foreign pressure. In secret meetings with Saudi officials, Sudan offered to expel
Bin Ladin to Saudi Arabia and asked the Saudis to pardon him. U.S. officials
became aware of these secret discussions, certainly by March. Saudi officials
apparently wanted Bin Ladin expelled from Sudan.They had already revoked
his citizenship, however, and would not tolerate his presence in their country.
And Bin Ladin may have no longer felt safe in Sudan, where he had already
escaped at least one assassination attempt that he believed to have been the
work of the Egyptian or Saudi regimes, or both. In any case, on May 19, 1996,
Bin Ladin left Sudan--significantly weakened, despite his ambitions and orga-
nizational skills. He returned to Afghanistan.
ing stopover in the United Arab Emirates.
associates since his organization's 1988 founding in Afghanistan. Dozens of
additional militants arrived on later flights.
his ambitious enterprise for war against the United States.
was--and remains--the country's strongest and most respected institution, and
the army had been and continues to be preoccupied with its rivalry with India,
especially over the disputed territory of Kashmir.
groups for support, and fundamentalists became more prominent. South Asia
had an indigenous form of Islamic fundamentalism, which had developed in
the nineteenth century at a school in the Indian village of Deoband.
funded institutions. Moreover, the fighting in Afghanistan made Pakistan home
to an enormous--and generally unwelcome--population of Afghan refugees;
and since the badly strained Pakistani education system could not accommo-
date the refugees, the government increasingly let privately funded religious
schools serve as a cost-free alternative. Over time, these schools produced large
numbers of half-educated young men with no marketable skills but with deeply
held Islamic views.