Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  Jihadists were able to stage further attacks after 9/11 on a smaller if still horrific scale. Some of the more prominent examples included the 2002 bombing of a Bali nightclub (202 dead), the 2004 bombing of the Madrid train system (191 dead), the 2005 bombing of the London subway system (52 dead), and the 2008 shootings in Mumbai (163 dead). But with some minor exceptions (the Madrid attack contributed to Spain’s exit from Iraq), such attacks did nothing to advance the agenda of Al Qaeda and its associated groups. Quite the contrary. By slaughtering so many innocents—including so many Muslims—jihadists turned Muslim opinion against them and spurred a global crackdown against them. Even Saudi Arabia, which had hitherto been apathetic in the struggle against the Islamists, got tough following the 2003 bombings in Riyadh that killed 35 people. The United States was able to knit together an effective global coalition to counter Al Qaeda because it was seen as a threat to a growing number of countries. International cooperation foiled numerous plots, including an ambitious attempt to bring down seven airliners over the Atlantic in the summer of 2006 using liquid explosives. Many other schemes, such as the attempted shoe bombing of a flight from Paris to Miami in 2001 or the attempted car bombing of Times Square in 2010, were undone by sheer incompetence or bad luck.

  Before 9/11 terrorists had generally refrained from inflicting massive civilian casualties because they realized that such attacks could backfire. As the terrorism analyst Brian Jenkins wrote in the 1970s, “Terrorism is theater, terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.”59 Al Qaeda and other Islamist organizations violated that dictum and paid the price in lost support. The Chechen rebels offered a case in point: they forfeited all sympathy after their 2002 hostage taking in a Moscow theater, which left 169 dead, and their 2004 hostage taking at a school in Beslan, in North Ossetia, which left 331 dead, more than half of them children.

  The same phenomenon—nihilistic violence turning counterproductive—was evident in Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s and in Iraq in the 2000s. In Algeria and Egypt, Islamist uprisings were suppressed by homegrown military regimes. In Iraq, however, the post-Saddam state was too weak to respond effectively. The job of battling insurgents was left to the “infidel” army of a foreign superpower that had done little to prepare for guerrilla warfare since its humiliating defeat in Vietnam.

  62.

  CARNAGE IN MESOPOTAMIA

  Al Qaeda in Iraq since 2003

  IT BEGAN IN August 2003—Iraq’s descent into hell. On August 7 a truck bomb outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad killed nineteen people. On August 12 a suicide bomber drove a cement mixer loaded with explosives into the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. Among the twenty-two dead was the UN’s senior representative in Iraq, the popular Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello. Worst of all was the attack on August 29 in Najaf. A parked vehicle, most likely a Toyota Land Cruiser, exploded at around 2 p.m. just outside the Imam Ali mosque, the most sacred shrine in the entire Shiite faith. Noon prayers were just ending. Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, one of the country’s leading Shiite clerics, was leaving after his weekly sermon and thousands of the faithful were milling around. The blast left a three-foot-wide crater in the street, killing more than eighty people, including Hakim. According to a witness, “Pieces of flesh were found on the rooftop of the building opposite the mosque and smeared across the windows.” Afterward a reporter found that “the air reeked of burned rubber, and streets were coated in oil, twisted metal, glass and debris.”60

  Such grotesque scenes would be repeated all too often in the years ahead. U.S. troops had little trouble toppling Saddam Hussein’s decrepit regime in a few short weeks of fighting in the spring of 2003, which highlighted the American mastery of conventional combat operations. Unfortunately American commanders had been overly focused on the initial assault and were unprepared to restore order and rebuild governance. The resulting power vacuum allowed sundry Sunni and Shiite extremists to wreak havoc, slaughtering tens of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of foreign troops in one of the most destructive terrorist campaigns ever recorded. At the forefront was the group that was responsible for the August bombings and many more to come: Monotheism and Jihad, or, as it was eventually renamed, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

  Its founder was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose own father-in-law was said to have been the suicide bomber in Najaf. He would for a brief time emerge as the most famous jihadist in the world after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, but he differed greatly from those educated offspring of distinguished families. Born Ahmad Fadil al-Khalaylah in the grimy Jordanian industrial city of Zarqa, whose name he took, he was a tattooed high school dropout, a former video store clerk and petty criminal, uneducated and barely literate, a hard drinker and street brawler. He eventually found Allah and in 1989, at the age of twenty-three, made his way to Afghanistan, where he trained in an Al Qaeda camp. After returning to Jordan, where he served five years in jail for his subversive activities, he was back in Afghanistan by 1999. Soon he was leading his own jihadist group.

  U.S. attacks in the fall of 2001 caused him to flee with his followers to Iran, which cynically provided him with aid and shelter notwithstanding his anti-Shiite sentiments. From there Zarqawi and his men infiltrated Iraq beginning with the Kurdish areas in the north that were, ironically, protected by American airpower. By the time the U.S. armed forces entered Iraq in the spring of 2003, in search of weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein no longer possessed, Zarqawi was ready to “burn the earth under the feet of the invaders.”61

  More secular Sunni groups, led by former Baathists, concentrated on sniping at the occupying troops and blowing up their vehicles with improvised explosive devices—time-honored guerrilla techniques that would have been all too familiar to French forces in Indochina and British forces in Malaya a half century earlier. Zarqawi, by contrast, preferred sick, flamboyant gestures such as televised beheadings of hostages that took advantage of the newest communications technologies. On May 11, 2004, a jihadist website posted a video in which five masked men decapitated a Jewish-American businessman, Nicholas Berg, who was dressed in an orange jumpsuit similar to those worn by detainees at Guantánamo. The CIA believed that Zarqawi personally wielded the knife that cut off Berg’s head. The way that this video was distributed online, taking advantage of newly available broadband Internet access, was typical of the sophistication with which AQI promulgated its propaganda. Just as nineteenth-century anarchists had taken advantage of the spread of newspapers and magazines, and the Vietcong and PLO had taken advantage of broadcast television, so these twenty-first-century insurgents showed how the latest technology could be harnessed to spread terror.

  While focused primarily on Iraq, Zarqawi did not forget about his homeland. In 2005 his suicide bombers hit three American-owned hotels in Amman, killing sixty civilians, mainly Muslims, and thus sparking mass revulsion in Jordan. But his most destructive actions were suicide car bombings in Iraq. There were more suicide attacks in Iraq between 2003 and 2008 than in any other country in history. “By April 2008,” writes Peter Bergen, “suicide attacks had killed more than ten thousand Iraqis.”62

  Although the political scientist Robert Pape claims that “suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation,”63 most of the suicide bombers in Iraq were not Iraqis and their targets were not foreign occupiers.64 They came primarily from other Arab lands via Syria (Saudis composed the largest group), and they struck mainly at Shiite civilians and Iraqi security personnel. Clearly they were motivated by religious ideology, not nationalism, since most of them had never previously visited Iraq before immolating themselves on its soil.

  It is perhaps pointless to look for rational motives behind such heinous crimes, given how rabidly Zarqawi hated Shiites. In a letter he had written that was intercepted by American authorities, he referred to Shiites as scorpions, snakes, rats, infidels, and “devils in the bodies of men.” To the extent that his attacks on Shiites were animated by more
than sheer animus, Zarqawi appeared determined to spark a Shiite backlash that would “awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger.”65 AQI could then emerge as the Sunnis’ defender. So far so good. The next step was not clear, however. How could the Sunnis, who accounted for no more than 25 percent of Iraq’s population, prevail against the Shiite majority? Far more likely that the Sunnis would be annihilated.

  The counterproductive nature of Zarqawi’s attacks was clear even to his nominal superiors in Al Qaeda. In July 2005 Zawahiri sent him a letter of admonishment. “Many of your Muslim admirers among the common folks are wondering about your attacks on the Shia . . . ,” he wrote. “My opinion is that this matter won’t be acceptable to the Muslim populace however much you have tried to explain it, and aversion to this will continue.”66

  Zarqawi was free to ignore this good advice because his own organization operated independently of Al Qaeda central. By its peak in 2005–06, AQI was raising nearly $4.5 million a year, primarily from criminal rackets such as gasoline smuggling, car theft, and extortion.67 The organization that Zarqawi built was strong enough to survive his own death; he was killed by a pair of bombs dropped by an F-16 on June 7, 2006, after having been tracked down to a safe house outside Baqubah by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command.68

  By then the disintegration of Iraq was well under way. AQI’s February 22, 2006, bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a revered site for Shiites, sparked a fierce backlash. Shiite death squads responded with a campaign of ethnic cleansing to push Sunnis out of Baghdad. Every day dozens of Sunni bodies would be found around the capital, some with evidence of torture from power drills, others simply shot through the temple. The number of Iraqi civilians killed jumped from 5,746 in 2005 to 25,178 in 2006.69

  An all-out civil war appeared to be starting with U.S. troops in the role of helpless bystanders. American commanders were focused not on stamping out the violence but on turning over control to Iraqi security forces. Unfortunately the Iraqi forces were badly trained and heavily infiltrated by Shiite militants. They fed rather than doused the flames of sectarian conflagration. Amid pervasive insecurity, ordinary Iraqis gravitated for protection to sectarian militias. By 2006 AQI had gained dominance of an area larger than New England in western and northern Iraq,70 while the leading Shiite militia, the Jaish al Mahdi (Mahdist Army) led by Moqtada al Sadr, asserted its control in central and southern Iraq.

  The seemingly hopeless situation began to reverse itself in September 2006 when tribal sheikhs around Ramadi launched a counterattack against AQI in cooperation with U.S. soldiers and marines. The tribes were offended that AQI had usurped their authority and their sources of revenue, primarily from smuggling. Because of its Salafist beliefs, AQI had even banned smoking—a favorite pastime across Iraq. Those who resisted its edicts were assassinated, sparking blood feuds with tribesmen. “The situation became unbearable,” one sheikh recalled.71 Similar sentiments had been expressed in nineteenth-century Chechnya by tribal elders offended by Shamil’s edicts. This led them to cooperate in the 1850s with Russian occupiers seeking to quash his jihadist movement. Yet even the tribesmen opposed to Shamil never took up arms against him en masse as the Sunni tribesmen of Anbar Province now proceeded to do against AQI. Eventually more than 100,000 Sunnis would join the Sons of Iraq, as the anti–Al Qaeda militia came to be called.

  There was nothing inevitable about this massive switch of allegiance. There had been disaffection among the tribes before, and it had always been repressed ruthlessly by AQI. This uprising too would likely have failed if U.S. troops had been on the way out in 2007 as the majority of the American public desired. But at the end of 2006, after more than three years of drift, President Bush made an unpopular decision to turn around a failing war effort. Over the opposition of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and most lawmakers, he decided to send 20,000 more troops to Iraq—a figure that would eventually grow to 30,000. At the same time he made a clean sweep of his Iraq team. Out went Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, General John Abizaid, the head of Central Command, and General George Casey, the senior officer in Iraq: all of the architects of the worst disaster in American military history since Vietnam. In an echo of Westmoreland’s fate, Casey was elevated to become army chief of staff.

  Until then, Bush had loyally acceded to the dogged desire of Rumsfeld, Abizaid, and Casey, all of whom he had picked personally, to minimize the American footprint in Iraq, because he did not want to repeat Lyndon Johnson’s supposed mistake of micromanaging the Vietnam War.72 This was a striking example of the importance of studying military history and of not relying on historical myths. In reality, as we have seen, Johnson only micromanaged the air strikes on North Vietnam; the ground war in the South he left to Westmoreland to run as he saw fit. The problem was that Westmoreland, like many of his successors in Iraq, approached an unconventional conflict with a relentlessly conventional—and Pollyannaish—mindset that seemed impervious to any evidence of failure.

  As the situation on the ground in Iraq grew ever grimmer and as the American public turned against the war effort, Rumsfeld and the generals continued to issue blithe assurances, as McNamara and Westmoreland had once done, that progress was actually being made even if no one else could discern it. Eventually even Bush, who entered office with no national-security background, realized that he could no longer trust the chain of command in which he had naïvely reposed so much faith. With his own presidency hanging in the balance, the president turned for a new concept of operations to outside advisers such as the military historian Frederick Kagan and the retired general Jack Keane who urged the president to abandon the drawdown envisioned by Rumsfeld, Abizaid, and Casey and instead to send all the reinforcements he could find to Iraq.

  To implement this “surge,” the president called on a general with a professorial air and a mild manner that only partially masked a fierce will to win. If Osama bin Laden had become the leading insurgent of the early twenty-first century, David Howell Petraeus was about to become the leading counterinsurgent.

  63.

  COUNTERINSURGENCY REDISCOVERED

  David Petraeus and the Surge, 2007–2008

  BEFORE HE COULD conquer Iraq, Petraeus first had to conquer the U.S. Army, an institution famously resistant to intellectuals such as this Princeton Ph.D. His most effective weapons were his fitness and his toughness. Even into his fifties, he was known for engaging in push-up contests with soldiers half his age—and winning. Intensely competitive, he interviewed potential aides by taking them out for a run and gradually ramping up the pace to see if they could keep up.

  In 1991, while still a lieutenant colonel, he was accidentally shot in the chest with an M-16 by one of his own soldiers during a training exercise. He barely survived after emergency surgery performed by Dr. Bill Frist, a future Senate majority leader. Yet in less than a week he was demanding a discharge from the hospital so he could get back to his battalion. To prove to the doctors that he was good to go, he took the intravenous tubes out of his arm and dropped to the hospital floor to do fifty push-ups. Nine years later, while skydiving in 2000, Brigadier General Petraeus’s parachute collapsed seventy-five feet above the ground, and he landed so hard that he fractured his pelvis. He had to have a metal plate and screws inserted. But that did not keep him from returning to a punishing pace of work and workouts. Nor was he appreciably slowed in 2009 by a bout of prostate cancer that he kept secret and treated with radiation.

  Petraeus had revealed that his slight frame—only five feet nine, 150 pounds—concealed impressive reservoirs of endurance. That enabled him to dispel doubts about whether he was too reserved and cerebral to lead men in combat, something he would not have a chance to do until 2003, when he was already a two-star general.

  Unlike many officers of his generation, who hailed from clans with generations of military service, Petraeus was the first in his family to wear a uniform. He was born in 1952, an immigrant’s son. His father was a Dutch merchant-marine capt
ain who had come to the United States after the Nazis overran the Netherlands and had captained American merchant vessels in some of the toughest convoys of World War II. His mother was a part-time librarian who imbued him with a love of reading. He grew up in Cornwall-on-Hudson a few miles from West Point, and when the time came to apply to college he could not resist the challenge of gaining admittance to this exclusive institution. The fierce competitiveness that would mark his entire career was exhibited at West Point, where he was a “star man,” meaning he was in the top 5 percent academically, as well as a cadet captain and a member of the ski and soccer teams. He even entered the premed program simply because it had the most demanding curriculum on campus. Shortly after graduation in 1974 he notched another accomplishment by marrying Holly Knowlton, the brainy daughter of the academy superintendent. Later he would become the only officer ever to finish first at both the Ranger School, a punishing nine-week endurance test, and the Army Command and General Staff College, a yearlong academic course for majors.

  His insatiable hunger for accomplishment—his desire to win every contest, earn every ribbon, best every rival—along with his obvious intellect, which he made no effort to hide, irritated less driven and more low-key officers but was made somewhat more palatable by his disarming sense of humor, his seemingly low-key personality, and by his concern for the well-being of his fellow soldiers. At the Ranger School, for instance, he was credited with helping to push a buddy to complete the course. Later Petraeus would develop a reputation for nurturing junior officers. He was no Courtney Massengale, the self-centered, political general at the center of Anton Myrer’s best-selling novel Once an Eagle, a military favorite since its publication in 1968. But neither was he the sort of back-slapping, tobacco-chewing good ol’ boy (see: Franks, Tommy) who often rose to the top of the U.S. Army.