Bin Laden’s goals seemingly elusive

Of all the mysteries surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the most mysterious may be the most basic: What did the terrorists hope to achieve?

No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks -- much less issued demands or explained what they hoped to accomplish through the destruction. The events have been allowed to stand in silence.

But in writings and interviews over the last five years, Osama bin Laden -- the attack’s suspected mastermind -- has laid out political goals that extend well beyond a primal rage at America. Indeed, those who have studied him most carefully agree that bin Laden seems as intent on toppling Arab regimes as weakening the United States -- though he clearly sees the two goals as interconnected.

From driving U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia to replacing authoritarian Arab governments with fundamentalist Islamic systems, bin Laden’s ambition has swelled and shifted over time. And as his aspirations have grown, it has become more difficult for policymakers to imagine any plausible changes in U.S. policy that could cause him to call off the “jihad,” or holy war, he declared against America in 1996.

“For years, we thought his principal goal was to get U.S. forces off the Arabian peninsula and then he’d declare victory,” said an intelligence specialist. “Now ... the range of his goals is increasingly ambitious. Whether he believes he can achieve all or some, it’s hard to know.”

At his most revolutionary, bin Laden may dream of erasing the modern map of the Middle East. In both of his fatwas, he has indicated he believes the West has artificially fragmented the Islamic world “into small and little countries.” That hints that his ultimate vision is unifying the Arab world under a common political structure -- a modern equivalent of the caliphate that provided an early form of Islamic government after the death of the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century.

As one U.S. government analyst put it: “Al-Qaida’s goal, in bin Laden’s words, is “to unite all Muslims and establish a government which follows the rule of the caliphs.’ ... al-Qaida’s goal, therefore, is to overthrow nearly all Muslim governments, which bin Laden views as “corrupt,’ to drive Western influence from those countries and eventually to abolish state boundaries.”

U.S. analysts still have a better sense of bin Laden’s motivation than his ambition, of what started him on this path than where he believes the path might end.

His anger at the United States hardened at two turning points. The first was the 1991 deployment of U.S. troops in his native Saudi Arabia for the Persian Gulf War; bin Laden condemned the presence of “infidel” troops in the birthplace of Islam. The second came in 1996 when Sudan -- where he had fled after being ousted from Saudi Arabia -- forced him to leave under American pressure.

Yet his anger goes only so far in explaining his actions, analysts agree. Most believe bin Laden pursues terror in service of an ideology that dreams of reshaping the world map as fundamentally as Hitler or Stalin hoped to more than half a century ago.

Bin Laden has fleetingly talked about the destruction and dissolution of the United States. “We predict a black day for America and the end of the United States as United States, and (it) will be separate states, and will retreat from our land and collect the bodies of its sons back to America, Allah willing,” he said in a 1998 interview with ABC.

But neither of the fatwas refer to such an overarching ambition. More commonly, he has proposed more tangible, if only slightly less grandiose, short- and long-term goals.

For many years, U.S. analysts believed bin Laden’s principal aim was to force the withdrawal of American military forces from Saudi Arabia in particular, and the Mideast more broadly. In his 1996 fatwa, bin Laden declared, “There is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land.” In this goal, he was no different from his predecessors among the Lebanese Shiite extremists who in 1983 bombed the U.S. Marine compound in Beirut, killing 241.

In interviews with Western reporters through the 1990s, bin Laden has never accepted blame for any specific terrorist act. But in praising those attacks, he suggested the aim was to make the price of remaining in Saudi Arabia unacceptably high to the U.S. government and public. He has made clear he believes that if terrorists can impose enough pain, the United States will retreat.

In a 1997 interview with CNN, bin Laden cited the U.S. military experiences in Vietnam and Lebanon, and particularly the U.S. retreat from Somalia in 1993, as proof of that conviction: “After a little resistance, the American troops left after achieving nothing,” he said of Somalia. “They left after claiming that they were the largest power on Earth. They left after some resistance from powerless, poor, unarmed people whose only weapon is the belief in Allah the almighty.”

Here, bin Laden’s thinking may most closely track the conventional terrorist calculation in which a militarily weaker but more committed force can expel an occupying presence by exposing an unwillingness to accept losses.

But bin Laden’s goals now seem to have broadened beyond driving the United States out of Saudi Arabia. “At this point, for us to withdraw our bases from Saudi Arabia, that would not be enough,” said Jim Steinberg, deputy national security advisor for former President Clinton.

The prevailing view among U.S. experts is that bin Laden’s larger aim is to transform the Arab world itself, starting with Saudi Arabia and perhaps ultimately unifying the region under some common form of an Islamic government. Ending U.S. support for Israel is clearly part of bin Laden’s agenda, but it is not the centerpiece, most experts agree.

“Creating an Islamic society is the fundamental point,” said Nasser Hadian, a political scientist from Iran’s Tehran University who is now teaching at Columbia University.

The key is bin Laden’s belief that U.S. military support is the critical prop maintaining the existing Arab governments, particularly Saudi Arabia.

In his 1996 fatwa, he argued at great length that it would not make sense to launch a revolt against the Saudi royal family or other Arab governments until the United States has been forced from the region. “An internal war is a great mistake, no matter what reasons are there for it,” he wrote, because “the presence of the occupier forces will control the outcome of the battle for (its own) benefit.”

In that sense, analysts think bin Laden has targeted the United States largely because he believes it blocks his ultimate objective -- radicalizing the Islamic nations. As President Bush put it in his speech to Congress last month: “They stand against us because we stand in their way.”

Bin Laden may also believe targeting the United States advances his goal of transforming the Arab world because he is convinced that his attacks can widen the gulf between the two. In effect, bin Laden inverts Bush’s declaration that the nations of the world must decide whether they stand with America or with the terrorists.