Muhammad Atef

Atef was a policeman in Egypt. He fled his country after the assassination of President Sadat in 1981. After fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s, he possibly worked with Mohamed Farrah Aidid to train the Somalis for the attack on the U.S. Army Rangers in 1993. As Al-Qaeda’s military chief, he probably set up the cells in Tanzania and Nairobi that carried out the East African American embassy bombings on August 7th, 1998 that killed 211 Africans and 12 U.S. citizens. This first independent terrorist action undertaken by Al-Qaeda garnered little sympathy in the Middle East and Africa until President Clinton retaliated with air strikes on the Sudan and Afghanistan. Atef was killed in Afghanistan in 2001 by a MQ-1 Predator which is described by the U.S. military as “a medium-altitude, long-endurance, remotely piloted aircraft.” This aircraft was probably manned by an operator in Florida guided by a video feed.

In January 2002, I went to see Blackhawk Down. The theater was really crowded. I cheered with everyone else for the Rangers. The actual U.S. military had been in Afghanistan since October. At the time, I guardedly supported their action. Probably most of the people in the theater in Union Square in New York City did too. The war in Iraq, which would change this support, wouldn’t begin for another few months. Growing up during the Vietnam War, I had always viewed any U.S. use of military power with distrust. Yet in 1993, providing security to the relief operation seemed like the right thing to do in Somalia. In Fall 2001, attacking those who had attacked us didn’t seem wrong either. No matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t construct Mohamed Farrah Aidid or the Taliban’s Mullah Mohammed Omar as freedom fighters. Was I getting older and more conservative or were there situations that justified the use of military force?