390. Road To 9/11: The Soviet-Afghan War (Part 2)

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2:05This is the story of how a regional conflict at the end of the Cold War gave birth to the world's most dangerous terrorist network. It's also the story of a charismatic Palestinian preacher and a quiet, shy Saudi financier named Osama bin Laden, who between them built a global army of holy warriors. In this episode, we step into the lion's den. We trace the founding of a tiny, highly secretive vanguard called Al-Qaeda and explore how a radicalized, stateless army ultimately fell into the hands of Osama bin Laden. Now, Anita's busy with another project today, but instead we have to navigate us through the treacherous world of 1980s Peshawar, a man who was there, as was I at this time, in the beginning of both our careers as young hacks, Jason Burke.

3:01Welcome back to Empire Pod. Hi, Willie. Great to be here. But we're going now to Peshawar in the 1980s. So tell us what it was like when you and Azama both turned up. Peshawar in the early 80s, obviously it's a frontier city. You're right up against the Afghan frontier. You're also right up against the border zones of Pakistan that were effectively lawless at the time. They're pretty lawless now, but it was even more anarchic back then. It was a city of around a half a million people, but expanding hugely and very rapidly as this enormous influx of refugees came in from Afghanistan, fleeing the war, and particularly the bombardments that the Soviets were doing in villages and so forth.

3:47The war started in late 79, but there'd been unrest for many years previously in Afghanistan. It was a very, very volatile situation. And Peshaw was the sort of center, the base for anyone with interests in Afghanistan who was in Pakistan. Which meant, we should say, everything from Osama and al-Zawahiri and these discontented Arabs fighting jihad to English public school girls sort of setting up clinics, odd people working for slightly dodgy charities that were trying to help the Mujahideen, the Mujahideen themselves, Pakistani police fleecing everybody. Yeah, and smugglers, lots of smugglers, drug dealers, like the Opium is beginning, Opium is just beginning.

4:31You could drive up towards the Khyber Pass and you'd pass four or five massive compounds of people who were making astonishing fortunes from opium and heroin. And you could just walk in. I remember literally just getting out of a tourist taxi on my first trip to the Khyber Pass, talking my way through the guards and walking into these extraordinary oases. I mean, it was very, for a young journalist, it was the most exciting thing. I once went to dinner with Imran Khan when I was writing a profile of him. And we went out of Pakistan into this wasteland where a whole load of motorcycle outriders suddenly appeared from nowhere to take his Mercedes through the tribal territories.

5:08We arrived at this desert fortress with anti-aircraft missiles on the turrets. And after dinner, everyone just took racks of AK-47s off the walls and fired Tracer into the air as after dinner entertainment. And then there was a slight change of tone because in the beginning of the Afghan Jihad, People like you and I were very welcome, and the Mujahideen were very happy to take us into Afghanistan. And it was oddly a safe place, despite all the sort of guns and everything. It was a place where we were regarded as allies because we were helping the war on the Soviets and providing the oxygen and publicity for these groups.

5:46And then you began to hear reports about people running into groups of Arabs who were far less friendly and who were positively hostile to Western journalists like you and me wandering around. Well, you think it's really interesting because what happens in the 80s is what starts as a religious conservative revolt of the provinces against a kind of Marxist modernizing, aggressively modernizing atheistic regime in Kabul evolves into something that is much more modern in its religious outlook, much more politicized, much more global and increasingly incubating. this particular strand of extremist Islamism.

6:33Not necessarily among all the Afghans, but among exactly the people you're talking about, those Arabs who've come in to volunteer to fight alongside the Afghans. So you have all these different groups with slightly different perspectives on this. From the American perspective, this is part of the Cold War. And this is the freedom-loving West stopping the Marxist bear of Russia from getting a warm water port, from launching down into Pakistan and containing communism. Now, other people are fighting the same war with a completely different perspective. For the Mujahideen, as for the Arab Afghans, the conflict is for Islam against secular or Marxist heresy.

7:18These people regard the pro-Russian regime in Kabul as the work of the devil, and suddenly they've got to overthrow with the sword of Islam. And linking these two worlds is the whole Saudi effort. Now, the Saudis are matching every dollar that the Americans give for the jihad with a dollar of their own. That connection is a really important one because it links the Afghan war with what's going on in the Middle East. And that connection with Saudi Arabia is one of the principal conduits for influence and ideas, as well as just material, money and so forth, people to flow backwards and forwards.

8:08And Saudi is really important, but there's also Egypt and a flow from Egypt backwards and forwards, and also elsewhere in the Middle East, right the way actually from kind of Morocco, in fact the broader Islamic world from Morocco all the way across to the Philippines, you end up with these connections being established. But just to clarify a canard that's often put out there, it's not true, is it, that the CIA are funding extremists like bin Laden to fight against the Soviets? They are not directly receiving CIA money. No, that's one of these myths that is just impossible to uproot because so many people want to believe it.

8:50But no, it just didn't work like that. So, you know, you have the seven major Mujahideen parties who are all led by Afghans and entirely staffed by Afghans. People like bin Laden are a tiny minority. You know, you're talking probably under 100 fighters, even perhaps a couple of hundred at the peak. even four, then you're talking dozens in a war where you've got an entire population of Afghans mobilized, basically, or two thirds. There are 500 ,000 Afghans in the field, or 250 ,000 Afghans are like 150 Arab Afghans. So this idea that they either played a significant part or were receiving substantial CIA funds or training or anything else just is a nonsense.

9:34There's no evidence for it whatsoever. But it is a nice morality tale, basically. But it's also quite an important thing in that it sets Bin Laden up within the Saudi establishment. This guy who would have been known to the Saudi establishment in Prince Turkey as the son of a builder is regarded locally in Saudi Arabia and among Arabs interested in the jihad as now a hero figure. By the end. Yeah, by the end. I mean, I think it's important to remember Remember that, you know, from over to the 80s, during the war against the Soviets, bin Laden is a completely obscure figure. Nobody knows who he is and nobody's really aware of what he's doing.

10:11In fact, he's not really doing very much. Now, there's also a very important character who's much less familiar to the world. Everyone's heard of bin Laden, but very few people have heard of Abdullah Azam. But he's a crucial figure at this point. Tell us about him. So this is a man who is born in the north of the West Bank. Janine, they are. In Janine, absolutely. and who is forced to leave his home in 67 when the Israelis take over the West Bank, move to Jordan. So for those that don't know this bit of history, in the 1967 war, the moment when the Israelis captured the wall in Jerusalem and you have those pictures of the paratroopers standing there triumphant, at the same time 350 ,000 Palestinians become refugees in Jordan.

10:58there is a whole second mini Nakba that takes place at this point and among them is Abdul Arasam. Yeah, Arasam is, he's a school teacher, he's young, he's forced to leave his home, he goes to Jordan, he wants to become an Islamic scholar and he's not immediately active. He's deeply involved with the cause of the Palestinians in the sense that he is a victim of the occupation of the worst bank by the Israelis in 67, but he doesn't see a clear path. He's more interested in a career in Islamic scholarship. Really interestingly, there's a very good anecdote, which is well verified, which is the moment for him where he's already blaming the failure to fight the Israelis and to defeat the Israelis in 67 on the lack of faith among Arabs and Muslims in the region.

11:48And he's at home, it's late at night and he hears singing. And the singing is nationalist, secular Palestinian fighters, possibly belonging to Yasser Arafat, maybe Marxist, popular front for the liberation of Palestine, people like that. And he hears them singing nationalist songs about their fight for Palestine. And he thinks, what am I doing? I'm an Islamic scholar, aspirant Islamic scholar, a Palestinian who's lost his home. I haven't done anything. And at that moment, And he sees a different way forward, a much more militant way forward. He spends some time with an armed group of Islamists who are operating within, actually interestingly, the PLO with quite a lot of tension.

12:32I haven't heard this story. They don't get on very well because the PLO is predominantly kind of secular. And so there are lots of arguments. He gets into trouble for insulting Che Guevara, who is the great hero of the Palestinian Nationalist armed movement at the time and he's very derogatory about some of the other practices that are going on that ends in 1970 he ends up studying clerical studies in in damascus he goes from there to egypt interestingly in the early 70s where he's exposed to and part of the circles around side kutub did he know side kutub personally no he's there too late kutub's been hanged in 66.

13:14He gets there in the early 70s, but he knows the family. He's quite impressed by the family and their devotion to the memory of Khutub and also their own personal commitment to a fairly militant form of Islam. He's in those circles in Cairo. Although there's one moment where he doesn't meet a genuine militant who's going to go on within a few years to sort of a front into an armed revolt against the Egyptian authorities and who tells him that he's a backslider. He isn't sufficiently militant. He's a hypocrite. And Azam, who is no shrinking violet ideologically, is quite shocked by this. He gets his PhD in Islamic studies.

13:57He goes to Jordan. He's quite successful in Jordan's university system as a young academic. Teaching Islamic law or what's he teaching? Yeah, Islamic studies generally. He really enjoys the contact with the students and teaching and so forth, but he rubs up pretty fast against Jordanian security services who aren't very keen on his implicit criticism of the king. So they boot him out and he gets a contract in Mecca to teach Islamic studies again. In Mecca, this is for him enormously important, also gets him out of Jordan. This is heaven, yeah. Again, he's part of this, like he was in Cairo, he's part of this really interesting and important new world milieu of quite radical, very modern contemporary Islamists, extremist thinkers.

14:50Publishes a couple of books. One is called Red Cancer, and it is a kind of diatribe against the left. Muslim is atheistic and all that stuff. He blames it all on the Jews, echoing decades of similar conspiracy theories. And then he publishes another one, which is called Islam and the Future of Mankind. One is a prescription of what's gone wrong, and the other is a prescription of what should be done. It's a pretty brutal prescription, you know, and they sell like hotcakes. They're bestsellers. He becomes a kind of Islamist celebrity. He's on the circuit, lecture circuit. This is a moment where you've got better communications, end of the 70s, early 80s.

15:33Cassettes of his sermons, that sort of thing. Yeah, and all over. He's all over the Middle East, but he's also in Italy. He goes to the US. He's traveling really widely, and he's a very good public speaker. He's quite striking. He's a handsome man. He's full of fire, and he has the kind of Islamic clerical scholarship behind it, which a lot of the lay preachers, the activists, don't know. Don't have. So at what point does he issue this famous fatwa, the defense of Muslim lands? Well, that comes out of his experience in Afghanistan. So in 81, he goes from Mecca to take up a job in Islamabad, a job that's actually funded by one of the big Saudi NGOs.

16:18And he's really impressed by the Afghan Mujahideen. He believes they're on the front of the battle against global unbelief. And he starts to build a support network for them. And he starts to build a huge propaganda network devoted to bringing in funds and volunteers for that. So this is actually quite an important point, Jason, isn't it? Because in the pop version of this story, bin Laden is absolutely the central and the overwhelming figure. But Azam is actually the guy who is turning the jihad into a global franchise before bin Laden gets anywhere near this. Bin Laden is nobody. Bin Laden is this young, rich kid from Saudi Arabia, the son of a tycoon who's never done anything.

17:13He's been into Afghanistan. He goes into Afghanistan once in 1984 for a couple of days, and he's sort of transformed by it. But Azzam has been doing this for years and years, and he's really, really good at it. This is so interesting. I remember after 9-11, writing pieces in newspapers saying how much the Palestinian issue was generating, how important it was as one of the principal elements in the Muslim complaint against the West. And got a lot of pushback at that time. People saying, oh, it's absolutely separate, nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, absolutely different. Azam shows that there is a direct link, doesn't it?

17:54Baaz I'm a Palestinian. You're absolutely right in the sense that in 1985, he publishes this extraordinarily influential book, which is in defense of Muslim lands, in which he innovates by saying that the obligation, individual's obligation to commit to jihad in whatever way you can, is incumbent on everybody, wherever they live, and wherever or whenever a jihad is necessary. So that even if you are in the US as a Muslim or in Egypt or in Saudi or in the Philippines or wherever, and there is a jihad underway, a defensive war against unbelief in Afghanistan or in wherever it might be, then it's still your duty to act.

18:46Even if, and this is important too, your sovereign, your ruler, your parents, your cleric says you shouldn't. And this is a kind of globalization. It's the global call to jihad, which is really powerful, particularly when it's backed by Azam's rhetorical gifts, but this big propaganda network he's built up with magazines and with videos and cassettes, particularly influential audio cassettes, and with his vocabulary that he's developed, which talks of martyrdom and of the almost supernatural interventions of birds that make Soviet helicopters crash and of the wonder and mystique of death for the face and the beauty of the violence and the cause.

19:41This is really heady stuff, particularly if you're an 18-year-old it's somewhere in Algeria or wherever who are reading this for the first time. Now, we need to bring these two currents together, bin Laden and Azzam. They meet for the first time in Peshawar, is that right? No, they've met previously in Mecca, which has only come just up the road from where bin Laden lives in Jeddah. He's there often. Bin Laden has attended some of the lectures that Azzam has done. So when they bump into each other again in Peshawar, they're already friends. Yeah, they know each other and they've stayed in touch.

20:19And in fact, Azam is going to, when he goes to Saudi Arabia, sometimes he stays with bin Laden. Bin Laden is much younger. He's very inexperienced. He's completely overawed by the older, very accomplished and famous Azam. Azam sees someone who could be very useful and he's right, but they do have a prior relationship. When Bin Laden first goes to Pakistan, which is in about 1981, he's taking money that he's raised, not his own money, but money he's raised from others to give to the Mujahideen. He checks in with Azam and eventually it's Azam who in 1984 convinces him to go over the border and spend a few days with one of the Majidine factions and experience the war firsthand for the first time.

21:08And that, as I say, is just this extraordinarily powerful experience for bin Laden and it changes his outlook in a really significant way. We need to take a break, but after the break, we're going to see how these two men, Azam and the young bin Laden, established the Maktab al-Khidamat, the services bureau in Peshawar. Essentially, a reception desk for holy war.

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23:39Welcome back. So, Jason, tell us about the Maktab al-Kidamat, the Services Bureau in Peshawar. Is this the first stab at al-Qaeda? Well, it becomes a sort of prototype, perhaps, for al-Qaeda. It's important to the formation of al-Qaeda. But when it's created, which is about 1985, no one's thought of al-Qaeda. Nobody's even thought of taking the jihad beyond Afghanistan, and certainly not at that moment. And it's funded by bin Laden, not by bin Laden's personal fortune, but by the donations that bin Laden is able to get in Saudi Arabia, where he has loads of contacts and so forth. So we should say that this is actually a bit of a low point in the jihad against the Soviets.

24:27In a few years' time, the Stinger missile will appear, which is a small shoulder-held missile that the Muj can take in with them and which changes the whole nature of the resistance. But at this point, it's not at all clear that the Mujahideen are going to succeed, is it, Jason? No, it's a horrendous, bloody, attritional struggle. The villages are in smoking ruins all over rural Afghanistan. The Soviets can't win. Famously, they own the roads and the towns, but the Muj own the countryside and the night. It's just one of those classic kind of insurgent wars that no one's going to win. And the sufferers are the rural Afghans and millions have fled.

25:12I think four or five million flee, something like a third of the population, more. And a lot of them are around Peshawar, right in the face of the people who we're talking about, the Arab Afghans who are arriving. And it's important to say that, and it's directly relevant to the creation of Mahdam al-Khidmat, that a lot of those Arab Afghans who are arriving, and there are a few hundred at any one time, maybe up to 1 ,000, 90 % of them, certainly 18 % of them, are involved in what would be called charitable activities. They're involved in clinics, schools for refugees, handing out food parcels, whatever it is.

25:47They're not involved in military activities at all. And Maktab al-Qidmat is set up as, as you say, a reception centre, a logistics centre for the volunteers who are coming in, in answer to Abdullah Azzam's call for support. And it kind of fits into this NGO role, offering sort of multiple pathways for helping the Afghans, but primarily it's about the military assistance that these volunteers can offer. And it's dealing with things like finding guest houses or opening guest houses for these fighters who are coming in, which, as we'll see in later episodes, the registers that they keep later become very important intelligence documents.

26:42Yeah, it's bureaucratic. It's like a lot of NGOs, you know, a lot of meetings, a lot of registers and records. Because a lot of the volunteers turn up with their families, and families are often quite numerous. So they've got to find accommodation for them, they've got to give them some money for food, whatever, find jobs for people, get them to school. And it's in the sort of nicer bit of Peshawar, which is going towards the Haiba Pass over in University Town Hayatabad. Up to the cantonment, yeah. Yeah, which is where a lot of the Mujahideen factions are based and the drug smugglers as well. This is the year I first turned up, the 86, and these guys are very much around.

27:18Yeah, and visible, particularly distinct from the Afghans and the Pakistanis, because these guys have got a lot more money. You know, they're the ones driving around in the big four-wheel drive trucks. All brand new, exactly. And that's important, too, because there's a lot of resentment from some of the Afghan Mujahideen to these Arab Afghans who turn up, who don't speak Pashto or Dari or any of the Afghan languages, have a very different form of Islamic observance, much more rigorous, much more Saudi style, Wahbi style, much less kind of involved in the Sufi inflected local traditions of Bareilvi in Pakistan and elsewhere.

27:52I went on that first visit to a Sufi shrine outside Peshawar and already there was tension between the, every Thursday night all the Afghans would turn up with their rababs and start singing songs to the saint. And there was a new madrasa funded by the Saudis down the same lane. And And these guys would turn up and argue with these guys, saying you shouldn't be playing music. This is completely wrong. Yeah, exactly. And there are other things that were causing a lot of tension inside Afghanistan as well. Particularly the fact that these guys, the Arab Afghans, often have no military experience and are pretty useless, frankly.