A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure
outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom
and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday (May 2).
And then the world went mad.
Fresh from providing us with a copy of his birth
certificate, the American president turned up in the middle of the
night to provide us with a live-time death certificate for Osama bin
Laden, killed in a town named after a major in the army of the old
British empire. A single shot to the head, we were told. But the
body’s secret flight to Afghanistan, an equally secret burial at sea?
The weird and creepy disposal of the body – no shrines, please – was
almost as creepy as the man and his vicious organisation.
The Americans were drunk with joy. David Cameron
thought it “a massive step forward”. India described it as a
“victorious milestone”. “A resounding triumph,” Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu boasted. But after 3,000 American dead on 9/11, countless
more in the Middle East, up to half a million Muslims dead in Iraq and
Afghanistan and 10 years trying to find bin Laden, pray let us have no
more “resounding triumphs”. Revenge attacks? Perhaps they will come,
by the little groupuscules in the West, who have no direct contact
with al-Qaeda. Be sure, someone is already dreaming up a “Brigade of
the Martyr Osama bin Laden”. Maybe in Afghanistan, among the Taliban.
But the mass revolutions in the Arab world over the
past four months mean that al-Qaeda was already politically dead. Bin
Laden told the world – indeed he told me personally – that he wanted
to destroy the pro-western regimes in the Arab world, the
dictatorships of the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis. He wanted to create a
new Islamic caliphate. But these past few months millions of Arab
Muslims rose up and were prepared for their own martyrdom – not for
Islam but for freedom and liberty and democracy. Bin Laden didn’t get
rid of the tyrants. The people did. And they didn’t want a caliph.
I met the man three times and have only one
question left unasked: what did he think as he watched those
revolutions unfold this year – under the flags of nations rather than
Islam, Christians and Muslims together, the kind of people his own al-Qaeda
men were happy to butcher?
In his own eyes, his achievement was the creation
of al-Qaeda, the institution which had no card-carrying membership.
You just woke up in the morning, wanted to be in al-Qaeda – and you
were. He was the founder. But he was never a hands-on warrior. There
was no computer in his cave, no phone calls to set bombs off. While
the Arab dictators ruled uncontested with our support, they largely
avoided condemning American policy; only bin Laden said these things.
Arabs never wanted to fly planes into tall buildings but they did
admire a man who said what they wanted to say. But now, increasingly,
they can say these things. They don’t need bin Laden. He had become a
nonentity.
But talking of caves, bin Laden’s demise does bring
Pakistan into grim focus. For months President Ali Zardari has been
telling us that bin Laden was living in a cave in Afghanistan. Now it
turns out he was living in a mansion in Pakistan. Betrayed? Of course
he was. By the Pakistan military or the Pakistan Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI)? Quite possibly both. Pakistan knew where he was.
Not only was Abbottabad the home of the country’s
military college – the town was founded by Major James Abbott of the
British army in 1853 – but it is the headquarters of Pakistan’s
Northern Army Corps’ Second Division. Scarcely a year ago I sought an
interview with another “most wanted man” – the leader of the group
believed to be responsible for the Mumbai massacres. I found him in
the Pakistani city of Lahore – guarded by uniformed Pakistani
policemen holding machine guns.
Of course, there is one more obvious question
unanswered: couldn’t they have captured bin Laden? Didn’t the CIA or
the Navy Seals or the US Special Forces or whatever American outfit
killed him have the means to throw a net over the tiger? “Justice,”
Barack Obama called his death. In the old days, of course, “justice”
meant due process, a court, a hearing, a defence, a trial. Like the
sons of Saddam, bin Laden was gunned down. Sure, he never wanted to be
taken alive – and there were buckets of blood in the room in which he
died.
But a court would have worried more people than bin
Laden. After all, he might have talked about his contacts with the CIA
during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, or about his cosy
meetings in Islamabad with Prince Turki, Saudi Arabia’s former head of
intelligence. Just as Saddam – who was tried for the murder of a mere
153 people rather than thousands of gassed Kurds – was hanged before
he had the chance to tell us about the gas components that came from
America, his friendship with Donald Rumsfeld, the US military
assistance he received when he invaded Iran in 1980.
Oddly, he was not the “most wanted man” for the
international crimes against humanity of September 11, 2001. He gained
his Wild West status by al-Qaeda’s earlier attacks on the US embassies
in Africa and the attack on the US barracks in Dhahran. He was always
waiting for cruise missiles – so was I when I met him. He had waited
for death before, in the caves of Tora Bora in 2001 when his
bodyguards refused to let him stand and fight and forced him to walk
over the mountains to Pakistan. Some of his time he would spend in
Karachi – he was obsessed with Karachi; he even, weirdly, gave me
photographs of pro-bin Laden graffiti on the walls of the former
Pakistani capital and praised the city’s imams.
His relations with other Muslims were mysterious;
when I met him in Afghanistan, he initially feared the Taliban,
refusing to let me travel to Jalalabad at night from his training camp
– he handed me over to his al-Qaeda lieutenants to protect me on the
journey the next day. His followers hated all Shia Muslims as heretics
and all dictators as infidels – though he was prepared to cooperate
with Iraq’s ex-Baathists against the country’s American occupiers, and
said so in an audiotape which the CIA typically ignored. He never
praised Hamas and was scarcely worthy of their “holy warrior”
definition on May 2 which played – as usual – straight into Israel’s
hands.
In the years after 2001, I maintained a faint
indirect communication with bin Laden, once meeting one of his trusted
al-Qaeda associates at a secret location in Pakistan. I wrote out a
list of 12 questions, the first of which was obvious: what kind of
victory could he claim when his actions resulted in the US occupation
of two Muslim countries? There was no reply for weeks. Then one
weekend, waiting to give a lecture in St Louis in the US, I was told
that Al Jazeera had produced a new audiotape from bin Laden. And one
by one – without mentioning me – he answered my 12 questions. And yes,
he wanted the Americans to come to the Muslim world – so he could
destroy them.
When Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl was
kidnapped, I wrote a long article in The Independent, pleading
with bin Laden to try to save his life. Pearl and his wife had looked
after me when I was beaten on the Afghan border in 2001; he even gave
me the contents of his contacts book. Much later, I was told that bin
Laden had read my report with sadness. But Pearl had already been
murdered. Or so he said.
Yet bin Laden’s own obsessions blighted even his
family. One wife left him, two more appeared to have been killed in
Sunday’s American attack. I met one of his sons, Omar, in Afghanistan
with his father in 1994. He was a handsome little boy and I asked him
if he was happy. He said “yes” in English. But in 2009 he published a
book called Growing Up bin Laden and – recalling how his father
killed his beloved dogs in a chemical warfare experiment – described
him as an “evil man”. In his book, he too remembered our meeting; and
concluded that he should have told me that no, he was not a happy
child.
By midday on May 2, I had three phone calls from
Arabs, all certain that it was bin Laden’s double who was killed by
the Americans – just as I know many Iraqis who still believe that
Saddam’s sons were not killed in 2003, nor Saddam really hanged. In
due course, al-Qaeda will tell us. Of course, if we are all wrong and
it was a double, we’re going to be treated to yet another videotape
from the real bin Laden – and President Barack Obama will lose the
next election.