Bin Laden will take his revenge

There will be repercussions from US air strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan

21 August 1998

Four days ago, as President Bill Clinton was testifying to Kenneth Starr about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, foreign diplomats in Pakistan were told that “all foreigners” in Afghanistan were in danger.

European embassy staff suspected that the United States, with the help of the Pakistani authorities, was about to assault Osama bin Laden, the Saudi dissident opposed to Washington’s continued presence in Saudi Arabia. One foreign embassy official in Islamabad told me the sources were American.

Now we know why. But the results are likely to be incalculable. President Clinton says that Mr Bin Laden declared war on the United States. Now Mr Clinton has declared war on him – which is exactly what Mr Bin Laden, guilty or otherwise of the American embassy bombings, will have wanted. Mr Clinton wants to destroy Mr Bin Laden. Now Mr Bin Laden will want to destroy Mr Clinton. He can count on the support of millions of Muslims who will never be persuaded that the strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan were anything but a cynical ploy to distract attention from Mr Clinton’s sexual adventures.

They are also aware that the camp in Khowst, in Paktia province, which the Americans bombed, was originally set up by the CIA to train Afghan – and Arab – guerrillas in their war against the Soviet army. For, in the 1980s, Mr Bin Laden and his men were regarded as “freedom fighters” rather than “terrorists” and were encouraged to use British-made Blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles against the Russians.

Mr Bin Laden demands the withdrawal of US troops from his native country of Saudi Arabia – some of whose officials give him considerable support. None of this, of course, was finding its way into the American news reports from Washington last night.

Of one thing we can be sure, that in the coming days the story will change. We will hear of civilian casualties. We will ask why Mr Bin Laden survived. We may even hear of secret deals – rumoured in the Middle East these past five days – between Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and the United States that would prepare the ground for the lifting of UN sanctions against Libya in return for its support in the war against Palestinian “terror”: the story that Abu Nidal, the cruellest of Palestinian militants, has been secretly sent from Tripoli to Cairo in a semi-comatose state, persists.

Egypt, it is said in the Arab world, has demanded action against its domestic enemies – which may be why the United States helped extradite five Egyptians from Albania to Egypt and bombed Sudan.