Osama was not a major player in the Russian-Afghan war. There was a fundamental cognitive gap between Afghans and Arabs. Afghans had peasant-gangster mentality. They switched between camps and villages, low-intensity fighting and farming. In a telling example, Afghan mujaheddin besieged Khowst for almost a decade. After the West and the Muslim world started pouring money into the war, Afghans found they could comfortably live off the war and had no intention of cutting off their source of income. Arabs, on the other hand, wanted an immediate victory and called for battles that endangered both lives and income. Afghans kept Arab visitors as guests rather than combatants, a trend that reversed only toward the war’s end. Afghan commanders universally detested Arab Afghans as incompetent zealots seeking glorious death rather than tangible results. Afghan guerrillas laughed at the Arabs for the gap between their professed readiness for martyrdom and their battlefield cowardice. Rich Arabs kids also gave Arab Afghans a bad name: they kept coming to Afghanistan for a safari-like jihad, firing a few rounds in the air when no enemy was around. These pilgrimages became more popular after the Soviets announced their withdrawal. Arab Afghans recall Osama’s courage as exceptional when he, alone out of all the Arabs, drove an excavator to make trenches during a Soviet attack; that tale shows that cowardice was widespread among Arabs. Afghans detested both Arab and American shows of help. That proud nation, living a free barbaric life in the mountains, is used to defeating invaders on its own, and has done so from Alexander the Great onwards. A lawless territory cannot be conquered. The Soviets learned that in Afghanistan and Israel learned it in Gaza. Afghans sensed Arab and American hypocrisy; neither nation cared about the Afghans. The Arabs wanted Afghanistan for a jihad battleground and the Americans found in Afghanistan a place for their major proxy-war with the Russians.
Osama lacked substantial battlefield experience in the Afghan war, and his most trumpeted battlefield accounts refer to minor battles against the fledgling Afghan government, such as near Jalalabad in 1989. Osama ran fund-raisers (mostly among his family friends), channeled small amounts of money to hospitals, paid for transporting Arabs to Afghanistan, and was engaged in similarly non-essential operations—mostly Islamic charities in Pakistan. His fame stemmed from snobbery: embattled and poor Afghans were flattered by the rich young Saudi’s involvement. Osama fostered that snobbery by trumpeting connections with his father’s business empire. A legend has it that Osama brought to Afghanistan a lot of construction equipment from his Saudi company. Given the difficulties of transporting heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, any such large-scale operation is unlikely, and Osama could have bought the equipment in Pakistan or bought Russian equipment already in Afghanistan. The assistance from the largest Saudi company was a PR trick. The assistance was a strategic nuisance: Osama, like a megalomaniac, built highways and tunnels in the Afghan mountains instead of spending the funds efficiently. His help to Afghanistan came too late to influence events and was negligible compared to the American or the official Saudi aid to the mujaheddin.
