Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State (2 page)

In this, AQ had much in common with insurgent movements, which manipulate grievances to mobilise populations, creating a mass base for a relatively small force of fast-moving, lightly equipped guerrillas. These guerrillas work with underground and auxiliary networks to target weak points such as outposts and poorly governed spaces, and might try to build “liberated” areas, or eventually seek to transition to a conventional war of movement. But unlike classical insurgents, who operate in one country or region, AQ was global. To succeed, it had to inject itself into other people’s conflicts, prey on them and exploit local grievances for its own ends. This meant AQ’s critical requirement, and its greatest vulnerability, was to unify many disparate groups – in Somalia, Indonesia, Chechnya, Nigeria, the Philippines or half a dozen other places. Take away its ability to aggregate the effects of such groups and AQ’s threat would be hugely diminished, as would the risk of another 9/11. Bin Laden would be just one extremist among many in Pakistan, not a global threat. He and the AQ leadership would become strategically irrelevant: we could kill or capture them later, at our leisure – or not.

Out of this emerged a view of al-Qaeda as a form of globalised insurgency, and a strategy known as “Disaggregation.” Writing for a military audience in late 2003, I laid it out like this:

Dozens of local movements, grievances and issues have been aggregated (through regional and global players) into a global
jihad
against the West. These regional and global players prey upon, link and exploit local actors and issues that are pre-existing. What makes the
jihad
so dangerous is its global nature. Without the . . . ability to aggregate dozens of conflicts into a broad movement, the global
jihad
ceases to exist. It becomes simply a series of disparate local conflicts that are capable of being solved by nation-states and can be addressed at the regional or national level without interference from global enemies such as Al Qa’eda . . . A strategy of Disaggregation would seek to dismantle, or break up, the links that allow the
jihad
to function as a global entity.

They say you should be careful what you wish for. In designing Disaggregation, our team was reacting against President Bush, who, through the invasion of Iraq, the “axis of evil” speech and statements like “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” had (in our view) inflated the danger of terrorism, so that Washington ran the risk of creating new adversaries, and fighting simultaneously enemies who could have been fought sequentially or not at all.

For example, the US and British practice of “extraordinary rendition” (a practice that went back to the 1990s and involved seizing suspects in neutral or friendly territory, then covertly deporting them to face interrogation by regimes with sketchy human rights records, including Syria, Libya, Yemen and Egypt) undermined US and British credibility on human rights, and made it hard to pressure these regimes for reform. Naming Pakistan as a “major non-NATO ally” in June 2004 – even as Pakistani intelligence officers continued to sponsor the Taliban and export terrorism across their region – hampered efforts to build closer ties with India and led to doublethink on the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. President Bush’s January 2002 “axis of evil” speech alienated Iranian leaders (who until then had been quietly cooperating against the Taliban and AQ). Most egregious, invading Iraq – which had no known connection with 9/11 and turned out to have no current weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – hugely undermined Western intelligence credibility because of the “dodgy dossier,” alienated France and Germany, made potential partners unwilling to work with the US and UK, and raised the standard of proof for subsequent WMD use in Syria.

As I wrote in the same military paper, “such a strategy undermines US legitimacy . . . because it tends to link obviously disparate conflicts, giving the appearance that the US is using the War as an excuse to settle old scores. Similarly, it causes the US to support morally dubious regimes and (by creating suspicion as to US motives) undermines opportunities for common cause with other democracies – notably the Europeans.”

It turned out that plenty of people in the US government felt the same way. Shortly after the Australian strategy came out, Canberra received a request from Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, for me to join the team writing the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a strategic assessment the Pentagon produces every four years. After some back and forth – Australia offered a general instead, while the Americans politely reiterated their request for the guy who’d written the Disaggregation paper – I was on my way to Washington, DC, embedded in the QDR team from late 2004.

The job took me to the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, Special Operations Command, the RAND Corporation and the new National Counterterrorism Center. In all these places I encountered people whose critique of the past three years was much like mine. Indeed, to anyone who’d deployed in the War on Terror – or had just been paying attention – it was nothing more than a statement of the obvious. Many people were thinking about variants of Disaggregation, but I could speak more bluntly than they, since I had no career in the US government, and since the Australian accent (for reasons I’ve never quite been able to fathom) affords the speaker a measure of amused indulgence in Washington.

Disaggregation, through the combined efforts of all these people (and under several different names), became central to Western counterterrorism strategy after 2005. Its working hypothesis is precisely as outlined by President Obama in his 2014 West Point speech: the notion that terrorism can be reduced to an acceptable level by dismantling core AQ, by maintaining pressure on its leaders to cut it off from its regional franchises, by helping governments deal with threats, once localised, by countering the ideology that fuels militancy, and by providing assistance to address the conditions that create fertile ground for terrorism. It seems sensible. It was certainly better than what we
had
been doing. But for two factors I’ll discuss shortly, the strategy could have worked. Obviously enough, it didn’t – as any Iraqi, Syrian, Afghan, Somali or Yemeni can tell you, and as people in Sydney, Ottawa and Paris have been tragically reminded.

It’s hard to remember now, more than a decade later, how intense was the official discouragement of counterinsurgency – the theory, its techniques, even the word – at this time. The Secretary of Defense was still Donald Rumsfeld, the man who’d sidelined the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Eric Shinseki, for having the temerity to suggest that Iraq might be something other than a cakewalk, who’d overridden the objections of his war planners and structured the invasion with enough firepower to ensure the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s regime but not enough manpower to ensure something stable would replace it. After Saddam fell, Rumsfeld insisted on leaving the absolute minimum force in Iraq, then oversaw Ambassador L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer’s disastrous de-Ba’athification edict and the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, which put 400,000 fighting men – as well as many Iraqis who’d been purely nominal party members, as they had to be if they wanted a job – on the street with no future, homicidally intense grievances and all their weapons.

In Anbar province, in particular, the heartland of Sunni Iraq, whole units of the Iraqi Army, with their weapons, equipment and command structure intact, were sitting on the sidelines, observing developments, unwilling to join the resistance but seeing fewer and fewer choices as time went on. Periodically, in the early days, their leaders would approach coalition commanders to explain that they were ready and able to help. The lucky ones would be rebuffed, told to go join the lines at the recruiting office like everyone else; the unlucky were arrested or even killed. Many had expected – had been told to expect through messaging over many years by US intelligence – that if they stood aside in the event of an invasion, they’d play a key role in stabilising post-Saddam Iraq and retain their influence. When the reality turned out to be the opposite, they saw Bremer’s policies as outright treachery, and their anger at the betrayal boiled over.

When these men joined the armed resistance and the war promptly went critical, Rumsfeld denied reality and contradicted General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, who’d told Congress the insurgency was far from fading. But many senior American military officers, and influential civilians, were painfully aware of the lives (American, allied and Iraqi) being lost through Rumsfeld’s mindless obstinacy. They began pushing for change: General David Petraeus led the effort to develop a counterinsurgency doctrine, while General Jack Keane and Professor Eliot Cohen argued for what became the 2007 “Surge” – though it couldn’t be implemented until President Bush finally fired Rumsfeld in late 2006. Hank Crumpton, a CIA officer with decades of experience in clandestine operations, was appointed Ambassador for Counterterrorism in late 2005. As the QDR wrapped up, Crumpton asked Canberra to second me to the State Department as his Chief Strategist.

Less than a month later, as a newly minted civilian official, feeling faintly ridiculous in my unspoiled body armour, with a brand-new encrypted mobile phone and one of those funky, retro briefcases that chains to your wrist, I stepped off a helicopter at Landing Zone Washington in the Green Zone, the fortified compound in central Baghdad that had become ground zero for the greatest strategic screw-up since Hitler’s invasion of Russia.

ABYSS

Iraq and Afghanistan, 2005–06

I mentioned that two factors undermined Disaggregation; the first was Iraq. When I arrived on that first trip in 2005, Baghdad was not yet as horrific as it later became. People still lazed by the swimming pool at the US embassy – once Saddam’s Presidential Palace and, like his other palaces, furnished in a head-scratchingly bizarre style, ornate yet shoddy, best described as “Mesopotamian Fascist.” In the cafeteria, people who’d served under Bremer had coffee mugs that said “Iraq: We Were Winning When I Left.” But we hadn’t left, and as soon as I ventured outside the wire to meet community leaders and work with coalition civil–military teams, it was clear that, by any objective standard, Iraq was a mess. Hundreds of civilians were being killed every week – 1059 in the first three weeks of 2006 alone. Every day, pillars of oily black car-bomb smoke roiled up from districts across Baghdad, and you could hear the dull sound of an AK-47 or the whump of a grenade from any point on the horizon, any night of the week.

One of those nights I was outside the bar some CIA officers had built in a bombed-out house near the Palace, sitting in the dark, feeling the night air on my sunburn after a few days with a light infantry unit in the “belts,” the zone of agricultural settlement around Baghdad that was now an incubator for the insurgency. Abruptly, two helicopters roared a couple of hundred feet overhead, popping flares to confuse heat-seeking missiles. It was the coalition force commander, General Casey, returning from a meeting at Camp Victory, the vast base-complex near Baghdad airport. I flinched as the noise washed over me. And then it hit me, as if I’d been punched, as if a flare had fallen in my lap: we were losing. How else, three years in, with 160,000 US troops in country, could Casey still not move ten miles in central Baghdad without such precautions? How could we stabilise Iraq if we couldn’t even secure its capital? (Later in the war a friend of mine, a US Army officer with a famously dry sense of humour, signed off an email “Note to self: consider renaming Camp Victory.”)

Earlier I likened the invasion of Iraq to Hitler’s invasion of Russia, and that’s no exaggeration: the two blunders were exactly equivalent. It goes without saying that the Western powers in Iraq were in no way comparable to Nazi Germany in their ideology, treatment of civilians or strategic objectives – quite the reverse. Yet in invading Iraq with the job unfinished in Afghanistan, President Bush made the same error as Hitler had in invading the Soviet Union. Stalin’s Russia was a long-term adversary, contained by treaty, which posed no immediate threat. In 1940 Hitler conquered Western Europe, leaving only Britain unsubdued, and in 1941 the time seemed right to him for an invasion of the Soviet Union, which was expected to be a pushover. When it wasn’t, Hitler was caught between two fires. The Russian quagmire held him, Britain recovered, America joined the war, resistance spread and the second front opened in Normandy; Hitler’s defeat became a matter of time and will.

Likewise, as early as December 2001, with the Battle of Tora Bora still raging on the Afghan–Pakistani border, Washington began transferring assets from Afghanistan, repositioning for a potential future invasion of Iraq. The job was far from finished: bin Laden’s location was unknown, and the effort of establishing a stable government to guard Afghanistan against a Taliban return had barely started. When bin Laden and Zawahiri resurfaced in Pakistan later in 2002, there was the problem of how to deal with them, and the thornier issue of Pakistani complicity with the Taliban. Rather than face this complex question – the classic twenty-first-century problem of how to wage war on non-state actors who hide in countries with which you’re technically at peace – President Bush and his team turned to Iraq. Like Stalin’s Russia in 1941, Saddam’s Iraq was a long-term adversary, contained by sanctions, posing no immediate threat – the invasion was expected to be a pushover. The success of the initial march to Baghdad in March/April 2003 seemed to confirm this, but soon things began to fall apart.

The invasion force was enough to push Saddam off his perch, but not to control the chaos of his fall. Little thought had been given to post-war stabilisation – this was no accident, since the plan was emphatically
not
to occupy and stabilise Iraq, but rather for a quick-in, quick-out operation to topple Saddam, hand power to a designated successor and ride victorious into the sunset. But Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon’s chosen successor, failed to gain support. Iraqi elites fell to squabbling, resistance festered and the country burned. Citizen safety evaporated: revenge killing, theft and violent score-settling escalated, while coalition troops stood by without orders to intervene. People looted every last toilet seat, pencil sharpener and light bulb from the buildings of a government that had systematically stolen from them for decades, and then they turned on their neighbours. The breakdown of law and order in Iraq’s cities was a terrifying shock to the population, and the failure of essential services (food, water, electricity, sanitation) undermined confidence. Measures to counter the resistance alienated ordinary Iraqis and created hundreds of thousands of what I later described as “accidental guerrillas,” and by late 2003 we were bogged down in our own two-front war.