The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Osama bin Laden was born into an incredibly wealthy Saudi family. He inherited some money from his family, although not as much as is often believed. Much of his funding came from wealthy Saudis who had different interests (economic, political, religious) in terrorist activities.
After some false starts in North Africa, he set operations in the White Mountains at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. He set up a training camp that could accommodate the wives and families of his recruits. Some were young, single men out of college willing to pay for a few months of adventure. Some were so dedicated to becoming martyrs that they were terrible soldiers, rushing out to get shot with absolutely no thought to strategy. And a few others were both dedicated to the cause and to their training.
Bin Laden wanted to re-establish the Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East, to have a region with both political and religious power. He didn’t seem to have any ideas for what would that society would look like, though, so his vision of the future was a vision of martyrdom.
This book is a mix of a biography of Bin Laden, a history of modern Afghanistan, and an analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. In many ways, Bin Laden was lucky, because the US law enforcement community was caught up in turf battles. We had all the pieces of the puzzle but couldn’t put them together.
The tragedy here is that the nation of Afghanistan has been so damaged by wars that it may take decades to recover. Its people had nothing to do with the geopolitics that have converged in a nation about the size of Texas.
