In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

longtime stop on the ancient Silk Road, its bazaars have attracted visitors for centuries with their gold, silver, carpets, pottery, arms, and artwork in wood, brass, and semiprecious stones. It was here, at the age of forty-three, that Azzam founded the Maktab ul-Khadamat (Services Office), which coordinated support for the mujahideen with a range of non-governmental organizations under the guise of the Red Crescent of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He said the cause he “had sought for so long was the cause of the Afghan people,” and acted as the primary connection between the Arabs and Wahhabi interests in Saudi Arabia.⁶

Unlike some other radicals, Azzam was opposed to targeting Muslims and pro-Western regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But he wrote that jihad in Afghanistan was a requirement for all good Muslims, an argument he made in his book Defending the Land of the Muslims Is Each Man’s Most Important Duty. The novelty of Azzam’s work lies not in its content, since other writers had called for jihad before. Rather, his success was in his skill as an agitator, able to convince Muslims from abroad to come to Afghanistan and fight. Saudi Arabia donated millions of dollars to Azzam’s Services Office and provided a 75 percent discount on airline tickets for young Muslims who wished to join the jihad. In addition, Saudi Arabia became a ferrying port and station for Arab veterans and jihadis, such as Zawahiri, who were journeying to Peshawar on their way to Afghanistan.⁷ Other countries, including the United States, also played a critical role. U.S. President Jimmy Carter was in favor of the mujahideen insurgency, arguing that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan posed one of the most serious threats to peace since World War II.⁸ Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, likewise noted that the “invasion of Afghanistan made it more important to mobilize Islamic resistance against the Soviets.”⁹

The Afghan jihad became the great inspiration that brought Islamic radicals together. Muslim ulemas issued fatwas interpreting the Soviet intervention as an invasion of the territory of Islam by sinners. This made it possible to proclaim a “defensive” jihad, which, according to sharia, obliged every Muslim to participate.¹⁰ These first-generation volunteers were mainly Arabs from various parts of the Middle East who had come to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. Once they reached Afghanistan, the Services Office generally divided them into small groups that formed entire operational units in eastern Afghanistan, along the Pakistan border.¹¹ A report compiled for Osama bin Laden indicated that more than 2,300 foreign fighters “from eight Arab countries have died in the course of jihad in Afghanistan. Among these martyrs 433 were from Saudi Arabia, 526 from Egypt, 184 from Iraq, 284 from Libya, 180 from Syria, 540 from Algeria, 111 from Sudan and 100 from Tunisia.”¹²

In the late 1980s, elite foreign fighters began to congregate in a camp near Khowst, Afghanistan, called Al- Maasada (The Lion’s Den). Osama bin Laden was the leader of this group; he said he had been inspired to call the place Al-Maasada by lines from one of the Prophet’s favorite poets, Hassan Ibn Thabit, who wrote:

Whoever wishes to hear the clash of swords,

let him come to Maasada,

where he will find courageous men ready to die

for the sake of God.¹³

The Russians attacked the Lion’s Den in 1987, and bin Laden fled, along with a group that included Hassan Abdel Rab al-Saray, a Saudi who later carried out the November 1995 attack on a U.S. training center in Riyadh; Abu Zubayr Madani, who was killed in Bosnia in 1992; Ibn al-Khattab, who emerged later in Chechnya; and Sheikh Tamim Adnani, who lost a son when Abdullah Azzam was killed in November 1989.

Al Qa’ida emerged shortly thereafter. In August 1988, a group gathered in bin Laden’s house in Peshawar to form a new organization, which they referred to as al-Qa’ida al-Askariya (The Military Base). They created an advisory council and membership requirements. ¹⁴ According to notes taken during the meeting by one of the participants, “al-Qa’ida is basically an organized Islamic faction, its goal is to live the word of God, to make His religion victorious.” Al Qa’ida leaders separated their recruits into two components: those identified for “limited duration” would fight with Afghan mujahideen for the remainder of the war; those identified for “open duration” would be sent to a separate training camp and “the best brothers of them” would be chosen to join al Qa’ida. Members were expected to pledge loyalty to the leadership: “The pledge of God and His covenant is upon me, to listen and obey the superiors, who are doing this work, in energy, early-rising, difficulty, and easiness, and for His superiority upon us, so that the word of God will be the highest, and His religion victorious.” They agreed that their goal would be “to lift the word of God, to make His religion victorious” across the Arab world through armed jihad. But members were urged to be patient, pious, and obedient, since the struggle would be long and challenging.¹⁵

In 1990, bin Laden responded to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait by offering Saudi Arabia his band of jihadists to protect the kingdom and turn back Saddam Hussein’s army, which threatened Saudi Arabia. “I am ready to prepare one hundred thousand fighters with good combat capability within three months,” bin Laden promised Prince Sultan, the Saudi minister of defense. “You don’t need Americans. You don’t need any other non-Muslim troops. We will be enough.”¹⁶ But the Saudi government instead turned to the United States, which led a coalition of roughly 700,000 soldiers that defeated the Iraqi military in just over a month. The deployment of U.S. soldiers to Saudi Arabia was a shock to bin Laden and a clarion call for his movement. The land of Mecca and the birthplace of the Prophet, Saudi Arabia was a symbolic and political oasis for Islamic radicals everywhere. To have non-Arabs on Saudi soil was an affront, but for the Americans to lead the military assault was a grievous transgression.

The Arabs Disperse

For bin Laden, Saudi Arabia’s reputation was now severely compromised by its agreement with the Americans. A U.S. State Department intelligence report later reported: “Bin Laden’s terrorism represents an extreme rejection of the increased U.S. strategic and military domination of the Middle East—especially Saudi Arabia and the Gulf—that resulted from the Gulf war.”¹⁷ In May 1991, a group of Saudi preachers and university professors, including Salman al-Auda and Safar al-Hawali, signed a petition (or khitab al- matalib) to King Fahd. They condemned the Saudi family for its pact with the infidel Americans and triggered a movement among some Islamic radicals to target the Saudi government.¹⁸

By this time, many of the Arabs had dispersed from Afghanistan to other countries, such as Bosnia, Algeria, and Egypt. In each location, they attempted to transform domestic conflict into jihad. But in Bosnia, for instance, they failed to make their radical interpretation of Islam a relevant component of the civil war. In other countries, such as Algeria, they were more successful for a limited period. Most Arab states viewed the veterans of Afghanistan as a serious threat—a kind of decentralized army of several thousand warriors in search of a place to fight and hide. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and others established border controls against al Qa’ida.¹⁹ According to a CIA report, bin Laden also financed the travel of several hundred veterans of the Afghan War to Sudan, “after Islamabad launched a crackdown against extremists lingering in Pakistan. In addition to savehaven [sic] in Sudan, Bin Ladin has provided financial support to militants actively opposed to moderate Islamic governments and the West.”²⁰

Those who remained in Afghanistan and Pakistan were initially scattered among a variety of groups. Some fought on the side of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar against Ahmed Shah Massoud, but the majority joined with local commanders, who were nearly all Pashtuns. In the Pashtun pocket around Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, there was a strong Arab presence in the Saudi-based International Islamic Relief Organization. In the midnineties, as the Taliban came to power, Pakistani organizations, such as the Harakat ul-Mujahidin, took control of a number of training camps for Pakistani militants in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province. Other camps were run by Harakat ul-Ansar (HUA) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The CIA believed that Harakat ul-Ansar—an Islamic extremist group used by Pakistan in its war against India in Kashmir—posed a particular threat to the United States: “Against the backdrop of possible declining support from Islamabad,” one CIA analysis concluded, “the HUA is discussing financing with sponsors of international terrorism who are virulently anti-U.S. and may encourage attacks on U.S. targets. The HUA may be seeking this assistance from such sources—including terrorist financier Usama Bin Ladin and Libyan leader Mu’ammar Qadhafi—in an attempt to offset losses resulting from the drop in Pakistani support.”²¹

Meanwhile, the Taliban entrusted to Osama bin Laden control of most non-Pakistani and non-Afghan militant groups. Bin Laden installed many of the senior Arab fighters in residential complexes near Jalalabad and Kandahar, including at the old USAID agriculture complex at Tarnak Farms, while the ordinary fighters were grouped together