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Bin Laden – The Wrong Target? - Empire? - Global Policy Forum Bin Laden – The Wrong Target?
By Paddy Ashdown
The Times
September 20, 2001
By concentrating all its energy on Osama bin Laden, the West is in danger of overlooking an enemy who could as easily be in Ealing as in Kandahar
What frightens me more than anything else in this crisis is our dangerous obsession with simplicities. Let us assume for the moment that “Osama Bin Laden” was responsible for the atrocities in the US last week and that we must take this “war” to where he is — in Afghanistan.
I shall explain the reasons for the quotation marks around Bin Laden’s name later.
But first of all some facts about Afghanistan.
We talk of Afghanistan as though it were a single, unified country — a sort of Netherlands with mountains and a lot of mad mullahs.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Afghanistan is fractured, divided and, when not at war with outsiders, has been almost permanently at war with itself.
Imagine Afghanistan as a box. Now draw two horizontal lines through it, dividing it into three equal portions. The top band is the home of the Tadjiks who speak Farsi (Persian) with Mazar-e Sharif as their principal town. The lower band is mostly Pashtuns who speak Pushtu, look south to Pakistan and have Kandahar as their capital.
In the central band, draw a dot in the middle and around that draw a circle which touches the lines above and below. This is the Hazarajat. Hazarajat means “land of the thousand” and its people derive from a quirk of history. Genghis Khan’s warriors roamed in bands of a thousand horsemen known as Hazara. Unfortunately for their descendants (who are Shia Muslims, unlike the majority in Afghanistan), the Mongol tide withdrew, leaving them trapped in the high plateau of central Afghanistan. The Hazara are physically different from other Afghans, being of Mongol appearance. They have no major town and are the underdogs of Afghan society.
To the left of the Hazarajat circle is the great city of Herat, which belongs to the Tadjiks. To the right is the capital, Kabul, which belongs to the Pashtuns. In the middle is a muddle of the two of them.
Historically, power in Afghanistan belongs largely to the Pashtuns, but the Tadjiks are the educated elite and hold many of the administrative posts.
Afghanistan’s politics are, if anything, even more fractious and divided than its ethnic mix. And one of the reasons for this is Western policy.
During the Soviet-Afghan war, the West sought to hide its hand in Afghanistan by using Pakistan as our “front”. We secretly provided weapons and cash to the guerrillas (including bin Laden) and left it to Pakistan to handle the day-to-day administration of the war: cash, arms distribution, etc. It was a task that the Pakistanis carried out with enthusiasm — and an appropriate share of the cash as it passed through their hands.
After the Soviets left, the West lost interest. But Pakistan, with severe enough problems of its own, was left to cope with the backwash of chaos and conflict in its volatile neighbour. It decided that it had to have a hand in who won the civil war which followed. It chose an incompetent, anti-Western Islamic fundamentalist, Gulbadin Hekmatyar, as its instrument and actively encouraged the involvement of Arabs from the Middle East with money (eg, bin Laden). Note: Afghans are not Arabs. Arabs, too, are foreigners in Afghanistan.
Despite massive logistical and material support (including manpower) from Pakistan, Hekmatyar failed.
Pakistan tried again, this time through the creation of a new group called the Taleban, which in Arabic means “the seekers”, so cloaking Pakistan’s agenda in a new Islamic coat.
Now go back to our “square” map of Afghanistan. The right-hand side of the square represents the border with Pakistan.
Colour in a series of red dots as close to this edge as possible, but no higher than the first horizontal line marking the northern limits of Pashtun territory. These are the bases, some of them academies of death, of Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organisation, al-Qaeda. They contain about 10,000 men.
It is no accident that these red spots are close to the border with Pakistan. Establishing them depended on Pakistani help. You should not be too shocked, if you arrived at one of these camps for tea, to find not only a mix of Arab students from many nations, but also Pakistanis preparing to meet Allah in Kashmir.
But al-Qaeda is not just a suicide organisation. It also has a private army, the 055 Brigade, numbering perhaps 2,000 to 3,000. These shock troops are used frequently by the Taleban in their war against other factions, most notably the United Front, whose moderate, pro-Western leader, the gifted and charismatic Ahmad Shah Masood, was assassinated by suicide bombers just before the attack on the USA last week (probably as part of the same operation).
But what is important is that al-Qaeda’s agenda differs significantly from that of the Taleban. It is not concerned with creating an independent Afghan Islamic state. In the long term there can be no room for the Taleban in its ambitions. Having being artificially introduced to the region, it has grown in confidence and stature. It is important also to understand that while members of 055 Brigade might serve with Taleban forces, they are not, in any Western sense, integrated. They remain rather like an international brigade, different in their language, habit, interpretation of Islam and vision of the future of Afghanistan.
Contrary to Western received wisdom, fundamentalism of the sort practised by the Taleban is rather alien to the majority of ordinary Afghans, who wear their attachment to Islam lightly, enjoying music, dancing, radio and sports. But if the ordinary Afghan has mixed feelings about the Taleban, he will feel even more ambivalent about bin Laden’s private army, who are mostly foreign Arabs. If there is one thing an Afghan dislikes more than being told what to do by another Afghan, it is being told what to do by a foreigner, even if he is a fellow Muslim. This, and the growing rivalry with the Taleban, are bin Laden’s Achilles’ heels.
So, if we have to act militarily against bin Laden (and I suspect that we now do), then we should: a) make it big enough to satisfy the desire for retribution which has been generated in the US, but b) make it limited enough to prevent further destabilisation and, most important of all, c) make it in a way which widens the fissures between bin Laden and his Afghan hosts (including the Taleban), rather than welding these over in a common front against an external enemy.
The safest way to do this would be by helping other Afghans who already oppose the Taleban, and their temporary alliance with al-Qaeda, to clean up their country. And there are plenty to choose from.
There was an uprising against the Taleban in the city of Khost last year. There are 50,000 Shia Muslims who live around Bamian and have no love for the Sunni Taleban.
And there are pockets of outright resistance, too: one bordering Iran to the west of Herat; another next to Turkmenistan, centred on Faryab and controlled by an Uzbeki warlord, Abdul Dostum, who has a long history of swapping allegiances; a further small pocket, allied to Ahmad Shah Masood’s United Front, around the town of Asadabad. And there is, finally, the United Front itself, now led after Masood’s assassination by General Mohammad Fakhim.
But if “attacking Afghanistan” requires a little more subtlety than the easy simplicities sometimes represented in our papers, what to do in such an attack is even more difficult.
I am not going to speculate on military options. We should leave the military a decent area of obscurity to get on with their task. But one point is worth making. Bombing alone would simply rearrange the rubble, which is all that is left of much of this desperate country.
Some say we should “bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age”. The problem is, this has already been done by the Soviets. Can we make them suffer? Not much more than they already do. Can we level their houses? Turn their schools to rubble? Eradicate their hospitals? Destroy their infrastructure? Too late. Someone has already done that, too.
This time, I fear, if we are serious, we will have to part company with the comfortable concept of fighting a casualty-less war from 15,000ft.
Next we need to consider the name on everyone’s lips: that of Osama bin Laden. The presumption on behalf of almost everyone (encouraged, probably unintentionally, by Western leaders) is that this man is a kind of Muslim Dr No — the evil mastermind planning, funding, executing and directing a campaign of worldwide terrorism.
That bin Laden is not the kind of man you would like to have dinner with, I have no doubt. But to presume that he is the single directing intelligence behind all this is fatally to underestimate our difficulties and the complexity of the action we have to take.
Osama bin Laden may well be the major funder, perhaps even spiritual guru, of the terrorist networks we are fighting. But beyond that, his is merely the name which has floated to the top of a witches’ brew of organisations which are diffuse, decentralised, appear and disappear, change their names and composition, and have occasional contacts with states but can act alone, though they more often do so in constantly shifting alliances with others. It is perfectly possible that bin Laden knew neither the date nor the nature, nor even the target, of the horrors of last week.
What we are dealing with is not a single, supremely evil “mad mullah” sitting in a cave in Afghanistan and plotting to destroy the world, but rather a widespread network of terror, the tentacles of which probably reach deep into almost all its target countries (remember how much the US helped in training those who attacked it?). The danger is that we have concentrated so much on the name of bin Laden that we believe that if only we can “get him” it will all end.
It won’t.
I don’t much like the language of war which is being so widely used. But if this is a war, it has to be fought on many fronts and at many levels, some visible, some invisible. So far the terror networks have been disrupting our home bases, forcing us to change the way we live and provoking us to overreaction. So far we have almost completely failed to disrupt the areas in which they work — which are not, as so many seem to believe, in a single country such as Afghanistan, but in every country and in none.
They operate across borders. They will have used the very international systems that they attacked in the World Trade Centre to move the huge sums of money needed to fund last week’s horrors. They use our systems of easy and anonymous travel to move the people and weapons to prepare their attacks. They use the Internet to form their alliances and to co-ordinate their actions. This is where they operate. And this is where we have to operate too, using the same underground systems that they use to disrupt them and destroy their means of working.
Messrs Blair and Bush are right in stressing that this will be a long, hard slog. They are wrong in seeming to place so much emphasis on a single name and a single place. I suspect that our real difficulty will not be how we deal with bin Laden if we can find him, but how we deal with the subversive network operating from a newsagent’s in Ealing. Our battleground will be as much about winning the hearts and minds of disaffected Muslim youth in Bradford as about establishing military bases in the Hindu Kush. If we really want to stem the supply of suicide bombers for the future, we need look no farther than the conditions of the 1.9 million Arabs who have been trapped, hopeless, in Palestinian refugees camps for half a century now.
The question for us will be not just what military weapons we use, but on what civil liberties we are prepared to compromise. The anonymity of bank transactions and secret accounts. Our easy freedom of travel. Whether we will allow our external intelligence services to operate more freely in domestic territory. Whether we permit unbreakable personal codes to be used on the Internet. Identity cards.
This is going to be a long campaign if we are to win it. But it will not be solved by picking a single man and a single country, or by allowing the belief that victory comes with a single strike, however much people in their pain want it to be otherwise.
*Paddy Ashdown is a former leader of the Liberal Democrats
