The 9/11 Wars (70 page)

PART SIX

Endgames: 2009–11

15
The 9/11 Wars: Europe, the Middle East, Iraq

A CHANGE IN THE WHITE HOUSE

On November 4, 2008, Americans had elected, by 52.9 per cent to 45.7 per cent, Barack Hussein Obama, the forty-seven-year-old Democratic Senator for Illinois, as their president. Some argued that the changes that Obama would introduce in the day-to-day American approach to the 9/11 Wars were more of style rather than substance. But though the compromises forced on the Bush administration in the last eighteen months of its tenure as popular support waned and a host of other problems had crowded in had blunted its ideological edge, the arrival of someone of the new president’s appearance, origins, views and charisma nonetheless created an obvious break that went beyond merely a shift in tone. At the very least, the departure of Bush meant an inevitable reformulation of the narrative of the conflict for all involved. The senior leadership of al-Qaeda, for example, had been sufficiently concerned to issue a series of pre-emptive statements attacking Obama for being a ‘house negro’.
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The new president’s early speeches did not disappoint those around the world hoping for a clear shift in policy, tone and approach. Obama repeatedly signalled a new realism, a new will to find inclusive multilateral solutions, a desire to enter into, and remain in, conversation with both allies and potential adversaries. Though the rhetoric might sometimes have been vague, it was attractive, occasionally inspirational and managed to sound radically new without challenging the broadly accepted package of values that, domestically at least, were associated with ‘being American’. In his acceptance speech, the new president had deftly turned his predecessor’s ‘you are either with us or against us’ into a resounding slogan of righteousness, strength and hope. ‘To those who would tear this world down: we will defeat you … To those who seek peace and security: we support you.’
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But Obama’s arrival in the White House was not the strategic inflection point in the 9/11 Wars that some had hoped it might be, and the ‘Obama effect’ was less potent than the al-Qaeda leadership had apparently feared. Opinion polls showed that the accession of the new president provoked a measurable increase in ‘confidence in America to do the right thing’ in international affairs almost everywhere but, though Obama was certainly more popular than Bush, also revealed that there was little change in the deep ambient anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. The surveys found that, even if the proportion of people trusting US leadership in world affairs rose dramatically in 2009 in Egypt and in Jordan, in most Muslim-majority countries the number of people expressing a favourable view of the USA remained at an appallingly low level.
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In some places, such as the Palestinian territories, Obama’s arrival in the White House seemed to have no effect at all. In others, views of the US actually got worse, dropping to levels not seen since the months around the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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Within forty-eight hours of taking office, Obama announced the appointment of two ‘special representatives’. The first was Senator George Mitchell, who was given the job of spearheading a new bid to reinvigorate a Middle East ‘peace process’ which had been moribund for a decade or more. There was little indicating that Mitchell would meet with any greater success than any of his predecessors, but the gesture, coming with the new president’s statements that he wanted to see the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank frozen, was nonetheless welcomed.
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The second appointment was the veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton Agreement, which had ended the conflict in the Balkans fifteen years before. Holbrooke became special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, soon abbreviated to ‘AfPak’.
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Obama also signed three executive orders. One ordered that, ‘without exception or equivocation’, the United States would ‘not torture’. The second decreed the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. The third commissioned a comprehensive review of procedures of holding and trying terrorism suspects ‘to best protect our nation and the rule of law’, which meant the effective suspension of ongoing tribunals of detainees. That the US Supreme Court had already judged that ‘enemy combatants’ were protected by the Geneva Conventions and by the United States Constitution, that ‘Gitmo’ would prove far harder to close than thought and that the prisoner review would lead to far lesser results than originally anticipated did not strip the announcements of their significant symbolic value.
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If they did little to mitigate the entrenched anti-Americanism around the globe, they did not exacerbate it either. This, in the battered, febrile world left after seven years of the 9/11 Wars, was something of an achievement in itself.

Obama also moved to distance himself from the lecturing of the Islamic world that had been characteristic of the Bush administration. The ambitious ‘Freedom Agenda’ was set aside. Instead of ‘draining the swamp of terrorism’ through revolutionary change, the emphasis was placed on peaceful coexistence. In Ankara in April 2009, he spoke of relations between the West and the Muslim world. ‘I know the trust that binds us has been strained … We will listen carefully … and seek common ground,’ he said. ‘We will be respectful even when we do not agree.’
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In Cairo in June, four years after Condoleezza Rice’s speech there announcing the Bush administration’s push for greater democratization in the region, Obama, in an address entitled ‘A New Beginning’, would speak of his own childhood in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, and of hearing the
adhan
, or call to prayer, ‘at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk’ and would argue that, though basic human rights were universal, ‘no system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on any other’.
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He flew from Egypt to Germany to visit the Buchenwald concentration camp and then stopped in France, where he explained that his pride in his own country did not ‘lessen [his] interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries’. ‘We’re not always going to be right … other people may have good ideas [and] in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise, and that includes us,’ the new president said.
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When asked in a press conference how he would resolve the theoretical conflict between respecting state sovereignty and intervening to defend the universal rights of oppressed people, Obama answered that ‘the threshold at which international intervention is appropriate … has to be very high’.
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At the American cemetery above Omaha beach in Normandy on the sixty-fifth anniversary of the D-Day landings, the president, flanked by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, told his audience that ‘we live in a world of competing beliefs and claims about what is true. It is a world of varied religions and cultures and forms of government. In such a world, it is rare for a struggle to emerge that speaks to something universal about humanity.’ Carefully avoiding any reference to current conflicts other than to pay tribute to ‘the young men and women who carry forward the legacy of sacrifice’, Obama made clear that, though committed to the war in Afghanistan, for him the days of the radical, ‘muscular’ interventionist liberal humanitarianism of Bush and Tony Blair were gone.
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The term ‘War on Terror’ was another casualty of Obama’s arrival. Instead, the president spoke of ‘a battle or a war against some terrorist organizations’.
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The challenges facing the new administration were manifold – a grave economic crisis, a vast budget deficit, the Iranian nuclear programme, climate change, continuing problems with America’s multiple security services, the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan and many others. Obama’s mandate too was much weaker than many overseas believed or wanted to believe. Yet the new president had one huge advantage: not only did he incarnate the hope of the advent of a new and brighter period after the dark and tense pessimism of previous years but he came to power at a moment when, for the first time for many years, it was reasonable to imagine that the optimism that the new president projected was at least in part justified. Through 2008 and into 2009, the indications of the potential for a more positive evolution of the 9/11 Wars that had first become visible in 2006 and 2007 broadened and consolidated. With the bad news pouring out of Afghanistan and Pakistan it was easy to forget what was going on elsewhere. But one of the reasons ‘AfPak’ could receive so much attention was that, in almost every other theatre previously touched by the 9/11 Wars, there was progress. Any advances were fragile, of course, and there was considerable potential for a sudden reversal, but, though no one even imagined returning to the pre-2001 situation, the news from many of the various fronts was undeniably better than it had been for many years. If the map that had shown the rapid spread in violence out of south-west Asia, across the Middle East and into Europe in one direction and out into the Far East in the other direction between 2001 and 2005 had been redrawn in the spring of 2009, a glance would have shown that the density of incidents had thinned markedly and the extent of the zone of conflict had shrunk. Nowhere did this appear clearer than in Europe.

THE ATLANTIC WALL

In the autumn of 2008, the Belgian and French volunteers who had complained of being deceived by al-Qaeda propaganda had left the tribal areas and returned to Europe, retracing their steps through Pakistan, Iran and on via Istanbul to their homes in the Moellenbeek area of Brussels and in Vénissieux, a tough immigrant suburb of the French city of Lyon. European security services had been alerted to their return through the interception of emails sent from the FATA to friends and family members back in Europe and were waiting for them. In December 2008, Belgian and French police thus made a series of arrests. In Belgium, newspapers ran headlines warning that the group was planning an attack on the metro. Police and prosecutors argued that the group’s claims to have come home because they were disappointed, ill or homesick were simply a poor cover for their re-entry to Europe. The group’s lawyers argued that the men were sincere.

The raids, in which one woman and six men were detained, attracted little international interest. Such operations had become wearily familiar over previous years. Nothing about the profile of the suspects was at all out of the ordinary. The men arrested were all young first- or second-generation immigrants who had been drawn into radical activity either through the internet or in person by an experienced activist, in this case a veteran called Moez Garsallaoui, who himself was married to a well-known online female radical polemicist.
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Little in the composition or the activities of the group diverged from that seen elsewhere in Europe at the time either. The group was a small network – a half-dozen or so core members, a dozen or so in an outer circle who were less engaged on a day-to-day basis, and then a few dozen more who were tacitly aware of what was going on but not directly involved.
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According to the European Union’s criminal intelligence agency, two-thirds of individuals active in Islamic militancy on the continent belonged to such ‘small autonomous cells’ rather than any known larger groups.
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Those arrested in Moellenbeek and Vénissieux, again typically, were ordinary men, neither desperately poor nor particularly wealthy, neither utterly without education nor especially well qualified. Several of them had been involved in petty crime before drifting into radical militancy – once more reflecting broader trends. One had committed more serious offences.
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As increasingly was the case elsewhere, the combination of a virtual community sustained by a radical website and a real community of friends had been key in the creation of the Brussels group. The approbation of the community – several of those who went received money to allow them to travel from close relatives fully conscious of the goal of the journey – had also been a crucial factor.
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Radicalization for the Belgian and French suspects, as for so many others, had been a gradual process involving a series of key contacts with other interested individuals rather than deriving from any inherent personal proclivity to violent militancy. Again this was now seen as fairly standard.

That such conspiracies posed a clear and present threat – ‘The answer is not
fatwas
… it is booooooooms,’ a web posting by the leader of the Brussels–Lyon network, Garsallaoui, from mid 2008 read – and that they would continue to pose a threat in the future was self-evident. One of the biggest problems for reporters working on terrorism and militancy – as for police and policy-makers – was the difficulty in gauging the real nature of that threat. There was a very natural tendency on the part of security authorities to err on the side of caution. The penalties for not warning political leaders far outweighed the credit to be gained by a more sober assessment of any potential danger. There was an equal logic driving journalists to err on the side of sensation. Yet the cumulative numbers of those involved in such plots in 2008 and into 2009 seemed difficult to tally with the more pessimistic announcements about the extent of radicalization in Europe of even a year or so previously. This was certainly evident in the UK. Though British newspapers, quoting ‘security sources’, continued to speak of up to 4,000 British citizens trained in terrorist camps, the number of annual arrests on terrorist charges in the UK had averaged 212 each year since 2002. This total included detentions linked to Irish Republican terrorism and other forms of political violence. In 2008, only 174 individuals had been arrested on terrorist charges and 207 people in 2009.
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Importantly, only a third of those arrested were eventually charged.
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British intelligence officials spoke of around thirty ‘significant’ individuals travelling to Pakistan each year.
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Others travelled to Somalia, they said, but only a ‘handful’.
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This was enough to cause a significant problem but remained far from the vision of hordes of young militants that had once been thought on the brink of unleashing a wave of violence in the UK. MI5 officials contrasted the current sentiment within their own service with that during the dark days of 2005 and 2006. ‘Back [then] it felt genuinely out of control … we were very worried there would be one [attack] and then another and another and another,’ one told the author. ‘Now we feel we’ve got a pretty good handle on it.’
²³
In July 2009, the official assessment of the level of the threat of terrorist attack on Britain, based since 2003 on the conclusions of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre or JTAC, was lowered from ‘severe’, highly likely, to ‘substantial’, a strong possibility, for the first time since the September 11 attacks.
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As if to underline the difficulty of gauging the threat, it was to return to its previous level only eight months later. But that it had been lowered at all was significant.