Hatred of the U.S. clearly is one of his motives. But the reasons behind last week’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in which he is the prime suspect, may be more subtle and nuanced, with the ultimate goal of attracting more recruits to his organization.
Experts believe the attacks may be part of a planned sequence: Strike the U.S., killing people and damaging symbols of American power; provoke a violent response; use the response to brand the U.S. as an enemy of Islam; and turn that hatred into a magnet for disaffected Muslims.
Hard as it might be for Americans to understand, bin Laden’s aim may be to gain sympathy for his cause from within the Islamic world by turning the U.S. into an enemy of Islam.
“He says he is waging a defensive war on behalf of Islam,” said Yoram Schweitzer, a researcher at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism outside Tel Aviv. “His aim is to protect Islam from being humiliated and annihilated” by Western values.
“Since this is a zero-sum game and it’s an ultimate war over everything, every Muslim, in order to defend Islam, has to sacrifice everything he has: his time, his property, even his life,” Schweitzer said.
Experts point to a number of strategic goals of bin Laden and his organization, Al Qaeda, Arabic for “The Base.”
Defending Islam’s `purity’
Bin Laden, the 17th of 52 children fathered by a billionaire Saudi builder, portrays himself as defending the purity of Islam against pretenders such as the Saudi royal family and the infidel states that support them, especially the U.S. He has said in formal fatwahs, or holy edicts, that he wants to drive the U.S. armed forces out of the Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia, home to Mecca and Medina, the two holiest sites in Islam.
U.S. officials suspect bin Laden was involved to varying degrees in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the 1996 bombing of U.S. airmen in the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia and the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya.
Now exiled and believed to be living in Afghanistan, bin Laden also despises Israel and calls U.S. support for that country an alliance of “the crusaders and the Jews.”
At the outer limits of bin Laden’s wish list may be the ultimate destruction of Western culture and its replacement with a pan-Islamic world.
None of those views make bin Laden particularly unusual in parts of the Arab world. But he is set apart by his wealth, organizational ability and utter ruthlessness, and his ability to make those three qualities support one another.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has said bin Laden should be thought of as the head of a holding company, Al Qaeda.
“It is not enough to get one individual, although we will start with that one individual,” Powell said. “[The campaign against Al Qaeda] will not be over until we have gotten into the inside of this organization, inside its decision cycle, inside its planning cycle, inside its execution capability, and until we have neutralized and destroyed it. That is our objective.”
Galvanizing his movement
Before bin Laden can achieve his broad goals, he must meet several tactical ones, including enlarging and uniting his surprisingly small movement.
U.S. officials frequently refer to bin Laden’s organization as a loosely connected collection of radical Islamic groups.
One of his tactics is killing large numbers of Americans. Typically, bin Laden denies responsibility, as he has done in the case of the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks.
Those denials provide cover for the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan, where bin Laden is believed to be hiding. As long as bin Laden denies responsibility, the Taliban can refuse U.S. demands that he be handed over.
Bin Laden has made no secret of his intentions. “To kill the Americans and their allies–civilians and military–is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do,” bin Laden wrote in a 1998 fatwah.
In a 1999 interview with ABC News, bin Laden said the U.S. troop presence in Saudi Arabia in support of what he regards as a corrupt regime is the reason “behind singling out America as a target.”
To the suggestion that his tactics are cruel, he replied, “The Americans started it, and retaliation can be carried out following the principle of reciprocity.”
Judith Yaphe, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University in Washington, calls it “a resentment of the superpower culture, economy, military presence, everything.”
As appalling as some terrorist actions are, bin Laden apparently sees them as adding to his prestige and drawing adherents to his cause, much as Afghanistan’s resistance to the Soviet Union drew Muslims from around the world, including bin Laden himself, to the region.
Born in 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, bin Laden inherited a fortune now valued at about $250 million from his father, Saudi construction magnate Mohammed bin Laden. He used some of that money during the mid-1980s to support the Afghan rebels and then began building his organization.
The group is feared, but it also is small: Over 13 years, U.S. intelligence estimates he has trained some 5,000 operatives in a dozen Afghan camps.
Short-term problems
Bin Laden probably does not expect that a major attack on a U.S. target with heavy casualties would cause Washington to abandon Israel or the oil-rich Persian Gulf.
Indeed, such attacks cause bin Laden acute short-term problems–the possibility of a U.S. military reprisal, or the risk that he will be apprehended by Afghan or Pakistani authorities. But the risks present opportunities.
“He wanted to make a provocation here,” Schweitzer said. “He’s trying to solicit a reaction from the United States and its allies that will crystallize the fact that there are two camps” — bin Laden’s believers and the rest of the world.
