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October 10,2021
Austin Kuan
Osama Bin Laden (hereinafter referred to as "Bin Laden") was widely regarded as the primary perpetrator of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. If he hadn't fled to Afghanistan, the world would have forgotten about it after the Soviet Union withdrew in February 1989. Furthermore, if it hadn't been for Bin Laden, the American army would never have entered Afghanistan, the "imperial cemetery."
As a Saudi Arabian, Bin Laden and his family immigrated to Saudi Arabia from Yemen in the 1930s. With the support of the Saudi royal family, Bin Laden's family began to flourish in the construction industry, and gradually diversified into a multinational business group, and even finally had business dealings with the Bush family in Texas, USA.
George Bush, the Bush family's second-generation successor, was elected President of the United States in November 2000. Who knew that the CEO of the Bin Laden Group's sixteenth younger brother would launch the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States ten months later?
In the Islamic world of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia had the closest relationship with the United States. It was the world's largest oil exporter prior to 2018. For a long time, the United States has maintained close ties with the Saudi royal family in order to maintain control over a reliable source of oil. The Bush family did business with the Bin Laden family. How could Bin Laden, the poisonous snake, be developed in such a context of dual cooperation?
Bin Laden was not a prominent member of the family. He had a prosperous life. While he was in it, he might be able to see many complicated international exchanges of interests. Instead, he had developed a hatred for the Western world. But he didn't need to pull his family's back legs, so the first rebellion was in 1988, when he founded the Al-Qaeda organization to oppose the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union was the first Western country he wanted to deal with because it had put his "Islamic brothers" in dire straits. From here, Bin Laden's fate in Afghanistan began.
After more than a thousand years since the Crusades in the Middle Ages, the conflict between the Christian and Islamic worlds has not subsided. Because the Soviet Union has traditionally believed in the Orthodox Church of the Christian system, the invasion of Afghanistan cannot be viewed simply as a large country invading a small country, but rather as a challenge from the Christian world to the Islamic world. Furthermore, despite the fact that the Middle East is divided into many countries, for Islamic believers, the country is sometimes of little importance, and Islam should be one of them. Many people in the Middle East believe in "Islamic unity," and fighting the Western world's invasion is referred to as "jihad."
Regardless of his family's and the West's business interests, Bin Laden, a wealthy man, took his considerable wealth and established an organization to call on Muslims all over the world to fight this jihad, earning him high praise in the Islamic world. In Argentina, he was similar to Ernesto Guevara. He misplaced a good doctor, but he went to Cuba and Bolivia to participate in the armed revolution. Despite the fact that he died during the revolution, he became a spiritual idol for many people in later generations.
Bin Laden founded the Al-Qaeda organization to fight the Soviet Union, and the Taliban quickly adopted a revolutionary mindset. The Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan and left the Islamic world in February 1989. The Taliban naturally gained control of Afghanistan's entire territory. Bin Laden's vision began to shift in response to the United States' control of the Middle East, but the US has not harmed the Islamic world, and the Al-Qaeda organization was forced to temporarily shut down. The Middle East world could have been peaceful, but in November 1989, the Berlin Wall between East and West Germany collapsed and accidentally lit a fire.
The Berlin Wall, which separated East and West Berlin, was originally a symbol of evil and totalitarianism. The people of West Germany hoped to demolish it, but the Soviet Union was the most powerful force defending the wall's existence. No one could have predicted the fall of this power. The withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in February 1989 was, in fact, a signal that the Soviet Union's national power was clearly declining, and that it was almost incapable of controlling the communist countries of Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall was unintentionally opened on November 9, 1989, and the Soviet Union was unable to control it. The East German government, ruled by the Communist Party, was well aware that it would not last long. East Germany was the first domino to fall in the communist world, followed by the communist parties of other Eastern European countries, and many republics under the Soviet Union strove for independence. The Soviet Union officially collapsed on December 25, 1991, after two years of wear and tear. As mentioned in the previous article, over the last two years, American pride had grown stronger and stronger, and the free world had finally defeated the communist world!
The United States' pride was never hidden. The more troubling aspect was that the United States believed that its liberal democratic system was the best and that it should be extended to the rest of the world. Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992, Japanese-American political scholar Francis Fukuyama published "The End of History and the Last Man," an important work that influenced Western political theory. Fukuyama argued that the arrival of liberal democracy in Western countries marked the end of human society's evolution and the final form of human government, dubbed "the final conclusion of history." To put it another way, a liberal democracy led by the United States was the best civilization model that humanity could devise. Bin Laden was deeply hurt by this point. He made the decision to mobilize the Al-Qaeda organization, join forces with other terrorist organizations around the world, and wait for an opportunity to punish the United States. Al-Qaeda orchestrated the bombing of a hotel where US troops were staying while being relocated from Somalia to Yemen in December 1992. Afghanistan is the primary training ground for these terrorists.
The seminal work "On the Clash of Civilizations," which influenced Western political thinking, was first published as a paper in 1993. The author was Francis Fukuyama's teacher, Samuel P. Huntington. According to the thesis, Western civilization must be stronger in order to avoid a conflict between Islamic civilization and Chinese civilization. This heavyweight paper was undoubtedly laying the theoretical groundwork for Europe and the United States to expand their control over the Middle East. It also fueled Bin Laden's rage. Despite the fact that he lacked the resources to fight the US, the idea of "shaking the sky" grew stronger.
Bin Laden continued to absorb and train terrorists from all over the world from 1994 to 2000, and then did the training in Afghanistan. During this time, the United States also established itself as an unbeatable national power. It became more involved in the political situation in the Middle East in order to ensure the strategic resource of oil. Naturally, it became more important to promote the importance of American liberty and democracy. The pressure on the traditional Islamic world's transformation increased, making Bin Laden more established and determined to fight until the end.
This was the motivation behind the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in New York, USA. Following this historic tragedy, the US quickly targeted Bin Laden, who fled to Afghanistan, and the Al-Qaeda organization based in Afghanistan, demanding that the Taliban government hand them over. If you understood the "Islamic brothers'" transnational sentiment, you would realize that the Taliban would not do what the US wanted. At the time, US President George W. Bush was confronted with domestic public sentiment and realized that he needed to put the most pressure on the Taliban in Afghanistan; otherwise, only by sending troops to Afghanistan to arrest people could the people's powerful anger be quelled.
On October 7, 2001, only 26 days after the 9/11 attacks, the United States dispatched troops to Afghanistan to lay the groundwork for the capture of Bin Laden and the annihilation of the Al-Qaeda organization. With its prosperous national strength, the United States encountered the Taliban, its former comrade-in-arms, but the friend turned into an enemy, which was extremely unfortunate. Initially, the US assumed it was only a short-term military mission. Bin Laden unexpectedly became unnoticed. The United States was unable to locate him in the middle of the world. Because Al-Qaeda was a virtual armed organization with no headquarters, it had to deal with the Taliban first. The Taliban fled to their vast mountainous lair, and the US took control of Kabul, the capital. However, this was not the United States' original intention. If Bin Laden was not apprehended, the US military would be unable to return to the country. The United States was trapped in Afghanistan in this cat-and-mouse game.
On May 2, 2011, the US finally tracked down Bin Laden in Afghanistan's neighboring Pakistan and killed him, a process that took 9 years and 6 months. Since the first conspirator was killed, the US should be relieved and able to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan! The situation in the United States was, in fact, even worse! Because the growth rate of terrorists increased from 2001 to 2011, particularly the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, which had always been unavoidable and trained more terrorists for the world. In 2011, the US realized that killing Bin Laden was pointless, and that it needed to eliminate the Taliban, who sheltered Al-Qaeda. In this way, the United States continued to be kidnapped by Afghanistan.
Bin Laden died, and the United States directly buried him at sea within 24 hours, preventing him from having a cemetery and becoming a holy place for terrorists to worship. From a humanitarian point of view, bin Laden was a villain, but in parts of the Islamic world, he got a heroic evaluation. From a macro point of view, it was he who introduced the United States into Afghanistan, and the Al-Qaeda organization he established spread, making it impossible for the United States to leave Afghanistan. Therefore, how could we skip Bin Laden when we planned to delve into Afghanistan’s influence on the situation of the world?