The 9/11 Wars (52 page)

Another important shift came within the American domestic intelligence community, and particularly the FBI, where Robert Mueller, the director, had set about changing the bureau’s role from detection and law-enforcement to intelligence-gathering, more along the lines of the British MI5. Philip Mudd, formerly a senior official at the CIA with intimate knowledge of south Asia, the Middle East and Islamic militancy, was made deputy director of the agency tasked with consolidating and accelerating the changes. Mudd, an intense and scholarly analyst with a Masters in English literature, had very different views from his predecessor in the post, who had proudly declared that knowledge of subject matter was not essential for senior officials.
⁹⁴
Though impressed by the FBI’s information-gathering capabilities, he believed the bureau needed to focus less on problems ‘that were known’, i.e. law-enforcement, and more on what could be potential problems, i.e. security. Mudd and his boss, Director Robert Mueller, wanted their staff to be asking not ‘Do we have a case open?’ but ‘Do we have a concern here worth investigating?’. By the end of 2006 the FBI had more than 2,000 intelligence analysts and, perhaps more importantly, nearly 1,400 linguists. The Americans also followed the Europeans in revising the vocabulary used to describe the conflict and their enemies. In late 2006, British cabinet ministers had been advised by the Foreign Office not to use the ‘counterproductive’ term ‘War on Terror’.
⁹⁵
The advice had had little effect until the June 2007 resignation of Tony Blair after ten years in power, when much of the more ideological charged rhetoric of the early years of the 9/11 Wars was immediately dropped. Blair’s departure also allowed a frank discussion of the effects of the Iraq war on radicalization in the UK and elsewhere for the first time. Previously, ministers had tied themselves in rhetorical knots to avoid admitting that the invasion of Iraq had been a major factor in the intensification of the threat in Britain between 2003 and 2005, though in private they admitted that ‘Iraq [was] a huge problem’.
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For Jonathan Freeman, head of the British government’s Combating Extremism Unit, the ‘military language’ used hitherto was ‘just wrong’. ‘You have to use language which does not alienate while not denying there are issues that have to be dealt with,’ he said.
⁹⁷
In January 2008, drawing heavily on the new British guidelines, a number of American federal agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center, advised staff not to describe Islamic extremists as ‘jihadists’ or ‘
mujahideen
’, or to use terms such as ‘Islamofascism’.
⁹⁸
Such changes were easy to dismiss as superficial and it would certainly be wrong to exaggerate their impact. The ‘cultural turn’ naturally had its limits. A resumé of a US wargame, seminar and workshop exercise in late 2007 showed just how cultural sensitivity was often seen as a tactic rather than a principle and how ‘winning hearts and minds’ remained a matter of persuading others rather than having any kind of genuine conversation. ‘The focus of effort in the persistent conflict environment must not be the opponents, but rather the people, the human terrain in which they operate,’ the review said, citing word for word the new counter-insurgency doctrines being employed in Iraq. It then insisted, however, that ‘the general population … must be convinced of the correctness of Western values and ideas’.
⁹⁹
But, as with so many elements of the 9/11 Wars, though individual measures may have had limited impact, cumulatively minor changes could have a significant effect, particularly when they acted to accelerate developments on the ground.

For the reaction against extremist violence in the Islamic world that had become evident in 2006 – though it had been underway in places like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Morocco and elsewhere much earlier – continued to build and broaden. Successive polls reinforced the earlier indication that support for radicalism fell away rapidly whenever violence was experienced locally. In Lebanon, Bangladesh, Jordan and Indonesia, the proportion of Muslims supporting suicide bombing had dropped to levels that were half or less of those of five years before.
¹⁰⁰
As ever, the picture was incomplete. In the deradicalization centres of Saudi Arabia ‘students’ were taught not that going to fight oppression of fellow Muslims in Iraq was necessarily wrong but that to do so
without the permission of the authorities
was wrong, a nuance that escaped most of the impressed Western politicians who were shown around the facilities. In Jordan, though 42 per cent said suicide bombing was never justified, 44 per cent continued to say it was sometimes or rarely justified. But overall it was difficult to argue that the same cycle of escalating chaos and violence seen during the earlier phases of the war was continuing unchanged. Support for Osama bin Laden declined further too, again most obviously in those countries which had suffered militant violence.
¹⁰¹
By 2007, only 15 per cent of Saudi Arabians had a favourable view of their former fellow citizen turned violent extremist and only one in ten held positive views about his group.
¹⁰²
As if to emphasize the point, one of the original founders of al-Qaeda and a key ideological mentor of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, published a book from his Egyptian prison cell called
Rationalization of Jihad
, in which he argued that ‘jihad had been blemished with grave Sharia violations during recent years … Now there are those who kill hundreds, including women and children, Muslims and non-Muslims in the name of jihad.’ Al-Sharif ruled that bombings in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere were illegitimate and that terrorism against civilians in Western countries was wrong.
¹⁰³
When they came from someone like al-Sharif, a respected senior figure within the movement who had been one of the first to elaborate the doctrine of
takfir
, such statements were an indication that an important shift was underway. Al-Sharif was not alone either. From mid 2007 onwards, scores of other well-known individuals also with impeccable extremist credentials began to make public statements denouncing al-Qaeda. One was Salman al-Auda, a Saudi scholar who had been a trenchant critic of the West and of Middle Eastern governments since the late 1980s and who had a cult following in Riyadh and east London alike. In September 2007, al-Auda had addressed bin Laden on a widely watched Arabic-language television network.
¹⁰⁴
‘My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly and women have been killed … in the name of al-Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions [of victims] on your back?’
¹⁰⁵
The discovery of a plot to launch attacks in Saudi Arabia in Riyadh, Medina and even the holy city of Mecca during the pilgrimage period of Hajj in December of 2007 was important too. Whether or not the plot was genuine – Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the deputy interior minister, insisted to the author that it was – the news that extremists were planning to target ordinary people performing one of the five fundamental duties of a Muslim had a powerful effect.
¹⁰⁶
Bin Laden’s communications were becoming increasingly defensive and increasingly frustrated. ‘O Muslim youth of this generation! Why is there cowardice and frailty?’ he asked angrily in a ‘message to the Islamic nation’ released in May 2008. ‘Our lives are already ruled by harmful policies meant to discourage our beliefs. My brother! Jihad against the infidels is your duty. How can you fear death, when death is your paradise? The pillar of religion shall not become stronger by voting and elections. Anything but the sword shall be of no help, I swear.’
¹⁰⁷

By the late spring of 2008, it was thus possible to distinguish four broad phases of the 9/11 Wars to date. The first three had been obvious for some time. Act One had seen the initial explosion of violence and the Afghan war. Act Two had seen the lull, the phoney war of 2002, and Act Three, the intensification and escalation of violence of 2003 to 2006. A year or so later, however, this now appeared to have been the nadir. For the nature of Act Four was gradually becoming clearer. The new phase of the conflict had seen the slide into ever greater violence stopped, tensions dropping in relative terms, fewer major headline attacks, no riots, no collapse of any government and, though perhaps due in part to a normalization of a sustained and high level of threat, a relative sense of calm. If al-Zarqawi’s strategy of ‘local jihad’ had failed in Iraq, al-Suri’s strategy of ‘global jihad’ was meeting with equally little real success more generally in the Islamic world. Again, there had been no ‘turning point’, more a subtle shifting in the balance of tendencies that opened up the possibility that the future evolution the 9/11 Wars might be in a new, more positive direction. This small progress was undoubtedly easily reversible, as fragile an advance on the global scale as it had been on the local scale in the more limited environment of Iraq. There was no doubt that grave problems remained. Certainly, most of the underlying issues that had underpinned radicalization even before 9/11 had remained largely unaddressed, and a single major successful terrorist attack could, depending on the reaction, completely change the dynamic. So too could the emergence of another leader of similar charisma to bin Laden but with perhaps a subtly different message and style. And even if it was the case that al-Qaeda’s global package had been rejected not just in Iraq but more broadly in the Islamic world, no one could predict what might fill the gap it left. But even if it was still very unclear what the next act of the conflict might bring, it was reasonable to hope that it would not be as grim as what had gone before.

One thing was certain. Despite their setbacks, radical Islamic militants in the spring of 2008 still retained the capacity to often think and move faster than those trying to kill or capture them. By late spring there were signs that well-known and capable individuals, some linked to the al-Qaeda senior leadership, were leaving Iraq and heading east.
¹⁰⁸
For if the militants were having less success than they had hoped in the Middle East and in Europe, they were having more than they had ever expected in the first theatre of the 9/11 Wars: Afghanistan. The strategic centre of gravity of the conflict appeared to have shifted again. No longer Europe or the Middle East, it was, once again, south-west Asia.

PART FIVE

Afghanistan, Pakistan and Al-Qaeda: 2008

12
Afghanistan Again

KABUL, LATE SUMMER 2008

Even in the summer of 2008, even on a hot afternoon in mid-August at the height of the fighting season, there was little that indicated that Maidan Shar, a small town 30 miles south of Kabul, lay astride a frontline. The only signs of conflict were the wrecks of two trucks burned out in an ambush a few days earlier and dumped outside a scruffy row of mechanics’ workshops and the Turkish armoured vehicles firing practice rounds into a hillside a mile or so away. A few ragged farmers sold small, bruised apples from battered barrows in the patch of dried mud that passed for a central marketplace. In the town’s single restaurant a dozen men lay on grubby carpets spread on the flat concrete floor, sipped smeared glasses of tea amid clouds of flies and stared hard at strangers. The frontline, as ever in the 9/11 Wars, was poorly defined, invisible and intangible. But it was a frontline nonetheless.

The torpor was thus misleading. By 2008, much of Wardak, the province of which Maidan Shar was the capital, had slipped under the control of the insurgents. Though the Taliban did not control all of the 10,000 square miles of mixed mountain, desert and parched farmland that made up the province, only a fairly limited amount of territory could be said to be under the authority of President Hamid Karzai and his government either. Their power, weak at the best of times, was limited to the main roads, the district centres and Maidan Shar itself. ‘Things are pretty safe round here,’ the local governor, Halim Fedayi, said disingenuously in an interview in his heavily guarded office minutes before news came in that his deputy had narrowly escaped death in an ambush on the main road through the province – Highway 1 from Kabul to Kandahar – a few miles away.
¹
Outside, a crowd of tribal elders had gathered. They had been summoned to hear the governor, a former NGO worker and exile, speak about how the insurgents’ interpretation of the Koran was erroneous. One, from a village only half an hour by motorbike away, summed up what many were thinking: ‘What the governor says is very nice, but it’s the Taliban who control my district, not him.’ Sitting on a metal bed on a small hill a few miles north of Maidan Shar, Salim Ali, a twenty-year-old policeman, forced a thin smile. With three colleagues, for a pound a day, he guarded the narrow pass on the road to Kabul. ‘There’s less traffic these days,’ he said. ‘People are frightened.’

The Afghan capital in August 2008 was an anxious place. The situation in the city’s immediate vicinity was unstable and fluid. It was very clear that insurgents were moving through surrounding villages, stockpiling weapons and establishing safehouses. Suburbs on the outskirts were unsafe and suicide bombers continued to hit targets within the city limits. Someone managed to fire an RPG – which has an effective range of a couple of hundred metres – at the new airport building. Even the streets of Shar-e-Nau, the centre of Kabul, saw a series of kidnappings. The road to Jalalabad was repeatedly cut by insurgent raids and roadblocks. Just north of the road in the valley of Uzbeen, ten French soldiers were killed in an ambush, pinned down amid rocks and on steep slopes as Afghan National Army soldiers fled in total disorder and NATO, which had around 25,000 heavily armed Western troops stationed within a hour’s helicopter flight and jets permanently overhead, tried without success to bring its formidable airborne assets to bear. Though few believed the Taliban had any chance of actually capturing the capital, when traditional calls of ‘Allahu akbar’ resounded from rooftops on the first day of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, local authorities thought the cries signalled an insurrection and ordered a major security alert. In a row of open-air workshops on the northern outskirts, labourers worked round the clock pouring concrete into battered metal moulds to meet the insatiable local demand for something barely seen in Afghanistan even five years before: the concrete blast wall. The big sections cost $550, the smaller a mere $300. A good team of workers could produce twenty a day. ‘I sell them to foreigners mainly and make good money,’ said Said Fahim, the owner of the biggest workshop. ‘If Afghanistan was peaceful there would be no use for them. I’d prefer to be out of business.’