On this subject, I will cite my favorite reporter. From newyorker.com
There is no evidence that bin Laden showed any interest in politics before 1979, when three events shook the Middle East: Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty; the Soviets invaded Afghanistan; and the Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah. Years later, looking back on the invasion of Afghanistan, bin Laden told an interviewer from the Arabic-language Al-Quds al-Arabi, "I was enraged, and went there at once."
Friends of the bin Laden family told me that the truth wasn't quite so dramatic. Osama spent the first years of the war travelling throughout Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf and raising millions of dollars for the jihad. Some of the funding came directly from the Saudi government, some from official mosques, and some from the kingdom's financial and business élite—including his late father's construction empire, the Bin Laden Group, which by then had interests on three continents.
In 1984, bin Laden moved to Peshawar, a Pakistani border town near the Khyber Pass which served as the key staging area for the jihad in Afghanistan. That year, I and other journalists in the region began to hear of a man known as the Good Samaritan or the Saudi Prince. He would arrive unannounced, it was said, at hospitals where wounded Afghan and Arab fighters had been brought. He was lean and elegant, and dressed in the traditional shalwar kameez of the Afghan tribes—a blousy knee-length tunic top—over tailored trousers of fine English cloth, and he always wore English custom-made Beal Brothers boots. According to the stories that we heard, he was soft-spoken, and went from bed to bed dispensing cashews and English chocolates to the wounded and carefully noting each man's name and address. Weeks later, the man's family would receive a generous check.
Soon we began to hear other tales. In the ungovernable tribal areas on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier, and in the military training camps outside Peshawar and in Afghanistan, jihad trainees and clerics began to speak of another enigmatic Saudi. He had arrived in an unmarked military transport plane, and brought in bulldozers and other pieces of heavy equipment, which he deployed to design and construct defensive tunnels and storage depots, and to cut roads through the deep valleys of Afghanistan. According to one frequently told story, the man often drove one of the bulldozers himself across the precipitous mountain peaks, exposing himself to strafing from Soviet helicopter gunships. This man also turned out to be bin Laden, and the equipment that he brought in was furnished by the Bin Laden Group.
Four years had passed since the C.I.A. began providing weapons and funds—eventually totalling more than three billion dollars—to the various Afghan resistance groups, all of which were, to varying degrees, fundamentalist in religion, autocratic in politics, and venomously anti-American. During (and also after) the jihad in Afghanistan, bin Laden met frequently with Hassan al-Turabi, an erudite Islamist who now effectively controls the rigid Islamic government in Sudan. He dined regularly with President Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan's military ruler, who was a conduit for the C.I.A. arms. He cultivated generals from the Pakistani intelligence service. And he befriended not only some of the most anti-Western of the Afghan resistance leaders fighting the jihad but also the Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is now serving a life sentence in a Minnesota prison for conspiracy to "wage a war of urban terrorism" against the United States.
The C.I.A. station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989 was Milt Bearden, an avuncular, barrel-chested man with an easy smile. He arrived with the first shipments of Stinger missiles that Washington dispatched to the combatants, and he spent a good deal of time in the mountains with the resistance groups. Not long ago, I asked Bearden, who is now retired, if he had known bin Laden during the war years.
"No," he replied. "Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did, but did I say that this tall, slim, ascetic Saudi was instrumental? No, I did not. There were a lot of bin Ladens who came to do jihad, and they unburdened us a lot. These guys were bringing in up to twenty to twenty-five million dollars a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It's an extra two hundred to three hundred million dollars a year. And this is what bin Laden did. He spent most of the war as a fund-raiser, in Peshawar. He was not a valiant warrior on the battlefield."
According to Bearden, bin Laden and the Saudi contingent "fought in only one important battle that I know of: the battle of Ali Khel"—in Paktia province, not far from the area struck by United States cruise missiles in August of 1998. "The Soviets ran out of steam just before we ran out of supplies. There were perhaps twenty or twenty-five Saudi shaheeds"—martyrs. Bin Laden, fighting under the nom de guerre Abu Abdullah, appeared to have modelled himself on the twelfth-century military hero Salah al-Din, who effectively checked the Crusaders and reconquered Jerusalem.
"As time went on," Bearden told me, "the story of the battle of Ali Khel grew, as did that of the Saudis' battlefield role. Part of the myth of bin Laden and of the Saudi fighters sprang from this. The U.S. government, along with others, sang the ballad of the Saudi shaheeds, and, dollar for dollar, King Fahd matched our funds. We put five hundred million dollars into Afghanistan in 1987 alone, and the Saudis matched us bill for bill."
That was back when Eurasia was the enemy and Eastasia was the ally, though, as opposed to now, when ex-KBG head Pootie Poot is W's good buddy and allegedly our oil savior. Somehow, I don't think Perle and friends are likely to bring up the fact that bin Laden had it in more for the Saudis than the US when the next stage of their latter-day Lawrence operation starts cooking. First casualty and all that. |
