Afghanistan

  The ISI will not act against the interest of Pakistan’s military. The ISI is many things, but it remains basically a professional military organization. It is not a tool of radical Islam, though it has certainly cooperated with it and used it to advance its own policies at times. Even today, despite the changes in Pakistan and its army that have taken place since the 1970s, the ISI’s operational capability lies with its field-grade officers, and these remained largely secular nationalists. The ISI has also, since the 1980s, been subjected to greater interest by outside governments and intelligence agencies than any other institution of the Pakistani government, other than perhaps the nuclear program. The ISI includes relatively few supporters of bin Laden, nor even of Mullah Omar; its secular military leadership is highly nationalistic, but this has not prevented them from supporting groups defined by a radical Islam to the point where they threatened the existence of Pakistan. But the ISI does resent what it sees as a history of US intrusions on Pakistani sovereignty ranging from conditionality on aid to the armed Predator UAV attacks on targets in Pakistan from bases also in Pakistan. It is not only extremists in Pakistan who fear that improved US security relations with India (and Israel) may eventually lead to confrontation with a nuclear-armed Pakistan. All of these factors influence the ISI’s development and implementation of Pakistan’s Afghan policy.

  Yet the paradox of this support and the 2008–10 insurgent threat to Pakistan remain. In the words of former US Ambassador James Dobbins, “Pakistani intelligence provides clandestine support [for the Talibans], despite their attacks in Pakistan and killing Pakistani soldiers.”73 US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said of Pakistani intelligence involvement with the insurgents: “Look, they’re maintaining contact with these groups, in my view as a strategic hedge. . . . They are not sure who’s going to win in Afghanistan. They’re not sure what’s going to happen along that border area. So, to a certain extent, they play both sides.”74

  Pakistani military and security services, spearheaded by but not limited to ISI, extending covert support to Afghanistan’s insurgents is likely to become an increasingly explosive issue as US and coalition casualties mount. While acknowledging that some of the ISI-created support networks still work in the insurgents’ favor, COL Patrick McNiece, USA, deputy director of intelligence for ISAF in 2008, saw “no high level government support,” although he acknowledged that there were reports to the contrary: “There are piles of intelligence on ISI guys meeting, doing training, but any outsider in the FATA is called ISI.”75 He saw as more substantial the lack of action against Afghan insurgent leadership. “If Pakistan is really serious, they could roll them up rather than cherry pick to appease the west. They are more serious in Bajaur [where there is the anti-Pakistan insurgency].”

  PART TWO

  THREATS FROM

  THE VORTEX

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TRANSNATIONAL TERRORISM

  “I am the spirit that always negates and rightly so, because everything that comes to be is worthy of its own destruction.”

  —Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s Faust

  Al Qaeda and its associated transnational terrorist organizations, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, defeated in Afghanistan in 2001, reestablished themselves in the Vortex. There, despite years of efforts by Pakistan to target Al Qaeda’s leadership, this organization and its allies have been able to use the pre-existing Taliban culture and the infrastructure developed by ISI and others over previous decades to enable insurgent operations in Afghanistan and Kashmir for their own purposes. Al Qaeda has been able to put in place new leaders to replace those it has lost, train new recruits, establish a headquarters, and reinforce its transnational networks of support. These networks now run from the Vortex to “franchised” groups that carry on the Al Qaeda name and run a campaign of terror in turbulent regions worldwide. Groups such as the Pakistani Lashkar-i-Taiba, originally formed to take part in Pakistan’s cross-border support of the insurgency in Kashmir, have carried out their own terrorist attacks, such as that in Mumbai in 2009. Al Qaeda is now a decentralized parallel movement in several countries, while rooted in the Vortex, a networked group, taking direct action when required but also willing to work indirectly or through local “franchises.”

  Networked Transnational Terrorism

  In the wake of Al Qaeda’s retreat from Afghanistan in 2001–02, senior US officials though it was defeated. But Al Qaeda quickly found what amounted to a sanctuary in parts of the FATA, places where individuals cannot be traced, policemen cannot operate, and even avenging armies march slowly and with great difficulty. It took advantage of Pushtowali to claim protection and invoke loyalty from some Pushtuns. Al Qaeda’s access to resources from Arabia and the Gulf gave their personnel additional opportunities to arrange local marriages that further cemented their ties to the region and their hosts.

  Al Qaeda has evolved over the years and has become politically more sophisticated, at least in its rhetoric and in its participation in the battle of ideas. Al Qaeda has replenished its decimated leadership cadres. It has often replaced lost Arabs with more-competent Pakistanis with local ties and cachet, although bin Laden himself remains apparently at the heart of an impenetrable Arab inner circle.

  Successes—publicized and otherwise—by the US, UK, and their international partners have effectively destroyed the pre-2001 leadership of Al Qaeda. Since 2001, it had lost three-quarters of its leadership and over 4,000 personnel worldwide. While Osama bin Laden remained the focus of Western efforts to disrupt the leadership, Pakistanis took over a larger role in the leadership, displacing Arabs and Egyptians. Yet despite many successes against Al Qaeda, the US Government National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of July 2007 suggested that Al Qaeda was still creating more terrorists than are being taken out of action by US efforts.76

  Al Qaeda has deepened its connections with and support for the wide variety of militants mounting insurgencies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al Qaeda relies on multiple networks to link their leadership in Pakistan with the operational cells, the recruiters, the ideologues and information warriors and those providing logistical and financial support across the world. It has trained and planned for operations worldwide while enabling regional terrorism. It has become a multi-regional group, not just revolving around a single headquarters in Pakistan, and has embraced franchises of local groups where it does not aim to have its own presence.77 For example, the formation of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb—a local franchise group—was not just created to attack targets in Algeria, but to penetrate France via the Algerian community. Because of this Algerian connection, Al Qaeda operatives now have French passports, even French names, and thus operate with greater ease in Al Qaeda’s “distant” targets, namely America and Western Europe.

  Before 2001, the Taliban’s war and Al Qaeda’s war in Afghanistan were the same war. Since then, they have become separate but overlapping ones. Today, Al Qaeda, the post-2001 Afghan Taliban, its insurgent and criminal allies, and the Pakistani insurgents all remain loosely allied and co-located in the Vortex, sharing the same networks and support systems, even though their broader policies, paths, and other global alliances have diverged. Al Qaeda is continuing to wage transnational jihad from the Vortex, aimed at distant targets including the US and UK as well as the Islamic world as a whole. Al Qaeda will fight alongside the Afghan and Pakistani Talibans as well as other insurgent groups. They remain united by their opposition to the US, the non-Muslim foreign presence in Afghanistan, and their desire to overthrow the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as a shared Islamic radical ideology.

  Al Qaeda is part of the transnational terrorist threat to the US, the UK, and the West, as well as taking part in terrorism and insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al Qaeda has been unable to recreate an attack on the US comparable with those of 11 September 2001. Whether it has the ability to do so remains uncertain.78 Al Qaeda’s desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction apparently also remains st
rong.79 The 2009 terrorist attacks in Mumbai show that the Al Qaeda approach to terrorism, with spectacular multiple attacks targeting soft targets, has been adopted by other terrorist groups. Mumbai also served warning that future Al Qaeda-style attacks may be mounted by other groups, sharing Al Qaeda’s goals if not operational planning and with better access to the target or more effective resources. “Al Qaeda has suffered serious setbacks, but it remains a determined, adaptive enemy, unlike any our nation has ever faced,” said former Director of Central Intelligence Michael Hayden.80

  The new transnational terrorist model adopted by Al Qaeda included multiple types of relationships, ranging from direct top-down control of high-value operations to franchising the Al Qaeda name to allied groups or sharing a support infrastructure and goals. Since 2001, Al Qaeda has outsourced much of its targeted violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan to groups that had their origins in the conflict in Kashmir and so had access to the support networks put together by the Pakistani security services, and has thus been more effective than if Al Qaeda had tried to carry out these actions directly. Al Qaeda has also put an increased emphasis on producing propaganda.

  It was in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan that Al Qaeda first demonstrated the benefits of working at the center of an enabling network, leaving other groups responsible for the kinetic activities. During the 2000 Air India Flight 814 hijacking incident in Kandahar, Al Qaeda let Kashmiri groups and the Afghan Taliban take the blame and receive worldwide attention, while maintaining a low profile, despite apparently having planned the hijacking.81 Similarly, Kashmiri groups’ willingness to use direct terrorist action to try to move India and Pakistan toward confrontation and radicalize Indian Muslims was seen in the 2002 attack on the Indian parliament and the 2009 attack in Mumbai. While there was no direct link to Al Qaeda in either one, both furthered Al Qaeda objectives. It remains uncertain whether either attack could have taken place without Al Qaeda support.

  Since 2001, Al Qaeda has also demonstrated its ability to cooperate with dissimilar groups (e.g., “secular” Palestinian groups). Al Qaeda has been able to use its franchises and networked connections to indirectly link up with groups that lack its commitment to violence but excel in building networks worldwide and running clandestine organizations, such as Hezb-ut-Tahrir, which operates covertly with its leadership believed to be on the West Bank. Such extremist groups, while not sharing a commitment to terrorism, are often well organized and offer a capability that can be used by other, more violent, groups. Even though these groups themselves have not relinquished their opposition to terror, their pre-existing organizations worldwide are targets for internal penetration by Al Qaeda.

  Al Qaeda’s War of Ideas

  The networked Al Qaeda that has emerged since it was forced to retreat from Afghanistan in 2001 has, while retaining its predecessor’s commitment to violence, embraced many of the tactics of emerging high-technology social movements: the Internet, cell phones, DVDs, and direct access to the global media. By 2007, Al Sahaab, Al Qaeda’s media outlet, had an audio or video release every three days to “outside” media, primarily in Pakistan and Afghan, and its efforts have greatly increased in both quantity and quality since then.82 Al Qaeda’s skills at propaganda and psychological operations have become a powerful asset. Even if they have not repeated the bloodshed of 9/11, they have managed to do much damage in less kinetic ways.

  Al Qaeda’s propaganda and information operations capability has evolved to be far more robust than its pre-2001 predecessor. From havens in the Vortex, Al Qaeda can draw adherents from across the globe, without respect for borders and simultaneously attacking the state system that imposes them. Al Qaeda aims to influence Muslim societies by a combination of violent terror and effective propaganda, going over the heads of governments to target the youth of the Islamic world, many facing nonresponsive governments and weak social structures, and exploit the challenges of a demographic bulge and lack of economic and political opportunity facing entire generations.

  The Islamic world as a whole—perhaps to a greater extent than just Afghanistan—faces an overwhelming crisis of purpose, memory, and knowledge involving everything about the way they live and think. Al Qaeda aims to seize the high ground and provide an answer to this crisis, one that will set those who hear it against the “Zionist-Crusader” enemy and make their own governments, if not the enemy, irrelevant. This propaganda is not limited to Afghanistan and the Pakistan border but has had an impact throughout the Islamic world. It offers the listener a coherent worldview that makes sense of a world that seems hostile, if not completely insane, while at the same time validating and valuing their own self-image. It answers the great question “If we—our religion and/or our culture—are so great, why are we so screwed up?” It’s not their fault, Al Qaeda says. It is externally imposed evil-doers—Zionist-Crusaders, takfir governments—that make your life hard, stupid, and pointless, while you deserve both social justice and material comfort. And we, Al Qaeda, can give you this. This narrative is not just aimed at the people of Afghanistan, where conspiracy theories and bizarre rumors can be easily accepted, but at Muslims worldwide who Al Qaeda has targeted as their potential supporters.

  By 2008, it was the Al Qaeda versions of events—including, for example, the brutal murder of a foreign aid worker in Kabul claimed by the Afghan Taliban in October 2008—that were picked up and used by the global English-language media while the Afghan government and the international coalition forces, despite their large expenditures of spokesmen and psychological operations, took several news cycles before they had their version before the world media. The view that could have been put before the people of Afghanistan, that this murder has violated their obligation to hospitality and has shamed them by killing a young woman who came a long way to help injured Afghans, never appeared. The divided “information warriors” of the Afghan government, independent news media, US, and ISAF, each conscious of its own turf and subject to external constraints and multiple layers of bureaucracy, conceded this particular battle of ideas to Al Qaeda. That terrorists and insurgents kill both Muslims and those foreigners that have come to help them must be brought before the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  Narratives are important in the Vortex. The tribal lineages of the Pushtuns are narratives. The Northern Alliance’s pride in withstanding first the Soviets and then the Taliban is a narrative, one that cannot be matched by returning exiles or those that fought with the Soviets, and hence it has been used to legitimate the claims of their leadership of access to power. Narratives transmit Pushtowali and Afghaniyat, rather than an explicit code. In creating the narrative that inks many of its efforts aimed at Afghanistan in its war of ideas, Al Qaeda has sought to portray the current conflict in Afghanistan in terms of Izzat (honor).83

  Al Qaeda has used its narrative of an assault on the Islamic world to justify insurgency in Afghanistan.84 Al Qaeda created and gave to the post-2001 Afghan Taliban the narrative “Islam is under attack” as well as using it themselves. Al Qaeda was able to claim their own powerful narrative—that of resilience after defeat and of the US thwarted—that has become all the more compelling as memories of 11 September 2001 faded and the costs of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza increased. These are sophisticated psychological and information operations that produce effective propaganda and make conditions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan more difficult and dangerous.

  During the war against the Soviets and even during Afghanistan’s internal conflicts of 1992–2001, Afghans generally did not see themselves as part of a larger struggle affecting the entire Islamic world. That many now do is in part because of the access to multiple media sources, but it is also the result of Al Qaeda’s strength in the battle of ideas, which has enabled it to define conflicts in Afghanistan in ways that make them harder to resolve, as well as the failure of post-2001 Kabul and its foreign supporters to effectively respond. More so than their pre-2001 predecessors, the Afghan Taliban and other insur
gents are increasingly willing to link their struggle to an international resistance to what they portray as US-Zionist invasion and oppression. Afghans were in the past less concerned about Israeli-Palestinian issues than their own crises. In place of this worldview, Al Qaeda has offered to what proved to be receptive audiences the theme that “non-Muslims are invading the Muslim world” and that the natural leaders of resistance are the Afghans, who have never been conquered by an outside invader, be they British or Soviet. Al Qaeda has helped add Americans to that list. They have helped define the US and coalition presence as occupiers rather than guests in the eyes of many Afghans. Even among Afghans that have never heeded Al Qaeda, the years of friction inherent in a foreign military presence, of nationalist sensibilities offended, road accidents with convoys, collateral damage incidents, house searches, raids, and detention, have caused more of them to oppose its continued presence.

  Al Qaeda-inspired themes have been powerful in Afghanistan and Pakistan for many reasons, but none has been more important than the Western presence in Afghanistan. Resentment of this presence has been successfully tied to Islam as well as nationalism, mobilizing many of Afghanistan’s Pushtuns against a government that can be presented as a client of a Zionist-Crusader war on Islam as well as corrupt and failing to deliver social justice.

  The Vortex also fits with Al Qaeda’s internal narrative and its self-image. Al Qaeda’s leaders see themselves as firkan (knights) that go forth from a stronghold to do great things autonomously.85 This fits too with the traditional Pushtun view of the Frontier—especially on the Pakistani side—as a place from which raiders, representing an exemplary and exceptional Islam, strike against targets in the plains, whether governed by infidels or takfir Muslims.