Who is Osama Bin Laden?

A few hours after the terrorist events in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, the Bush administration concluded without waiting for supporting evidence that "Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization were prime suspects. George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, stated that bin Laden has the capacity to plan "multiple attacks with little or no warning." Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks "an act of war," and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the nation that he would "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." Former CIA Director James Woolsey pointed his finger at "state sponsorship," implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. And in the words of former National Security Adviser Lawrence Eagleburger, "I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution."

Meanwhile, parroting official statements, Western media commentators encouraged the launching of "punitive actions" directed against civilian targets in the Middle East. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: "When wereasonably determine our attackers' bases and camps, we must pulverize them--minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage-and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror's national hosts."

The following examines the history of Osama bin Laden and the links of the Islamic jihad (holy war) to the formulation of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War and its aftermath.

Prime suspect in the September 11, 2001, hijackings, branded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as an "international terrorist" for his role in the African U.S. embassy bombings, Saudi-born Osama bin Laden was recruited during the Soviet-Afghan war "ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight Soviet invaders"--so reports the August 24, 1998, London Daily Telegraph. According to Fred Halliday in the March 25, 1996, New Republic, "The largest covert operation in the history of the CIA" was launched in 1979 in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of the pro-communist government of Babrak Kamal. And Ahmed Rashid writes in the November/December 1999 Foreign Affairs:

   With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI [Inter Services
   Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged
   by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals
   from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992.
   Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually
   more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the
   Afghan jihad.

The Islamic jihad was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia, with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade. Steve Coil writes in the July 19, 1992, Washington Post:

   In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive
   166 ... [which] authorized stepped-up covert military aid to the
   mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to
   defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a
   Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic
   increase in arms supplies--a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987
   ... as well as a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon specialists who
   traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan's ISI on the main road near
   Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani
   intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels.

The CIA's covert support was provided indirectly, using Pakistan's military ISI as a "go-between." Washington had concluded that, for these covert operations to be "successful," it must not reveal the ultimate objective of the jihad, which was to destroy the Soviet Union. The CIA played a key role in training the mujahideen by channeling CIA support through the ISI, which integrated the guerrilla training with the teachings of Islam. As Dilip Hiro of the International Press Service explains:

   Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete socio-political ideology,
   that holy Islam was being violated by the atheistic Soviet troops, and that
   the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by
   overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow.

The CIA's Milton Beardman stated, "We didn't train Arabs." Yet according to Abdel Monam Saidali, of the Al-aram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, bin Laden and the "Afghan Arabs" had been imparted "with very sophisticated types of training that was allowed to them by the CIA." Beardman confirmed that Osama bin Laden wasn't aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington and reported bin Laden as saying, "Neither I, nor my brothers, saw evidence of American help."

Motivated by nationalism and religious fervor, the Islamic warriors were therefore unaware that they were fighting the Soviet army on behalf of Uncle Sam. And while there were contacts at the upper levels of the intelligence hierarchy, Islamic rebel leaders in theater had no contacts with Washington or the CIA. With CIA backing and the funneling of massive amounts of U.S. military aid, the ISI had developed into what Dipankar Banerjee described in the December 2, 1994, India Abroad, as a "parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government." The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents, and informers, collectively estimated at 150,000.

Meanwhile, CIA operations had also reinforced the Pakistani military regime led by General Zia Ul Haq. According to Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, as quoted in an International Press Service review of their book, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal:

   "Relations between the CIA and the ISI had grown increasingly warm
   following Zia's ouster of Bhutto and the advent of a military regime." ...
   During most of the Afghan war, Pakistan was more aggressively anti-Soviet
   than even the United States. Soon after the Soviet military invaded
   Afghanistan in 1980, Zia sent his ISI chief to destabilize the Soviet
   Central Asian states. The CIA only agreed to this plan in October 1984....
   "The CIA was more cautious than the Pakistanis." Both Pakistan and the
   United States took the line of deception on Afghanistan with a public
   posture of negotiating a settlement while privately agreeing that military
   escalation was the best course.

The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the CIA's covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. However, with CIA intervention, that changed. Alfred McCoy's study, "Drug Fallout: The CIA's Forty Year Complicity in the Narcotics Trade," in the August 1997 Progressive, confirms that, within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operations in Afghanistan,

   the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin
   producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the
   heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979 ... to 1.2 million by
   1985--a much steeper rise than in any other nation....

CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests.... U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies "because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there." In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War. "Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn't really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade.... I don't think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout.... There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan."

In the wake of the Cold War, the Central Asian region wasn't only strategic for its extensive oil reserves; it continued to produce three-quarters of the world's opium, representing multibillion-dollar revenues to business syndicates, financial institutions, intelligence agencies, and organized crime. The annual proceeds of the Golden Crescent drug trade--between $100 billion and $200 billion--represents approximately one-third of the worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $500 billion.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production unfolded. According to UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998 to 1999--coinciding with the buildup of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics--reached a record high of 4,600 metric tons. Powerful business syndicates in the former Soviet Union allied with organized crime to compete for strategic control over the heroin routes.

The ISI's extensive intelligence military network wasn't dismantled after the Cold War, and the CIA continued to covertly support the Islamic jihad through Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set in motion in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans. Pakistan's military and intelligence apparatus essentially "served as a catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of six new Muslim republics in Central Asia," reports the International Press Service.

Meanwhile, Islamic missionaries of the Wahhabi sect from Saudi Arabia had established themselves in the Muslim republics, as well as within the Russian federation encroaching upon the institutions of the secular state. Despite its anti-American ideology, Islamic fundamentalism was largely serving Washington's strategic interests in the former Soviet Union.

Following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the civil war in Afghanistan continued unabated. The Taliban was being supported by the Pakistani Deobandis and its political party, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). In 1993, the JUI entered the government coalition of Prime Minister Benazzir Bhutto. Ties between the JUI, the army, and the ISI were established. In 1995, with the downfall of the Hezb-I-Islami Hektmatyar government in Kabul, the Taliban not only instated a hardline Islamic government but, according to Ahmed Rashid, also handed control of training camps in Afghanistan over to JUI factions. And the JUI, with the support of the Saudi Wahhabi movements, played a key role in recruiting volunteers to fight in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. Jane Defense Weekly confirms in this regard that "half of Taliban manpower and equipment originates in Pakistan under the ISI."

In fact, it would appear that, following the Soviet withdrawal, both sides in the Afghan civil war continued to receive covert CIA support through Pakistan's ISI. In other words, backed by Pakistan's military intelligence, which in turn was controlled by the CIA, the Taliban Islamic State was largely serving U.S. geopolitical interests. The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In recent months there is evidence that mujahideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia.

No doubt, this explains why, until recent events, Washington had mostly closed its eyes to the reign of terror imposed by the Taliban--including the blatant derogation of women's rights, the closing down of schools for girls, the dismissal of women employees from government offices, and the enforcement of the Sharia laws of punishment.

With regard to Chechnya, the main rebels--Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab--were trained and indoctrinated in CIA-sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress's Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the conflict in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia. The summit was attended by Osama bin Laden and high-ranking Iranian and Pakistani intelligence officers. According to Levon Sevunts in the October 26, 1999, Montreal Gazette, the involvement of Pakistan's ISI in Chechnya "goes far beyond supplying the Chechens with weapons and expertise: the ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war."

Russia's main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington's perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil conglomerates, which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin.

The two main Chechen rebel armies--estimated at 35,000 strong and led respectively by Commander Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab--were supported by Pakistan's ISI, which also played a key role in organizing and training the Chechen rebel army. Sevunts writes that, in 1994,

   the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence arranged for Basayev and his
   trusted lieutenants to undergo intensive Islamic indoctrination and
   training in guerrilla warfare in the Khost province of Afghanistan at Amir
   Muawia camp, set up in the early 1980s by the CIA and ISI and run by famous
   Afghani warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In July 1994, upon graduating from
   Amir Muawia, Basayev was transferred to Markaz-i-Dawar camp in Pakistan to
   undergo training in advanced guerrilla tactics. In Pakistan, Basayev met
   the highest ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officers: Minister
   of Defense General Aftab Shahban Mirani, Minister of Interior General
   Naserullah Babar, and the head of the ISI branch in charge of supporting
   Islamic causes, General Javed Ashraf (all now retired). High-level
   connections soon proved very useful to Basayev.

Following his training and indoctrination stint, Basayev was assigned to lead the assault against Russian federal troops in the first Chechen war in 1995. His organization also developed extensive links to criminal syndicates in Moscow, as well as ties to Albanian organized crime and the Kosovo Liberation Army. In 1997 and 1998, according to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), "Chechen warlords started buying up real estate in Kosovo ... through several real estate firms registered as a cover in Yugoslavia."

Basayev's organization has also been involved in a number of rackets including narcotics, illegal tapping and sabotage of Russia's oil pipelines, kidnapping, prostitution, trade in counterfeit currency, and the smuggling of nuclear materials (see "Mafia Linked to Albania's Collapsed Pyramids" in the February 13, 1997, European, as well as the January 4-5, 2000, Itar-Tass). Alongside the extensive laundering of drug money, the proceeds of various illicit activities have been funneled toward the recruitment of mercenaries and the purchase of weapons.

During his training in Afghanistan, Basayev linked up with Saudi-born veteran mujahideen commander Al Khattab, who had fought as a volunteer in Afghanistan. Barely a few months after Basayev's return to Grozny, Khattab was invited in early 1995 to set up an army base in Chechnya for the training of mujahideen fighters. According to the BBC in September 1999, Khattab's posting to Chechnya had been "arranged through the Saudi-Arabian based [International] Islamic Relief Organisation, a militant religious organisation, funded by mosques and rich individuals which channeled funds into Chechnya."

Since the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at the same time placing him on the FBI's "most wanted list" as the world's foremost terrorist. While the mujahideen are busy fighting the United States' war in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, the FBI--operating as a U.S.-based police force--is waging a domestic war against terrorism, operating in some respects independently of the CIA which has, since the Soviet-Afghan war, supported international terrorism through its covert operations.

In a cruel irony, while the Islamic jihad--featured by the Bush administration as "a threat to America"--is blamed for the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as the hijacking of the fourth plane downed in Pennsylvania, these same Islamic organizations constitute a key instrument of U.S. military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, the truth must prevail to prevent the Bush administration, together with its "coalition" partners, from expanding on a military adventure that threatens the future of humanity.

Michel Chossudovsky is a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and director of the Centre for Research and Globalisation. This article is adapted with permission from his Web posting at globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html.