Under financial pressure, less one wife and his eldest son, who had already returned to Saudi Arabia, Osama flew with his remaining family to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on a chartered jet. He left behind a comfortable urban sheikh’s life of air-conditioned offices, horse farms, and business and jihad meetings. In the considerably more unplugged and violent landscape of eastern Afghanistan, he tried to make a virtue of necessity, often lecturing his children about the character-building benefits of an austere lifestyle, such as that endured by the Prophet and his companions. Yet it was plain, from the first weeks after his arrival in Afghanistan, that he did not relish his rough circumstances and that he was feeling a degree of psychological pressure. He fumed with renewed intensity at those who had forced him to endure a return to Afghanistan. Increasingly, in particular, he concentrated his anger on the government of the United States.
While in Khartoum, in his political essays, Osama had directed his incitement and sarcasm at Riyadh. The royal family’s failures and depredations were his dominant literary obsession, but he never formally declared war on the Saudi government. His expulsion from Sudan seems to have convinced him once and for all, however, that the Al-Saud were best understood as mere puppets of Washington. In any event, soon after he arrived in Afghanistan, Osama composed a rambling declaration of war against the United States, the first document he ever published that formally and openly endorsed a violent campaign against the West.
Its most striking passages were stanzas of poetry, particularly an autobiographical passage that suggested the anger and defiance building up within him. In these lines, Osama chose words and images associated with insanity or loss of control. He made near-explicit reference to those family members who had abandoned him, and to those he had defied in the name of Islam. He described his burning feelings about the “loss” of the Al-Quds mosque in Jerusalem, which he had never visited, so far as is known, but which he associated with his father in other public comments; perhaps this passage is best read as entirely political, but the possible complementary reading of an unconscious paternal reference is at least notable, particularly since the line is quickly followed by references to death, his mother, and her sanity. Overall, Osama’s self-portrait in verse suggested a man grappling with new extremities of personal experience—but while these feelings might be tormenting, he wrote, he retained a faith that they could ultimately be cleansed by righteous violence:
Some of Osama’s agitation may have been caused by the insecurity of his situation immediately upon arrival with his family near Jalalabad that summer of 1996. Eastern Afghanistan was then in violent flux, and Osama’s old Afghan contacts were in disarray as the Taliban swept to power. With a reputation for wealth and little political protection, he was fortunate during these initial weeks not to have become one more collateral victim of the ever-shifting Afghan civil war.
By the end of the year, however, his circumstances had improved dramatically. Bin Laden won an introduction to Mullah Omar and established cordial relations. Omar offered him hospitality in the poor but entirely peaceful southern Afghan city of Kandahar. Osama moved there with much of his large family—at least eleven sons by this point, three wives, and a brood of daughters whom none of his aides could or would try to count.
Even after his world calmed, he remained preoccupied by the United States. He collected and read an odd assortment of books about America, according to Al-Bahri, who later joined him as a bodyguard. These included accounts of former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s discussions about the seizure of Saudi oil fields during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war; a book by an American military commander about the use of rapid-deployment forces; and a book of undetermined origin that described a supposed plan by former U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt to control the world.17 Osama’s public comments during this period make clear that, like many Saudis, he subscribed to hoary anti-Semitic screeds such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an invented text about supposed global Jewish conspiracies that had been one of Adolf Hitler’s preferred “historical” sources. In Osama’s spare library, these sorts of tracts lay interspersed with traditional Koranic texts, faxed essays from radical Islamic scholars in Saudi Arabia, and bits and pieces from Western media reports. Sitting cross-legged on wool carpets, sharing meals of bread and yogurt, as the electricity flickered on and off, the line between history and fantasy would have been difficult to discern, even if Osama had been interested in locating it.
Osama and his colleagues asked, as Al-Bahri recalled it: “What is America?” If they had succeeded in jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and against the Serbs in Bosnia, then “America will not be something new.” They heard oral reports from veterans returning from participating in combat against American troops in Somalia. They heard about the confessions of the bombers who had struck American targets in Saudi Arabia. The United States, they concluded, “has become a target for all and sundry.”18
The broad political-military equation they perceived was sadly familiar, particularly in its fundamental view of Judaism as a fountain-head of evil global conspiracy: Jews and Christians, or “Zionists” and “Crusaders,” sought to destroy Islam and seize its lands. This war had been described and forecasted in the Koran, which called upon Allah’s followers to resist in His name, to hasten Islam’s ultimate victory and the arrival of Judgment Day. Possession of oil was one contemporary object of this contest because God had placed vast oil reserves in Saudi Arabia in order to strengthen those who resided in Islam’s birthplace; fearing this, the Jews and Crusaders had conspired to take the oil for themselves, preying on the weakness and infidelity of local Arab rulers. In this light, American manipulations in Saudi Arabia constituted the worst crimes by infidels in more than a thousand years of struggle, Osama wrote in his August 1996 declaration. He included himself among the victims:
The latest and greatest of these aggressions incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places. By orders from the U.S.A. they also arrested a large number of scholars in the land of the two Holy Places…Myself and my group have suffered some of this injustice. We have been pursued in Pakistan, Sudan and Afghanistan…19