradecraft.) Still, there was a crowning irony hiding in plain sight, much as Osama himself had spent the last five years of his life hiding in plain sight holed up in an old Raj cantonment town. And that was that, by the time he died at 54, Osama had become irrelevant.
Some of his irrelevance could be charted by the dogged statistics of modern counterterrorism, grown vastly more efficient since 9/11 thanks to billions of dollars spent for that purpose. Ten years ago the CIA, the FBI, the lavishly funded Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency (so secretive it once was nicknamed “No Such Agency”) and other barely known intelligence organizations often did not even exchange information, or least not efficiently. Because the FBI and CIA computer systems were not compatible, famously some members of the 9/11 suicide bomber teams slipped into the United States despite red-flag warnings designed to deny them visas. Such obvious lapses had been remedied.
New tools kept coming on stream: armed unmanned drones in ever more sophisticated and deadly iterations, stealth helicopters capable of eluding radar detection, cloud-piercing radar and electronic sorting and tracking techniques for listening to telephone conversations, intercepting Internet traffic and analyzing the contents without having to resort to the tedious, time-consuming hands-on analysis of yore. Only a decade ago one specialist said tackling Al-Qaeda was like “looking for a needle in a needle stack.” Just as crucial was vastly improved international cooperation on counterterrorism among the world’s specialized services—and reduced feuding by rival national experts.
Indeed, the price for his staying out of America’s vengeful grasp had come down to living like a hermit (if being surrounded by two wives and children in the Abbottabad compound can be so described). Gradually, that famously bearded face, once ubiquitously seen on Third World walls, T-shirts and posters, faded away. Sahiba, Al-Qaeda’s clandestine news agency—aptly named “the clouds”—did its best to keep up pretences by producing infrequent video and audio clips of Osama, who dyed his white hair and beard for such performances. Osama became dependent on a trusted trilingual courier for episodic communication with Al-Qaeda’s steadily eroded remnants among the surviving inner circle in Pakistan and those further afield in unruly Yemen, anarchic Somalia and the equally unwelcoming sands of the Western Sahara.
To prevent American electronic eavesdropping , the Abbottabad compound had no telephone line or internet connection. These precautions finally came to naught. The Americans eventually identified the trade-craftwise courier who was careful enough to remove his cell phone batteries miles before he came to or left Osama’s compound, but uncharacteristically had used a cell phone to call a third person on the U.S. watchlist. Deprived of the vital oxygen of easy access to the media and direct contact with his inner circle, Osama fell victim to a contemporary strain of Gresham’s law governing pop culture heroes and villains in our Andy Warhol world of evanescent notoriety.
Isolated in his compound like Gloria Swanson’s ageing movie queen in Sunset Boulevard, the white-bearded Osama, wrapped in a blanket like an old man suffering from rheumatism, was reduced to contemplating his former glory as he watched footage of his younger self on an ancient television set. What a comedown for a man who had delighted in the most recent electronic gadgets. And didn’t just the Americans enjoy releasing that footage seized when they killed him! With the passage of time Osama commanded less obedience from those Al-Qaeda clones in Iraq, Yemen or the Western Sahara than McDonald’s central ownership expects from the fast-food chain’s worldwide franchisees.
In my mind’s eye, I imagined Osama consoling himself by insisting his first name still was instantly recognized even in the world’s meanest hamlet.
But the true measure of his irrelevance came out of the blue shortly after the New Year.
Abruptly, the long-frozen Arab world began shaking in ways that no one had predicted—not Western officials, not political scientists, and certainly neither Osama nor the equally startled long-enthroned regimes suddenly under threat. Barring a miracle, nothing he could do would restore his place in the imaginations of those he sought to impress: the West, especially the Americans, the Arabs and Muslims everywhere.
Starting in Tunisia of all places, North Africa’s smallest state, spontaneous upheavals began sweeping Muslim societies from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf. Final results from what became known as the “Arab Spring” are far from in. Their infrequent successes at best are still too unstable to lay claim to durability. Yet, at least pace-setting Tunisia and Egypt, where peaceful mass demonstrations drove out long-ensconced autocrats, kept pushing. They installed fledgling democratic institutions despite a lack of experience and seriously damaged economies deprived of essential hard currency receipts from now skittish foreign tourists. What was clear was that the thousands who died demonstrating in often still uncertain struggles from Bahrain, Yemen and Syria to Libya and Morocco gave their lives for what they conceived as democracy, democracy plain and simple, not the “guided,”“Islamist” or “peoples” varieties. Rarely, if ever, mentioned at the onset were jihad, Al-Qaeda, or even Islam, those essential touchstones for Osama. (Only in chaotic Yemen, and after several months of violent anti-government street demonstrations, did pro-Al-Qaeda jihadists start appearing and then in often confused circumstances suggesting that the beleaguered regime may have egged them on in hopes of rallying Western, especially American, support.)
Osama never had hidden his contempt for people power, elections and all the other trappings of democracy that the demonstrators so volubly championed. His strategy called for his “sworn” men, his phalanx of jihadi followers in Al-Qaeda, to reunite the umma, or Muslim faithful, by reimposing the religious rule of the caliphate abolished in 1924 by Ataturk, the quintessentially secular founder of the Turkish republic. When you came down to it, Osama and the peaceful demonstrators for democracy shared but one thing: a desire to get rid of incumbent Muslim regimes they considered corrupt.
Osama wanted to do it by force and force alone—and certainly not by peaceful street demonstrations organized in part by Westernized, educated young men and women expert in the use of Twitter, Facebook and the Internet and aware of radical American academic theories about maximizing the influence of crowds. Bush in his time had talked the talk about necessary democratic reforms in the Muslim world, but stopped when rebuffed by conservative regimes warning “it’s us or Osama.” Early in his presidency Obama had held out his hand to Muslims in major speeches in Istanbul and Cairo, generating real, but short-lived, enthusiasm. That promise foundered on hard realities ranging from a stolen election in Iran to a rightwing Israeli prime minister who thwarted timid White House initiatives designed, among other things, to demonstrate that the United States could act decisively in the Middle East. But despite such manna for standard jihadi propaganda, opinion polls showedMuslim support for Al- Qaeda dropping, albeit without much improvement in America’s abysmally low approval rates.
What had happened? Muslims now realized that by far most of Al-Qaeda’s victims were fellow Muslims, killed, for example, in Iraq in the name of ancient hatreds reignited by the now fallen traditional Sunni ascendancy against the Shia majority. No setback was more telling than Osama’s failure despite determined efforts to overthrow the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia, the Land of the Two Mosques and the Kaaba—and his birthplace. Osama had only set his sights on the American “far enemy” as a way to take over the Kingdom by hurting its protector, but his efforts before and after 9/11 were repulsed. Gradually, Muslims in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere came to see Osama as a nihilist, incapable of providing a viable model for stable Muslim governance. Perversely, was God in Al-Qaeda’s jihadi version of Allah turning out to be The God That Failed?
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To be sure at the end of the Osama decade the Empire Struck Back, got its man, but do Americans get to live happily ever after? Quite apart from more possible terrorism and the parlous state of their war-impoverished economy, Americans would be wise to factor in the damage Osama and Al-Qaeda persuaded them to inflict on their hallowed institutions, on American “soft” power and the way all of us are forced to live our lives now. What happened to the America once priding itself as the world’s most open society? Just read the Patriot Act and see the limitations it has imposed on rights Americans once considered natural. As part of George W. Bush’s now abandoned global war on terrorism, plenty of other restrictive laws and ingeniously twisted legal interpretations were enforced. None was as controversial as the so-called “torture decree” inflicted on so called “enemy combatants,” detainees deprived of prisoner of war status, and held at America’s offshore base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in conditions which an incensed English law lord described as a “lawless black hole.”
More mundanely, travellers soon forgot about trying to buy an airline ticket with cash at the last moment at an airport. Consider also the growing intrusion of states into what hitherto was considered the private lives of their citizens. Remember not to take more than $10,000 in cash out the United States at one time. Osama is to be thanked for almost all of these as well as other restrictions and they are likely to remain in force for a very long time. Perhaps not 9/11 but the damage Americans did themselves is Osama’s true legacy, at least the onemost likely to last. Not half bad for a man virtually no one outside counter-terrorist circles had heard about until 1998. ■
Image above: U.S. service members watch on television President Obama talk about the details of the death of Osama Bin Laden inside the USO at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, May 2. Photo courtesy of DVIDSHUB.
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