It is a problem for journalists that states often launch cover-ups even when they have nothing very grisly to conceal. This is partly because the local police chiefs or middle-ranking security men may strongly suspect that their leaders have been up to no good but do not want to find out about it.
In 1999, for instance, I arrived in Moscow just after a series of devastating bomb explosions there and in other cities that had killed 300 civilians. These atrocities led to the second Chechen war and enabled Vladimir Putin to get a grip on power which he has never since relinquished.
It was widely suspected by Russians at all levels that that the Kremlin had a hand in these highly convenient attacks. There were undoubted signs of a coverup by the police which journalists latched on to as a sign of government involvement. But Russian security men may have been concealing or destroying evidence because no local police chief wanted to risk his job by appearing too eager to investigate his own bosses. The Chechen rebels were quite stupid enough to carry out on the bombings themselves and thereby provide the Kremlin with an excuse to renew the war.
Experts, whether they are assessing the stability of the Soviet Union or the likelihood of Saddam invading Kuwait, are always in danger of being proved wrong because their expertise is based largely on precedent. The way people have behaved before is generally a good guide to how they will behave in future. But what can be foreseen can also be averted, and turning points in history therefore tend to happen by surprise. Diplomats, academics and journalists who had claimed to know what was happening in the Soviet Union or Iraq end up with a humiliating amount of egg on their faces.
The April Glaspie cable reveals little that was not known before. She did not tell Saddam not to invade Kuwait because neither she nor anybody else thought he would be stupid enough to do so.
The criminal error of the US, Britain, the Arab states and much of the rest of the world in dealing with Saddam before the invasion has never in fact been a secret. They were so eager to prevent him being defeated by Iran, which he had invaded, that they helped him become the greatest military power in the Gulf. They allowed him to use poison gas against Iran and winked at his slaughter of 180,000 Kurdish civilians. If he was a monster they created him.
Tuesday, 3 May 2011
CAN WE EVER BE TRULY SAFE FROM TERRORISM?
Al-Qa'ida is the most successful terrorist organisation in history. By destroying the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001 it provoked the US into launching wars damaging to itself in Afghanistan and Iraq. Al-Qa'ida aimed to destroy the status quo in the Middle East and it succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.
Its success has not been all its own doing. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qa'ida's number two and chief strategist, wrote at the time of 9/11 that the aim of the group was to lure the US into an over-reaction in which it would "wage battle against the Muslims". Once the US was committed to a ground war, and no longer exercised its power primarily through local surrogates, the way would be open for Muslims to launch a jihad against America. By over-reacting President Bush, aided by Tony Blair, responded to 9/11 very much as al-Qa'ida would have wished.
In the decade since the attack on the Twin Towers "terrorist experts" and governments have frequently portrayed al-Qa'ida as a tightly organised group located in north-west Pakistan. From some secret headquarters its tentacles reach out across the world, feeding recruits, expertise and money to different battlefronts.
Al-Qa'ida has never operated like that. The closest it came to being a sort of Islamic Comintern was when it had several hundred militants based in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan in 1996 to 2001. Even at that time, when it could operate more or less freely in the Afghan mountains, its numbers were so small that it would hire local tribesmen by the day to be filmed for propaganda videos showing its men marching and training.
Many of the most important al-Qa'ida leaders from that era have since been detained or killed. But the organisation has proved so hard to eradicate because it exists primarily as a set of ideas and methods for fighting holy war. Osama bin Laden's target was primarily the US and its Western allies, though this has not always been true of local franchises. Civilians were fair game because they had chosen or tolerated evil rulers. In its fundamentalist religious beliefs al-Qa'ida is little different from Wahhabism, the puritanical and intolerant version of Sunni Islam that is dominant in Saudi Arabia.
Suicide bombing became the preferred method for al-Qa'ida to wage war. It was tactically effective because it meant that untrained but fanatical recruits willing to die could be deployed as a lethal weapon capable of killing many enemies. Moreover, the public-self-sacrifice of the bomber as a demonstration of Islamic faith was an important part of a successful operation.
The CIA and other intelligence agencies were criticised after 9/11 for failing to pick up on the threat posed by al-Qa'ida early in the 1990s, but in practice it barely existed before 1996 when Bin Laden moved to Afghanistan from Sudan and, even then, he was only one among several players leading Islamic Jihadi groups.
Since 2001 al-Qa'ida has continued to exist organisationally mainly as a series of local franchises. In Iraq, for instance, al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia was led by a Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had previously opposed Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Expanding rapidly among the defeated Iraqi Sunni after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, it mounted a ferocious war of suicide bombings, primarily directed against the newly dominant Shia Iraqis rather than Americans. The US itself played a role in the expansion of al-Qa'ida. In Iraq the US army spokesman in Baghdad attributed all armed attacks to al-Qa'ida regardless of who carried them out. He hoped to discredit the insurgents in the eyes of Shia Iraqis and the outside world. But within Iraq this only added to the high profile of the organisation among those hostile to the new order of things, while abroad it made it much easier for al-Qa'ida to raise money. The wave of anti-Americanism that swept the Muslim world after the invasion of Iraq also benefited the group.
One vicious aspect of al-Qa'ida activities is under-reported in the Western media: it has always killed more Shia Muslims than it did Americans.
The group was sectarian before it was nationalist. The Shia were seen as heretics as worthy of death as an American or British soldier. Again and again its suicide bombers would target Shia day labourers as they waited for work in public squares in the early morning in Baghdad or massive bombs would be detonated as Shia worshippers left their mosques. Likewise in Pakistan, the Pakistan Taliban, ideologically linked to al-Qa'ida, has shown equal enthusiasm for slaughtering Shia where ever they can be targeted.
Al-Qa'ida had the advantage post 9/11 that it did not have to do much to have an impact in the US. It had entered US demonology to a degree that any action by it, however ineffectual or trivial, had a disproportionate effect: a Nigerian student, who had received training from al-Qa'ida in Yemen, failed to blow up an aircraft over Detroit using explosives hidden in his underpants; a Pakistani man living in the US was unable to detonate explosives in a car in Times Square in New York. But, as al-Qa'ida in Yemen gleefully pointed out in a statement, such failures had almost the same effect as a successful bombing in terms of the disruption and dismay caused.
No US government can afford to have another 9/11 take place without devastating retaliation from the voters. Washington had to be seen to be doing something successful to restore American confidence in its own strength. One of the reasons why Mr Bush's administration had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, rather than devoting all efforts to hunting down Bin Laden, was that the first two options seemed easy and the third was not. Saddam Hussein was easy to puff up as a threat and eliminate in a way that was not true of the leader of al-Qa'ida.
Mr Bush set up a special cell to find Bin Laden and Zawahiri. At his morning briefings during his final months in office he would ask plaintively: "How are you getting on getting number one and number two?" In the presidential election of 2008 the Democrats made the damaging, though somewhat spu
rious charge, that the White House had taken its eye off the ball in the pursuit of Bin Laden in Afghanistan in order to invade Iraq.
The claim that Bin Laden was operationally ineffective also missed the point that he remained a potent symbol. This had been true since 9/11; all he had to do was to go on surviving for his survival to be a further sign that the will of the US could be frustrated. This is why Bin Laden's killing by US forces has such importance, regardless of how far he masterminded different plots or was behind more recent attacks on the US.
His demise will have some impact on al-Qa'ida itself, in so far as it exists as an organisation, but its main impact will be on American self-confidence. Of course, there will be jihadi groups who will want to restore the balance of terror by making new attacks, but none is likely to have the same impact as 9/11. The psychological effect was so great not just because so many were killed but because of the uniquely public nature of the attack: the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre and the slow crumbling of the two towers.
Will al-Qa'ida attacks be easier to carry out this year than in the past because of the fall or disruption of so many police states such as Egypt, Tunisia and Libya? The "strongmen" in the Arab world, like Hosni Mubarak or Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, had post 9/11 been swift to manipulate Washington to support their despotic regimes in return for their clamping down on Islamic fundamentalists. Sometimes the repression, as in Yemen, was less effective than it looked, but in Pakistan the authorities were prepared to locate and hand over al-Qa'ida members to the US while being careful to shield the Afghan Taliban.
But the collapse of the old order in the Arab world may play against al-Qa'ida: it will no longer be the beneficiary to the extent it was in the past of the hatred felt towards local dictators allied to or tolerated by the US. Other ways of ending an intolerable political and social status quo have been demonstrated. Mr Mubarak effectively allied himself with Israel and the US during Israel's war in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza in 2009. This created anger among many Egyptians which benefited fundamentalist Islamic groups, but it is difficult to envisage future, more democratic Egyptian governments being on such friendly terms with Israel. Al-Qa'ida's appeal will be diluted. But already its significance was confined mainly to the world of perceptions rather than real threats. This is why it is of such real importance that Bin Laden, the symbol of so many American fears, is dead.
Sunday, 8 May 2011
BIN LADEN WAS THE REASON WE WENT TO WAR, RIGHT?
Does the death of Osama bin Laden open the door for the US and UK to escape from the trap into which they have fallen in Afghanistan? At first sight, the presumed weakening of al-Qa'ida ought to strength the case for an American and British withdrawal. When President Obama ordered the dispatch of an extra 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2009, he declared that the goal was "to deny safehaven to al-Qa'ida and to deny the Taliban the ability to overthrow the Afghan government".
This justification for stationing 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan and for Washington spending $113 billion (£69 billion) a year always looked thin. By the US army's own estimate there are about 100 members of al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan compared with an estimated 25,000 Taliban. Even on the Pakistan side of the border, al-Qa'ida probably only has a few hundred fighters.
A problem for the US and Britain is how to dump this convenient but highly misleading explanation as to why it was essential for the safety of their own countries to fight a war in Afghanistan. This has required pretending that al-Qa'ida was in the country in significant force and that a vast US and UK military deployment was necessary to defend the streets of London or the little house on the prairie. The death of Bin Laden reduces this highly exaggerated perception of al-Qa'ida as a threat. People, not unreasonably, ask what we are doing in Afghanistan, and why soldiers are still being killed. One spurious argument has been to conflate al-Qa'ida and the Afghan Taliban, and say they are much the same thing. But it is difficult to think of a single Afghan involved in bomb attacks against targets in the US and Britain before and after 9/11. Al-Qa'ida's leadership was mainly Egyptian and Saudi as were all the 9/11 bombers.
The problem for Washington and London is that they have got so many people killed in Afghanistan and spent so much money that it is difficult for them to withdraw without something that can be dressed up as a victory. Could the death of Bin Laden be the sort of success that would allow Obama to claim that America's main objective has been achieved? For the moment, at least, it will be more difficult for the Republicans to claim that a disengagement is a betrayal of US national security. Could not this be the moment for the US, with Britain tagging along behind, to cut a deal and get out? Unfortunately, it probably isn't going to happen. It will not be Obama's decision alone. In 2009, he was dubious about what a temporary surge in US troop numbers would achieve and keen not to be sucked into a quagmire in Afghanistan just as the US was getting out of one in Iraq. Endless discussions took place in the offices of the White House about whether or not to send reinforcements.
But the outcome of these repeated meetings was predictable given the balance of power between different institutions in Washington.
Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA and the next US Secretary for Defence, said that the decision to send more troops should have been made in a week, because the political reality is that "no Democratic president can go against military advice, especially if he has asked for it. So just do it. Do what they [the generals] said."
The US military is not going to eat its optimistic words of late last year when they were claiming that it was finally making headway against the Taliban. Insurgent mid-level commanders were being assassinated in night raids by US Special Forces, and survivors were fleeing to Pakistan.
If the Taliban were increasing their strength in northern Afghanistan, they were losing their grip on their old strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar.
Such reports of progress appear to have been largely propaganda or wishful thinking. At the start of this year's fighting season the Taliban have been able to launch as many attacks as last year and replace its casualties. In Kandahar last month, they were able to free 500 prisoners from the city jail by digging a tunnel 1,000 feet long over five months without anybody finding out about it. An organisation that can do this is scarcely on its last legs. The message of the last few months is that the "surge" in Afghanistan, of which so much was expected, has not worked.
The Americans and British are meant to be training Afghan military and police units to take the place of foreign forces. It is never quite explained how Taliban fighters, without any formal military training, are able to battle the best-equipped armies in the world, while Afghan government troops require months of training before they can carry out the simplest military task.
One escaped Taliban prisoner in Kandahar has said that their plan was helped by the fact in the evening the prison guards always fell into a drug-induced stupor.
Official bromides about building up the strength of the Afghan government ignore an ominous trend: the governing class is detested by the rest of the population as a gang of thieves and racketeers. I was struck in a recent visit to Kabul by the venom with which well-educated professional people and businessmen, who are not doing badly, condemn Hamid Karzai's government. This does not mean that they support the Taliban, but it does show that Karzai's support, aside from cronies busily engaged in robbing the state, is very small.
When negotiations do start they should be between the four main players: the US, the Afghan government, the Taliban, and Pakistan. For all the rude things being said about the Pakistan military after Bin Laden was discovered so close to their main military academy in Abbottabad, nothing is going to be decided without their say-so.
Only the Pakistani army can deliver the Taliban whose great strategic advantage in the war is that under pressure they can always withdraw across the border into Pakistan. It is the highly permeable border, as long as the distance from London to Moscow, which prevent
ed the Soviet Union from defeating Afghan rebels in the 1980s. Pakistan is not going to try to close this border and could not do so even if it wanted to.
It would not be difficult for the Taliban to renounce al-Qa'ida and other jihadi groups. The killing of Bin Laden as the icon of evil should make this easier for the US to accept.
Obviously there is going to be no military solution to the Afghan conflict, and negotiations with the Taliban will have to begin sooner or later, so why not now?
Saturday, 1 October 2011
AMERICA SILENCES A KEY AL-QA’IDA PROPAGANDIST
The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki by a US drone is significant, unlike that of other al-Qa'ida operatives, because he was one the few effective propagandists in the group. He did not direct bomb makers, but his sermons inspired Muslims to violent action.
In 2010, his words led a 21-year-old student in Britain called Roshonara Choudhry to stab and wound a member of parliament who had supported the Iraq war. She later told police that she had decided to act, without consulting anybody, after listening to Awlaki's lectures on the internet for 100 hours. "I told no one. No one else would have understood," she said.
No other figure in al-Qa'ida had the same power with words as US-born, Yemen-based Awlaki, who could speak in fluent English. In his YouTube lectures he speaks with an easy-going and confident clarity.
A further reason for the US to be pleased by Awlaki's death is that the group to which he was affiliated, al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), was genuinely interested in striking at US targets. It may seem self-evident that al-Qa'ida is chiefly devoted to a holy war against non-Muslim great powers, but it is by no means the case, even if this was the aim of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East Page 19