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THE ROVING EYE
OSAMA AT LARGE, 2: What
he's up to
By Pepe Escobar
Part
1: Get him before Sept 11
BRUSSELS - For the
absolute majority of the Arab world, he remains Sheikh
Guevara: a rich heir who could just have enjoyed a life
of privilege, but instead he invested all his knowledge
and connections to wage jihad.
Osama bin Laden
may not be an Islamic Guevara, but he certainly read
Chairman Mao Zedong's Little Red Book. Bin Laden's Long
March took place when he had to leave Sudan and set up
camp in Afghanistan (just like the communists had to set
up theirs in the back and beyond of China). He organized
a "base" - the term Qaeda is a literal translation of
base, as theorized by Mao in the 1930s.
And just
like the communists, the base spread out to conquer a
countryside ripe for revolution: from Afghanistan to the
Indus Valley, and then to Central Asia (Uzbekistan).
Some countries accepted his missionaries - like
Afghanistan and Sudan. Some accepted them only
half-heartedly, like Somalia and Chechnya. Emissaries
kept roaming the earth - from Chechnya to Kyrgyzstan,
from London to Hamburg. Al-Qaeda invested heavily in the
Pakistani army, in the Saudi Islamic police, in the
Saudi ulemas (clerics), and until recently in the
Sudanese Islamic regime. Any dividends would be welcomed
- even if collected in the distant future.
Bin
Laden is admired in the Arab world because he knows the
Holy Koran and the hadith - the traditional
teachings. He knows how financial markets work. And of
course he knows everything about globalization.
No wonder. People from the bin Laden clan are
Hadramis - Bedouin fishermen from the Hadramut region.
They have been open to the world since time immemorial.
Their ships have been everywhere since the Middle Ages.
They always knew Africa very well: that's why Osama was
based in Khartoum, in Sudan. As with the Chinese
guanxi, the whole thing about al-Qaeda boils down
to connections. And bin Laden's connections are also
very well introduced in Southeast Asia. With Indonesian
strongman Suharto, the Yemenite clan was in power for
more than three decades. A few million Indonesians of
Arab descent still have close contact with the people
from the Hadramut.
Afghanistan, as far as bin
Laden and al-Qaeda were concerned, was not a defeat.
Afghanistan was just a remote outpost of global jihad.
Bin Laden may be very well connected in Sudan, in the
southern Philippines and Indonesia and Malaysia, but in
al-Qaeda's global jihad, the most important prizes
remain Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan.
The key
to all of bin Laden's and al-Qaeda's business is the
intersection of the Iranian world, the Indian world and
the Arab world: this means the deserts of Baluchistan
(which are half-Iranian and half-Pakistani), and
legendary Peshawar, capital of the ultra-volatile North
West Frontier Province in Pakistan. Baluchis are
redoubtable fighters. They comprise one-third of the
army of their neighbors, the sultanate of Oman. Arabs
from Oman and from the Hadramut region are the men who
matter in Baluchistan ports.
Prophet Mohammed,
1,400 years ago, united the tribes of Arabia - some
allied to Persia, some allied to the Byzantine Empire.
Messianic bin laden wants to unite the tribes of Islam -
some formerly allied to the US, some formerly allied to
the defunct USSR. This means a restoration of the
Caliphate. Bin Laden's hardcore Islamism vows to immerse
people in a glorious past that they have forgotten, but
is revealed to be much more rewarding than the bleak
Western-dominated present.
With help from
selected sources in Peshawar - which used to be (and
certainly remains) bin Laden's main base, and European
intelligence sources tracking al-Qaeda movements, it's
possible to infer how bin Laden's strategy will guide
him and al-Qaeda's next steps. Some tribal leaders are
claiming bin Laden is now comfortably living in
Peshawar, a city he knows extremely well: al-Qaeda's
intelligence cells supposedly remain connected and
supported by wealthy Pakistani and Saudi private donors.
Bin Laden knew that strikes against the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon - Apocalypse Now-style -
would provoke a devastating American response. But he
was also counting on massive support from the Muslim
world for his jihad. He was certainly betting on a
surefire escape route from the American encirclement:
that's exactly what happened in Tora Bora last December.
Like an Islamic version of a master Go player, he was
betting on gaining strategic territorial and political
advantages. Ten months after September 11, it's not so
far-fetched to think that things are going his way.
There is extreme turbulence in Yemen, Egypt and Pakistan
- not to mention Saudi Arabia.
To understand bin
Laden's long-term view, it's essential to consider his
Four Pillars of jihad: 1) The Arab peninsula, with all
its oil wealth, and most of all, Islam's two most sacred
sites - Mecca and Medina. 2) The Indus Valley, which
means basically Pakistan - a technology-savvy nuclear
state with an Islamic army permeated by fervent
Islamists. 3) Egypt, the heart of the Muslim world,
where he can draw support from Gamaa Islamiya, the
organization founded by al-Qaeda's brain, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, alias "The Surgeon". 4) This is the
trickiest pillar: we could call it the Iranian Islamic
counter-revolution, which bin Laden thinks will develop
when his own Sunni Islamic revolution will be a
superpower and Iranian Shi'ites will be forced to adhere
to it.
In bin Laden's not-exactly-worldwide
strategy (he is only interested in selected areas of the
Muslim world), he concentrates his attacks on what he
qualifies as rotten regimes. His mapping is extremely
coherent. His intuition has shown him that all
traditional Muslim monarchies - from Jordan and Morocco
to Saudi Arabia - are in deep trouble. The periphery -
from Pakistan to the Central Asian republics - is
bordering chaos. In Iran, a counter-revolution by
secular and democratic forces is taking shape around
President Khatami. And Indonesia and Malaysia - the
Meccas of Muslim capitalism - were battered by the
1997-8 Asian financial crisis (most Arabs still firmly
believe the crisis was detonated by Jewish speculators
to get rid of Suharto).
For bin Laden, Hosni
Mubarak's Egypt has to implode - because Mubarak, a
thug, is also a beggar: in exchange of the annual
American US$2 billion pocket money, he has to maintain
diplomatic relations with Israel - an arrangement that
enrages the Egyptian street. Bin Laden despises the
Algerian regime - whose generals are dying to get a
French passport. He despises both Baath Party regimes in
Iraq and Syria - because they are despised by the
majority of the respective populations, Shi'ite in Iraq
and Sunni in Syria. But his strategy for Iraq and Syria
is completely different from Egypt's. bin Laden wants to
recycle both Iraq and Syria - because for him the main
enemy is Saudi Arabia. This goes some way to explain why
al-Qaeda maintains a shady but arguably solid connection
with the Lebanese Hezbollah - which is allied to Syria -
and also a connection with a significant sector of Iraqi
intelligence.
Of course, bin Laden's
noire is the Saudi Arabian regime, which was born
from a Bedouin revolt and was supposed to reestablish
the "purity of Islam" through the ultra-conservative
Wahhabi faith. But for bin Laden, the Saudi royal family
boils down to a bunch of cowards and traitors. It's
important to remember there is no hereditary monarchy in
Islam. The only family widely respected is the Hashemite
family - who are the legitimate descendants of Prophet
Mohammed.
Bin Laden's resentment against the
House of Saud is widely shared by the majority of the
Arab population (which, by the way, is not Wahhabi). And
this includes the Yemenite minority. Rounding up his
strategy, bin Laden was also the first to notice how
Pakistan was in danger of being absorbed - economically
and socially - by regional superpower India. He
understood that after the end of the Cold War, Pakistan
was literally left in the cold by both its crucial
allies, China and the US.
The only missing link
would be to seduce the Iran of the mullahs. And that's
exactly what bin Laden did. He recognized the merits of
the Shi'ite Islamic revolution of 1979. But he promised
much more to the mullahs: the keys to his all-embracing
super-Sunni Islamic revolution, the only means to end
the Iranian regime's political isolation. Bin Laden may
have started his career in the anti-Soviet jihad in 1982
as an American agent - but in the 1990s he did
everything in his power to convince hardline Iranian
mullahs that he was not an American ally anymore.
Israeli commentators and a few CIA analysts swear that
he got extremely valuable help from Iraqi intelligence -
but there's absolutely no evidence. At the time bin
Laden was based in Khartoum, Sudan, working on
subversive plots for Egypt. Sudan was pro-Iraq - and
Iraq had a very imposing embassy in Khartoum. But this
proves nothing.
Saddam Hussein's main strategy
to rally worldwide Muslim public opinion is to emphasize
his commitment to the Palestinian cause. In this
context, bin Laden could not be further from Saddam. He
never demonstrated any interest in Palestine. Sources in
Peshawar remember how disgusted he was when in the peace
negotiations in Madrid in 1992 the Palestinian
spokesperson was an unveiled Christian woman, Hinane
Ashraoui (nowadays she is assistant secretary to the
Arab League). The Palestinians are way too "modern" for
bin Laden. He firmly believes that they cannot extract
anything out of the Jews because they are led by a
cocktail of women, Christians, homosexuals and Marxists.
In this case, bin Laden is nothing more than reproducing
the ideas of his mentor, Abdullah Azzam, a Jordanian
Palestinian academic killed by a massive explosion in
Peshawar in 1989. Azzam was the brains behind the new
ultra-hardcore wahhabis of Saudi Arabia.
Pakistan is vital to bin Laden's design. It's
nobody's secret in Pakistan that President General
Pervez Musharraf has virtually no clue of what his
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is up to. It's an
extraordinary "revenge of history": the Pakistani army,
which according to much evidence never respected
civilian political power, now is constantly upstaged by
an intelligence agency. But the ISI is not just an
agency: it is a state within a state. Bin Laden
immensely profited from the fact that in the 1980s he
had two key Pashtun allies. General Hamid Gul was the
architect of the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad - alongside
the "moneyman", Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia. General
Nasirullah Babar - today living a cozy life in Peshawar
- was no one else than the man who invented the Taliban.
These two generals were the real masters of Afghanistan.
They were Afghans, anyway, because they belonged to
prominent Pashtun families.
As the evidence
collected by Western intelligence shows that al-Qaeda is
directed by a sort of central committee, it's important
to point out that this committee also includes
high-ranking Pakistani generals, some from the ISI, and
some of them Pashtun.
American pundits seem to
be startled that terrorism central has moved from
Afghanistan to Pakistan. Time to wake up: this is
exactly what bin Laden wanted. He always knew that
post-September 11 the conditions were ripe for Pakistan
to explode or implode at any moment. This fits his plans
for more power for the Islamist contingent (according to
official Pakistani figures, around 15 million people),
but most of all for the crucial ISI Islamist sectors
with access to the Pakistani nuclear bomb.
No
news is sweeter news for al-Qaeda at the moment than the
killing of Haji Qadir, one of the Afghan
vice-presidents. Haji Qadir was the self-styled
"liberator" of Eastern Afghanistan from the Taliban last
November. His brother, the notoriously brave mujahideen,
Abdul Haq, was captured and executed by the Taliban
during the war, in October last year. It's not
implausible at all to consider the possibility of an
al-Qaeda and Taliban involvement in Haji Qadir's death.
This would prove that not only are they extremely active
in the tribal areas - as everybody knows - but that they
have managed to infiltrate the fragile Hamid Karzai's
administration in Kabul as well. Not only al-Qaeda, but
the majority of Pashtuns on both sides of the border
consider Karzai's as nothing more than a puppet
government.
The most plausible definition of
victory for Osama bin Laden, even long-term, means the
end of Saudi Arabia as we know it - where Islam's sacred
sites are not guarded by "traitors" and where 50 billion
barrels of oil reserves would not revert to the West's
benefit; a nuclear Pakistan not constrained by any form
of nuclear deterrence; and the death knell to any Muslim
regime defined as moderate or allied with the US. This
is what bin Laden really wants. He always wanted the US
to declare war on Pakistan - not Afghanistan. But there
he made a major mistake. He overvalued the military
capability of his Afghan and Arab fighters in
Afghanistan. And the coup d'etat in Pakistan - provoked
by Muslims disgusted with the American bombing - never
happened.
Bin Laden dreamed - and still dreams -
that with a destabilized Pakistan capturing the
imagination of the Muslim world, he could return to
Yemen and really attack what is closest to his heart:
the destabilization of Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden's most
hardcore supporters were not in Afghanistan. They are in
Yemen - a federation of tribes where Shi'ites and Sunnis
are equally represented. If the ruler, Shi'ite Colonel
Ali Saleh, started getting cozy with the US because he
fears bin Laden, Yemeni secret services remain in
al-Qaeda's pocket. They control as many as 50,000
fighters in north Yemen. All of them Sunni. And all of
them religiously ultra-hardcore.
It's important
to know that all the Saudis in the
Boeings-turned-into-missiles on September 11 came from
tribes in the province of Assir. This province was taken
from Yemen by Ibn Saud himself. This is the place that
bin Laden will go to when things really get hot - which
means, from his point of view, ripe for an attack on
Saudi Arabia.
Bin Laden wants to reign not only
over Riyadh, but most of all over Mecca and Medina. He
may be terribly wrong about a multitude of factors: his
belief that Muslims won't go to war against other
Muslims; the strength of Islamists in different areas;
the anti-Islamist stance of most of the Pakistani
population; the force of will of his two mortal enemies,
Musharraf and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah (no, George W
Bush is not the main enemy). He may be wrong, but
he will keep on trying to detonate his super Sunni
Islamic revolution, his Allah-blessed self-appointed
mission - the stuff of dreams emanating from the bowels
of the big Pakistani city where he is hiding right now.
Tomorrow: The Sheikh against the Saudis
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