Fields of Blood (71 page)

Other Arab-Afghan veterans found that when they returned home, they were too radical for the local Muslims who had not shared their experience in Afghanistan. The vast majority vehemently rejected their ruthless militancy. In
Algeria, Afghan veterans had high hopes of creating an Islamic state, because the
Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) seemed certain to gain a majority in the
national elections in 1992. But at the last moment, the military staged a coup, and the liberal secularist FLN president
Benjedid, who had promised democratic reforms, suppressed the FIS and imprisoned its leaders. Had a democratic process been thwarted in such an unconstitutional manner in
Iran or
Pakistan, there would have been worldwide outrage. Yet because it was an Islamic government that had been blocked by the coup, there was jubilation in some sectors of the Western press, which seemed to suggest that in some mysterious way this undemocratic action had made Algeria safe for democracy. The French
government threw its support behind the new hard-line FLN president
Liamine Zeroual and strengthened his resolve to hold no further dialogue with the FIS.

As we have seen elsewhere, when suppressed, these movements tend almost invariably to become more extreme. The more radical members of the FIS broke away to form a guerrilla organization, the
Armed
Islamic Group (GIA), and were joined by the returning Arab-Afghans. At first the veterans’ military training was welcome, but their unsparing methods soon shocked the Algerians. They began a terror campaign in the mountains south of Algiers, assassinating monks, journalists, and secular and religious intellectuals as well as the inhabitants of entire villages. There are indications, however, that the military not only acquiesced but may even have participated in this violence to eliminate populations sympathetic to the FIS and to discredit the GIA. There was also a chilling preview of future events, when the GIA hijacked a plane flying to France intending to crash it over Paris to prevent the French government from supporting the Algerian regime. Fortunately, the plane was captured by commandos at Marseilles.
²⁹

The returning
Egyptian Arab-Afghans also found that they had become too extreme for their fellow countrymen.
Zawahiri founded
Islamic Jihad (IJ) with the intention of assassinating the entire
Mubarak government and establishing an Islamic state. In June 1995 IJ attempted but failed to murder the president. In April 1996 it killed a busload of thirty Greek tourists—the intended targets had been Israelis who had switched buses at the last moment—and finally, to weaken the economy by damaging the all-essential tourist industry, it massacred sixty people, most of them foreign visitors, at
Luxor in November 1997. IJ discovered, however, that it had wholly misjudged the mood of the country. Egyptians saw this violent obsession with an Islamic state as blatant idolatry that violated core Muslim values; they were so appalled by the Luxor
atrocity that Zawahiri had no option but to rejoin
Bin Laden in Afghanistan and merge his Islamic Jihad with
al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden fared no better than the other veterans when he returned to
Saudi Arabia.
³⁰
When
Saddam Hussein invaded
Kuwait in 1990, he offered the royal family the services of his Arab-Afghan fighters to protect the kingdom’s oil fields, but to his fury they turned him down in favor of the U.S. Army. This began his estrangement from the Saudi regime. When in 1994 the Saudi government suppressed
Sahwa (“Awakening”), a
nonviolent reformist party that shared Bin Laden’s disapproval of American troop deployment in Arabia, his alienation was complete. Convinced now that peaceful resistance was futile, Bin Laden spent four years in
Sudan, organizing financial backing for Arab-Afghan projects. In 1996, when the
United States and the Saudis pressured the
Turabi government to expel him, he returned to
Afghanistan, where the
Taliban had just seized power.

After the Soviet
withdrawal, the West lost interest in the region, but both Afghanistan and
Pakistan had been gravely derailed by the long conflict. A flood of money and weapons had flowed into Pakistan from the United States as well as from the
Persian Gulf, giving extremist groups access to advanced armaments, which were simply stolen as they were being unloaded. These heavily armed extremists had therefore broken the state’s monopoly on violence and henceforth could operate outside the law. To defend themselves, nearly all groups in the country, religious and secular, developed paramilitary wings. Moreover, after the
Iranian Revolution, Saudi Arabia, aware of the significant Shii community in Pakistan, had stepped up its funding of Deobandi madrassas to counter Shii influence. This enabled the
Deobandis to educate even more students from poorer backgrounds, and they sheltered the children of impoverished peasants, who were tenants of Shii landlords. These entered the madrassas, therefore, with an anti-Shii bias that was greatly enhanced by their education there.

Isolated from the rest of Pakistani society, these “students” (
taliban
) bonded tightly with the three million Afghan children who had been orphaned during the war and were brought to Pakistan as
refugees. They had all arrived traumatized by war and poverty and were introduced to a rule-bound, restricted, and highly intolerant form of Islam. They had no training in critical thought, were shielded from outside influence, and became rabidly anti-Shii.
³¹
In 1985 the Deobandis founded the
Soldiers of the Companions of the Prophet in Pakistan (SCPP) specifically to harass the Shii, and in the mid-1990s two even more violent Deobandi movements emerged: the
Army of Jhangvi, which specialized in assassinating
Shiis, and the
Partisan Movement, which fought for the liberation of
Kashmir. As a result of this onslaught, the Shii formed the
Soldiers of the Prophet in Pakistan (SPP), which killed a number of
Sunnis. For centuries
Shiis and Sunnis had coexisted amicably in the region. Thanks to the
United States’
Cold War struggle in
Afghanistan and to Saudi-
Iranian rivalry, they were now tearing the country apart in what amounted to a civil war.

The Afghan Taliban combined their
Pashtun tribal chauvinism with
Deobandi rigorism, an unholy hybrid and maverick form of Islam that expressed itself in violent opposition to any rival ideology. After the Soviet
withdrawal, Afghanistan had descended into chaos, and when the Taliban managed to take control, they seemed to both the Pakistanis and the Americans to be an acceptable alternative to anarchy. Their leader,
Mullah Omar, believed that human beings were naturally virtuous and, if placed on the right path, needed no government coercion, social services, or public health care. There was therefore no centralized government, and the population was ruled by local Taliban
komitehs,
whose punishments for the smallest infringement of Islamic law were so draconian that a degree of order was indeed restored. Fiercely opposed to modernity, which had, after all, come to them in the form of Soviet guns and air strikes, the Taliban ruled by their traditional tribal norms, which they identified with the rule of God. Their focus was purely local, and they had no sympathy with Bin Laden’s global vision. But Mullah Omar was grateful to the
Arab-Afghans for their support during the war, and when Bin Laden was expelled from Sudan, he admitted him to Afghanistan, in return for which Bin Laden improved the country’s infrastructure.
³²

Other uprooted radicals gathered around Bin Laden in Afghanistan—Zawahiri and his
Egyptian radicals most especially.
³³
Yet
al-Qaeda was still a minor player in
Islamist politics. A former militant told ABC television that even though he had spent ten months in training camps run by Bin Laden’s aides, he had never heard of the organization.
³⁴
It seems that, even though he expressed his approval of both operations, Bin Laden played no part in the 1993 bombing of the
World Trade Center in
New York by Arab-Afghan veteran
Ramzi Youssef or in the 1995 truck bombing in
Riyadh that killed five Americans. However, al-Qaeda may have provided an ideological focus for militants in Afghanistan, who were feeling increasingly dispirited.
³⁵
Not only had they failed to advance on their three main fronts of
Bosnia,
Algeria, and Egypt, but by the end of the 1990s, political Islam itself seemed in terminal decline.
³⁶
In a dramatic turnabout,
Hojjat ol-Islam Seyyed Muhammad Khatami, running
on a democratic ticket, won a landslide victory in the 1997 elections in
Iran. He immediately signaled that he wanted a more positive relationship with the West and dissociated his government from
Khomeini’s
fatwa against
Salman Rushdie. In
Algeria the government of President
Abdul-Aziz Bouteflika included militant secularists as well as moderate Islamists, and in
Pakistan the secularist colonel
Pervez Musharraf toppled
Nawaz Sharif, patron of the Islamist parties. In
Turkey the Islamist prime minister
Necmettin Erkbakan had to resign after a single year in office, and Turabi was deposed in a military coup in Sudan. It seemed increasingly urgent to Bin Laden to reignite the
jihad in a spectacular operation that would catch the attention of the whole world.

In August 1996 he issued his
Declaration of War
on the United States and
Israel, the “Crusader-Zionist Alliance,” which he accused of “aggression, iniquity, and injustice” against
Muslims.
³⁷
He condemned the American military presence in the Arabian Peninsula, equating it with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and denounced American support for corrupt governments in the Muslim world and the sanctions led by Israel and the United States against
Iraq, which, he claimed, had caused a million Iraqi deaths. In February 1998 he announced the
World Islamic Front Against Zionists and Crusaders, stating that all Muslims had a religious obligation to attack the United States and its allies “in any country in which it is possible to do it” and to drive American troops from Arabia.
³⁸
Three entirely new themes were emerging in Bin Laden’s ideology.
³⁹
The first was his identification of the United States as the prime enemy rather than
Russians,
Serbs, or “apostate” Muslim rulers. Second was his call to attack the United States and its allies anywhere in the world, even in America itself—an unusual step, because terrorists usually avoided operations outside their own country, which cost them international support. Third, even though Bin Laden never wholly abandoned
Qutb’s terminology, he drew chiefly on pan-Islamic themes, focusing particularly on the suffering that Muslims were enduring worldwide.