Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (35 page)

These groups, as well as “lone wolves” inspired by bin Laden, will continue to attempt to wreak havoc, but their efforts will not precipitate a “clash of civilizations” as bin Laden had hoped to do on 9/11. Indeed, governments in Muslim countries from Jordan to Indonesia have taken aggressive actions against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, and al-Qaeda is now peddling an ideology that has lost much of its purchase in the Muslim world. In the two most populous Muslim nations—Indonesia and Pakistan—
favorable views of bin Laden and support for suicide bombings dropped by at least half between 2003 and 2010. The key reason for this decline was the deaths of Muslim civilians at the hands of jihadist terrorists. Al-Qaeda and its allies have consistently targeted the vast majority of fellow Muslims who don’t precisely share their views. The trail of dead civilians from Baghdad to Jakarta and from Amman to Islamabad in the decade after 9/11 was largely the work of al-Qaeda and its allies. That al-Qaeda and its allies defined themselves as the defenders of true Islam yet left so many Muslim victims in their wake was not impressive to many in the Islamic world.

Despite the abject failure of al-Qaeda’s strategy on 9/11, a number of prominent writers, academics, and politicians in the West claimed that the attacks on Washington and New York were the beginning of a war with a totalitarian ideology similar to the murderous ideologies the United States had done battle with in the twentieth century. Certainly “Binladenism” shared some commonalities with National Socialism and Stalinism: anti-Semitism and anti-liberalism, the embrace of charismatic leaders, the deft exploitation of modern propaganda methods, and the bogus promise of utopia here on Earth if its programs were implemented. But Binladenism
never posed anything like the existential threat that communism or Nazism did. Still, the conviction that “Islamofascism” posed as great a threat to the West as the Nazis or Soviets had was an article of faith for some. The influential neoconservative Richard Perle
warned that the West faced “victory or holocaust” in its struggle with the Islamofascists. And the former CIA director James Woolsey became a constant presence on television news programs after 9/11,
invoking the specter of World War IV.

But this was all massively overwrought. The Nazis occupied and subjugated most of Europe and instigated
a global conflict that killed tens of millions. And the United States spent about 40 percent of its GDP to fight the Nazis, fielding millions of soldiers. Communist regimes killed 100 million people in wars, prison camps, enforced famines, and pogroms.

The threat posed by al-Qaeda is orders of magnitude smaller. Despite bin Laden’s hyperventilating rhetoric, there is no danger that his followers will end the American way of life. In almost any given year,
Americans are far more likely to drown accidentally in a bathtub than to be killed by a terrorist. Yet, few of us harbor an irrational fear of a bathtub drowning. Al-Qaeda’s amateur investigations into weapons of mass destruction do not compare to the very real possibility of nuclear conflagration the world faced during the Cold War, and there are relatively few adherents of Binladenism in the West today, while there were tens of millions of devotees of communism and fascism.

Despite the relative insignificance of the threat posed by al-Qaeda and its allies, the War on Terror was a bonanza for the American national security industrial complex. On 9/11, the annual budget for all the U.S. intelligence agencies was about $25 billion. A decade later it was $80 billion; and by then almost a million Americans held Top Secret clearances, and six out of ten of the richest
counties in the United States were in the Washington, D.C., area. If the War on Terror was, in the end, as much about about bringing bin Laden to justice as anything else, it is sobering to observe that American intelligence agencies consumed half a trillion dollars on their way to that goal.

S
IX WEEKS AFTER
the death of bin Laden,
al-Qaeda announced his successor, the dour Egyptian surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri. The longtime deputy to bin Laden had his work cut out for him; his predecessor had gifted him a bit of a lemon. By the time bin Laden was killed, al-Qaeda was an ideological “brand” long past its sell-by date and an organization in deep trouble.

In the “treasure trove” of some six thousand documents retrieved by the SEALs from the bin Laden compound, there is ample confirmation of how profound al-Qaeda’s problems had become. In memos he never dreamed would end up in the hands of the CIA, bin Laden advised other militant jihadist groups not to adopt the al-Qaeda moniker. On August 7, 2010, he wrote to the leader of the brutal Al-Shabaab militia in Somalia, telling him that Al-Shabaab should not declare itself publicly to be part of al-Qaeda because to do so would only attract enemies, as al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate had done, and would make it harder to raise money from rich Arab donors.

Clearly, even bin Laden understood that the shine was long gone from the al-Qaeda brand. At the same time, he was troubled by the fact that the Obama administration had solved a branding problem of its own because it had “largely stopped
using the phrase ‘the war on terror’ in the context of not wanting to provoke Muslims because they feel that saying ‘the war on terror’ would appear to most people to be a war on Islam.”

The spectacular set of self-inflicted mistakes by al-Qaeda’s
affiliate in Iraq played heavily on the minds of bin Laden and his top advisors. Among themselves, they grumbled that al-Qaeda’s campaign of attacks against Iraqi Christians had not been sanctioned by bin Laden. And bin Laden urged his followers in Yemen not to kill members of the local tribes, a tactic that al-Qaeda had frequently employed in western Iraq, which had provoked a tribal uprising against al-Qaeda that began in 2006 and dealt a large blow to the group’s fortunes in Iraq.

In October 2010, bin Laden wrote a forty-eight-page memo to one of his deputies that surveyed the state of al-Qaeda’s jihad. He began on an optimistic note, observing that for the Americans it had been “the worst year for them in Afghanistan since they invaded,” a trend he predicted would only be amplified by the deepening U.S. budget crisis. But bin Laden also worried that al-Qaeda’s longtime sanctuary in Waziristan, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, was now too dangerous because of the campaign of American drone strikes there. “I am leaning toward getting most of our brothers out of the area.”

In the meantime, bin Laden advised his followers not to move around the tribal regions except on overcast days, when America’s satellites and drones would not have as good of coverage of the area, and he complained that “the Americans have great accumulated expertise of photography of the region due to the fact they have been doing it for so many years. They can even distinguish between houses that are frequented by male visitors at a higher rate than is normal.”

Bin Laden urged his followers to depart the tribal regions for the remote Afghan provinces of Ghazni, Zabul, and, in particular, Kunar, where he himself had successfully hidden after the Battle of Tora Bora, pointing out that the high mountains and dense forests of Kunar provided especially good protection from prying American eyes. Bin Laden fretted about his twenty-year-old son, Hamza, who had moved to the tribal regions in Pakistan after being released from
house arrest in Iran, writing, “Make sure to tell Hamza that I am of the opinion he should get out of Waziristan.… He should move only when the clouds are heavy.” Hamza should decamp for the tiny, prosperous Persian Gulf kingdom of Qatar, bin Laden advised.

In his final days, bin Laden became doubly cautious, sometimes even paranoid in his thinking. He instructed that Hamza should throw out anything he had taken with him from Iran as it might contain a tracking chip and that he should avoid the company of someone named Abu Salman al-Baluchi because he had associates tied to the Pakistani intelligence services. Bin Laden also provided elaborate instructions about how Hamza might evade the surveillance of the American drones by meeting members of al-Qaeda inside a particular road tunnel near Peshawar.

Bin Laden also reminded his deputies “that all communication with others should be done through letters” rather than by phone or the Internet. As a result, he had to wait up to two or three months for responses to his queries—not an efficient way to run an organization. Bin Laden also advised his lieutenants that when they kidnapped someone they should take many precautions during the negotiating process and throw away any bags of ransom money because they might contain tracking devices.

In his isolated final years, bin Laden even became an inveterate micromanager, admonishing his group in Yemen that its members should always refuel and eat heartily before they embarked on road trips so that they wouldn’t have to stop at gas stations and restaurants that might be monitored by government spies. And he advised al-Qaeda’s North African wing to plant trees so they could later use them as cover for their operations. It’s safe to assume that this arboreal advice was simply ignored.

Above all, bin Laden strategized about how to improve his public image, observing that “a huge part of the battle is in the media.” He
instructed his media team: “The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack is coming and due to the importance to this date, the time to start preparing is now. Please send me your suggestions on this.” He suggested reaching out to the correspondents of both Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic and wondered if he could get a hearing on an American TV network: “We should also look for an American channel that can be close to being unbiased such as CBS.” Perhaps in response to this call for action, one of his media advisors—believed to be the American al-Qaeda recruit Adam Gadahn—suggested that bin Laden take advantage of the 9/11 anniversary in 2011 to record a high-definition videotape that could be given to all the major American news networks except Fox News, which Gadahn said “lacks neutrality.” It does not appear that bin Laden ever made such a tape.

Until the end, bin Laden remained fixated on mounting another large-scale attack on the United States, prodding one deputy, “It would be nice if you could nominate one of the qualified brothers to be responsible for a large operation against the U.S. It would be nice if you would pick a number of the brothers not to exceed ten and send them to their countries individually without any of them knowing the others to study aviation.” Bizarrely, he complained that Faisal Shahzad, the American citizen of Pakistani heritage who had tried to blow up an SUV in Times Square, had broken the oath of allegiance he had sworn to the United States, and he tut-tutted that “it is not permissible in Islam to betray trust and break a covenant.” This seeming aversion to recruiting U.S. citizens to carry out such attacks narrowed the available options. In any case, Zawahiri pushed back, telling bin Laden it was much more realistic to attack American soldiers in Afghanistan than civilians in the United States.

The fact was, bin Laden and his men hadn’t mounted a successful terrorist attack in the West since the July 7, 2005, transportation bombings in London. The terrorist network’s plots to
set off bombs
in Manhattan in 2009 and to mount
Mumbai-style attacks in Germany a year later all fizzled out. And al-Qaeda never mounted a successful attack in the United States after September 11, 2001.

This significant record of failure predated the momentous events of the Arab Spring—events in which al-Qaeda’s leaders, foot soldiers, and ideas played no role. Meanwhile, U.S. drone strikes had decimated the bench of al-Qaeda’s commanders since the summer of 2008, when President George W. Bush had authorized a
ramped-up program of attacks in Pakistan’s tribal regions. After Zawahiri’s ascension to the top job in al-Qaeda,
a CIA drone killed Atiyah Abdul Rahman, who, as we have seen, acted as bin Laden’s chief of staff for many years. The group could not easily replace someone with Rahman’s long experience, or the many other leaders of the group who had been picked off by drones during Bush’s last year in office and during the presidency of Obama.

Zawahiri is unlikely to turn things around for al-Qaeda. Far from being the inspiring orator that bin Laden was, Zawahiri is more like the pedantic, long-winded uncle who insists on regaling the family at Thanksgiving dinner with accounts of his arcane disputes with obscure enemies. During 2011, Zawahiri’s half-dozen or so public disquisitions about the events of the Arab Spring were greeted by a collective yawn in the Middle East. Not only was Zawahiri a black hole of charisma, he was an ineffective leader who was not well regarded or well liked even by the various jihadist groups from his native Egypt.

The death of bin Laden eliminates the founder of al-Qaeda, which has only known one leader since its founding in 1988, and it also eliminates the one man who provided broad, largely unquestioned strategic goals to the wider jihadist movement. A wild card is that
one of bin Laden’s dozen or so sons—endowed with the iconic family name—could eventually rise to take over the terrorist group.

J
IHADIST TERRORISM WILL NOT
, of course, disappear because of the death of bin Laden, but it is hard to imagine two more final endings to the “War on Terror” than the popular revolts against the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and the death of bin Laden.

We do not, of course, know the final outcome of the Arab revolutions, but there is very little chance that al-Qaeda or other extremist groups will be able to grab the reins of power as the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East crumble. But while al-Qaeda and its allies cannot take power anywhere in the Muslim world, these groups do thrive on chaos and civil war. And the whole point of revolutions is that they are inherently unpredictable even to the people who are leading them, so anything could happen in the coming years in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, and much is unpredictable in Egypt.

In Egypt,
Islamist groups did very well in parliamentary elections after the dictator Hosni Mubarak was deposed. The Muslim Brotherhood and a Salafist party received about three quarters of the vote. These groups do not advocate violence, and al-Qaeda has long been critical of the Brotherhood for its willingness to engage in elections that members of al-Qaeda consider to be “un-Islamic.” But certainly the Salafists in Egypt want a society that looks much more like the Taliban in pre-9/11 Afghanistan than the one envisaged by the Facebook revolutionaries who first launched the revolt against Mubarak.