1996: Bin Laden Declares War on the United States
In the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, many declarations and taped messages from terrorist leaders have reached the American media. Not so long ago, however, such communications were rare. When terrorists released messages, they rarely reached audiences beyond the Muslim world. It was therefore very surprising when, 10 years ago, in August 1996, Osama bin Laden published a letter in a London newspaper directed specifically at the West. Printed in a pro-Palestinian paper called Al Quds Al Arabi, the message was titled “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.”
In it bin Laden leveled criticism against the United States in a manner now familiar to most Americans, expressing rage at America’s military presence in Saudi Arabia and at continued sanctions against Iraq, and blasting the United States for supporting Israel. His declaration of war was an important indication of his rising power among Islamic fundamentalists, and it served to bring him further into the eye of the United States government.
In the summer of 1996 bin Laden was operating out of Afghanistan, having moved there in May that year. A native of Saudi Arabia, he had earlier resided in Afghanistan and had led insurgents fighting against the Soviets there throughout the 1980s. With the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union, he had moved to Sudan. There he attempted to hold together his organization in the absence of the Soviet enemy, maintaining his role as a military leader and a financier of terrorism.
From his African base he forged links between Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah, and also made contact with sympathetic states like Iran. His increasingly influential activities did not escape the notice of the United States, which began calling on the Sudanese government to expel him. After five years, the Sudanese government complied. Gathering up his organization, bin Laden transported his headquarters back to Central Asia.
Thus when Al Quds Al Arabi published a 12-page letter from the radical leader it was far from his first appearance on the international stage. Bin Laden had already been identified as an enemy of the United States long before he formally announced the start of a war. What he revealed in his 1996 missive, however, to a wider audience than ever before, was the nature of his radicalism.
Unlike previous violent Islamists, bin Laden didn’t focus his ire on one of the many secular dictators of the Middle East, or against Israel. Instead, his message concentrated almost exclusively on the United States. He called the United States the sponsor of anti-Muslim actions the world over and particularly in the Persian Gulf, where America had troops stationed close to the two holy places of Mecca and Medina.
He argued that rather than fight separately against the numerous tyrannical regimes in the region, Islamic militants should join forces against “the far enemy” and attack the nation he had long termed “the head of the snake.” Though Islamist hostility toward America was no new development, the intense and single-minded anti-Americanism of bin Laden’s radicalism was new and menacing.
His letter was significant not only because of its focus on the United States; it also was useful in illustrating the motivating forces behind Al Qaeda. He used religious rhetoric to stir up anger and support for his actions, but his grievances were more economic and political—having to do with sanctions and troop deployments—than cultural. Religion, for bin Laden, was a useful tool for the popularization of his objectives.
In the aftermath of September 11, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States described him as appealing to “people disoriented by cyclonic change as they confront modernity and globalization”: “He promises to restore pride to people who consider themselves the victims of successive foreign masters.” His strategy was effective. Increasing numbers of Muslims, searching for hope amid lives of uncertainty and destitution, turned to figures like bin Laden for reassurance and leadership. And it was easy for him to cast the United States as a universal foe. As the commission put it, “Americans are blamed when Israelis fight with Palestinians, when Russians fight with Chechens, when Indians fight with Kashmiri Muslims, and when the Philippine government fights ethnic Muslims in its southern islands.”
Tragically, it took too many Americans too long to understand the very real threat bin Laden posed. In a post-September 11 world, the news coverage of his 1996 statement sounds hopelessly naive. A New York Times article referred to him merely as a “Saudi Arabian dissident who is believed to be using his wealth to finance Islamic militant groups.” Nonetheless, the government agents tracking him were beginning to fully understand the violent nature of his work, and by the end of the decade the government came to see him as a force behind violence throughout those years, from the 1993 downing of two Black Hawk helicopters in Somalia to the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and the October 2000 assault on the USS Cole. Despite this, neither the Clinton nor the Bush administration ever authorized operations that could eliminate him and roll back his network.
September 11, 2001, made evident the consequences of bin Laden’s power and of the American government’s insufficient efforts to stop him. The work of numerous federal agencies prosecuting Al Qaeda members, freezing their funds, and identifying their sponsors ultimately failed to prevent the act that realized his threats of August 1996. And in the decade that has passed since the issuance of those threats, Al Qaeda has become a force much larger than one man and far more dangerous than all but a very few anticipated.