Who is Osama bin Laden?

One of the most shocking examples of Pakistani perfidy related by Bodansky concerns a major offensive launched by the mujahedin on Jalalabad in March 1989, supposedly a "final push" against the Soviet-installed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Pakistan convinced the mujahedin's light, irregular forces to launch a doomed attack, with the clueless backing of America and Saudi Arabia, against the "fortified defenses and large artillery forces in Jalalabad":

Islamabad knew that such a frontal assault could only result in massive carnage of the attackers, who were not tightly controlled by Pakistan. As a result, the Afghan resistance that had endured almost a decade of fighting the Soviet-DRA forces was so decimated, it could no longer constitute a viable fighting force. The road was open for Islamabad to organize and field its own "mujahideen" force, now known as the Taliban.

Bin Laden is said to have participated in the battle, and according to Bodansky "witnessed and experienced the massive and essentially needless slaughter of dedicated mujahedin." He and his spiritual mentor, Sheikh Abdallah Yussuf Azzam, "concluded that they were victims of a U.S. conspiracy, implemented through the Pakistanis."

Like many of the stories Bodansky relates in "Bin Laden," this one portrays bin Laden in an ambiguous light. The young Saudi's grief and outrage are only natural, even if he directs them at an (allegedly) innocent party. It's clear that, amid the schemers, weaklings, opportunists and tyrants of Bodansky's Middle East, here is a man he can't help but admire. Bodansky never attempts a real portrait of bin Laden, but from bits picked up here and there throughout this weighty book, an outline emerges nonetheless. The author describes bin Laden as "genuinely and selflessly committed to the cause of all-Islamic solidarity," and as brilliant, judicious, modest, "efficient," "loyal," "resourceful" and "charismatic." According to Bodansky, bin Laden's proclamations are small masterpieces of Arabic prose, and the physical courage he showed in the Afghan jihad is legendary among his comrades. (Accounts of bin Laden's fearlessness in battle have been contested in some quarters.)

To find any of this, however, readers will have to slog through vast deserts of lifeless prose listing the particulars of an endless parade of conferences and meetings at which, Bodansky insists, all the serious planning and authorization of international terrorism gets done. The sheer volume of detail Bodansky presents seems meant to balance out the fact that he relies largely on unnamed sources (many of whom appear to be Egyptian, as are several of bin Laden's closest associates). While the need to protect vulnerable sources is understandable, this, along with the murky question of Bodansky's own agenda, makes it hard to evaluate some of his more grandiose claims. One the other hand, some -- like the links between the ISI and al-Qaida -- are now making their way onto the front pages of major newspapers like the New York Times.

A less turgid and in some ways wider-ranging account of the current escalation in Islamist terrorism is "Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism" by John K. Cooley, a veteran foreign correspondent. Cooley harbors no theories about covert state-sponsorship of bin Laden, who he says has "effectively privatized global terrorism in the 1990s," and he focuses more on the tentacles al-Qaida has extended into Algeria (where Islamists have participated in a bloody civil war) and the Philippines, another area of concern to the U.S. He also explores the role of the drug trade in financing a variety of Islamist and tribal insurgencies, something Bodansky barely goes into, perhaps because, given the CIA's history of using drug money to finance its proxy forces, this would make it harder for him to depict the U.S. as a hapless victim of neglectful and uninformed foreign policy.

Following the intricate network of Islamist movements in over a dozen nations in the Mideast and Central Asia can be especially maddening due to the lack of standardized transliterations of Arabic names and the fact that many individual terrorists and organizations use multiple aliases. That makes "Usama bin Laden's al-Qaida: Profile of a Terrorist Network" by Yonah Alexander and Michael S. Swetnam, although it is more of a dossier than a book, useful. It lists the various names al-Qaida members use, and when I found myself wondering why Mouhammed Atef, said by the New York Times to be suspected of masterminding the logistics of the Sept. 11 attacks, wasn't even in the index of "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America," it helped me figure out that Atef is the same man Bodansky calls Abu-hafs al-Masri.

Yet none of these books offers much more than the same basic biographical sketch of bin Laden that can be found in countless newspaper backgrounders. His father was a Middle Eastern Horatio Alger, a famously pious Yemeni bricklayer who emigrated to Saudi Arabia and became a billionaire construction magnate. The family company won the prized contract to restore the mosques in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and Osama proved to be as competent a businessman and project manager as his father. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Muslim Afghanistan galvanized his religious instincts, however, and he left for Central Asia to fight the jihad.

Dismayed when the Saudis invited the U.S. to fight off Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and permanently alienated when he realized that the royal family would permit American troops to be stationed in the holy land of the Arabian Peninsula even after the Gulf War, bin Laden cut ties with his homeland and fled, first to Sudan and ultimately to Afghanistan. Some of the terrorist operations tied directly to him include: the 1992 bombing of a hotel in Yemen, a car bomb attack on the American-operated Saudi National Guard training center in Riyadh in 1995, the bombing of the Khobar Towers U.S. Air Force housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1996, the simultaneous bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and, of course, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

It's a grisly, monstrous résumé, and perhaps the most grotesque thing about it is that it belongs to a man who, according to Bodansky -- no starry-eyed mujahedin, he -- possesses so many sterling qualities. We're used to tinpot bad guys like Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein, a strutting braggadocio and a sadistic dictator, both straight out of central casting. We can suspect them of intimidating their own people into going along with their policies. But it's impossible to tell ourselves that Osama bin Laden doesn't command a tremendous amount of sincere popular support among many Muslims, in part because he has some of the familiar traits of a hero, from his willing sacrifice of a life of luxury and ease to his incorruptibility in a region where crass self-interest usually comes first.

And yet all of this has been perverted in the service of religious fanaticism with a horrible indifference toward human suffering. The experts and journalists who have written the existing books on bin Laden have laid out the facts and their strategic implications, the vast chessboard where all these players make their moves. But we'll need another kind of writer, another kind of thinker and, I suspect, a whole new understanding of evil, to map the shadow lands of the inner Osama.

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