The road to 9/11 and beyond

Over the last several years, through captured al-Qaida documents, court proceedings and various news investigations, a clearer picture has emerged of the complex organization bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Zawahiri, nurtured in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Wright pulls the many fascinating details together. Al-Qaida lieutenants had advanced educational and professional backgrounds -- they were university graduates, teachers, engineers, soldiers. On arrival at the training camps, new recruits filled out forms in triplicate and signed an oath of loyalty. They received a monthly salary, vacation time and health benefits.

Al-Qaida also developed a constitution and bylaws, including a recommendation that its leader have "at least seven years of jihad experience and preferably a college degree." There was an advisory council and a budget plan. "One can appreciate the ambition of al-Qaeda by looking at the bureaucratic structure, which included committees devoted to military affairs, politics, information, administration, security and surveillance," Wright says. "The military committee had subsections devoted to training, operations, research, and nuclear weapons."

The organization arose from the rubble of the Afghan-Soviet war, where bin Laden had made his name among the fighting faithful. Wright traces al-Qaida's inception back to a 1988 meeting in Peshawar, Pakistan, attended by a consortium of jihad heavyweights who shared Afghanistan experience more than they did ideological views. Citing court documents and two men he communicated with who allegedly attended the meeting, Wright reports that "a vote was taken to form a new organization aimed at keeping jihad alive after the Soviets were gone."

Although bin Laden and Zawahiri had been rivals seeking control of a broader Islamist movement, they joined forces for good in Pakistan by the mid-1990s. Wright argues al-Qaida could not have emerged without their union. "Each man filled a need in the other," he says. "Zawahiri wanted money and contacts, which bin Laden had in abundance. Bin Laden, an idealist given to causes, sought direction; Zawahiri, a seasoned propagandist, supplied it." Zawahiri had wanted to ignite a revolution in Egypt, while bin Laden was focused on expelling foreign infidels from Muslim lands. "The dynamic of the two men's relationship made Zawahiri and bin Laden into people they would never have been individually," Wright argues. "Moreover, the organization they would create, al-Qaeda, would be a vector of these two forces, one Egyptian and one Saudi. Each would have to compromise in order to accommodate the goals of the other; as a result, al-Qaeda would take a unique path, that of global jihad."

While bin Laden had been banished from Saudi Arabia, kicked out of his sanctuary in Sudan, and had few places left to go, Wright suggests that his final migration to the caves of Afghanistan in 1996 was as much a stroke of propagandistic brilliance as a move of necessity. By then bin Laden was on the run and had been stripped of most of his wealth. The cave, Wright says, became the primary symbol of his hijira, or retreat, likening bin Laden's plight to that of the prophet Mohammed, who, centuries before, had been ostracized and expelled from Mecca. In the year 622, the prophet fled to Medina, where he took refuge in a cave. It was a historic turning point, Wright observes: Within a few years Islam "burst out of Medina and spread from Spain to China in a blinding flash of conversion and conquest."

Bin Laden's move, Wright says, was emblematic of his "public-relations genius." Only by retreating from modernity and the corruption of society could bin Laden presume to speak for "the true Islam" and those who longed to restore its purity and dominion. "Inside the chrysalis of myth that he had spun about himself," Wright says, "he was becoming a representative of all persecuted and humiliated Muslims."

Bin Laden forged that myth despite some stark contradictions. Never mind that the former construction magnate had built the Tora Bora cave complex with heavy modern machinery, or that he had outfitted it with computers, telecommunications gear and an archive of press clippings. His ascetic trappings and bitter diatribes were convincing enough to the world's subjugated and demoralized Muslims. As Wright says of bin Laden in his cave, "the mind that understood such symbolism and how it could be manipulated, was sophisticated and modern in the extreme."

Today, from Bush and Cheney speeches to the nation's Op-Ed pages, we continue to be bombarded with declarations about whether the al-Qaida faithful hate America for its freedoms or for its policies. Wright's work reveals that the answer, clearly, is both.

Bin Laden often emphasized his objection to the presence of U.S. troops on the Arabian peninsula, beginning with the Gulf War. He regularly demonized Israel and the United States as its prime benefactor. Nor were Arab allies of the United States exempt; he excoriated the corrupt Saudi regime, whose members continued their legendary indulgence in Western extravagance -- yachts, booze, women, gambling -- despite the acute inflation and unemployment ravaging the kingdom after the Gulf War. "How can you ask people to save power when everyone can see your enchanting palaces lit up night and day?" he demanded of King Fahd in August 1995. "Do we not have the right to ask you, O King, where has all the money gone? Never mind answering -- one knows how many bribes and commissions ended in your pocket."

Bin Laden knew how to further sow a crop of young, enraged jihadis in Saudi Arabia and other bankrupt societies of the Middle East. Increasingly, his fiery political dissent burned on a perversion of Islamic ideology, one obsessed with religious purification rather than any kind of governance.

Bin Laden had long harbored strict religious views of his own. But by the mid-1990s, Zawahiri -- who became both the operational and ideological mastermind of the organization, according to Wright -- was responsible for securing takfir, a doctrine of violent excommunication from Islam, at al-Qaida's visionary core. All those who did not adhere to their extremist conception of Sharia law were regarded as infidels punishable by death. Offenses included such Western behaviors as registering to vote. Despite some moral dissent in the ranks, Zawahiri apparently found bin Laden in agreement and successfully hard-wired the radical ideology into al-Qaida's strategy -- and with it the religious justification for a ghastly tactic: suicide bombing.

Wright describes the doctrine of takfir as a dark "mirror image of Islam, reversing its fundamental principles but maintaining the semblance of orthodoxy." Wiping out all offenders was no less than a religious obligation, and collateral damage, including women and children, was a non-issue. "The new takfiris believed that they were entitled to kill practically anyone and everyone who stood in their way," he says. "Indeed, they saw it as a divine duty."

Ultimately, that duty would lead to the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands in New York, who represented more than 60 nationalities and dozens of ethnicities and religions. "This battle is not between al-Qaeda and the U.S.," bin Laden declared in October 2001, lower Manhattan still smoldering. "This is a battle of Muslims against the global Crusaders." He also renewed his call for recruits: "These events have divided the whole world into two sides -- the side of believers and the side of infidels. Every Muslim has to rush to make his religion victorious."

This was indeed a theological war, Wright explains, and in bin Laden's eyes "the redemption of humanity was at stake."

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