Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden appears in Noam Chomsky’s account as both a probable figurehead of a diffuse militant network and a symbol whose influence cannot be reduced to his operational role. Chomsky connects that network to forces organized, trained, armed, and supported by the United States and its allies for strategic purposes, while carefully distinguishing this history from what could be established about bin Laden’s direct involvement in the September 11 attacks. The resulting portrait is less a biography than an argument about how political violence is made, interpreted, and allowed to reproduce itself.

Network and Historical Background

Chomsky places bin Laden within the militant forces assembled during the 1980s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The larger project, he argues, began in 1979, when Zbigniew Brzezinski later claimed to have initiated covert support for mujahideen fighting the Afghan government, with the aim of drawing the Soviet Union into what he called the “Afghan trap.” The United States and its allies subsequently built a large force, perhaps one hundred thousand or more, recruiting militants from across national boundaries. They were commonly called Afghans, although many, like bin Laden, came from elsewhere.

Bin Laden joined those forces during the 1980s and became involved in their financial networks, which Chomsky suggests may have endured. The war against the Soviet occupation succeeded in driving Soviet forces out of Afghanistan, but the network’s history did not end with that victory. Chomsky links elements relying on the same broader forces to the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, one of the enthusiastic architects of the mobilization against the Soviet Union. He also notes that a 1983 suicide bombing, possibly connected to those forces, helped bring about the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Lebanon. These episodes establish the recurrent consequence of creating armed networks for immediate strategic ends: they can persist, redirect their violence, and become difficult for their former sponsors to control.

Role, Organization, and Stated Aims

Chomsky resists treating bin Laden as the proven planner of an extraordinarily sophisticated operation. People familiar with the matter, he says, doubted that bin Laden could have directed the September 11 plot from a cave in Afghanistan. His network could nevertheless have been involved, and bin Laden could serve as an instigator to its members. Such organizations were decentralized, lacked a strict hierarchy, and communicated with one another only to a limited extent; Chomsky therefore allows that bin Laden might have been telling the truth when he said he knew nothing about the operation.

At the same time, Chomsky regards bin Laden’s public articulation of his goals as significant. Bin Laden addressed Western interviewers, including Robert Fisk, but reached Arabic-speaking audiences especially through widely circulated cassette recordings. As Chomsky presents his program, its first targets were Saudi Arabia and other repressive, corrupt Middle Eastern governments that bin Laden regarded as not genuinely Islamic. He also called for support for Muslims resisting non-Muslim forces in places including Chechnya, Bosnia, Kashmir, western China, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. The expulsion of Soviet forces from Afghanistan furnished a precedent for the further objective of driving U.S. forces out of Saudi Arabia, a country of particular importance because it contains Islam’s holiest sites.

Chomsky describes bin Laden’s appeal as inseparable from grievances that extend beyond the militants themselves. Robert Fisk’s interviews, as summarized in the book, associate bin Laden with anger over the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, American support for atrocities against Palestinians, and the role of the United States in the ruin of Iraqi civil society. Chomsky says this anger crossed class and political lines in the Middle East. He also stresses that bin Laden’s crimes inflicted serious harm on the poor and oppressed, including Palestinians, rather than advancing their interests. The contradiction does not necessarily prevent him from appearing heroic to people who see him as fighting genuine oppressors: from within that perspective, courage against an adversary may eclipse the suffering inflicted on the wider population.

Responsibility, Evidence, and the Power of a Symbol

Chomsky distinguishes a historical and indirect connection between U.S. policy and the attacks from a claim of direct causation. He argues that the network from which the attackers were thought to have come had roots in mercenary forces organized, trained, and armed by the CIA and allied services, with support from Egypt, Pakistan, France, and Saudi funding. Brzezinski’s account of covert aid beginning in 1979 is one part of this history, although Chomsky notes that Brzezinski may have been boasting. The connection, in this analysis, concerns the creation and cultivation of forces for state purposes; it does not by itself establish who ordered a later attack.

The uncertainty over bin Laden’s precise role is central to Chomsky’s warning against personifying an enemy. Whether or not bin Laden was directly involved, Chomsky considers the network of which he was a leader very likely implicated. Casting a single person as the embodiment of ultimate evil is easier than investigating the sources and history of terrible crimes, and it can obscure the role played by the United States itself. Chomsky argues that this role was not especially difficult to discover for anyone attentive to the region’s recent history. The caution is analytical as well as political: a symbol may make an enemy legible, but it can also conceal the relationships and decisions that helped form the threat.

Chomsky also warns that killing bin Laden could enlarge rather than erase his symbolic power. He might become a martyr, his voice continuing to circulate through the same cassettes that had carried his message. In this account he is both an actor within a militant network and an emblem recognized by U.S. audiences and much of the region’s population. That double function helps explain why attention focused on his person cannot, by itself, resolve the conditions that nourish the network or the grievances in which its message finds an audience.

Aftermath and the Cycle of Violence

For Chomsky, the attacks belong to a longer chain of violence, not to a sudden rupture without antecedents. He argues that the CIA could not claim to have been surprised by the crimes of militant forces whose earlier history it had followed. He points to the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 and to a longer record of activity by armed and trained radical Islamist forces, supported in part by the United States and several allies. The history complicates the language of a wholly external threat: the network’s later hostility cannot be separated from the earlier decisions that helped build its capabilities.

Chomsky further connects the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to this history. He recounts John Cooley’s account that CIA agents had voluntarily helped the cleric Omar Abdel Rahman enter the United States in 1990, although Egypt already sought him in connection with terrorism. Abdel Rahman was later implicated in the 1993 bombing, which Chomsky says used procedures taught in CIA manuals apparently supplied to Afghans during the war against the Soviet Union. The alleged plan extended beyond the World Trade Center to the United Nations building, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and other targets. Abdel Rahman was tried for conspiracy and given a lengthy prison sentence. In Chomsky’s argument, such precedents make the subsequent violence part of an ongoing and intelligible history, even as they do not settle every question of operational responsibility.

Chomsky places the response to September 11 within this same cycle. He predicts that a major military offensive would fulfil bin Laden’s wishes, while hawkish political forces might use the crisis to pursue militarization, missile defense and the militarization of space, weaken social programs, divert attention from the harms of globalization and environmental problems, shift more wealth to a small number of people, and suppress public debate. He describes the likely pattern as familiar: political leaders may seize the opportunity to strike enemies with extreme violence, without regard for innocent people who would suffer abroad, in the United States, and in Europe. In this framing, the attacks make bin Laden’s symbolism more potent even as a retaliatory campaign risks producing further victims and further recruits to the cycle.

The account therefore holds several propositions in tension. Bin Laden’s declared program is treated as intelligible, not as a justification for his crimes; those crimes are described as gravely harmful to the people he claimed to defend. The network’s roots in earlier state-supported mobilization are presented as a consequential history, not as proof that the United States directly planned the September 11 attacks. And bin Laden’s potential martyrdom shows why eliminating an individual cannot be equated with dismantling a decentralized network or addressing the political conditions that sustain its appeal. His significance lies in this convergence of militant leadership, public symbol, and blowback: a figure made easier to condemn as an isolated embodiment of evil, yet harder to understand without confronting the history around him.