Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan: an insider’s perspective

A four-year dialogue between sworn enemies paints a very different picture of Osama bin Laden’s time in Afghanistan.

In The Arabs at War in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden is portrayed as harried and indecisive. Picture: AP

One of the most vexing questions in the debate on how to counter the rise of groups such as Islamic State is whether to engage the enemy in a dialogue — to use words when weapons fail. To Mustafa Hamid, one of the first Arabs to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, Leah Farrell was the enemy. He associated Farrell, a former terrorism analyst with the Australian Federal Police, with the smiling American soldiers photographed abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Hamid had been designated a terrorist by the US Treasury for allegedly helping smuggle al-Qa’ida members to Iraq after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001. But Farrell had studied his writings while researching her doctorate on militant Salafist groups and realised his unique perspective on the poorly documented role of the Arab-Afghans in the jihad against the Soviet Union and the rise of al-Qa’ida was invaluable.

The trigger that brought the two together was an opinion piece Farrell wrote for The Australian in September 2009 in which she misrepresented Hamid as a senior al-Qa’ida figure. An apology on her blog and a letter to Hamid expressing her desire to engage in a dialogue was initially rejected. Hamid eventually agreed on the condition the exchange was genuine and not one-sided. “I quickly realised she was different, she was honest and serious, and she gave me honest answers when I asked her something,” Hamid would write later.

The fruit of this four-year-long dialogue, much of it conducted by email while Hamid was under house arrest in Tehran, is the remarkable but little known story of Arab fighters in Afghanistan from 1979 until the defeat of the Taliban in late 2001. Rather than a retelling of well-trodden narratives, it sheds important new light on the dynamics between the Arab-Afghans and the various mujaheddin groups, as well as the role of Pakistan and the Gulf states in the decades-long conflict.

Hamid, the author of 12 books and numerous articles written under his nom de guerre Abu Walid al Masri, is hardly an impartial observer. A former journalist of Yemeni descent, he first arrived in Afghanistan in 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, to fight alongside mujaheddin groups opposed to the pro-Moscow regime in Kabul. In 1981, he organised a visit to the Gulf by senior Afghan mujaheddin commanders. This first direct contact with the Gulf Arabs opened the door to a steady flow of funding and foreign fighters pouring into Afghanistan, among them Osama bin Laden.

Across the next two decades Hamid was witness to many crucial events including bin Laden’s first meeting with Mullah Omar in Kandahar in 1996. Bin Laden insisted that Hamid, who was close to the Taliban leader, accompany him, fearing he might be assassinated. Instead Omar told him he was a guest, but begged the Saudi-born jihadist to keep a low profile as the Taliban’s position was so precarious. Bin Laden did the opposite, using Afghanistan as a base to train jihadists and launch terrorist attacks against the West.

While Hamid shows little sympathy for the policies of the Western powers, most of his criticism is directed at the various jihadist groups and bin Laden. As the funding from the Gulf increased, so did the opportunities for corruption. Much of the aid meant for the frontline ended up lining the pockets of mujaheddin commanders. The bin Laden that emerges in this book is not a fearless, charismatic jihadist dispensing financial largesse to build a global terror apparatus. Instead the al-Qa’ida leader appears harried and indecisive, a poor military strategist, petulant and impervious to advice.

Hamid singles out two crucial battles as framing bin Laden’s career: Jaji in 1987 and Jalalabad in 1989. Bin Laden’s victory against seemingly impossible odds in the battle against Soviet Special Forces at Jaji, near the Pakistani border in Paktia province, became the stuff of legend and elevated him as the undisputed leader of the Arab-Afghans.

But the glory days were short-lived. Two years later bin Laden led a disastrous assault on the strategic city of Jalalabad on the main highway from Kabul to the Pakistani border. Hundreds of mujaheddin died in the bloodbath, leaving the Arabs divided and reducing bin Laden’s authority to almost zero.

By the time bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996, after shuttling between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Sudan, he had with him just 14 followers.

According to Hamid it was the victory at Jaji, not the defeat at Jalalabad, that defined bin Laden’s world view. He became convinced “that if he opposed the mainstream, he won. This is why he pushed ahead with 9/11 in spite of everyone from the old leadership opposing it.”

That stubbornness and lack of strategic insight also led the al-Qa’ida leader to believe he could defeat the Americans if they invaded Afghanistan using the same guerilla warfare tactics the mujaheddin had used against the Soviets. He never counted on an air war that would leave al-Qa’ida and the Taliban all but defenceless.

As Farrell’s dialogue develops, she extracts intriguing nuggets of information from Hamid such as the participation of Afghan mujaheddin fighters in the first Gulf War; the early involvement of Pakistan’s spy agency, the ISI; divisions within the mujaheddin; and the rise of the Taliban. Hamid’s closeness to the Taliban — he pledged an oath of allegiance to Mullah Omar in 1998 — tends to cloud his judgment of the group’s role in the conflict. His propensity to portray himself as the only voice of reason in bin Laden’s circle at times seems self-serving.

He blames the younger, poorly trained generation of jihadists that emerged from the training camps of Afghanistan who saw violence as an end itself as being at the root of the present conflict in Syria and Iraq.

“In Afghanistan, the ideological control of the Salafi Wahhabis over armed groups was consolidated, and has since expanded and come to dominate Salafi jihadi yards around the world,” Hamid says. “This has led to grave consequences for the people of the countries in which these groups operate, not only most recently in Syria but everywhere they have gone.”

Such formulations might sound simplistic, but they should not be lightly dismissed, particularly when read in the wider context of Hamid’s deep and incisive testimony on the Afghan jihad and formation of al-Qa’ida.

As so many questions are being asked about what led to the rise of Islamic State, Farrell has done a commendable job in bringing us an alternative perspective on what historians will look back on as the defining period in crisis now enveloping the Arab world.

John Zubrzycki reported on Afghanistan for The Australian from 1994 to 1998.

The Arabs at War in Afghanistan

By Mustafa Hamid and Leah Farrell

Hurst Publishers, 355pp, £20 (HB)