Tuesday 3 May 2011
Robert Fisk: Was he betrayed? Of
course. Pakistan
knew Bin Laden's hiding place all along
A middle-aged nonentity, a
political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding
freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday. And then
the world went mad.
Fresh from providing us with a
copy of his birth certificate, the American President turned up in the middle
of the night to provide us with a live-time death certificate for Osama bin
Laden, killed in a town named after a major in the army of the old British Empire . A single shot to the head, we were told.
But the body's secret flight to Afghanistan ,
an equally secret burial at sea? The weird and creepy disposal of the body – no
shrines, please – was almost as creepy as the man and his vicious organisation.
The Americans were drunk with
joy. David Cameron thought it "a massive step forward". India described
it as a "victorious milestone". "A resounding triumph,"
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu boasted. But after 3,000 American dead on 9/11,
countless more in the Middle East, up to half a million Muslims dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and 10 years trying to
find Bin Laden, pray let us have no more "resounding triumphs".
Revenge attacks? Perhaps they will come, by the little groupuscules in the
West, who have no direct contact with al-Qa'ida. Be sure, someone is already
dreaming up a "Brigade of the Martyr Osama bin Laden". Maybe in Afghanistan ,
among the Taliban.
But the mass revolutions in the
Arab world over the past four months mean that al-Qa'ida was already
politically dead. Bin Laden told the world – indeed, he told me personally –
that he wanted to destroy the pro-Western regimes in the Arab world, the
dictatorships of the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis. He wanted to create a new
Islamic Caliphate. But these past few months, millions of Arab Muslims rose up
and were prepared for their own martyrdom – not for Islam but for freedom and
liberty and democracy. Bin Laden didn't get rid of the tyrants. The people did.
And they didn't want a caliph.
I met the man three times and
have only one question left unasked: what did he think as he watched those
revolutions unfold this year – under the flags of nations rather than Islam,
Christians and Muslims together, the kind of people his own al-Qa'ida men were
happy to butcher?
In his own eyes, his achievement
was the creation of al-Qa'ida, the institution which had no card-carrying
membership. You just woke up in the morning, wanted to be in al-Qa'ida – and
you were. He was the founder. But he was never a hands-on warrior. There was no
computer in his cave, no phone calls to set bombs off. While the Arab dictators
ruled uncontested with our support, they largely avoided condemning American
policy; only Bin Laden said these things. Arabs never wanted to fly planes into
tall buildings, but they did admire a man who said what they wanted to say. But
now, increasingly, they can say these things. They don't need Bin Laden. He had
become a nonentity.
But talking of caves, Bin Laden's
demise does bring Pakistan
into grim focus. For months, President Ali Zardari has been telling us that Bin
Laden was living in a cave in Afghanistan .
Now it turns out he was living in a mansion in Pakistan . Betrayed? Of course he
was. By the Pakistan
military or the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence? Quite possibly both. Pakistan knew
where he was.
Not only was Abbottabad the home
of the country's military college – the town was founded by Major James Abbott
of the British Army in 1853 – but it is headquarters of Pakistan 's Northern
Army Corps' 2nd Division. Scarcely a year ago, I sought an interview with
another "most wanted man" – the leader of the group believed
responsible for the Mumbai massacres. I found him in the Pakistani city of Lahore – guarded by
uniformed Pakistani policemen holding machine guns.
Of course, there is one more
obvious question unanswered: couldn't they have captured Bin Laden? Didn't the
CIA or the Navy Seals or the US Special Forces or whatever American outfit
killed him have the means to throw a net over the tiger? "Justice,"
Barack Obama called his death. In the old days, of course, "justice"
meant due process, a court, a hearing, a defence, a trial. Like the sons of
Saddam, Bin Laden was gunned down. Sure, he never wanted to be taken alive –
and there were buckets of blood in the room in which he died.
But a court would have worried
more people than Bin Laden. After all, he might have talked about his contacts
with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan ,
or about his cosy meetings in Islamabad with
Prince Turki, Saudi Arabia 's
head of intelligence. Just as Saddam – who was tried for the murder of a mere
153 people rather than thousands of gassed Kurds – was hanged before he had the
chance to tell us about the gas components that came from America, his
friendship with Donald Rumsfeld, the US military assistance he received when he
invaded Iran in 1980.
Oddly, he was not the "most
wanted man" for the international crimes against humanity of 11 September
2001. He gained his Wild West status by al-Qa'ida's earlier attacks on the US embassies in Africa and the attack on the US barracks in
Dhahran. He was always waiting for Cruise missiles – so was I when I met him.
He had waited for death before, in the caves of Tora Bora in 2001 when his bodyguards
refused to let him stand and fight and forced him to walk over the mountains to
Pakistan .
Some of his time he would spend in Karachi – he
was obsessed with Karachi ;
he even, weirdly, gave me photographs of pro-Bin Laden graffiti on the walls of
the former Pakistani capital and praised the city's imams.
His relations with other Muslims
were mysterious; when I met him in Afghanistan , he initially feared
the Taliban, refusing to let me travel to Jalalabad at night from his training
camp – he handed me over to his al-Qa'ida lieutenants to protect me on the
journey next day. His followers hated all Shia Muslims as heretics and all
dictators as infidels – though he was prepared to cooperate with Iraq 's
ex-Baathists against the country's American occupiers, and said so in an
audiotape which the CIA typically ignored. He never praised Hamas and was
scarcely worthy of their "holy warrior" definition yesterday which
played – as usual – straight into Israel 's hands.
In the years after 2001, I
maintained a faint indirect communication with Bin Laden, once meeting one of
his trusted al-Qa'ida associates at a secret location in Pakistan . I
wrote out a list of 12 questions, the first of which was obvious: what kind of
victory could he claim when his actions resulted in the US occupation
of two Muslim countries? There was no reply for weeks. Then one weekend,
waiting to give a lecture in Saint Louis in the US , I was told
that Al Jazeera had produced a new audiotape from Bin Laden. And one by one –
without mentioning me – he answered my 12 questions. And yes, he wanted the
Americans to come to the Muslim world – so he could destroy them.
When Wall Street journalist
Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, I wrote a long article in The Independent, pleading
with Bin Laden to try to save his life. Pearl
and his wife had looked after me when I was beaten on the Afghan border in
2001; he even gave me the contents of his contacts book. Much later, I was told
that Bin Laden had read my report with sadness. But Pearl had already been murdered. Or so he
said.
Yet Bin Laden's own obsessions
blighted even his family. One wife left him, two more appeared to have been
killed in Sunday's American attack. I met one of his sons, Omar, in Afghanistan
with his father in 1994. He was a handsome little boy and I asked him if he was
happy. He said "yes" in English. But last year, he published a book
called Living Bin Laden and – recalling how his father killed his beloved dogs
in a chemical warfare experiment – described him as an "evil man". In
his book, he too remembered our meeting; and concluded that he should have told
me that no, he was not a happy child.
By midday yesterday, I had three
phone calls from Arabs, all certain that it was Bin Laden's double who was
killed by the Americans – just as I know many Iraqis who still believe that
Saddam's sons were not killed in 2003, nor Saddam really hanged. In due course,
al-Qa'ida will tell us. Of course, if we are all wrong and it was a double,
we're going to be treated to yet another videotape from the real Bin Laden –
and President Barack Obama will lose the next election.
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