The terrorist read, and dreamt of a comeback
It is said that one can tell a lot about a man from the books he reads. If that's true, then the recently released partial list of the documents confiscated from Osama bin laden’s Abbottabad home shows that the world's best known jihadi terrorist was quite a foreign policy wonk. He read several English-language books on the US, including many on issues of counter-terrorism and how the Bush and Obama Administrations were fighting the war on terror. The list includes some of the biggest names of the field, from Michael O'Hanlon (Unfinished Business, U.S. Overseas Military Presence in the 21st Century) to Bob Woodward (Obama's Wars) and Christine Fair (introduction to Fortifying Pakistan: The Role of U.S. Internal Security Assistance). He also focused on the US as a superpower and its role in global geo-politics and seemed like a regular reader of Foreign Policy, Newsweek and TIME magazines. Bin laden had also saved a bunch of reports prepared by some of the world's top think-thanks.
But on the other hand, he kept up with the parallel world of jihadi terror — he had a long list of reading materials published by different Islamist outfits, dealing with suicide attacks and sharia'h banking, and even browsed through the Fall 2010 edition of Al Qaeda's English language Inspire magazine. His books on religion, at least according to this partial list, were relatively few — most dealt with Islam and some with Christianity. Interestingly, bin laden seemed to devour conspiracy theories about 9/11, especially the ones that said it was an inside job. He also read about the Illuminati creating Israel (Bloodlines of the Illuminati by Fritz Springmeier) and how a few wealthy families controlled the US Federal Reserve (Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins).
The list also throws some light on the personal life of Osama bin laden, who lived for about five years in the Abbottabad house, where he was finally killed in a US raid in 2011, with his wives and children. In a letter to his wife, where he allows her to re-marry after his death but also says that he'd like to be re-united with her in paradise, he come across as a loving and surprisingly liberal husband. The younger ones in the house clearly played a lot of video games, and the large number of computer software manuals could have either been intended for the children or used to produce Al Qaeda literature.
The new list offers little insight into how bin laden managed Al Qaeda from his Abbottabad home (which some now say may have actually been more of a Pakistani protective den) or what kind of control he had in his final years. His letters to other Al Qaeda leaders show that he believed the group should remain focused on destroying the US, instead of targeting Arab despots in West Asia and North Africa and setting up a caliphate in the region. On hindsight, this may have been a strategic misstep given how the Islamic State has done exactly that and in the process eclipsed Al Qaeda.