Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [236]
Gnarled mujaheddin who met the lanky Gulf Arab (his family were originally from Aden in Yemen) thought his hands felt weak while his simpering smile reminded them of a girl’s. Actually, the soft exterior, which was slowly reconfigured so that bin Laden seemed like a modest, slow-speaking sage despite his relative youth, concealed a huge ego, a ferocious temper and a cunning organisational mind. Most Arab leaders do not need to be eloquent as repression stands in for the arts of persuasion. By contrast, bin Laden was highly eloquent in his native Arabic. He opened his own training camp—the Lion’s Den—at Jaji exclusively designed for Arab jihadists. This was an assertion of independence from Azzam. When the Russians attacked in April 1987, bin Laden and fifty of his supporters allegedly held off two hundred Russian troops for a week. This engagement gave birth to a legend of Arab fighting prowess that served to attract further recruits.
Bin Laden showed an adroit awareness of how to use the media. He had a fifty-minute video made of himself riding horses, firing weapons and lecturing his fighters. These have the indirectness of home videos because bin Laden never addresses the camera. He summoned trusted foreign journalists, notably Robert Fisk, to sit at the feet of this prodigal phenomenon: the millionaire Saudi who had given up the high life to share Afghan caves with scorpions. An easy familiarity enhanced the sensation of celebrity. Visitors noted his simple consumption of water, flat bread, rice and potato and tomato stew.26 If many Afghan mujaheddin found his renunciation of the good life incomprehensible—most of their own warlords lived rather well in urban villas kitted out with consumer gismos—it played well among his fellow Gulf Arabs. He did not demur when his followers took to calling him ‘the sheikh’, a dual title that means clan ruler and religious sage. While bin Laden had no theological expertise or spiritual authority whatsoever, any more than the doctors and engineers around him, and was physically hundreds of miles from the traditional sites of Islamic learning, gradually through his mountainside appearances he assumed all of those roles within the new disorder he was hatching even as US policymakers spoke airily in their big-talking way of the order they were about to impose as the USSR disintegrated. While they described the future architecture of the world in Foreign Affairs, National Interest and similar journals, thousands of miles away others construed the world through the life and times of the Prophet.27
As the Soviet Union under Gorbachev resolved to pull out of its disastrous eight-year campaign in Afghanistan, bin Laden and the other leading Arabs determined to keep the spirit of jihad alive through a secret organisation concealed within a wider guerrilla-training programme which included huge Saudi-financed bases at places like Zhawar Khili and Tora Bora.28 They may have helped defeat a global superpower, the first major Muslim victory after decades in which Israel had defeated the Arabs and Indian Hindus the Muslim Pakistanis, but the ensuing Afghan civil war showed that they had failed to create an Islamist state in Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda probably came into existence in May 1988, but it was only in August of that year that the leading Arab Afghans discussed it. Originally the word meant ‘base’ as in military base, so that the US base at Bagram is ‘al-Qaeda Bagram’. While the camps would train Arab fighters destined for Islamist mujaheddin factions battling to control Afghanistan after the Soviets had left an isolated client regime behind, Al Qaeda would consist of a more select cadre, of between 10 and 30 per cent of the trainees, destined for open-ended operations. That is the second meaning of Al Qaeda: as a revolutionary