Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State (6 page)

In the comparatively peaceful environment of 2008, with substantial US forces on the ground and American advisers as arbiters among Iraqi factions, it was relatively safe for Maliki to act inclusively towards Kurds and Sunnis. After 2010, things became zero-sum: with a US drawdown, funding cuts and negligible attention from President Obama, Maliki had to fall back on other sources of support, including his base in the Shi’a-supremacist D’awa Party, and the Iranians who, as US influence waned, were increasingly overt players. It’s worth recalling that Maliki was close to both the Iranian and Syrian regimes, having spent almost twenty-four years in exile in Tehran and Damascus, and working with Hezbollah and the Quds Force against Saddam. All this pushed him in a Shi’a-supremacist direction, unleashing an authoritarian streak that grew over time.

Rightly wary of a coup, Maliki created structures to cement his control over the military, police and intelligence services. These included the Office of the Commander in Chief (OCINC), a post Maliki set up in his own office. Some in OCINC had track records of sectarian abuse; many were Shi’a supremacists. Maliki created a Counter-Terrorism Service to direct Iraqi Special Forces, often against Sunni targets, and replaced competent technocrats with loyal functionaries. In January 2010 Maliki used his control of the Independent High Electoral Commission to bar more than 500 candidates (mostly Sunnis) from the March elections, claiming they had Ba’athist connections. He cut funding to the Sons of Iraq, arrested hundreds of Awakening Council members, including tribal elders leading the fight against AQI, and restricted the Iraqi press. From December 2010 he acted as defence and interior minister, as well as prime minister. By April 2013, Middle East analyst Marisa Sullivan had concluded that “the national unity government that was formed in the wake of the 2010 parliamentary elections has given way to a de-facto majoritarian government in which Maliki has a monopoly on the institutions of the state . . . Maliki’s institutional control has enabled him to use de-Ba’athification and accusations of corruption and terrorism as political tools to advance his interests at the expense of his rivals.”

Maliki’s authoritarianism alienated Sunnis, created grievances that surviving AQI cells could exploit, and eroded the security created by the Surge and the Awakening. This gave Sunni nationalists and Ba’athists an increasingly strong case: “The Americans are leaving, Maliki is a dictator in league with Iran, you need us to defend you.” And as American leverage diminished, any idea Sunnis had that the United States might continue to protect them evaporated.

This created a security dilemma: Maliki may have been acting defensively, protecting himself against threats from the military and the Sunnis as American influence waned. But his measures
looked
offensive to Sunnis, who began to protect themselves against the risk of Shi’a oppression. This in turn looked offensive to Maliki, who increased his authoritarianism, further alienating Sunnis, and so on. After 2010 it was hard for Washington to break this cycle, since the drawdown, lack of presidential engagement, spending cuts and – most importantly – failure to agree a SOFA that would have kept forces in Iraq after 2011 progressively reduced Washington’s leverage.

By early 2011 I’d been out of government for two years. I’d founded a research firm combining pattern analysis of immense amounts of remote-observation data (now called “big data”) with field research teams, usually in denied or dangerous environments, working to validate that data, understand local conditions in detail and design solutions with local populations. This gave me, my data science team, our forward-deployed analysts and our field teams – often drawn from the neighbourhoods where they worked – a close-up view of the wave of political change that was about to sweep the greater Middle East.

If Iraq was the first factor undermining Disaggregation, the second was this massive regional transformation, which was triggered by three events: the death of bin Laden, the failure of the Arab Spring and the rebirth of ISIS.

TSUNAMI

Pakistan, Iraq and the greater Middle East, 2011–14

Just after 1 a.m. on 2 May 2011, US Navy SEALs attacked a compound outside Pakistan’s military academy near Abbottabad, in the country’s east. Moving carefully up a staircase onto the upper floor, two special warfare operators – Robert O’Neill and Matt Bissonnette – confronted an unkempt man in pyjamas, cowering behind a young woman he was using as a human shield. O’Neill shot him twice in the forehead and once more as he hit the floor. The SEALs recovered a Russian-made AKSU carbine and Makarov pistol from near the body, and a vast trove of intelligence from the compound. It had taken a decade to find him but, ten years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden was dead. The raiders spent only thirty-eight minutes on the ground.

The significance of bin Laden’s death lies in its twin effects – on US strategic thinking and on al-Qaeda’s senior leadership – at a pivotal moment of the Arab Spring.

The bin Laden hit let President Obama claim an achievement that had eluded President Bush. He lost no time taking credit, boasting about the raid throughout 2012 and beyond. This was scarcely surprising for a highly partisan politician in a re-election battle. The problem was that magnifying the raid’s significance made people expect a quick end to the war.

The point of Disaggregation, remember, was to render bin Laden irrelevant, so it wouldn’t matter whether he lived or died. As early as 2006, this had largely been achieved – Alec Station, the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, was closed in late 2005, and the focus broadened to AQ affiliates and self-radicalised terrorists, in recognition that regional groups were now more important than the core leadership. The CIA and the Pentagon maintained pressure through intelligence, special operations and drone strikes. This helped find bin Laden, but its strategic purpose was to keep AQ leaders on the run, unable to communicate freely, and hamper planning of future terrorist attacks on US cities.

For six years before he was killed, bin Laden was marginalised – and thus the celebration of his death, though understandable, was a strategic misstep. It contributed to a complacent mindset that made a string of decisions – withdrawing completely from Iraq, re-balancing from Europe and the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific in 2012, cutting military manpower and budgets in 2013, setting a December 2014 deadline for leaving Afghanistan – seem sensible in light of a soothing narrative that killing bin Laden had reduced the terrorism threat, the nation’s wars were ending and people could get back to normal. None of these things was true.

By 2011 the main threat came from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the franchise in Yemen that orchestrated numerous high-profile terrorist attacks, including a bombing attempt against a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day, 2009 – the first attack inside the United States by an al-Qaeda affiliate since 11 September 2001. But AQAP was only one of several groups expanding into the space vacated by the core AQ leadership. Another was the Pakistani Taliban, which sponsored an attempted bombing in New York’s Times Square in May 2010. “Light-footprint” counterterrorism failed to reduce this threat, while the increase in drone strikes under President Obama inflamed anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, creating a more receptive environment for terrorists. Similarly, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (northwest Africa) and al-Shabaab, the Somali affiliate, were expanding their reach. The light footprint was proving no more successful in these places.

Most concerning was the emergence of self-radicalised terrorists – individuals acting alone in self-organised, self-directed acts of violence. For example, the Fort Hood shooting – where Anwar al-Awlaki used email, video and social media to radicalise Nidal Hasan, a US army psychiatrist, prompting him to kill thirteen and wound thirty-two at a US army base – occurred in November 2009. By the time bin Laden was killed, there was strong evidence of “remote radicalisation” – use of communications systems to spot, assess, develop, recruit and handle an asset from a distance.

Through outlets like
Inspire
, AQAP’s English-language online magazine, terrorist networks could publish target lists, issue planning advice, discuss lessons learnt, warn supporters of counterterrorism measures and offer how-to guides to anyone with an internet connection. Email, YouTube and Twitter let figures like al-Awlaki contact recruitable individuals anywhere in the world, offer support and develop attacks without ever meeting them. Secure messaging made such communication hard to spot in a vast flow of innocuous messages. An explosion of electronic connectivity had shifted the threat from formal organisations like al-Qaeda towards ad hoc networks of radicalised individuals connected on social media.

Killing bin Laden did nothing to change any of that. Thus, the main effect of over-hyping the raid was to obscure the fact that although the first part of Disaggregation (dismantle core AQ) was working, the second (help partners defeat the local threat) was not. If anything, we’d become addicted to drone strikes and unilateral special forces raids in tacit recognition that partnerships with local governments were
not
succeeding. In part this was because of their sheer long-term difficulty: some partners just weren’t capable of handling local terrorists and would need years of assistance (and thoroughgoing anti-corruption and political reforms) before they would ever be. In part it was a sequencing issue: taking down core AQ took much less time than building countermeasures against regional groups, thus leaving a vacuum these groups expanded to fill. In part it was because of a self-inflicted loss of trust: partners hesitated to cooperate because of anger over the invasion or the botched occupation of Iraq. Meanwhile, countries like Russia and China, which had stood aside from Iraq and Afghanistan (in military terms – commercially, both profited from these conflicts), exploited the US preoccupation to expand their influence. China, in particular, was attractive to countries facing security challenges but wary of Washington. Beijing offered military equipment, know-how and economic support with few strings attached, while taking a less preachy approach to human rights and the rule of law. But if the effects of the bin Laden raid on US thinking and relations with potential partners were negative, within core AQ they were catastrophic.

Bin Laden’s death catapulted AQ into a succession crisis. Choosing a new leader – bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri – took six weeks, and was far from unchallenged. Zawahiri – who, as we saw earlier, can come across as pedantic and uninspiring – lacked bin Laden’s charisma. Some believed only a native of Arabia was eligible to lead the organisation, disqualifying Zawahiri, who is Egyptian. Things eventually played out in Zawahiri’s favour, but it took most of 2011 for his authority to be accepted across the wider al-Qaeda network. This meant AQ was absent – inward-looking, consumed with its leadership crisis – at the critical stage of the Arab Spring. Worse than that: as we’ve seen, AQ’s model is to exploit and manipulate others’ grievances, aggregating their effects into a global whole. AQ was failing (for the moment) to infiltrate the Arab Spring, and the grievances it sought to exploit were being resolved peacefully, which was the last thing it wanted.

To understand why this mattered so much, we need to backtrack a little. Founded in August 1988, al-Qaeda is a mash-up of several strains of militant Islam. The first was a movement against secular, authoritarian governments across the Middle East and North Africa that traced its origins to the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s and, more recently, to a backlash against Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s US-brokered peace deal with Israel in 1978. Members focused on what they called “apostate regimes”: governments in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, which they saw as traitors to Islam and creatures of European colonialism (or American neo-colonialism).

For this school – which included Zawahiri – the decline of Islam, the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, the humiliation of colonialism, Israel’s foundation as a western outpost in the heart of the Middle East, the loss of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and Egypt’s defeat in 1973 were symptoms of a deeper disease. Muslims had lost the true faith and been corrupted by European values (capitalism, nationalism and communism). They’d abandoned Islamic law and sunk into ignorance – and Egypt’s accommodation with Israel only confirmed the Arab regimes’ loss of legitimacy. Like many revolutionary narratives, this school looked back to a golden age to explain present troubles and prescribe a redemptive program of action: Muslims needed to overthrow the apostate regimes, reintroduce sharia and remake the relationship between the Islamic world and the global order until the two were one and the same.

The Islamist militants weren’t the only ones clamouring for change. Secular democrats, moderate nationalists, religious and ethnic minorities, trade unions and women’s groups all demanded reform. In the 1970s improvements in public health and education – combined with economic stagnation compounded by socialism and crony capitalism – created a bubble of educated, articulate youth whose prospects were poor, whose expectations had been raised and then dashed, and who rejected repressive government. Authoritarians worried that Islam might become the vanguard for revolution. Sadat’s murder in October 1981, coming after the Islamic Revolution in Iran and followed by a Muslim Brotherhood uprising bloodily suppressed by Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad, panicked the regimes. Zawahiri was swept up in a wave of arrests, spending three years in prison on weapons charges. After his release he made his way to Pakistan, arriving at the height of the Soviet–Afghan War. Here he encountered Osama bin Laden, a Saudi of Yemeni descent and scion of the bin Laden construction dynasty, who’d rejected his privileged upbringing and journeyed to Afghanistan to support jihad against the Soviets.

Bin Laden had a specifically Saudi critique: he viewed the House of Saud, with its cosy relationship with the United States and failure to fully enforce Wahhabi Islam, as a Western puppet unworthy of the Prophet’s legacy as guardian of the holy places. Like Zawahiri, the ascetic bin Laden saw Muslim humiliation as a result of compromising values, befriending infidels and succumbing to the lure of luxury and comfort. From this mix something new was born: bin Laden’s group (the “Afghan Services Bureau”) merged with Zawahiri’s “Egyptian Islamic Jihad” to form a new organisation, whose name (al-Qaeda) means “the base.” It was intended as exactly that – a base to rebuild movements in the Middle East, propagate global revolution and form a new clandestine organisation, forged in combat against the Soviets, to execute a new strategy.