The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  At the trial of the would-be bombers, a scientist testified that the explosive devices they had used were similar to the bombs used on 7/7. Prosecutors said Mukhtar Ibrahim, the leader of the July 21 group, had traveled to Pakistan in 2005 around the time that the 7/7 cell leader, Mohammed Siddique Khan, was there. Ibrahim denied this, but a year before the attacks, he had been searched by British authorities on his way to Pakistan and was found to be carrying camping equipment, cold weather gear, three thousand pounds in cash, and pages from a first-aid manual about how to treat ballistic injuries, suggesting that he was not embarking on a conventional vacation. Ibrahim had also previously traveled to Sudan “to do jihad.” Jurors convicted Ibrahim and three of his sidekicks of conspiracy to murder despite their claims that they had designed their bombs only to make a symbolic noise and had no intention to harm anyone.

  The grim lesson of the London 7/7 attacks was that al-Qaeda was still able to inspire and direct simultaneous bombings in a major European capital, thousands of miles from its base on the Afghan-Pakistan border. By the summer of 2005, al-Qaeda had recovered sufficient strength that it could now undertake multiple, successful bombings aimed at targets in the West. And the London bombings underlined the fact that no Western country was more affected by Pakistan’s jihadist culture than the United Kingdom, because many British terrorists are either second-generation Pakistanis or have trained with militant groups in Pakistan.

  Despite the success of the London bombings, as the 9/11 attacks faded into history, some believed that al-Qaeda’s leader and the organization he headed had largely faded into irrelevance, not able to carry out an attack on the United States and seemingly able only to threaten Americans with video- and audiotapes that occasionally popped up on the Internet. At a press conference in 2006, President Bush asserted, “Absolutely, we’re winning. Al-Qaeda is on the run.” American officials weren’t the only ones who believed this. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the Atlantic ran a cover story headlined simply “We Won.”

  The most prominent exponent of the view that al-Qaeda was largely out of business was Dr. Marc Sageman, a sociologist and former CIA case officer who in 2004 had published an influential study of jihadist terrorists titled Understanding Terror Networks. A year later he told PBS that “Al-Qaeda is operationally dead.” And in early 2008 Sageman published another book, Leaderless Jihad, which claimed that “the present threat has evolved from a structured group of al-Qaeda masterminds controlling vast resources and issuing commands, to a multitude of informal groups trying to emulate their predecessors by conceiving and executing plans from the bottom up. These ‘homegrown’ wannabes form a scattered global network, a leaderless jihad.” In the Washington Post Sageman further argued that these homegrown militants “must now be seen as the main terrorist threat to the West.”

  In the spring of 2008, Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor who had worked at the CIA after the 9/11 attacks and was the author of the standard text Inside Terrorism, launched a blistering critique of Sageman’s claim that “leaderless” jihadis unconnected to a formal terror group were now the main threat to the West. Hoffman wrote in Foreign Affairs that this was “a fundamental misreading of the al-Qaeda threat,” pointing out that the terrorist group had reorganized and reinvigorated itself in the years following the fall of the Taliban. Sageman, a frequent consultant to government agencies, and the New York Police Department’s freshly minted first scholar-in-residence, fired back at Hoffman in the New York Times, saying “maybe he’s mad that I’m the go-to guy now.”

  Henry Kissinger is supposed to have quipped that “the reason why academic quarrels are so nasty is that the stakes are so small.” But in the case of the Sageman-Hoffman spat the stakes were enormously high; if indeed Sageman was correct that the West was threatened largely by “self-starting” home-grown militants, then why spend hundreds of billions of dollars in a “Global War on Terror” in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen, where al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups were headquartered? If Hoffman was correct, then the course that the Bush administration had followed, of taking the war to wherever al-Qaeda and its allies had found sanctuary, made a great deal of sense.

  The idea of a “leaderless jihad” was not a new one. In a different context, Louis Beam, a prominent American racist, advocated the idea of “leaderless resistance” during the 1980s as a technique for his fellow racists to struggle successfully against the American government without fear of being penetrated by law enforcement agencies. Beam explained: “Utilizing the Leaderless Resistance concept, all individuals and groups operate independently of each other, and never report to a central headquarters or single leader for direction or instruction, as would those who belong to a typical pyramid organization.” Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168, the deadliest terrorist attack on the American homeland hitherto, carried out this attack largely as an independent operator functioning with no support from any formal organization, which demonstrated that the “leaderless resistance” model really worked.

  The “leaderless jihad” concept had also percolated within al-Qaeda itself in the years before 9/11. Abu Musab al-Suri, the intense Syrian intellectual who was at once an ally and internal critic of bin Laden’s, in 2000 set up his own training camp in eastern Afghanistan, where he laid out the principles of such an approach, which was quite contrary to al-Qaeda’s existing heavily bureaucratized, top-down structure.

  Videotapes recovered in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban showed Suri in front of a whiteboard addressing one of his classes, explaining that he wanted to demonstrate how to keep jihadist cells secure. Suri then launched into a critique of the hierarchical structures prevalent in al-Qaeda, drawing a diagram indicating how easy it is to round up a cell structure in which many cells can be traced back to the leader of the organization. Suri urged that the best approach for jihadists in the future was to organize themselves in small cells with a flatter structure. “In the new stage,” Suri told his class, “I advise that your brigade doesn’t exceed ten members.” And Suri outlined the importance of self-starting militants taking the jihad into their own hands: “If a man living in Sweden spots a Jewish security target, he should attack it.”

  In his magnum opus, the fifteen-hundred-page Call for Global Islamic Resistance, which Suri released to the Internet in 2004, he formalized his concept into the slogan “nizam la tanzim”—“a system, not an organization”—meaning that there should be no organizational bonds between the “Resistance fighters” who are bound together only by their common ideology: defeating the supposed enemies of Islam.

  After the fall of the Taliban, al-Qaeda of necessity had to adopt a flatter structure because the group had been flattened by the American assault on Afghanistan and it would subsequently never resurrect its network of Afghan-era, large-scale training camps that had churned out thousands of graduates every year. But al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups continued to try to build organizational structures from Iraq to Pakistan, as it was those structures that gave them the ability to carry out large-scale operations.

  The “leaderless” approach to jihad could be seen in its purest form three years after 9/11 during the assassination of Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker known more in Holland for his role as a professional provocateur than for any merit as an auteur. Van Gogh had collaborated with the Somali-Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali to make a film about the subjugation of women under Islam, Submission, in which verses of the Koran were projected onto the naked bodies of several young women. The film was designed to provoke, and it did.

  Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Moroccan Dutchman who had recently embraced a militant form of Islam, calmly shot van Gogh on November 2, 2004, as the filmmaker was bicycling through the streets of Amsterdam, after which he slashed the filmmaker’s throat with a machete. The assassin then pinned a letter to the dead man’s chest addressed to Ali, in which he accused her of betraying he
r childhood faith. Bouyeri had no links to any existing terror organizations and his murder of Van Gogh was purely the work of a “lone wolf.”

  The most deadly act of “leaderless jihad” had taken place a few months earlier, on March 11, 2004, when a group of mostly Moroccan Spaniards had launched multiple bombings on Madrid’s transportation system, killing 191 and wounding hundreds more, attacks designed to protest Spanish support for the war in Iraq. There had been some discussion on an al-Qaeda website three months earlier that attacking Spain might result in its troops being pulled out of Iraq, and bin Laden had in October 2003 for the first time mentioned Spain as a potential target. However, the Madrid attacks were largely the work of leaderless jihadis who financed the bombings with the proceeds of substantial drug deals, and only some of whom were affiliated with a known jihadist organization, the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. The Madrid attacks worked; a new Spainish government quickly announced that it would be pulling its troops out of Iraq.

  Sageman’s view of the evolving, homegrown nature of the jihadist threat was largely shared by key counterterrorism officials in Europe, who said that several years after 9/11, although bin Laden was an important inspirational figure, they didn’t find any evidence of al-Qaeda operations in their countries. Armando Spataro, one of Italy’s leading terrorism prosecutors, said that in his investigations he found “there is no longer a hierarchical organization, now there are many groups without links to al-Qaeda.” And Baltasar Garzon, a judge who had investigated terrorist groups in Spain since the mid-1990s, said that while bin Laden was “a fundamental reference point for the al-Qaeda movement,” he didn’t see any of the terror organization’s fingerprints in his inquiries.

  This view of al-Qaeda’s increasing irrelevance, and by extension bin Laden’s, was emphatically not shared by top counterterrorism officials in the United Kingdom and the United States. The sixteen American intelligence agencies that collectively make up the U.S. intelligence community all signed off on a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that al-Qaeda was resurging, particularly in the wake of its 7/7 bombings in London. Jonathan Evans, the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5, said a year later that there were some two thousand citizens and residents of the United Kingdom whom the British government considered a serious threat to security, a good number of them with connections to al-Qaeda.

  Why was there such a starkly differing view of the al-Qaeda threat in much of Europe compared to the way the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States saw it? The difference in the perception of the threat was because of the deadly nexus that had developed from 2003 onward between militant British Muslims and al-Qaeda headquartered in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The lesson of a number of the terrorist plots uncovered in the United Kingdom was that the “bottom-up” radicalization described by Sageman only became really lethal when the “‘homegrown’ wannabes”—often radicalized by jihadi videos on the Internet—managed to make contact with “Al-Qaeda Central” in the tribal areas of Pakistan along its border with Afghanistan. For just as the U.S. military doesn’t conduct its training over the Internet but at boot camps, it turns out that effective jihadist terrorists are generally the graduates of training camps or war zones, rather than the passive consumers of jihadist propaganda on the Web.

  Michael Sheehan, the deputy police commissioner in New York City responsible for counterterrorism until 2006, explained that “hotheads in a coffeehouse are a dime a dozen. Al-Qaeda Central is a critical element in turning the hotheads into an actual capable cell,” providing them with the skills in bomb making and maintenance of operational security that turns them from angry young men into effective killers. Philip Mudd, the number two in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center who later worked at the FBI to help improve its intelligence capabilities, agreed: “There is a very clear almost mathematical increase in lethality as soon as plotters touch the FATA,” the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan, where al-Qaeda is headquartered. What was worrying for the Bush administration was the trend highlighted by the Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell, in congressional testimony in 2008. He noted that “We have seen an influx of new Western recruits into the tribal areas since mid-2006.”

  After 9/11, jihadist terrorist attacks were carried out by a mixture of true “leaderless” cells and a resurgent al-Qaeda regrouped in Pakistan, but the deadliest or most threatening attacks on commercial aviation, oil interests, and Western and Jewish targets were not generally carried out by leaderless jihadis but rather by leader-led, organized groups. There was a certain logic to this. The more complex and deadly the attack, the more likely it was to be organized not by a group of ad hoc “self-starting” jihadists but by an organization with cadre trained in bomb making and other pertinent skills such as countersurveillance. After all, 9/11 itself, the most lethal terror attack ever, was carried out by arguably the most organized terrorist group in history.

  The 7/7 London bombings were carried out by an al-Qaeda–directed cell; the bombings of two nightclubs on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002, which killed some two hundred mostly Western tourists, were the work of Jemaah Islamiyah, al-Qaeda’s Southeast Asian affiliate, and were the most deadly terrorist attack in the history of the world’s most populous Muslim country; the bombings in Istanbul a year later that killed sixty-two were directed by al-Qaeda; the most protracted suicide bombing campaign in history, in which thousands of Iraqis were murdered, was largely conducted by al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq; and the wave of suicide attacks in Pakistan that killed many hundreds after 2006 was carried out by groups allied to or inspired by al-Qaeda.

  Attacking commercial aviation—the central nervous system of the global economy—continued to preoccupy al-Qaeda after 9/11. Hydrogen-peroxide-based bombs would again be the signature of a cell of British Pakistanis trained by al-Qaeda who plotted to bring down seven passenger jets flying to the United States and Canada from Britain during the summer of 2006. The plotters were intent on committing suicide when they detonated their bombs on the passenger jets. Six of them made “martyrdom” videotapes recovered by British investigators. The ringleader, twenty-five-year-old Abdullah Ahmed Ali, recorded a video wearing a Palestinian-style black-and-white checkered head scarf in which he lectured into the camera in a heavy Cockney accent, “Sheikh Osama warned you many times to leave our lands or you will be destroyed. Now the time has come for you to be destroyed.” Like a number of aspiring British suicide bombers, Ali was married and had a young son, and in the years before his arrest he had made frequent trips to Pakistan, including a six-month sojourn there in 2005. And, like many other jihadist militants before him, he had a technical background, with a degree in computer science.

  British authorities were tracking Ali and his crew intensively during the summer of 2006. On July 4 Ali sent an email to his al-Qaeda handler in Pakistan saying, “my black mate said he is cool with a trial run.” A month later he followed up with another email: “all I have to do now is sort out opening time table and bookings.” British police wired Ali’s bomb factory for sound and video and on August 10, the day he was arrested, Ali was heard saying that in “a couple of weeks” the plan would be ready to go. One of the bomb makers was also heard to say triumphantly, “We’ve got our virgins,” likely a reference to the fragrant black-eyed houris of Paradise supposedly awaiting the suicide bombers in their next life.

  Juan Zarate was the point person at the U.S. National Security Council on counterterrorism during the summer of 2006. “My job, in some ways, was to serve as a kind of tripwire for the White House,” he says. Intelligence about the planning of the plot to bring down the airliners began crossing Zarate’s desk in early July. By the second half of that month, Zarate recalls, senior officials at the White House viewed the plot as quite alarming, with the 9/11 fifth anniversary looming and attacks on American passenger jets a real possibility. Frances Fragos Townsend, Bush’s top homeland security adviser, began to chair meet
ings that eventually included President Bush in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

  Townsend, a former federal prosecutor in New York, recalls the “planes plot” as the greatest crisis of her tenure: “They had a bomb-making factory, they were trying to put the thing together, there were communications and links back to Pakistan.” A thirteen-year veteran of the Justice Department, she remembers that the plot posed a dilemma, “because you want to see how far you can trace the conspiracy back into the tribal areas and up the command chain of al-Qaeda, yet at the same time as we understood the contours of the plot—liquid explosives, multiple simultaneous explosions, American airlines targeted—our feeling was, ‘How long can we let this thing go and have planes flying?’ Because every time a plane took off, it was a risk.” The sense of urgency picked up in early August as the plotters seemed to be preparing some kind of trial run. Townsend recalls, “How would we know that it was only a trial run? You’ve got some intelligence officers arguing, ‘Well, if it’s a trial run and you don’t have anything on them, let them go. Let’s watch it.’ I was like, ‘I don’t think so!’”

  When Ali was arrested in East London on August 10, he was carrying a Memory Stick storing flight plans for United Airlines, American Airlines, and Air Canada jets flying from the United Kingdom to destinations such as Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Montreal, and Toronto. Ali had also downloaded security advice from Heathrow Airport’s website about items that were restricted as hand luggage. Also recovered was his diary, in which were found diagrams of bombs and notations about “time taken to dilute in HP [hydrogen peroxide].”