Fourth, the militants keep adding to their list of enemies, including any Muslim who doesn’t exactly share their ultrafundamentalist worldview. Al-Qaeda has said it is opposed to all Middle Eastern regimes; the Shia; most Western countries; Jews and Christians; the governments of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Russia; most news organizations; the United Nations; and international nongovernmental organizations. It’s very hard to think of a category of person, institution, or government that al-Qaeda does not oppose. Making a world of enemies is never a winning strategy.
Given the religio-ideological basis of al-Qaeda’s jihad, the condemnation being offered by religious scholars and fighters once close to the group was arguably the most important development in stopping the spread of the group’s ideology since 9/11. These new critics, in concert with mainstream Muslim leaders, created a powerful coalition countering al-Qaeda’s ideas. Simultaneously al-Qaeda began losing significant traction with ordinary Muslims. The numbers of people having a favorable view of bin Laden or supporting suicide bombings, for instance, in the two most populous Muslim countries, Indonesia and Pakistan, dropped by at least half between 2002 and 2009.
By the end of the second Bush term it was clear that al-Qaeda and allied groups were losing the “war of ideas” in the Islamic world, not because America was winning that war—quite the contrary: most Muslims had a quite negative attitude toward the United States—but because Muslims themselves had largely turned against the ideology of bin Ladenism.
It is human nature to be concerned mostly with threats that directly affect one’s own interests, and so as jihadi terrorists started to target the governments of Muslim countries and their civilians, this led to a hardening of attitudes against them. Until the terrorist attacks of May 2003 in Riyadh, for instance, the Saudi government was largely in denial about its large-scale al-Qaeda problem. The Saudi government subsequently arrested thousands of suspected terrorists, killed more than a hundred, and arrested preachers deemed to be encouraging militancy. A similar process also happened in Indonesia, where Jemaah Islamiyah, the al-Qaeda affiliate there, was more or less out of business within half a decade of 9/11, its leaders in jail or dead, and its popular legitimacy close to zero.
Zawahiri acknowledged in his autobiography that the most important strategic goal of al-Qaeda is to seize control of a state, or part of a state, somewhere in the Muslim world, explaining that “without achieving this goal our actions will mean nothing.” But after 9/11, al-Qaeda had lost control of Afghanistan, where it had once had a large role, and its attempt in Iraq to set up a state that dominated the Sunnis dramatically backfired.
A decade after 9/11, by Zawahiri’s own standard, the group had achieved “nothing.”
Chapter 18
The End of the “War on Terror”?
Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing; after they have exhausted all other possibilities.
—Winston Churchill
A couple of weeks after assuming office, President Barack Obama was interviewed in the White House by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. Cooper asked Obama: “I’ve noticed you don’t use the term ‘war on terror.’ … Is there something about that term you find objectionable or not useful?” Obama replied: “I think it is very important for us to recognize that we have a battle or a war against some terrorist organizations.” Cooper followed up: “So that’s not a term you’re going to be using much in the future?” Obama said: “What I want to do is make sure that I’m constantly talking about al-Qaeda and other affiliated organizations because we, I believe, can win over moderate Muslims to recognize that that kind of destruction and nihilism ultimately leads to a dead end.”
Obama may have abandoned the Global War on Terror (GWOT) framing of the Bush administration but he did not embrace the view that was common on the left of his Democratic Party and among many Europeans, who have lived through the bombing campaigns of various nationalist and leftist terror groups for decades: that al-Qaeda was just another criminal/terrorist group that could be dealt with by law enforcement alone. After all, a terrorist organization like the Irish Republican Army would call in warnings before its attacks and its largest massacre only killed twenty-nine people. By contrast, al-Qaeda had declared war on the United States repeatedly during the late 1990s and then had made good on that declaration with attacks on American embassies, a U.S. warship, the Pentagon, and the financial heart of the United States, killing thousands of civilians without warning—acts of war by any standard. Al-Qaeda was obviously at war with the United States and so Obama understood that to respond by simply recasting the GWOT as the GPAT, the Global Police Action against Terrorists, would be both foolish and dangerous.
For Obama, America was still at war but the conflict was now bounded, as he put it, to “al-Qaeda and its allies.” Within a year of Obama assuming office, one of those allies demonstrated that this war was far from over. On Christmas Day of 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a twenty-three-year-old from a prominent Nigerian family who had graduated a year earlier from the top-flight University College London with a degree in engineering, boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam, which was bound for Detroit with some three hundred passengers and crew on board. Secreted in his underwear was a bomb made with eighty grams of PETN, a plastic explosive that was not detected at airport security in Amsterdam or the Nigerian city of Lagos, from where he had originally flown. He also carried a syringe with a chemical initiator that would set off the bomb.
As the plane neared Detroit the young man, who was only fifteen at the time of the 9/11 attacks, tried to initiate his bomb with the chemical, setting himself on fire and suffering severe burns. Some combination of his own ineptitude, faulty bomb construction, and the quick actions of the passengers and crew who subdued him and extinguished the fire prevented an explosion that might have brought down the plane near Detroit killing all on board and also likely killing additional Americans on the ground. Immediately after he was arrested Abdulmutallab told investigators that the explosive device “was acquired in Yemen along with instructions as to when it should be used.”
The Northwest Airlines plot had been presaged in almost every detail a few months earlier, several thousand miles to the east of Detroit. On August 28, the Saudi deputy minister of interior, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, survived a bombing attack launched by an al-Qaeda cell based in Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s southern neighbor. Because he leads Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda, the prince is a key target for the terrorist group.
Prince Nayef was responsible for overseeing the kingdom’s terrorist rehabilitation program, and some two dozen important members of al-Qaeda had previously surrendered to him in person. Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri, the would-be assassin, a Saudi who had fled to Yemen, posed as a militant willing to surrender personally to Prince Nayef. During the month of Ramadan, traditionally a time of repentance in the Muslim world, Asiri gained an audience with the prince at his private residence in Jeddah, presenting himself as someone who could also persuade other militants to surrender. Pretending that he was reaching out to those militants, Asiri briefly called some members of al-Qaeda to tell them that he was standing by Prince Nayef. After he finished the call, the bomb blew up, killing Asiri but only slightly injuring the prince, who was a few feet away from his would-be assassin. A Saudi government official characterized the prince’s narrow escape as a “miracle.”
According to the official Saudi investigation, Asiri concealed the bomb in his underwear; it was made of PETN, the same plastic explosive that would be used in the Detroit case, and he exploded the hundred-gram device using a detonator with a chemical fuse, as Abdulmutallab would attempt to do on the Northwest flight. Prince Nayef’s assassin also had had to pass through metal detectors before he was able to secure an audience with the prince. (It was also PETN that Richard Reid, the al-Qaeda recruit who tried to bring down the American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami, had used in his shoe bomb almost exactly eight years before
the attempt to bring down the Northwest flight. According to a senior U.S. counterterrorism official, it is “rare” for PETN to be used in terrorist attacks.)
Shortly after the failed attacks on both Prince Nayef and the Northwest passenger jet, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen took responsibility for the operations and released photographs of the two bombers taken while they were in Yemen. A Saudi counterterrorism official said that “after the attack on the prince, the fear of using similar techniques against airplanes, which was discussed openly in the media, has encouraged al-Qaeda cells to try it.” The official also explained that American government agencies had participated in the forensic investigation of the Prince Nayef plot, which meant that they should have been aware that a PETN bomb concealed in underwear would evade metal detectors.
The plot to bring down the Northwest flight demonstrated that al-Qaeda was still targeting commercial aviation, which after 9/11 had become one of the hardest targets in the world. And it also demonstrated that the group retained some ability to mount large-scale plots against American targets despite all the damage that had been inflicted on the group. If Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had succeeded in bringing down Northwest Airlines Flight 253, the bombing would not only have killed hundreds but would also have had a large effect on the U.S. economy, already reeling from the effect of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and would have devastated the critical aviation and tourism businesses.
If the attack had succeeded it would also have dealt a crippling blow to Obama’s presidency. According to the White House’s own review of the Christmas Day plot, there was sufficient information known to the U.S. government to determine that Abdulmutallab was likely working for al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen and that the group was looking to expand its terrorist attacks beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Yet the intelligence community “did not increase analytic resources working” on that threat. Also information about the possible use of a PETN bomb by the Yemeni group was well-known within the national security establishment, including to John Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, who was personally briefed by Prince Nayef about the assassination attempt against him. As Obama admitted in a meeting of his national security team a couple of weeks after the Christmas Day plot, “We dodged a bullet.”
On January 21, 2009, on his second day in the Oval Office, surrounded by a photo-op-ready bevy of sixteen retired generals and admirals, President Obama signed executive orders that made good on the best line in his inaugural address: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” As he appeared to be drawing down a curtain on the “war on terror,” Obama ordered the Guantánamo prison to be closed within a year, officially ended the use of secret prisons by the CIA, and required all interrogations to follow the noncoercive methods of the Army field manual. And he ordered a six-month review of all the cases of the 245 prisoners then held at Guantánamo, which effectively ended any of the trials going on at the base. These moves seemed to presage a wholesale rollback of Bush’s “war on terror.”
The issue of what the Obama administration would do with the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo boiled down to how dangerous these prisoners actually were. Sixty had already been cleared for release by the Bush administration but some would likely face persecution if they returned to their home countries, in particular, a hapless group of seventeen Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs. In 2009 some of those Uighurs were flown to the island nation of Bermuda, where they were released.
There were also some one hundred Yemenis in the prison camp who could not, for the foreseeable future, be returned to Yemen because of the Yemeni government’s weak prison system. There had been not one but two jailbreaks in Yemen in recent years by men involved in the USS Cole attack.
Complicating the issue, some of the detainees who had already been released from the prison camp then engaged in terrorism, such as Said Ali al-Shihri, a Saudi who was released in November 2007 and who, like all other Guantánamo detainees released to Saudi custody, entered a comprehensive reeducation program. After passing through the program, Shihri left Saudi Arabia for Yemen and became the deputy leader of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, the group that planned the botched Christmas Day 2009 attack.
Other released detainees appear to have been so radicalized by their time at Guantánamo that they turned to violence. Abdullah Salih al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti held in Guantánamo until November 2005, conducted a suicide attack in the Iraqi city of Mosul on April 26, 2008, killing thirteen Iraqi soldiers. Ajmi had changed while incarcerated at Guantánamo. Letters to his Washington lawyer, Thomas Wilner, chart his changing character. His first letter is upbeat and friendly: “How are you and how is your nice team doing? I hope you are doing well. Tell me how you are doing, Mr. Tom, and what is going on in the outside world.” Ajmi’s final letter to Wilner was a different matter: “To the vile, depraved Thomas, descendant of rotten apes and swine.” Wilner said that Ajmi became more radicalized while he was jailed: “Guantánamo took a kid—a kid who wasn’t all that bad—and it turned him into a hostile, hardened individual.”
In May 2009 a Pentagon fact sheet about Guantánamo detainees who had been released but had since taken up arms was made public. What dominated news stories about the report was the claim that seventy-four of those released from Guantánamo, or one in seven, had “returned to the battlefield.” On May 21 the New York Times ran a story on its front page about the report under the headline “1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad.” The paper subsequently issued a correction, noting it had conflated those “suspected” by the Pentagon and those “confirmed” of engaging in violence, but the media splash surrounding the report overwhelmed the later correction. The Times story ran on the same day that President Obama and former vice president Cheney gave their dueling keynote speeches in Washington about Guantánamo. Unsurprisingly, Cheney seized on the findings of the new report, saying of the released detainees, “One in seven cut a straight path back to their prior line of work and have conducted murderous attacks in the Middle East.” However, when threats to the United States were considered, the true rate for those released from Guantánamo who were either confirmed or suspected of taking up arms was one in twenty-five, or barely 4 percent, according to a review of the public record by the New America Foundation.
Despite Obama’s declarations that the “war on terror” was a construct of the past and the implication that his administration would dramatically move away from Bush’s policies, the shift was more one of tone than of substance. Guantánamo did not close a year after Obama was inaugurated, as he had promised; indeed around two hundred prisoners remained incarcerated there, some fifty of whom were likely to be detained indefinitely as they were deemed too dangerous to release, yet at the same time there wasn’t enough evidence to put them on trial; the some one hundred Yemenis in the jail similarly could not be released because of the lax Yemeni prison system, while the rest of the inmates would eventually face either a civilian trial or a military commission. Under pressure from New York politicians, Obama backed away from a promised trial in a federal court in Manhattan for Guantánamo’s most infamous inmate: 9/11 operational commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
There were other continuities with the Bush administration: While Obama did ban the use of the euphemistically named “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” the practice of waterboarding had already ended in 2003 and the other coercive interrogation techniques were suspended three years later because of a ruling by the Supreme Court. And Obama dramatically increased the Bush administration policy of the targeted killing of militant leaders in Pakistan by drone strikes, while greatly expanding the war against “al-Qaeda and its allies” in neighboring Afghanistan.
Chapter 19
Obama’s War
The Taliban regime is out of business, permanently.
—Vice President Dick Cheney in March 2002
[The Taliban] have a dominant influence in 11 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
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br /> —Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the U.S.
Joint Chiefs of Staff, in December 2009
On January 22, 2009, two days after his inauguration, President Obama gave a speech at the State Department declaring that Afghanistan and Pakistan were the “central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism.” Of course, this was true, but few commented at the time how strange an outcome this was. After all, hadn’t the Taliban been defeated in the winter of 2001? And wasn’t Pakistan a close American ally in the “war on terror”?
At the State Department, Obama announced he was creating a new diplomatic post, appointing a U.S. special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The special representative would be Richard C. Holbrooke, the veteran diplomat who had cajoled, charmed, and bullied the warring parties in the Balkans to make peace, at Dayton, Ohio, in 1995. His appointment was a recognition by the Obama administration that stability could not come to Afghanistan without a stable Pakistan, and vice versa, and also of how much work needed to be done in the region to end its status as the “central front” for al-Qaeda and its allies.
Just as Holbrooke was making his first official visit to the region, eight Taliban fighters carrying AK-47s and wearing explosive vests mounted simultaneous attacks on several government buildings in Kabul, including the Ministry of Justice and the Prisons Department, spraying gunfire indiscriminately and killing at least twenty. It was a particularly brazen daytime assault designed to demonstrate that the Taliban could penetrate even the most sensitive Afghan government ministries. And the attacks, which took place on February 11, 2009, just hours before Holbrooke landed in Kabul, were designed to send a message from the Taliban to the United States: We own Afghanistan. The Taliban seemed to understand instinctively that what the Pentagon termed “information operations”—that is, sending political messages—should always play a key role in their military planning.
The Longest War Page 40