About the Book
The world’s leading expert on Osama bin Laden delivers for the first time the definitive biography of a man who set the course of American foreign policy for the 21st century, and whose ideological heirs we continue to battle today.
In The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Peter Bergen provides the first reevaluation of the man responsible for precipitating America’s long wars with al-Qaeda and its descendants, capturing bin Laden in all the dimensions of his life: as a family man, as a zealot, as a battlefield commander, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive. The book sheds light on his many contradictions: he was the son of a billionaire, yet insisted his family live like paupers. He adored his wives and children, depending on two of his wives, both of whom had PhDs, to make important strategic decisions. Yet he also brought ruin to his family. He was fanatically religious, yet willing to kill thousands of civilians in the name of Islam. He inspired deep loyalty yet, in the end, his bodyguards turned against him. And while he inflicted the most lethal act of mass murder in United States history, he failed to achieve any of his strategic goals.
The lasting image we have of bin Laden in his final years is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself, just another dad flipping through the channels with his remote. In the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound, far from the front lines of his holy war. And yet despite that unheroic denouement, his ideology lives on. Thanks to exclusive interviews with family members and associates, and documents unearthed only recently, Bergen’s portrait of Osama will reveal for the first time who he really was and why he continues to inspire a new generation of jihadists.
416 pages
Published on August 3, 2021
Buy the book
There has been a lot in the news about Afghanistan recently, and the result has been a lot of people with a lot of very loud opinions. When something big happens in the world, my first inclination is to find a book about it. At least one book. My preference is 3-5 at a minimum, so I can see a full range of aspects of the subject, as well as approaches to it. I don’t like having half-formed opinions loudly online. I like to understand. I want to know. And in this connected world, there’s no reason not to inform myself. We have more information at our fingertips than we ever have at any moment in human history, so why not use it? I like books, rather than the internet. You can find anything to justify how you feel on the internet. Books are different, though. Books come at subjects from different angles. Books tend to be a bit more careful. They also have more room to dive deeper, and there are sources at the back, which matters to me.
So all this stuff was happening in Afghanistan, and I thought, “I really want to learn more about this conflict.” I know enough, but I don’t know a lot, and it seems like a whole bunch of publishers took advantage of this upheaval over there and used it to drop some books on the region. Why not read a few of them?
I love biographies, but I tend to be one of those people who thinks there really isn’t a point to a biography unless it’s 700+ pages. Also Osama bin Laden was a repugnant excuse for a human being, and I had to really amp myself up to read this biography. However, once I started, I found it impossible to put the book down. It reads almost like a crime thriller, each chapter is easy to devour, and it’s gripping, because while I know what happened, there are a ton of behind-the-scenes details here that I was completely unaware of and put events in a bit of a new light.
Osama bin Laden is an interesting person, and while it would be easy to boil down his story to a narrative of extremism, and in some ways, that’s what it is, there is more to him than that. His slow, yet steady slide into extremism was fascinating. Seeing why it appealed to him was really important, because extremists still exist, and if we can understand a bit more about why it appeals them, maybe we can learn better ways to effectively combat it. What surprised me in regards to bin Laden, perhaps, was how Bergen dug deep into bin Laden’s ideology, and showed a bit of what attracted him to it. His early years, when he was just starting to find himself on this extremist road, were some of the most interesting parts of the book, because that was the point where he wasn’t so invested. He could have turned around, gone another way, and yet he didn’t. His deal was officially sealed in the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
The jihad in Afghanistan was fascinating. Not only reading about what attracted him to that conflict, but it helped me fundamentally understand why Afghanistan was so important to him, something I've never known before. The battle of Jaji was really where the creation of the bin Laden the world came to know took place. From the ashes of this battle, al-Qaeda was formed. This whole region turned into a kind of weird personal holy ground for bin Laden, and he’d find himself longing for those days of jihad and heroism and returning to Afghanistan where it all began.
After the Soviets left, and the US pulled their embassy out of Kabul, bin Laden started forming his ideas about the wider world. Specifically, the US, whom he viewed as a “paper tiger” because of how easily they left the embassy in Kabul. After that, he’d see the US pull out of Somalia, and then the non-reaction to the bombing of the ship off the coast of Yemen, and other events as well. While on the western side, the US pulled out of embassies and the like because there wasn’t enough invested in the region to justify the danger of keeping people on the ground there, in bin Laden’s mind, it showed how weak the US truly was. In his mind, he saw all of this happening because his people were so threatening, and the US puts up a lot of bluster but has no real muscle. It underscored his fundamental belief that the US would be easy to topple, because we are all shine and no substance.
That was interesting to read about, because on the US side, where I’m at, I know why those decisions were made. I understand that there just wasn’t enough invested in places like Somalia to keep soldiers there, especially after the Blackhawk Down tragedy. I also understand that the Saudi royal family invited the US to stay on bases in their country as a jumping off point for conflicts in Kuwait and Yemen (a huge grudge of bin Laden’s was the US’s presence in the Arab peninsula.). However, what this book helped me do was see how bin Laden interpreted these events, and how he used his interpretation to justify his ideology, and his course of action. Quite frankly, it was illuminating in the extreme.
In 1996, bin Laden ends up back in Afghanistan. He lives in a cave in the Tora Bora mountains, sets up a few training camps, and the Clinton administration have a holy hell of a time trying to take this guy out. The planning of 9/11 is briefly gone over, as well as the execution of the event. If there was, perhaps, one point where I wished there were more details, it was here. However, there are books that elaborate on this and I’ll probably end up reading a few of them. I will also say, if you’re a person who already knows a lot about bin Laden, you might not find a whole lot of new information here.
After the 9/11 attacks, the narrative widens in scope. The book, from that point on, ends up being about 40% bin Laden, and 60% America’s actions. Bergen goes into the fallout, some behind-the-scenes discussions in the Bush administration, some of the events that happened when the US put boots on the ground in Afghanistan, some serious, serious blunders. He also talks about bin Laden’s various escapes, and how he managed to lay low for ten years before he was found. Bin Laden’s life from this point on isn’t really terribly interesting. He was on the run, but al-Qaeda sort of fell apart after 9/11 and lost a lot of its power. They were a fractured group, and all of them were in hiding.
Bush’s invasion into Iraq is discussed here, as well as the justifications of it and some of the results. Al-Qaeda in Iraq ended up becoming a pretty powerful group in the region, though it always had schisms with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda group and did things he was very much uncomfortable with. However, the Iraq war really breathed new life into the group, and they started coming together for this new jihad, and becoming a powerful force again. Of course, al-Qaeda in Iraq became what we know as ISIS.
The finding of bin Laden was an event I’ve never read about before and I was absolutely fascinated by the entire thing, from how they found him, to the fact that the operation to get him was a complete and absolute 50/50 gamble (they didn't even really know if it was him living in that house), which I didn’t know.
It brought the story of bin Laden to a close, but not the story of the war, or the troubles in the region, which brings us to today. After ISIS, and the Taliban taking over Afghanistan again, and the US pulling out troops, the region is still in a lot of turmoil and strife. Bin Laden is a disgusting human and I hope the troops that dumped his body into the ocean enjoyed doing that because I would have found an intense amount of satisfaction in that event, but the story of the man lives on to this day, both in the grieving, mourning families and ever-changing policy issues over here in the US, and in the jihad movements in the Middle East.
It’s important to understand how someone like bin Laden thought, how he saw the world, and events that mattered to him. It’s not comfortable, but it is important. If we don’t want another event like 9/11 to happen, we have to know why people are attracted to ideologies like bin Laden’s, and the best way to do that, is to be informed about these horrible, awful people around which so much disaster and darkness circulates. Bin Laden might be dead, but as the back of this book says, “his ideological heirs still circulate.”
The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden is a gripping narrative biography about the man around whom much of 21st century US policy has been based. He might be dead, but his jihadist movement is still very much alive. To understand a bit more of bin Laden, we understand those who currently live on, spreading his message.
This is an important book.
4/5 stars
Comments
Post a Comment