As reporting opportunities go, few can have been more spectacularly flubbed than the one that came my way on a long-ago spring day in the former Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. The year was 1989; the location a cramped room at a ramshackle indoctrination camp for Arab militants outside Peshawar, the frontier town that was a staging area for the mujahedeen who forced Soviet troops to withdraw from Afghanistan earlier that year.
At the back sat a tall, stragglybearded man in his early 30s, silent, taut-faced and, plainly, by his body language, deeply upset by a reporter’s intrusion. His name, I learned later from an officer of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, was Osama bin Laden. I never spoke to him on what proved to be the only firsthand sighting I would have of the man whose terrorist murderousness - and success for so long in eluding history’s biggest manhunt - was to recast the story of our time.
For me, as for many foreign correspondents , Bin Laden was to become an obsessive figure, a sort of unholy grail, just as he was for the American commandos who tracked him down. A handful of reporters succeeded in interviewing him after my own encounter. But none were to meet him after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when he became a figure to be seen only in the smuggled videotapes that became his sermons - and now his epitaph. Still, even unseen, the man and his cause were revealed in all manner of ways to those who pursued him. My own journey included a eureka moment in the old bazaar in the Yemeni capital, Sana, in August 2001, when a visit to a video shop specializing in jihadi best-sellers produced a set of fresh-from-the-courier tapes that included hours of Bin Laden addressing Qaeda loyalists in Afghanistan.
After spending days poring over the tapes with an Arab-speaking scholar in London, I came across a scene from early 2001 in which the Qaeda leader, framed against an azure sky in the flowing white robes of an ancient prophet, spoke to a gathering that seemed to include would-be suicide bombers, hailing a reckoning that lay ahead for America . I included that anecdote in an article I wrote in the days before 9/11, when its imminent significance was not apparent. The article was on the pending list at The Times’s foreign desk the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and it did not appear in the paper.
The nagging question now, with Bin Laden dead, is whether he will prove an icon for Al Qaeda and its affiliates, or the movement will become irrelevant amid the democratic currents now inspiring the Arab Spring.
While America seeks the defeat of Islamic militancy, many of Pakistan’s leaders have convinced themselves that theirs must be a longer game. Remembering how America abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, they believe that their interest lies in hedging their bets as to who will ultimately rule in Kabul and Kandahar.
Perhaps most pressing in its implications for America’s relations with Pakistan, the war in Afghanistan and the struggle with Al Qaeda, there is a further question: whether the ISI knew that Bin Laden was “hiding in plain sight”- for as long as five years, as his wounded wife is said to have told Pakistani interrogators - in Abbottabad, one of Pakistan’s principal army garrisons.
Making sense of the jumble of justifications from senior Pakistani officials is a fool’s errand. Some have said Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad took the country’s security establishment by surprise; others say it is inconceivable that the spy agency did not know. Still others have said that Bin Laden’s success in hiding in a city in Pakistan’s interior was the result of basic mistakes by Pakistan or, conversely, that it can be traced to America’s decision not to share with Pakistan the intelligence that led to pinpointing Abbottabad.
Pakistan’s double-dealing is hard to contest. The country has absorbed more than $20 billion in Western aid since 9/11, yet it has been “looking both ways,” in the words of Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, on the terrorism spawned on its soil and in Afghanistan. A WikiLeaks release of military field reports offered evidence of the ISI’s role as a patron of Taliban groups, and Al Qaeda. While few would have imagined its complicity might extend to sheltering Bin Laden, Pakistan’s trustworthiness as an ally has long been questioned in Washington.
In the West, the Pakistani approach is often judged as misguided and self-defeating. But it has more than a faint resonance with America’s erstwhile willingness to sup with the devil of jihadism during the cold war, when a Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, for Washington, was an existential and obsessive issue. And so, in many ways, it has been for Pakistan, as it has fashioned its own relationship with the jihadis.
There have been fewer Bin Laden posters for some time now in storefronts of the Arab world, suggesting that these feelings are less intense now than they have been for much of the past 20 years, especially with the successes of the Arab Spring and the path it is charting to Arab renewal. But if the West does not address the anger that Bin Laden articulated more violently than almost any other Muslim leader of his time, his legend may well live on, and not just among the dispossessed.
One measure of this, for me, goes back to a dinner party shortly after 9/11 in Islamabad, where many of the Pakistani guests were active or retired generals. As the whiskey flowed, tongues loosened, and views made for uncomfortable hearing. The 9/11 attacks , one man said, had “taught the Americans a lesson.” An officer’s wife drew murmurs of assent when she said, “America had it coming.”
With attitudes like these, I thought , was it so odd that Bin Laden chose for his final sanctuary the garrison town of Abbottabad, where he may have judged that powerful people might be prepared to look the other way?
