As (Osama) bin Ladens stay in Abbottabad lengthened into years, his central focus always remained attacking the United States. By early 2011 he was keenly aware that almost a decade had passed since a successful attack on America. As the 10th anniversary of his great victory against the Americans approached, bin Laden wrote messages to Al Qaedas franchises in Algeria, Iraq and Yemen reminding them that America was still their main enemy, and admonishing them not to be distracted by local fights. He schemed about assassinating President (Barack) Obama and General David Petraeus, who had inflicted such heavy losses on Al Qaedas affiliate in Iraq, although he observed that killing Vice President Joe Biden would likely be a waste of time because he was not a sufficiently important target.
To his team, bin Laden emphasized the continued importance of targeting major American cities such as Chicago, Washington, New York and Los Angeles. (Chief of staff Atiyah Abdul) Rahman frequently had to remind bin Laden that Al Qaeda simply didnt have the resources to carry out his ambitious plans. Some of bin Ladens other lieutenants pointed out to him that it would be much more realistic to focus on fighting American soldiers in Afghanistan rather than trying to attack the United States itself, advice bin Laden simply ignored.
Writing in his journal, bin Laden, a meticulous note taker, tallied up how many thousands of dead Americans it would take for the United States to withdraw finally from the Arab world. He mused about attacking trains by putting trees or cement blocks on railroad tracks in the United States, and he suggested that Al Qaeda enlist non-Muslim American citizens opposed to their own government, citing disaffected African Americans and Latinos as potential recruits.
Al Qaeda enjoyed only modest success with this tactic, recruiting Bryant Neal Vinas, an unemployed Hispanic American from Long Island, who participated in an attack on a U.S. base in Afghanistan in 2008 before he was arrested by the Pakistanis and handed over to American custody.
Bin Laden exhorted his followers to plan an attack on the United States to coincide with the 10th anniversary of 9/11 or with holidays such as Christmas, and he advocated attacks on oil tankers as part of a wider strategy to bleed the United States economically. He ordered Rahman also to focus on recruiting jihadists for attacks in Europe. Al Qaedas last successful European attacks had been the four suicide bombings on Londons transportation system on July 7, 2005, which killed 52 commuters. Rahman was in touch with a group of Moroccan militants living in Düsseldorf, and in the fall of 2010, Al Qaedas leaders were impatient to pull off an attack with multiple gunmen somewhere in Germany, though this plan fizzled out.
In one of his more blue-sky moments, bin Laden considered changing the name of Al Qaeda, which he believed had developed something of a branding problem. He worried that the full name of the group, Al Qaeda al-Jihad, which means The Base for Holy War, was being lost in the West, where the group was known, of course, simply as Al Qaeda. Bin Laden believed that lopping off the word jihad had allowed the West to claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam. Bin Laden mulled over some decidedly un-catchy alternative names: the Monotheism and Jihad Group and the Restoration of the Caliphate Group.
Bin Laden paid a great deal of attention to his relatively new but quite promising Yemen-based affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It was this affiliate that had managed to smuggle a bomb onto an American passenger jet in the underwear of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian recruit who tried, unsuccessfully, to detonate the device as the plane flew over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. Bin Laden gave tactical advice to the group, which published Inspire, an English-language webzine aimed at recruiting militants in the West. In one issue of Inspire, a writer proposed that jihadists turn a tractor into a weapon by outfitting it with giant blades and then driving it into a crowd. Bin Laden tut-tutted that such indiscriminate slaughter did not reflect Al Qaedas values.
And bin Laden made important personnel decisions for the group. When the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula suggested appointing the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki to head the organization, because his name recognition in the West would help with fundraising, bin Laden nixed the idea, saying he didnt know Awlaki and was quite comfortable with the leadership already in place. Bin Laden also offered strategic advice to his Yemeni followers, warning there wasnt yet enough steel in Al Qaedas support in the region to try to impose a Taliban-style regime there.
His key lieutenants wrote to bin Laden about the problems they were facing; chief among them was the campaign of American drone strikes in Pakistans tribal regions. The U.S. drone campaign had begun there in 2004, under President (George W.) Bush, but, as we have seen, President Obama had massively expanded the program. Under Bush, there had been one strike every 40 days; under Obama, the tempo increased to one every four days. The strikes had made the position of Al Qaedas number three one of the worlds most perilous.
In May 2010, down a dirt road from Miran Shah, the main town in the tribal region of North Waziristan, a missile from a drone killed Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, along with his wife and several of their children. Yazid was a founding member of Al Qaeda who served as the groups number three and oversaw the groups plots, recruitment, fundraising and internal security. In the past two years, bin Laden had also lost to drone strikes his chemical weapons expert, his chief of operations in Pakistan, his propaganda chief and half a dozen other key lieutenants.
Rahman wrote to bin Laden that Al Qaeda was getting hammered by the drones, and asked whether there were alternative locations where the organization might rebase itself. Bin Laden instead approved the formation of a counter-intelligence unit to root out the spies in the tribal areas who were providing pinpoint-accurate information to the Americans about the locations of his lieutenants. In 2010, however, he received a complaint that the counter-intelligence shop could barely function on its small budget of a few thousand dollars. A particular worry for both bin Laden and Rahman was the fact that cash flow at Al Qaeda headquarters had by then slowed to a trickle. They corresponded about ways to refill the groups depleted coffers, focusing in particular on kidnapping diplomats in Pakistan.
Conscious of the pressures that Al Qaeda was now under its dire financial situation, its decimated leadership bench and its longtime inability to carry out any attack in the West bin Laden started casting about for ways to reinvigorate his group. In the spring of 2011 he contemplated a new effort to negotiate a grand alliance of the various militant groups fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In exchanges with his aides, he also considered brokering some sort of deal with the Pakistani government: Al Qaeda would halt its attacks in Pakistan and would in turn receive official Pakistani protection.
Theres no evidence that this deal ever happened, and it was, in any event, quite a naïve idea. No Pakistani government would make a peace deal with Al Qaeda; bin Laden and his top deputies had for many years publicly and repeatedly called for attacks on Pakistani officials and had on two occasions in 2003 tried to assassinate Pakistans president, General Pervez Musharraf.
To the world, of course, bin Laden tried to present a very different image from that of the aging leader of a troubled terrorist group that he had become. Bin Laden once told the Taliban leader Mullah Omar that up to 90 per cent of his battle was fought in the media.
Indeed, he took his media campaign seriously, and in the videotapes he shot in a makeshift studio in the Abbottabad compound he dyed his whitening beard jet black and dressed in his finest beige robes trimmed with gold thread. In these videos, he sometimes sat behind a desk and no longer had the gun that had invariably been beside him, a prominent feature of many of his earlier videotaped appearances.
In 2007, bin Laden released a half-hour videotape that received considerable attention in the West because it was the first time he had appeared on video in three years. On the tape, he spoke directly to the American people from behind a desk in a jihadist parody of a presidential address from the Oval Office. He made no explicit threat of violence but instead urged Americans to convert to Islam and, in a meandering indictment of the United States, invoked the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the extermination of Native Americans; the baleful influence of U.S. corporations; and Americas poor record on climate change, as demonstrated by its failure to sign the Kyoto agreement on global warming. These seemed more the musings of an elderly reader of The Nation than the leader of global jihad.
