Biographers should, as a rule, steer clear of the rich and the reclusive. So little to go on, so risky if you get it wrong, unflattering, or libellous. Osama bin Laden is not the rule, however. Rich and famous after a life of suffocating piety, he has finally taken his career as a recluse to uncharted depths. And you can say what you
Osama bin Laden was born in 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, of a Yemeni father and one of his several wives. (As Peter Bergen tells us, bin Laden senior was understandably vague about the maternity of his 50-odd offspring, but it appears that this wife was a Syrian.) From an early age, Osama worked in the construction business which his father had established under the patronage of the Saudi royal family, and which by the end of the last decade had grown to a value of £5billion, employing 37,000 people.
At 17 he married a Syrian relative, the first of his four wives. He attended the prestigious King Abdul-Aziz university in Jeddah where he was awarded a degree in economics and public administration in 1981.
Although his father had instilled in his family a respect for Islam and a sharp nose for business, it was only at university that Osama first encountered the fundamentalism that was to change his life (and that of thousands of Americans unaware of his interest in them). One such encounter was with Abdullah Azzam, an Islamic scholar who founded the world's first international jihadist movement, and who was to have a profound influence as bin Laden's mentor and father-figure for his al-Qaeda campaign of terror.
During his undergraduate years, the young Osama was either a tearaway or a religious bore, depending on which author we trust. A belief has grown in the west - authenticated by little more than a photo of a lanky bin Laden lounging in flares - that he lived the life of a young playboy, had an eye for girls and a vast capacity for alcohol. Adam Robinson, whose primary source material is personal interviews with members of bin Laden's extensive network of siblings and cousins, opts for that line. (He even hints at a homoerotic relationship with the scholarly Azzam, but this appears to be one of several gratuitous comments inspired more by the Haughey factor than by evidence.) "The champagne flowed freely", he tells us "as Osama took in the dancers, the hostesses and the prostitutes who were attracted to a table of well-to-do Saudi Arabians . . . It was a wild night at the Crazy Horse." How does he know? Without references or index, there is no way of checking Robinson's facts and judgments. Bergen, by contrast, is sceptical of the playboy theory; his description of bin Laden as "a deeply religious teenager" is less titillating but probably more reliable.
A more serious question of evidence arises in regard to US involvement in funding and arming the Mujahadeen and al-Qaeda organisations opposed to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Was America's most wanted terrorist a creature of the CIA?
Bergen is correct to reject the literal version of CIA funding and military support. Bin Laden had enough money of his own to finance his anti-Soviet campaign, he never met with CIA officers, and from the early 1980s the US had joined the USSR in his pantheon of satanic evils. But this is to reduce the question of CIA involvement to its most superficial. Of course the brown envelope was never passed directly to the bearded zealot. The CIA was happy to encourage any gangsters who aided their mission - "you wouldn't want any of these guys marrying your daughter", as one official said - but deniability was critical and support could only be through proxies. The principal proxy used was the Pakistani Intelligence agency, which ensured that American support was funnelled to the most uncompromising of the religious bigots in the field.
Both Bergen and Robinson are interesting in exploring the tangle of deceit and intrigue through which money and weapons were passed from western interests to tribal warlords with quite different goals in mind. But they miss the whole story.
Some of it, relating to US complicity in forming the fundamentalism which led to the events of September 11th, was exposed in recent revelations by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. Three years ago he disclosed - boasted - that the proxy US intervention in Afghanistan began six months before the Soviet invasion in December 1979, not as the public assumed (with all three authors under review) as a later response to communist expansionism. "It was time to finally sow shit in their backyard" in Brzezinski's colourful English. But the time he refers to is July 1979. "This secret operation had the effect of luring the Russians into the Afghan trap." Reflecting much later, he felt that "a few stirred-up Muslims" in Central Asia counted for little in the cause of liberating Central Europe and ending the Cold War. This vignette of Realpolitik has been in the public realm since 1998.
For the rest, both Bergen and Robinson focus on a similar range of issues, most of them familiar to us from current media coverage. The rise of the al-Qaeda movement, its principal leaders and network of agents and sleepers around the world, the link with the Taliban, are all discussed.
Both books were revised in haste to include some afterthoughts on the September bombings. While they are well-written and pacy, Bergen's is the more authoritative guide to the secret world of Osama bin Laden and to what caused "a few stirred-up Muslims" to crash into the icons of American power.
The third book under review addresses the wider background. What kind of society was it that Brzezinski used as a ploy in his power game with the Russians? And who were the strange clerics who would later emerge as its overlords? This is the focus of Michael Griffin's account of the rise of the Taliban. Going to press before September 11th - and all the better for escaping the rushed revision which adds bulk, but little else, to the other two - it ranks with Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game as a balanced, well-researched and readable insight into what, for most of us, is far-off territory at its most foreign.
With the fall of the communist regime of Mohammad Najibullah in 1992, which had survived the departure of the Soviet Union for three years, the people of Afghanistan staggered under the lash of one clique of crazed despots after another. Despite his record as collaborator, Najibullah had given the Afghans six years of relative order, higher education, food and heat subsidies and entertainment. In a prescient comment before his removal from office, he saw the common task of "Afghanistan, the USA and the civilised world - to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism . . . (otherwise) Afghanistan will be turned into a centre for terrorism".
Griffin has a fascinating chapter on the role of oil and gas in the power politics of Central Asia. Global demand for energy will double in the next 25 years and Afghanistan's neighbours - Azerbaijan, Kazakstan and Turkmenistan - "are sitting on the largest known reserves of unexploited fuel in the planet", at a time when existing resources in the Gulf are threatened by longterm political instability. It does not need a conspiratorial frame of mind to guess that the major powers, circling the theatre of war and watching the actors in the throes of mutual slaughter, have more on their minds than the liberation of women in Kabul or the humanitarian crusade of Tony Blair.
Bill McSweeney teaches on the International Peace Studies programme at Trinity College Dublin