Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (47 page)

25.
The Western influence in Kabul is angering conservative Afghans. Afghan teens are wearing jeans, listening to Indian pop music, watching Hollywood movies, and gathering in mixed-sex groups. In addition, the presence of Western diplomats, military personnel, and Europeans working for more than six hundred Kabul-based Western NGOs has stimulated the establishment of hotels, bars, restaurants, stores selling alcohol, and brothels to flourish in the city. As much as the lack of law and order, these perceived Western perversions make Afghans recall the Taliban regime’s Islamic rule fondly. “Afghanistan is an Islamic country,” a senior Kabul cleric warned, “and it should be following the laws of Sharia. In the previous regimes there were no shops where they clearly sold alcohol. There were no houses of hotels where they had prostitutes. Now we do have these things.” See Ben Arnoldy, “Kabul Must-see TV Heats Up Culture War in Afghanistan,” ABCNEWS.com, May 10, 2005; Kim Barker, “In Afghanistan, Cultural Struggle Turns Dangerous,”
Chicago Tribune,
May 22, 2005; and Chris Sands, “Kabul Clerics Rally Behind Taliban,”
Toronto Star,
May 22, 2006.

26.
One of the greatest post-9/11 disservices done to both America and the U.S. Intelligence Community is to be found in the testimony on HUMINT collection from then-DCI George Tenet and then-CIA deputy director for operations James Pavitt to the congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee and the 9/11 investigatory panels. The gist of that testimony was that if Congress had supplied more money and more positions to the clandestine service before 9/11, the quantity and quality of human intelligence would have been better and perhaps the attack might have been stopped. The implication was that a massive investment of money and new personnel would improve HUMINT immediately. This of course is not the case. Collecting HUMINT is difficult—you are, after all, trying to persuade someone to commit treason—and dangerous and cannot be counted on in the short term for more and better information simply because Congress allocates a large amount of money and positions. Such growth, over a good many years, is likely to produce better HUMINT, but there is no quick fix for the HUMINT problem. On this issue, Mr. Tenet’s testimony was particularly interesting, as in the decade or more before 9/11 (as chief of staff for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, NSC Director for Intelligence Programs, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, and then DCI) he was not known for an eagerness to expand the clandestine service.
The post-9/11 hunt for bin Laden offers an excellent example of how hard it is to collect reliable HUMINT against the Afghan and Islamist targets. For the CIA and other U.S. and foreign intelligence services, the Pashtun tribes residing along both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border present a formidable obstacle to the collection of intelligence, let alone the capture of major al-Qaeda and Taliban figures. The Pashtun people are divided into tribes, subtribes, and clans. These groupings are often at odds with each other, at times violently so, but they do form a relatively homogenous and strongly insular society. While Muslim non-Pashtuns are today more welcomed than they were a decade ago—occasionally to the point of intermarrying and becoming permanent residents—Westerners are not and, even when disguised, stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Even small U.S. Special Forces units are not likely to operate for long without being discovered. Clandestine HUMINT collection in the tribal regions, therefore, has to be done through surrogates (Pashtuns willing to work for us) or by close-in SIGINT collection against local radios, telephones, cell phones, walkie-talkies, etc.
CIA HUMINT-collection operations in the tribal regions since 1979 demonstrate that it is not hard to recruit Pashtun assets, but that it is almost impossible to recruit one who will betray a brother Pashtun or (because of tribal mores guaranteeing that, once accepted, guests be protected) a non-Afghan Muslim. As always, Afghans will take your money and tell you what you want to hear, but they generally will not provide actionable intelligence, and like those the U.S. military hired to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora, they always show up a few hours too late. This is a lesson that the CIA learned well during the Afghan jihad, that a new generation of clandestine officers is learning today, and that military officers and senior policymakers apparently will never learn.
Collecting reliable HUMINT among the Pashtuns, moreover, has become more difficult because the conservative nature of Afghan Islam has deepened since the Soviet invasion of 1979. The pressures and sacrifices of war, the pride and sense of solidarity derived from the reality that Muslims had defeated the Soviet superpower, and the unrelenting proselytizing activities of the Pakistani religious parties and the money-and faith-dispensing Islamic NGOs sponsored by Arabian Peninsula regimes have all moved the Pashtuns’ brand of Islam much closer to the standard of the Middle East. While there are still significant differences between the two, the tribes’ development of an increasingly conservative faith adds another layer of resistance to whatever recruitment enticements Western intelligence services can offer.
Each of the points above applies in almost equal measure to the Pakistani intelligence and military services. The army and ISID are not much more welcomed than Westerners or unvouched-for Arabs in the border region. Tribal leaders usually tolerate the Pakistanis, but experience has demonstrated that their ability to collect reliable HUMINT in the Pashtun regions is limited, as is their willingness to share all of what they do collect. In addition, both the military and intelligence services consider themselves under constant threat, move only in well-armed, multivehicle convoys, and seldom venture out of their compounds at night. The situation for Pakistani military and intelligence units in the tribal regions has, of course, become much less tenable and much more dangerous in the wake of unprecedented, prolonged, and bloody Pakistani Army operations in the region since 2003.

27.
Keegan, “If America Decides to Take On the Afghans.”

28.
Keegan, “How America Can Wreak Vengeance.”

29.
Lord Roberts is quoted in Frank L. Holt,
Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 5. Dr. Holt is a distinguished classicist whose extraordinarily pertinent book should be mandatory reading for all hands in the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government, as well as for every Afghanistan-bound military and intelligence officer. In addition, Ralph Peters, one of America’s preeminent and most prophetic strategists, has seconded the importance of both Keegan and Lord Roberts for contemporary U.S. leaders. “We need to relearn the usefulness of punitive expeditions,” Peters wrote in 2005. There will be times in the future when “we simply will need to send in our military on a punitive expedition to exact a price that discourages further attacks on our homeland or on our interests, and then leave with our guns still smoking…Punitive expeditions are not described anywhere in our current military doctrine. That isn’t proof of our moral enlightenment but of the benighted state of our strategic thinking.” To date, sadly, the American governing elite has paid little attention to Colonel Peters’s always-acute insights. See Ralph Peters,
New Glory: Expanding America’s Global Supremacy
(New York: Sentinel, 2005), 83.

30.
Emphasizing his group’s long and close ties with al-Qaeda, Hekmatyar told a Pakistani television interviewer in January 2007 that his fighters had been among those who helped bin Laden and his lieutenants to escape from Tora Bora in December 2001. See “Rebel: We Aided Bin Laden Escape,” Associated Press, January 11, 2007. For the best account of the disaster the U.S. generals inflicted on U.S. national security by letting bin Laden escape, see Gary Bernsten and Ralph Pezzulo,
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by CIA’s Key Field Commander
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006).

31.
In Woodward’s nearly four-hundred-page book one of the few hints that the Bush administration even momentarily focused on solving the border problem using U.S. resources comes on page 237: “There was some talk [at an October 7, 2001, meeting of NSC principals] of sealing the border.” Woodward writes that the NSC concluded that “it seemed an impossible idea, not practical given the hundreds of miles of mountainous and rough terrain, some of the most formidable in the world.” Well, there is no denying that closing that border was a hard job, but if the NSC did not believe the best military in the world could close the border and trap bin Laden, why did it decide that the task could be safely allotted to the poorly armed and trained and generally anti-U.S. Pakistani border forces? The ingrained tendency of U.S. officials to look for proxies to do U.S. dirty work prevailed again, and so bin Laden remains alive and free as this is written. In addition, an effort to close the border to snare bin Laden would have required large amounts of U.S. military manpower and so would have played havoc with the plans of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld (the dean of the RMA’ers) and would have proven that his concept of “military transformation” ensured only that America had the wrong weapons and not enough soldiers and Marines to do the job. See Woodward,
Bush at War
, 237.

32.
For excellent discussions of the U.S.-vs.-al-Qaeda combat at Shahi Kowt and elsewhere in Afghanistan, see Sean Naylor,
Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda
(New York: Berkeley Books, 2005), and Stephen Biddle,
Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy
(Carlisle, Penn.: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 2002).

33.
By not abandoning the Cold War practice of finding foreigners to do America’s dirty work, we have blithely assumed that Musharraf’s Pakistan is an American proxy, with national-security interests that mirror those of the United States. The truth is that virtually none of the many things Musharraf has done to assist the United States in Afghanistan have been in Pakistan’s national interest. Indeed, by supporting the installation of Karzai’s pro-India, minimally Pashtun regime, Musharraf weakened security on his country’s western border, and by sending the Pakistani army into the Pashtun regions, he diverted nearly a corps-size military organization from the Indian border and brought his country to the brink of civil war. He even tolerated Washington’s clearly destabilizing demand that former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto—whose government was manned by kleptomaniacs of epic avarice—be allowed to return to the country and reinvolve herself in Pakistan’s political mix. Musharraf’s accommodation of Washington’s wishes vis. Mrs. Bhutto brought such chaos to the country’s politics that he had to declare a near-martial-law “state of emergency” in early November 2007. History will show, I believe, that America has seldom if ever had an ally more willing than President Musharraf’s Pakistan to take actions to further U.S. interests, actions that in no way served its own. Musharraf, however, drew the line at risking complete political collapse in Pakistan; he was not going to play the role of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, the only national leader in memory who knowingly sacrificed his country for a friend. In future years, when America’s defeat in Afghanistan is apparent, and if he survives, Musharraf will be able to reflect on his relationship with President Bush and lament (as President Lincoln said about his relationship with General George McClellan), “Poor George…I did all I could for him, but he could do nothing for himself.”

34.
Holt,
Into the Land of Bones,
19–20, 76–77.

Chapter 4. Iraq—America Bled White by History Unlearned

1.
Bernard Lewis, “License to Kill: Osama bin Laden’s Declaration of Jihad,”
Foreign Affairs
77, no. 6 (November–December 1998), 14–19.

2.
See, for example, Osama bin Laden, “Message to Our Brothers in Iraq,” Al-Jazirah Satellite Television, February 11, 2003.

3.
In one of those only-in-historically-ignorant-America moments, the Clinton administration was confident that it had pulled the rug out from under bin Laden and negated this issue when most U.S. forces were moved from Saudi Arabia to Kuwait and Qatar. If administration officials had known a bit of Islamic history, they would have known that the Prophet Muhammad had said that all infidels should be evicted from the Arabian Peninsula, not from Saudi Arabia, as the latter had not yet been founded in the seventh century. So on this issue Washington managed to pull its own hair over its own eyes, spending large sums to relocate U.S. forces but leaving bin Laden’s grievance as relevant as ever.

4.
Jeff Stein, “Can You Tell a Shia from a Sunni?”
New York Times,
October 18, 2006.

5.
Ibid.

6.
Ibid. Not wanting to be outconfused by a member of the House Intelligence Committee he chairs, Representative Silvester Reyes (D-Texas) told reporters he believed al-Qaeda was “predominantly, probably Shia,” and added that “it is hard to keep things in perspective and in categories.” See “Queries Vex New Chair of Intelligence,” Reuters, December 12, 2006.