In fact, the CIA-backed author of those textbooks, University of Nebraska’s Gouttierre, was paid by Unocal to train the staff that would maintain its expected pipeline in Afghanistan. In July 1999, when Taliban commanders and a few Al Qaeda operatives were junketed to the United States by the American government and Unocal, Gouttierre was assigned as their personal guide. For several weeks, the professor escorted his guerrilla guests to local malls for all-expenses paid shopping sprees, and to Mount Rushmore, where they gazed blankly at a rendering of the vehemently anticlericist Thomas Jefferson. When he brought the illiterate Taliban men to his university department, a horrified female Afghan assistant took shelter in the basement. Back in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s Saudi-trained religious police adopted the slogan “Throw reason to the dogs.”
For at least the initial period of its rule, the dystopian regime the Taliban imposed on a once vibrant society was at best a secondary concern to Washington. As State Department spokesman Glyn Davies said at the time, the United States found “nothing objectionable” in the new Afghan government’s intention to impose Sharia law. A top State Department diplomat justified the Faustian bargain with the Taliban to Rashid in February 1997: “The Taliban will probably develop like Saudi Arabia. There will be [the Saudi-owned oil company] Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”
In a remarkable interview five years after 9/11, Iranian American filmmaker Samira Goetschel asked Brzezinski, the original author of the strategy that aimed to induce a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by covertly supplying the mujahedin, if he had any regrets about the role the United States had played in Afghanistan. He was entirely unrepentant.
“Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?” Zbigniew Brzezinski asked indignantly. “So yes, compared to the Soviet Union, and to its collapse, the Taliban were unimportant.”
A Very Hard War
Years of US-backed war had not only deluged Afghanistan with weapons and left its infrastructure in ruins; the country was also being flooded all over again with foreign fighters magnetized by the rise of a Saudi-backed Islamic Emirate. Among them was bin Laden, who had been driven from his haven in Sudan by American pressure and was desperate for new sanctuary. Though the Taliban viewed him with deep suspicion, it was in desperate need of his patronage. A marriage of convenience was born that breathed new life into bin Laden’s movement just as Al Qaeda had reached its nadir. “I call on Muslims to support this nation, because God willing, this nation will raise the banner of Islam,” bin Laden said of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, linking his own fate to that of the government.
In 1996, soon after bin Laden’s arrival to Afghanistan, British reporter Gwynne Roberts, working at the time on a documentary about Saudi opposition movements, secured an interview with the Al Qaeda leader. Before meeting bin Laden in Jalalabad, Roberts stopped in on one of his associates, a Saudi professor teaching in the crumbled, hollowed out classrooms of Kabul University, which was now off-limits to female students. He was one of many Saudi dissidents who had found sanctuary within the realm of the Taliban and who was determined to ultimately seize power in the country of his birth. What would happen if the United States insisted on maintaining its military presence inside Saudi Arabia? Roberts asked the professor.
“An international war that will affect everyone,” he replied matter-of-factly. “A very hard war between Muslims and Westerners in ten years.”
Back in Egypt, Zawahiri’s Al-Jihad was on a rampage. Activists connected to the group, many of them Afghan war veterans, had killed over a thousand people throughout the early and mid-1990s. But the worst was yet to come. The Egyptian government had struck a deal in July 1997 that saw thousands of Islamist activists formally renounce violence in exchange for freedom from prison. Abdel-Rahman, the Blind Sheikh, signed off on the initiative from his own cell. Having just joined bin Laden in Afghanistan, Zawahiri raged against the deal, blasting it as a catastrophic sellout. He immediately put into motion a plot to shatter Egypt’s tourism sector, the beating heart of the country’s economy.
On November 17, 1997, six jihadist cadres methodically butchered fifty-eight tourists and six Egyptian locals at Luxor. Just a month prior, the same resort on the banks of the Nile had been the site of a performance of Verdi’s Aida attended by President Mubarak and Sean Connery. The killers’ methods—aiming at victims’ legs before executing them at close range, and disemboweling their bodies with knives—had been seen before on the Afghan battlefield, and as Cooley put it, “had been so rare as to be unknown until then in Egypt.” The sheer savagery of the attack turned the Egyptian public wholly against the jihadists, giving the government all the space it needed to clamp down.
Zawahiri’s dream of an Islamic State in Egypt had been extinguished, and with it, the war against the “near enemy” seemed over. From Kandahar, he and bin Laden festered in a squalid encampment with little food or provisions for their bedraggled underlings. Brought to their lowest point by their own hubris, they hashed out an ambitious plan to strike America and its assets abroad. Their former frenemy was now the “far enemy.”
In Washington, the threat from Al Qaeda was little understood. “We probably should have been more concerned about it at the time than we were, but in the first term we did not see Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda as a major factor, or one that we were concerned with,” then-defense secretary William Cohen reflected years later.
In March 1998, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya became the first country to issue an international Interpol arrest warrant for bin Laden. The warrant was studiously ignored by American and British intelligence, which had apparently judged toppling Gaddafi a greater priority than disrupting Al Qaeda’s growing global network, according to French journalist Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, an advisor to French president Jacques Chirac. At the time, the British MI6 was grooming a group of veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan who had formed into the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an Al Qaeda ally dedicated to assassinating Gaddafi and replacing his rule with an Islamist theocracy.
Five months after Gaddafi’s Interpol warrant was ignored, on August 7, 1998, Al Qaeda struck the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people. The attack was carried out under bin Laden’s personal orders as retaliation for the American military intervention in Somalia.
The most deadly Al Qaeda attack to date had been a pet project of Ali Mohamed. It was Mohamed who scouted the US embassy in Nairobi in 1993—right after being released from Canadian police custody on the word of his FBI handler. (“I took pictures, drew diagrams and wrote a report,” he later admitted, describing how he passed off his files to bin Laden in Sudan.) And it was Mohamed who personally trained the local cell, which was led by a former Al-Kifah staffer named Wadih el-Hage. Mohamed’s involvement with the Al Qaeda unit in Kenya should not have been a secret to the national security officials working on a budget of around $40 billion a year. By the spring of 1996, they knew of the existence of the East African cell and had received Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to monitor Mohamed and el-Hage’s calls, even as they paid Mohamed’s salary as an informant. But the presence of an admitted terror operative in eastern Africa failed to trigger any action by the FBI.
Ten months before the bombings, US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald had a rare chance to meet with Mohamed in person. Having gained acclaim prosecuting the “Day of Terror” trial, during which his ultra-conservative assistant counsel, Andrew McCarthy, apparently prevented Mohamed from taking the witness stand, Fitzgerald was appointed to direct I-49, the government’s newly formed “bin Laden Unit.” And now, inside a restaurant in Sacramento one block from the California statehouse, he sat face-to-face with Al Qaeda’s top spy in America.
Fitzgerald listened to the seasoned operative freely declare that he did not require any fatwa to attack the United States, that he “loved” bin Laden, and that he had personally trained bin Laden’s bodyguards. “This is the most dangerous man I have ever met. We cannot let this man out on the street,” Fitzgerald concluded. And yet, Mohamed was allowed to do just that—he walked out of the restaurant a free man.
Why was Mohamed allowed to walk away? Did Fitzgerald believe he did not have