The Osama bin Laden I Know by Peter L. Bergen

Author:Peter L. Bergen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Al Qaeda Attacks

On August 7, 1998, two months after bin Laden had announced on ABC News his intention (yet again) to attack American targets, al Qaeda blew up two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania within nine minutes of each other. The attacks came exactly eight years after President George H. W. Bush announced the introduction of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers into Saudi Arabia, following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait—bin Laden’s particular grievance against the United States.

The embassy attacks signaled that al Qaeda was capable of mounting sophisticated operations thousands of miles from its base in Afghanistan. Following those attacks the U.S. launched ineffectual cruise missile strikes against bin Laden’s training camps in eastern Afghanistan, which had the counterproductive effect of increasing the profile of al Qaeda’s leader around the Muslim world.

Al Qaeda would then again demonstrate an ability to strike an American target far from its Afghan base two years later in Yemen when suicide attackers almost sank the USS Cole, a U.S. destroyer, in October 2000.

Throughout this period, seeking to placate the United States, the Taliban tried to stop bin Laden from giving provocative interviews, and an intense, but concealed, debate developed inside the Taliban about what to do with al Qaeda’s leader. Several key Taliban officials, such as the Taliban foreign minister Wakil Muttawakil, wanted to expel bin Laden from Afghanistan, but his most important protector, Taliban leader Mullah Omar, remained adamant that bin Laden would continue to be protected by his regime.

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