Combat Engineer When bin Laden decided to become active inside Afghanistan, he began, naturally enough, with construction work. He would later say that after he had witnessed the “brutality” of the Soviets’ bombing, he decided to transport heavy equipment from Saudi Arabia, including APPRENTICESHIP, 1979–1989 | 59 60 | OSAMA BIN LADEN bulldozers, loaders, dump trucks, and trench diggers. In 1997, bin Laden told CNN’s Peter Arnett that “by the grace of God we dug a good number of huge tunnels and built in them some storage places and in some others we built a hospital. We also dug some roads, by the grace of God, and glory be to Him, one of which you came by to us tonight.”50 The impact of bin Laden’s efforts was noted by Hashim al-Makki, a mujahedin who later became a strong critic of the al-Qaeda chief. “Perhaps everyone [now] realizes,” he wrote in 1994, “what it means to neutralize a sophisticated air force by a cheap and primitive weapon like digging some caves in the mountains, and what it means to control heights and important passages with a number of good trenches. The weaker side militarily is always in need of digging. The Chinese wise man Sun Tzu said 2,000 years ago: ‘If you are weak, dig deeper in the ground and when you become strong attack from above like an eagle.’”51 Bin Laden described the difficulty of using construction equipment under Soviet fire, but refused to let it stop the work.52 This made an impression. The journalist John Miller has written that when he was in Afghanistan to interview bin Laden in May 1998 he found that “griz- zled mujahedin fighters still tell of the young man [Osama] who rode the bulldozers himself, digging trenches on the frontline.”53 Bin Laden also again showed his willingness to act under men with better skills then his. While he arranged and paid for transferring equipment from the Kingdom to Pakistan, he borrowed an expert engi- neer named Abdullah Saadi from his father’s company to plan and direct the jobs.54 Bin Laden and his engineers helped build Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan (IULA) leader Sayyaf ’s major training and educational facility—called “Sada”—in the Parichinar area; caves, trenches, tunnels, and artillery positions in Khowst for Jalaluddin Haqqani’s forces; and at least four other mujahedin camps in eastern Afghanistan.55 Ahmed Badeeb also suggests that bin Laden’s builders worked under contract for the Saudi intelligence service to construct health facilities for Islamic NGOs in Peshawar, and to level roads in eastern Afghanistan to allow truck deliveries of ordnance to the mujahedin.56 Through these projects, bin Laden became a familiar face to the Pashtun tribes on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, which would later aid his 2001 escape from Pakistan, and help APPRENTICESHIP, 1979–1989 | 61 with his recruiting them to join him and the Taleban in fighting the U.S.-NATO occupation of Afghanistan. Foot Soldier, Then Leader Bin Laden’s decision to train an Arab-only unit reflected not just his aspiration to prepare well-trained fighters for future struggles, but a level of naiveté and cultural obtuseness. Bin Laden had come to oppose the distribution of Arab volunteers to Afghan commanders in part because he claimed the latter treated the volunteers as guests and kept them from going into battle with their mujahedin. As a result, Arab volunteers were not getting the combat experience they would need in the future. The reality is that Afghan field commanders were not eager to have Arabs in their units because they were undisciplined, unwilling to take commands from Afghans they thought religiously inferior, and, more than anything, were seeking martyrdom at the ear- liest possible opportunity. They were, in effect, “racing to die.” Thus, the Arabs were a disruptive element in Afghan units, and endangered both the safety of their comrades and the success of operations. “They were not organized,” Commander Saznur of the IULA said, “and only wanted to become martyrs.”57 While Afghans certainly are willing to die for God’s cause if necessary, they much prefer to die in bed as very old men. During the anti-Soviet jihad, suicide attacks by Afghans were unknown, a situation that has changed dramatically. Before he could start an Arab-only unit, bin Laden needed a place inside Afghanistan to use as a base for training, for caching ordnance and other supplies, and for launching operations. He turned to Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, chief of the IULA and the Afghan leader closest to the Saudi regime and its intelligence service. Isam Darraz has written that bin Laden approached Sayyaf at some point in 1984 and requested his permission to set up an Arab-only camp in the IULA’s area of opera- tions in the mountains near Jaji in Paktia Province.58 Sayyaf concurred, but for reasons not fully understood, bin Laden’s engineers did not begin building the camp—called “Al-Masadah al-Ansar” (Lion’s Den of the Companions) after a verse written by a companion of the Prophet—until late in the last quarter of 1985.59 Bin Laden displayed something of his taste for risk-taking by picking a mountain top site for 62 | OSAMA BIN LADEN the camp. The camp was ideally situated to observe Soviet and Afghan communist military movements on the plain below, but for that reason would be a magnet for Soviet artillery and airpower once the Arabs’ presence there was discovered.60 Bin Laden brought construction equipment to Jaji, and he and his men cut a road up to the campsite—to make it accessible during the winter—and then another from the base of the mountain toward Jalalabad.61 They next dug trenches, caves, tunnels, and fighting and anti-aircraft positions; they also built living quarters and storage facil- ities. The first tent was pitched at the Lion’s Den on October 24, 1986, by bin Laden and eleven others—including two Egyptians with signif- icant military or paramilitary experience, Abu Ubaydah al-Panshiri and Abu Hafs al-Masri—and by mid-April 1987, the camp featured seven or eight buildings and was manned by about seventy fighters.62 As con- struction proceeded, volunteers were detached for military training under Abu Ubaydah and Abu Hafs, or sent across the Pakistani border to Sayyaf’s military camp at Sada. The men also received religious training because, as one veteran of the Lion’s Den has said, the goal was to produce “a coordinated and principled [military] group.”63 The process of building and training proved a difficult task for bin Laden and his lieutenants, due in part to the personnel they worked with. Although often well educated, the Arab volunteers presented the same problem to bin Laden and those working with him as they did to the Afghan commanders: they were eager to die and stubbornly averse to anything that would delay reaching that goal. For bin Laden this was the toughest management challenge he had yet encountered, far harder than supervising construction gangs working for his father’s company. By all accounts, he handled this problem well, persuading the volunteers that they first needed to construct a campsite and com- plete fortifications before attacking the enemy. As Isam Darraz, an Egyptian journalist, notes in “Impressions of an Arab Journalist in Afghanistan,” bin Laden “preached patience to his brothers and trained them to be patient because there were no battles.”64 Besides channeling this religious zeal, bin Laden, Abu Ubaydah, and Abu Hafs also had to learn how to manage young men of various nationalities and ethnic groups. While Saudis and Yemenis dominated the group, there also were North Africans, Kurds, Egyptians, and Sudanese. The men also differed in educational levels—some had attended college, others high school, and some were semi-literate— and work experience. The volunteers included businessmen, soldiers, policemen, laborers, and dilettante sons of the wealthy. Their degree of commitment and dedication to jihad also varied. There were those who joined for the duration—and are with al-Qaeda or other Islamist groups today—those who came on a lark, and those who wanted to go home as soon as winter started. On top of such variables, each volun- teer reacted in a different way to living in a foreign country, many for the first time. Unable to speak the local language, they were working and fighting without almost any creature comforts and in arduous terrain. Many were exerting more physical effort on a daily basis than they ever had before. Bin Laden and his lieutenants were constantly engaged in negotiating with or mollifying local Afghan commanders, some of whom who did not like Arabs, seeing them as reckless would- be martyrs with whom they could not communicate. Bin Laden is reported to have said he always considered these days as the “happiest days of our lives,” but added, perhaps a bit ruefully, that “when one is with his brothers, one becomes more patient.”65 Bin Laden’s Arab-only unit staged its first operation on August 17, 1987, under the command of Abu Ubaydah al-Panshiri, and under the observation of Abdullah Azzam; his assistant, Shaykh Tamim al-Adnani; and Sayyaf, the leader of IULA. The operation was unsuc- cessful because the Arabs had failed to do sufficient reconnaissance and planning. They encountered the enemy in unexpected positions on the battlefield and consumed their ammunition at a far faster pace than anticipated.66 The mujahedin left to guard the camp and cover the unit’s rear were hit heavily by Soviet planes and artillery.67 Interestingly, when the Arab-only unit was at last ready to fight, bin Laden did not put himself in command of it. He deferred to Abu Ubaydah and Abu Hafs. Since childhood, Khalid al-Batarfi has said, Osama had been “a good soldier; send him anywhere and he will follow orders,” and Isam Darraz—an eyewitness—said that at Jaji bin Laden “fought in this battle like a private.”68 Steve Coll has said that bin Laden acquitted himself “honorably” in the Jaji engagements.69 The recollections of bin Laden’s associates bear this judgment out. “I saw Osama in the midst of severe fighting,” Shaykh Musa al-Qarni said in APPRENTICESHIP, 1979–1989 | 63 64 | OSAMA BIN LADEN 2006, by which point he had become one of the Saudis’ anti-Osama spokesmen. “He was not the type of man to flee and withdraw. There were battles when Osama was left alone with only two or three muja- hedin. They used to stand and fight to cover the entire mujahedin force’s withdrawal. He would withdraw only when this was accom- plished.”70 Darraz concluded that at the end of the battle, bin Laden had grown significantly in stature. “It was clear now that he’d be the leader. I was near him in the battle, many months, and he was really brave. That’s why he got respect from Afghans and Arabs.”71 The August 17 engagement started off about three weeks of intense fighting around Jaji. The Arabs did not defeat the Soviets, but they held their own until the enemy withdrew. Overall, bin Laden and his men benefited from the battle not only in terms of morale but also with gains in experience. Bin Laden later said Muslims would come to see the Jaji engagement, while small in scale, as an important battle in Islamic history, because a superpower had confronted a lightly armed force that stood its ground. Bin Laden said Allah had protected and guided the mujahedin in a battle that “pitted Muslims against the leading idol-power of the time.”72 Allah’s grace had facilitated Muham- mad’s military victories over stronger enemies at Badr and the Trench, and now it had returned. After the Jaji fight, information about bin Laden’s unit grows sparse, to say the least. The unit must have engaged in other fighting in the two years that followed, but reports citing dozens or hundreds of engagements are surely exaggerations. The last documented fighting of bin Laden’s unit occurred around Jalalabad in the spring of 1989, a few weeks after completion of the Soviet withdrawal. This engage- ment has been much discussed in the Afghan jihad literature, most of which focuses on whether or not the Pakistani military pushed the mujahedin into a semi-conventional battle before they were ade- quately prepared. A thorough analysis of the fight is beyond the scope of this book, so I will focus instead on the performance of bin Laden and his men, and assess the lessons bin Laden and lieutenants took from their combat experiences.73 The Afghan mujahedin and their Arab allies—most of whom had at best a rudimentary grasp of conventional military operations and tactics—began their Pakistan-backed assault on Jalalabad in early March 1989. Savage fighting raged around the city for three months. When the mujahedin’s initial attacks failed, the Afghan communist ground forces—alone for the first time since the Soviet withdrawal— attacked from the positions to which they had fallen back, but the insurgents held their ground. They then went back on the offensive. This proved a fatal mistake. From the city’s strong defensive posi- tions, the Afghan army employed their conventional firepower with devastating effect on insurgent forces advancing across flat and open terrain.74 When the battle began, Bin Laden had just returned to Peshawar from Saudi Arabia. He quickly went to the battlefield. Initially, he focused upon logistical support for the Arab force, purchasing with his own money thirty truckloads of arms and ammunition in Pakistan and arranging for them to be convoyed by truck to the front. He also estab- lished a makeshift hospital near Jalalabad, and bought cars and small pick-up trucks, which he sent to the mujahedin to give them increased mobility on the battlefield. One insurgent later recalled the great value of the vehicles, concluding that “Toyota is good for jihad.”75 Bin Laden thereafter joined the fighting, at one point leading his men onto the tarmac of Jalalabad airport before being driven back.76 Bin Laden was wounded at Jalalabad, and the physical bravery and leadership skill he displayed there, and earlier at Jaji, earned him the respect and affection of many Afghan commanders in Nangarhar Province. His actions also became well known in Saudi Arabia where, according to his friend Wael Julaidan, “everyone started to know about Osama.”77 The Afghans were badly beaten at Jalalabad, due in almost equal parts to the artillery and airpower of the Jalalabad garrison and the failure of mujahedin commanders to coordinate with each other. Both Afghan Arabs and Afghans incurred heavy casualties in the drawn- out, back-and-forth struggle. Bin Laden took note of the Afghan insurgent groups’ lack of cooperation—indeed, he strove to overcome it while the battle was in progress. He later claimed that over 170 Afghan Arabs were killed in the Jalalabad fighting, and that this number exceeded all Arab fatalities in the war until then.78 By admit- ting this, he was also admitting that fewer than 500 Afghan Arabs were killed in the thirteen years of the jihad, a minuscule total compared to APPRENTICESHIP, 1979–1989 | 65 66 | OSAMA BIN LADEN the several hundred thousand Afghan mujahedin killed in the same period. He was conceding that the war had been won by “poor, bare- footed Afghans.”79 Bin Laden’s frankness about the comparatively small role played by Arabs in the Afghans’ jihad has not changed since 1989, when he appeared in a video prodding young Muslims to act, noting that “the number of volunteers who joined jihad is still small considering the size of the Islamic world.”80 By not inflating the numbers, or using the rhetoric of an “Arab victory” in Afghanistan, he reveals a realistic assessment of the war. Nonetheless, the Afghans’ victory was further proof that faithful Muslims could prevail even against a superpower, despite the latter’s far superior military forces. From 1989 onward, bin Laden no longer wasted any time worrying whether the infidels could be beaten; he moved on to devising how they would be beaten. And how Muslims can win emerged from a combination of the lessons bin Laden and his lieutenants learned during the Afghan jihad.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 14:53:30 +0000