by Scott Shane
I quoted him near the bottom of the story, wanting to cover all points of view. But surely, I thought, Scheuer’s spoilsport take on the surge of young Muslims demanding democracy and the fall of despots must be wrong.
The upbeat mood certainly extended to the White House. Obama, who was soon to announce his reelection bid, was steering clear of public appearances in Muslim settings. One in five Americans clung to the false belief that he was Muslim, and he would soon release his long-form birth certificate to counter the wacky but widespread belief that he was not an American citizen. But on a Sunday night in early March, he dispatched one of his closest aides, Denis McDonough, to give a highly publicized speech to a Muslim audience at a mosque outside Washington. White House officials stayed away from Awlaki’s Dar Al-Hijrah, a conservative institution that was now unfairly tagged on Fox News and in the conservative media with the bogus label of “the 9/11 mosque” because of Awlaki’s contacts with the hijackers. Instead they chose a more liberal competitor, the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, better known by its acronym as the ADAMS Center. McDonough, Obama’s point man on countering radicalization, spoke to two hundred people gathered in the mosque gym, preceded by an honor guard from the local Boy Scout troop. McDonough’s purpose was partly to counter heavily publicized hearings on radicalization being held by a pugnacious Republican congressman, Representative Peter King of Long Island, once an outspoken supporter of the Irish Republican Army but now on a crusade to expose the dangers of Islam. McDonough offered a reassuring message: the administration knew that Muslims were loyal Americans, that few had anything to do with terrorism, that extremist violence was as alien to Islam as to other great religions. He pointed to the revolution in Egypt as a blow to Al Qaeda. “It is the most dramatic change in the Arab world in decades, and al Qaeda had nothing to do with it,” McDonough said. “And so President Obama made it a point to commend the Egyptian people and their embrace of ‘the moral force of nonviolence—not terrorism, not mindless killing.’ ”
But McDonough also had something to ask for: cooperation in the battle against extremism. He mentioned Awlaki three times, saying that he and other radicals calling for homegrown terror “have found a miniscule but receptive audience” among American Muslims. Only a partnership between the Muslim community and the government, he said, could prevent young Muslims from going astray. “We will not stigmatize or demonize entire communities because of the actions of a few,” he said.
McDonough, one of eleven children from a devout Irish Catholic family, was a surrogate whom no one had accused of being a secret Muslim. But his message was vintage Obama. The president had been adamant that his administration would not conflate Islam and terrorism, and his aides still stayed away from labeling terrorist attacks and plots as “Islamic” or “jihadist,” arguing that such terms unintentionally conveyed religious legitimacy to violence. By substituting drone strikes for large-scale American occupations, and by avoiding the religious labeling that many Muslims resented, Obama hoped to put the lie to the claim of Awlaki and others that America was at war with Islam.
A few weeks later, Awlaki offered a confident reply to Obama and all the American officials and commentators who had declared the Arab awakening bad news for Al Qaeda. In late March, the fifth issue of Inspire magazine made its appearance on jihadi forums. The cover story was Awlaki’s four-page piece called “The Tsunami of Change,” and the cover blurb promised clarity: “The unfolding revolution has brought with it a wave of change. Shaykh Anwar explains.” The piece made clear that Awlaki’s security precautions had not cut him off from news coverage of the Arab uprisings; he accurately quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the commentator Fareed Zakaria, and the terrorism expert Peter Bergen from late February and early March, fairly reflecting their view that the uprisings were bad news for Al Qaeda. He used his usual cocky American voice, referring to Clinton and Gates as “these guys” and gleefully quoting Malcolm X and his use (made famous by the Spike Lee film) of the word bamboozled.
Then Awlaki did his best to dismantle what had become a broad Western consensus. His main point was right in line with Michael Scheuer’s view, and it was quite ominous. In fact, he said, while the United States might be spinning the awakening as a welcome development, the fall of authoritarian rulers who had suppressed religious extremists was a big blow to its campaign against terrorism. “The mujahidin around the world are going through a moment of elation,” Awlaki wrote, “and I wonder whether the West is aware of the upsurge of mujahidin activity in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Arabia, Algeria and Morocco? Is the West aware of what is happening or are they asleep with drapes covering their eyes? Or is what is happening too much for the West to handle at the moment and they are just bidding for time while attempting to prop up some new stooges who would return the area to the pre-revolution era?” America, he said, was “an exhausted empire,” and the Arab uprisings were opening “great doors of opportunity” for Al Qaeda.
In a sly reference to the Dickens novel included in the printer box in the bomb plot of five months earlier, Awlaki even slipped the phrase “great expectations” into his essay. His article could be dismissed as bravado—the protesters had bypassed the extremists across the Arab world, and now Awlaki was playing spin doctor. It would take a few years to determine who had been right about the true strategic significance of the Arab Spring for Al Qaeda.
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In Yemen, the developments of the Arab Spring of 2011 were so disparate that for a while both Western officials and Al Qaeda ideologists could find plenty of evidence to support their theories. On Change Square, in front of Sanaa University, the exuberance of Tunis and Cairo was replicated, as young people gathered with protest signs and bullhorns, demanding democracy. As the weeks passed, there were singing contests, poetry competitions, and sports events to pass the time. The median age in Yemen was an astonishing 18.6 years—in the United States, it was just short of 38—so there was an army of teenagers and twenty-somethings ready to take to the streets.
Among the regulars was a perpetually smiling fifteen-year-old who looked enchantingly goofy in his glasses and dark curls and always seemed to be surrounded by a gang of friends. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was as skinny as his father had been as a teenager. He and his friends were at an age when they were just becoming fully aware of the political world, its factions and causes, and Sanaa was serving up the most exciting events it had witnessed in years. The sense of freedom and camaraderie on Change Square was like nothing they had ever experienced in their tradition-bound country. Abdulrahman, who had been born in Denver and moved to Yemen with his family at age six, posted with enthusiasm on Facebook, where the only hint of his notorious father was the nickname he’d assigned himself: “Ibn al Shaykh,” the son of the sheikh. His subtle boast was not surprising, but his posts had no whiff of jihad. Among his “Favorites,” he listed Harry Potter, the Twilight series, Shakira, and Eminem. By all accounts, Abdulrahman was a relaxed, friendly kid, always clowning and mugging for the camera. His life was about schoolwork, video games, rap music, and his teenage pals.
But Ali Abdullah Saleh, the wily survivor of three decades as Yemen’s ruler, felt deeply threatened by the demonstrators’ persistent calls for his ouster. The regime began to react with violence, and the protests escalated in response. On March 18, government snipers opened fire from the rooftops surrounding the square on the unarmed protesters below, killing fifty-three people and wounding hundreds more. As in other Arab capitals, the protests took on an air of fear and fury. Beyond Change Square, a broader power struggle ensued as Saleh and his son and nephew, who ran different security agencies, squared off against other Yemeni power brokers, each with his own armed militia or loyal military element. The city dissolved into bloody civil strife.
Meanwhile, with security agencies preoccupied with the battle for the capital, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula took advantage of the chaos to come out of the shadows and seize territor
y in the group’s southern strongholds, especially Abyan province, where the terrible American strike on the village of Al Majala had occurred in 2009. In scenes that would presage what the world would later see as the so-called Islamic State seized territory in Iraq, AQAP fighters rolled into the cities of Jaar and the Zinjibar, raising the black flag of Al Qaeda over government buildings and setting up provisional rule that would last for months.
American military planners were deeply worried about the advance of AQAP, which also started a trend across the Arab countries by creating a second brand for itself as Ansar al-Shariah, or supporters of Islamic law. In effect, it was saying, if you associate Al Qaeda with brutality, try this kinder, gentler version—we’re just a bunch of folks who support Islamic governance. But the Americans were not in a strong position to halt Al Qaeda’s advance. After the disastrous strikes of 2009 and 2010, and President Saleh’s resistance to a repeat performance, the Obama administration had put strikes on hold in Yemen, and from May 2010 through April 2011 AQAP didn’t have to worry about American drones and jets. To complicate matters still more, the Saleh government’s escalating violence toward demonstrators, and the breakdown of civil order, led to a temporary cutoff of American security aid. Neither Yemeni nor American authorities were in any position to counter the attempt by AQAP, flush with tens of millions of dollars in revenue from kidnappings, to set up a mini-state in the south.
A story that Anwar al-Awlaki’s uncle, Saleh bin Fareed, told me captured poignantly both the government’s terrifying loss of control of the country and the underlying reasons for Al Qaeda’s strength. As a tribal leader in Shabwah, Bin Fareed traveled regularly from his coastal villa in Aden, the old British port, to his home in the village of Al Saeed, where Awlaki had lived before fleeing to the mountains. It was a drive of four or five hours, and Bin Fareed liked to get an early start, leaving around 4 a.m. in a convoy of three SUVs. One such trip at the height of Al Qaeda’s territorial seizures was interrupted half a dozen times at checkpoints set up by the terrorist group. Al Qaeda gunmen would ask the man known as Sheikh Saleh who he was and examine his identification before allowing him to proceed. The militants knew better than to harm him, he said, since that would incur a violent response from his Awaliq tribe. At the third Al Qaeda checkpoint, he said, a teenage guard approached. He was still too young to shave, maybe fifteen or sixteen—just the age of Abdulrahman and his friends, a far more privileged group who were protesting on Change Square in Sanaa two hundred miles to the north. The youth, who Bin Fareed said “was sweating like hell at seven in the morning,” was so hapless at his job that he had left his AK rifle lying on a barrel nearby when he came to the car window.
“I didn’t know him, but when I looked at his face I could tell what tribe he was and what family,” Bin Fareed said. The boy asked how Bin Fareed knew, and he said he could read both tribe and family in the boy’s face. “I said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ He said, ‘Sheikh Saleh, I have no job, I have no education. My family cannot feed me. The only way for me is to join Al Qaeda.’ I told him, ‘Do you have any other reason?’ He said, ‘No—I am starving, that’s why I joined Al Qaeda.’ I said, ‘Okay, jump in the car. I will give you enough money for a year to feed you and your family.’ ”
Bin Fareed, who had tried to help Anwar al-Awlaki only to see him drift inexorably into militancy, saw an opportunity to save one young tribesman. But it was not to be. The teenager, he said, “smiled and said, ‘Sir, if I do it, they will kill me. I wish I could go with you, but if I do it, I will be killed.’ ” Bin Fareed reluctantly drove on, leaving the boy behind. More than two years after that encounter, he said, the situation had barely improved. Just ten kilometers from Aden, he said, “there is no government existing at all. You drive four hundred kilometers to Shabwa, eight hundred kilometers to Hadramaut, Mukalla, and Al Barra, there is no government existing whatsoever.” In the absence of government, he said, Al Qaeda, Ansar al-Shariah, or any other terrorist or criminal group with plenty of cash could thrive.
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Obama had always emphasized the fertile ground for terrorist recruiting in impoverished and uneducated populations. He liked to consider underlying causes and debate the nuances of policy. But Anwar al-Awlaki was a different matter. Like many leaders of terrorist movements, from Russian noblemen plotting to kill the tsar in the nineteenth century to Osama bin Laden in the twenty-first, he had come from the most privileged and affluent of backgrounds. And for Obama, any nuance in the Awlaki matter had been settled long ago. The question was how soon he could be found and killed.
The Awlaki hunt through 2010 and early 2011 made regular appearances in the President’s Daily Brief as Obama coped with more pressing issues. At home, Obama had to respond to the oil spill in the Gulf, select two new justices to the Supreme Court, manage the auto industry bailout and other measures to spark the economy, and engage in excruciating negotiations with the Republicans over the budget and debt ceiling. Overseas, as the Arab uprisings gathered steam, the administration groped for the proper stance toward the motley forces that were ousting one problematic but familiar leader after another. And framing every action, especially after Republicans swept the 2010 midterms and took control of the House of Representatives, was Obama’s approaching campaign for reelection, which he formally announced on April 4, 2011.
White House officials were relieved that the spike in terrorist plotting that had troubled Obama’s first year in office, which had concluded with the massacre at Fort Hood and the fizzled bomb above Detroit, was looking like an outlier, not a trend. But no one doubted that a terrorist attack on American soil would undermine his chances for a second term. The entire Republican Party would take up Cheney’s soft-on-terror line, ignoring the hundreds of drone strikes. And that message of weakness would resonate, if not with the facts, at least with many Americans’ lingering doubts about the first black president, with the odd name and hard-to-remember connection to Islam.
Remarkably, however, the intelligence machinery began to serve up rare victories. First, in mid-April, two weeks after Obama had made his campaign official, American commandos captured a fishing boat shuttling a Somali named Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen to Somalia. He was a commander for al-Shabab, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, who had become a liaison between al-Shabab and AQAP. He was taken aboard the USS Boxer, a navy amphibious assault ship with a crew of almost two-thousand sailors, where the government’s High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group questioned him for two months. The HIG, as it was called, was Obama’s alternative to the CIA’s brutal interrogations, the waterboarding and wall-slamming that had been dropped years earlier and that Obama had banned for good. Instead of using torture, the HIG used brains. Reprising methods used on high-ranking German and Japanese prisoners during World War II, interrogators learned everything they could about the prisoner and used traditional rapport building and psychological trickery to get them talking. The methods paid off with Warsame, who turned out to have inside knowledge of both Shabab and AQAP—including Awlaki.
Even as Warsame started to talk, a team of veteran SEAL operatives, hardened by the experience of many raids in Afghanistan and Iraq, were practicing for their most important mission. CIA analysts had decided that the tall fellow they had nicknamed “the pacer,” who got his exercise walking inside the walls of a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was indeed Osama bin Laden. In this extraordinary case, Obama rejected the drone option, deciding that physical proof of Bin Laden’s capture or, far more likely, his demise, was critical. In a series of Situation Room meetings, Obama pressed each member of his security cabinet to answer the question: Given the CIA’s estimate of a 60 percent chance that Bin Laden was in residence, should he order a risky raid? A year after his awkward joke about Predators, his daughters, and the Jonas Brothers, Obama returned as scheduled to the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner and joked about footage of his birth in Kenya (with a c
lip from The Lion King), eager to give no hint that he had approved the risky assault into Pakistan for the next day. And late on Sunday night, May 1, as rumors raced around the capital, the president strode along the red carpet in the East Room to the podium and made a historic announcement: “Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation…”
That opening, in keeping with the importance of the event, avoided any taint of politics by attributing the killing of Bin Laden to the entire country. But deeper into his remarks, Obama asserted his own role in the achievement that had eluded George W. Bush for seven years. He recalled, with satisfaction, the pledge in his maiden national security speech in the presidential campaign that had drawn such scorn and ridicule: “Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was.” In describing the mission, he did not stint on personal pronouns: “Shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against Al Qaeda….I was briefed on a possible lead to Bin Laden….I met repeatedly with my national security team….And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation.” Even skeptics in security circles had been impressed by Obama’s consultations and decision making on the raid. He had made a gutsy decision that had worked out. But even if Obama had not been inclined to emphasize his own central role—the man was a politician, after all—his aides would have insisted. There could be no more potent answer than this operation to the unrelenting criticism for Obama’s counterterrorism record from Cheney and the Republicans.