Cover Story

The Tapes

Other missives travelled other paths. Some were put on disks and carried by couriers. Others merely printed and distributed as flyers in Kabul or Peshawar. Press statements were sent to sympathetic journalists in Pakistan. Bin Laden was astute enough to use some of his substantial funds—derived not from his father's inheritance but from his wealthy backers in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere—to buy the favours of several. Other statements, such as claims of responsibility for the two African bombings, were faxed directly to London to appear in major Arab newspapers published from there. Some stunts were fantastically clever. When America first posted a reward for him, bin Laden had thousands of Pakistani Rs 100 notes stamped with his picture and details of the money being offered by the FBI, and distributed them in bazaars in Jalalabad and the North West Frontier Province. Through this media operation—one that would have been inconceivable just a decade earlier—bin Laden established himself as the world's foremost radical Islamist.

THE NEWSMAKER OF THE YEAR "This fellow won't be welcome anywhere. He is an outcast ... and he is on the run. We will get him." Colin Powell, US Secretary of State "Osama is not responsible. We brought peace to Afghanistan and we want peace everywhere." Mullah Mohammed Omar, Taliban supreme leader "Earlier he was very softspoken. Now he speaks like a seasoned orator, even laughs a lot." Hamid Mir, bin Laden's biographer "The US is asking Mullah Omar to hand over Osama. It's a joke. It's the other way round." Hafiz Hassani, bin Laden's former bodyguard Bin Laden's cool, clear logic of radical Islam was a powerful draw. "Bin Laden is a hero among Islamic terrorists and other terrorists active in Kashmir." L.K. Advani, Union Home Minister "No matter how many bombs are dropped, the Afghan earth will never give up my father." Mohammed Laden, son of Osama bin Laden "He is not in Pakistan. We are not hundred per cent sure. Maybe he is dead because of the bombings." Pervez Musharraf, Pakistani President

To judge his spectacular achievement, one has only to cast an eye on the pantheon of Islamic radicals in 1996. Bin Laden barely features in the CIA's threat list. There are plenty of others: Sheik Yasin of Hamas, leaders of Iranian-backed Hizbollah, Saddam Hussein, Harkat-ul-Ansar and other Kashmiri militant groups. In the Muslim world too, bin Laden was peripheral. In Pakistan, in 1997, few had heard of him. Two years later, they were naming their children after him.

How did this happen? Through the media, bin Laden was able to boost his profile significantly. Hardcore Islamists, ranging from senior men like Ayman al-Zawahiri, founder of the Egyptian Islamic jehad, to 19-year-old Rasheed al'Owhali who was to ride shotgun on the Nairobi truck bomb, were all eventually sucked in by bin Laden Inc. They, in turn, gave him the power to go further-to blow up the embassies, to attack the USS Cole, to conceive and execute the most audacious plan in the history of terrorism: the September 11 attack in the US.

And they came. They came in thousands. If bin Laden was formed by the cross-currents of geopolitics in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties-westernisation, growth of the new oil states, resurgence of radical Islam, final spasms of the Cold War-then he was picked up and borne along by the fast flowing surge of events in the Nineties. In 1994, the Taliban, backed in true realpolitik style by the Pakistanis, Americans and Saudis, had begun their rampage across Afghanistan. For bin Laden, they provided a safe haven. And, as Middle Eastern governments cracked down on the wave of Intifada-inspired unrest that swept their rotten kingdoms and autocracies, thousands of new Islamic radical recruits flowed into the camps that had been built for their mujahideen forebears. The leader had his army. And, with modern communications, a way of teaching them, instructing them, organising them.

INDICTING FILMS: Travellers at the Berlin railway station watch a videotape of bin Laden. The US Government released several such tapes worldwide in a bid to muster support and nail the Saudi as the mastermind of the World Trade Center attacks.

Despite being stuck in a country without roads, let alone telephones, bin Laden was powerful BECA use of modern communications.

Now, of course, we know what happened. How the towers fell, how the jets of a wounded superpower howled through the night skies over Afghanistan and poured their firepower into the ragged ranks of the Taliban. We have watched Al Qaida fall apart. Bin Laden has disappeared-at least for the moment.

But his group has redefined terrorism and radical militancy. It has redefined war. For no one, except the most hawkish Pentagon optimist, believes that the cancer has been rooted out. For bin Laden was not a chief executive running Holy War Unlimited, a global conglomerate with market penetration in scores of countries, but the titular head of a huge and amorphous movement. No top-down hierarchy that can easily be disrupted, no carefully organised cell structure that resists, but is ultimately vulnerable to covert subversion, no nation state that can be battered into submission.

CLONING GLORY: Bin Laden masks in a Brazil factory reflect his undiminished popularity

The closest parallel to bin Laden's "organisation" is the anti-globalisation movement and that is why he is for our time, as well as of it and by it. The anti-globalisation movement joins hardcore Italian anarchists who want to "smash the state" with Delhi housewives concerned by the plight of laboratory rabbits or genetically mutated crops. It crosses national frontiers without problem, has esoteric sources of funding, has forced world leaders into well-defended citadels, has a multiplicity of local offshoots and fiercely particularist strands as well as an incoherent, diffuse ideology and a tendency to mythologise. Currently, there is no individual who acts as a figurehead for "anti-globalisation" but if there was, would anyone think that chasing him into a cave in eastern Afghanistan would end the support for his aims?

Now, of course, bin Laden has disappeared. His only appearance has been on a suspect video recorded on November 9 retrieved by the CIA. Bin Laden does not exist at the moment. But he dominates everything. He may have gone off our screens. Those quiet, measured fanatical tones may not be heard on any radio. But he is everywhere. There is no one else in the world with that power. That is his greatest achievement to date. That is a truly 21st century achievement. And for that he has to be the Newsmaker of the Year.