I can imagine how Osama bin Laden received the news of the atrocities in the United States. In all, I must have spent five hours listening to him in Sudan and then in the vastness of the Afghan mountains, as he described the inevitable collapse of the United States, just as he and his comrades in the Afghan war helped to destroy the power of the Red Army.

He will have watched satellite television, he will have sat in the corner of his room, brushing his teeth as he always did, with a mishwak stick, thinking for up to a minute before speaking; he is one of the few Arabs who doesn't feel embarrassed to think before he speaks. He once told me with pride how his own men had attacked the Americans in Somalia. He acknowledged that he knew personally two of the Saudis executed for bombing an American military base in Riyadh. Could he have been behind yesterday's mass slaughter in America?

Of course, we need a health warning here. If Mr. bin Laden was really guilty of all the things he has been blamed for, he would need an army of 10,000. And there is something deeply disturbing about the world's habit of turning to the latest hate figure whenever blood is shed. But when events of this momentous scale take place, there is a new legitimacy in casting one's eyes at those who have constantly threatened America.

Mr. bin Laden had a kind of religious experience during the Afghan war. A Russian shell had fallen at his feet and, in the seconds as he waited for it to explode, he said he had a sudden, religious feeling of calmness. The shell - and Americans may come to wish the opposite happened - never exploded. The United States must leave the Gulf, he would say every 10 minutes. America must stop all sanctions against the Iraqi people. America must stop using Israel to oppress Palestinians. It was his constant theme, untouched by doubt or the real complexities of the Middle East. He was not fighting an anti-colonial war, but a religious one. In the Arabia that he would govern, there would be more, not less, head chopping, more severe punishments, no Western-style democracy.

His supporters - Algerians, Kuwaitis, Egyptians and Gulf Arabs - would gather round him in his tent with the awe of men listening to a messiah. I watched them one night in Afghanistan in a mountain camp so cold that I woke to find ice in my hair. They were obedient to him, not the kind of obedience of schoolchildren but the sort of adherence you find among people whose minds are made up. And, the words they listened to were fearful in their implications. American civilians would no more be spared than military targets. This was not a man who would hesitate to carry out his promises if he could. He was a man who would have appreciated the appalling irony of creating a missile defence shield against "rogue states" but unable to prevent men crashing domestic airliners into the centre of America's financial and military power.

Yet I also remember one night when Mr. bin Laden saw a pile of newspapers in my bag and seized upon them. By a sputtering oil lamp, he read them page by page in the corner of his tent, clearly unaware of the world around him, reading aloud of an Iranian Foreign Minister's visit to Saudi Arabia. Was this really a man who could damage America, who would have laughed when he heard that the United States had placed a $5 million (£3.3m) reward on his head? Was it not America, I wondered then, which was turning Mr. bin Laden into the face of "world terror?" Was he really so powerful and so deadly?

If - and we must keep repeating this word if - the shadow of the Middle East falls over yesterday's destruction, then who else in the region could produce such meticulously timed assaults on the world's only superpower? The rag-tag and corrupt Palestinian nationalist groups that used to favour hijacking are unlikely to be able to produce a single suicide bomber. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have neither the capability nor the money that this assault needed. Perhaps the old satellite groups that moved close to the Lebanese Hezbollah in the 1980s, before the organisation became a solely resistance movement, could plan something like this. The bombing of the US Marines in 1983 needed precision, timing and infinite planning. But Iran, which supported these groups, has changed out of recognition since then, now more involved in its internal struggles than in the long-dead aspiration to "export" a religious revolution. Iraq lies broken, its agents more intent on torturing their own people than striking at the country that defeated it so suddenly in 1991.

So the mountains of Afghanistan will be photographed from satellite and high-altitude aircraft in the coming days, Mr. bin Laden's old training camps and perhaps a few new ones highlighted on the overhead projectors in the Pentagon. But to what end? When America last tried to strike at Mr. bin Laden, it destroyed an innocent pharmaceuticals plant in Sudan and a few of Mr. bin Laden's Muslim followers in Afghanistan. For if this is a war between the Saudi millionaire and President Bush's America, it cannot be fought like other wars. Indeed, can it be fought at all without some costly military adventure overseas.

Or is that what Mr. bin Laden seeks above all else?

Robert Fisk is a journalist in the U.K.

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