On April 17, 1987, Osama bin Laden led 120 of his most fierce Arab mujahedin
into battle. The attack was planned for months and billed as a major
offensive for the warriors of God against the atheistic Soviet Red Army and
its apostate Afghan puppets. The target: an Afghan government position on
the outskirts of Khost.
Things went so poorly one wonders what "FUBAR" is in Arabic. None of the
mujahedin positions had been supplied with ammunition, which was stuck in a
car far from the battle scene. Men were so exhausted from carrying their own
rockets and mortars - they didn't have enough mules - that some went back to
their cave and passed out from exhaustion before the battle even started.
And nobody remembered to pack those pesky wires used for connecting rockets
to detonators. A lone government soldier heard the racket bin Laden's men
made and kept the entire force pinned down with a machine gun until bin
Laden ordered a retreat.
This sort of thing was typical among the so-called Arab Afghans, a few
thousand ragtag religious misfits imported from the Arab world, interested
not so much in Afghan liberation as global jihad. The real Afghans
considered the Arab forces clownish and lousy fighters. They were more like
the Keystone Cops than battle-hardened mujahedin.
But the following month, Bin Laden helped lead the Arab Afghans in their
most successful military effort: defending their mountain lair, the
so-called Lion's Den. The battle was militarily successful in the sense that
the already retreating Red Army was held at bay on its way out of Dodge.
"From the Soviet perspective the battle of the Lion's Den was a small moment
in the tactical retreat from Afghanistan," wrote Lawrence Wright, my source
for all of this, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Looming Tower."
But for bin Laden and his followers, it was divine proof that the mujahedin
crushed the mighty Soviets. There was, according to Wright, "a dizzying
sense that they were living in a supernatural world, in which reality knelt
before faith. For them, the encounter at the Lion's Den became the
foundation of the myth that they defeated the superpower."
Armed with this useful myth, the Arab Afghans became the core of a new
global jihadist insurgency called al-Qaida.
For years, some of the shriller voices on the left have argued that 9/11 was
a classic example of "blowback" from our support of the mujahedin's struggle
against Afghanistan. But the fact is, we didn't "create bin Laden" - he
largely created himself. And to the extent that any superpower can claim
credit for him, it's the Soviets. It was their withdrawal, not our support,
that convinced the foreign fighters that their pinpricks felled the Soviet
bear.
Today, a new "blowback" thesis is in the works. The Washington Post, Time
magazine and the Associated Press are just a few of the news outlets that
have asserted the U.S. is arming the Sunnis in Iraq. This is simply not
true, Gen. David Petraeus insisted in congressional testimony Monday. But
it's no surprise that many people are leaping to that conclusion because the
familiar "blowback" story line is the only plausible one for millions of
people who've made up their minds that the war is, was and forever shall be
hubristic folly.
Similarly, opponents of the war denounced Petraeus' testimony before he said
a single word, not because they know the facts better than Petraeus - please
- but because anything that doesn't fit the narrative of an ever-worsening
quagmire must be a lie. MoveOn.org even seems willing to suggest that
Petraeus' personal motives are perfidious.
Many war supporters have certainly forced reality to kneel before faith in
recent years. But reality can't stay on bended knees for very long, so those
running the Iraq project have had to change course and give facts the
respect they deserve.
Many Democrats, too, have been grudgingly breaking from their base's
otherworldly narrative of late, though they continue to insist that a
"political solution" can be had in Iraq without a concomitant military one.
Even the Sunni insurgents are coming to grips with the fact that al-Qaida
doesn't have Iraq's best interests at heart.
But there is one group that is under no inclination to nod to reality:
al-Qaida. The jihadis' mission, as always, is to create a new reality.
If the bin Laden of the late 1980s could convince himself that his motley
crew delivered the death blow to the Evil Empire, leading to the formation
of al-Qaida, one can only imagine what lesson he and the bin Ladens of
tomorrow would take from America's defeat in Iraq. That's a story line we
should all hope won't be written.