The 9/11 Wars (82 page)

THE END OF THE FIRST DECADE

If the evolution of al-Qaeda and its affiliates during 2010 and the early part of 2011 continued on broad lines established over previous years, so too did developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the former, the Taliban continued to have problems. Up to 200 mid-level commanders and operatives were being killed every month by the coalition special forces units and their Afghan auxiliaries in the ‘night raids’, and, with public support for the insurgents as variable as ever, the movement’s leaders were forced to turn to tactics that risked further damage to their popularity. Through 2010 suicide attacks occurred at a rate of about three per week and the use of IEDs nearly doubled.
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These latter accounted alone for around a third of Afghan civilians killed or wounded over the year.
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Another sign of weakness was that the insurgents intensified their unpopular and increasingly brutal campaign of assassinations and intimidation, even, in a series of well-publicized incidents, targeting children.
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Discipline and unity continued to be problems. Many of the older Taliban field commanders were now battle-weary and resentful of the senior leadership secure in Pakistan. Tensions and competition with other insurgent groups – Hekmatyar’s fighters or the ‘Haqqani network’ – were often sharp. The very young commanders replacing the more experienced men killed in the special forces raids often had no memory of the 1990s, no understanding of the original mission of the Taliban and no respect for the hierarchy. Orders given before the 2011 spring offensive once again stressed the twin causes of nation and of Islam. More fragmented than ever, increasingly contaminated by criminal elements, the movement remained a largely local phenomenon, however. Even if many wintered in Pakistan, between 80 and 90 per cent of Taliban captured or killed were found within 12 miles of their home villages.
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Yet the reinforced international coalition, now commanded directly by General David Petraeus after McChrystal was sacked for effective insubordination in July, still struggled to achieve a breakthrough. In many areas massive application of resources had undeniably made a difference.
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In Marjah, a force of 2,000 Marines spending a million dollars a month on development projects, backed by 300 policemen, 700 Afghan National Army soldiers and, controversially, an 800-strong locally raised militia had imposed some kind of order. But there was no way such resources could be committed even across the whole of the south. Kandahar and its surrounding districts appeared more secure, so too was the immediate hinterland of Kabul. But countrywide the violence was as intense as anything seen since 2001. In Wardak and Logar, many of the ‘ideological’ Taliban had been driven out, but warlordism and criminal violence were rife. In the north, insurgent influence had grown. Afghan security forces were expanding rapidly, with better training and equipment, but governance was still grotesquely flawed. Corruption was worse than ever and, along with simple incompetence, still crippled efforts to deliver basic services. Though officials rightly pointed to millions of children in thousands of new schools and effective vaccination programmes, any improvements in the police or justice system were, at best, incremental. Much of the population continued to prefer the swift and honest Taliban-run courts. Very large quantities of drugs continued to be produced. Pressurized by domestic opinion and failing finances, Western political leaders continued their increasingly desperate search for some kind of relatively dignified exit. Every few months there were new reports of talks with the insurgent leadership. A Quetta-based shopkeeper posing as a senior commander with access to Mullah Omar was paid a large sum of money and flown to Kabul. Other envoys moved back and forth. The most senior figures in the US administration attempted to persuade Pakistan’s security services to deliver potential interlocutors all while trying to convince a sceptical American public that withdrawing troops from July 2011 onwards was not an admission of partial defeat and that a total ‘transition’ to local control in Afghanistan, now scheduled for 2014, did not imply failure. Disagreements within the Obama adminstration and between allies over exactly what might happen if some kind of deal was concluded with the Taliban continued. Would the movement host al-Qaeda as before? Would they act more reasonably than in the 1990s? Was any kind of inclusive political settlement even possible or desirable? But such questions were rapidly becoming academic. The West was on the way out of Afghanistan. It was only a matter of time.
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Across the border in Pakistan, broad trends established over the previous years continued too. Catastrophic floods in the summer of 2010 led to a temporary halt in the ongoing violence but had a variety of hugely negative effects well beyond the immediate humanitarian impact. Vast grain stocks were destroyed, livestock wiped out, roads and power lines washed away, and millions made homeless. Not only did the state show itself to be corrupt and incompetent, but many landlords failed to respond to the needs of communities who had worked their fields for generations. The deference and hierarchies already under such strain were further degraded. The floods also accelerated the migration of populations from rural areas to the cities, with millions of refugees from the countryside seeking refuge in the urban centres. In Karachi, the influx altered the ethnic and political balance of the city, provoking violence which killed dozens in October 2010. Elsewhere the population of migrants simply swelled the reservoirs of the rootless, displaced urban working class or lower middle class, the classic constituency for political Islamists. The weak and unstable government of Asif Ali Zardari proved as incapable of managing the natural catastrophe as it was of managing the various man-made disasters affecting Pakistan. Even without the floods, the economy was in very deep trouble, with negative or negligible growth and runaway inflation.

Nor, despite the problems at home, was there any sign of change in the Pakistani security establishment’s basic strategic vision or understanding of its nation’s interests. Even two years after the Mumbai attacks, only token measures had been taken to find and incarcerate those responsible, for example. Individuals like Hafiz Saeed, the founder and effective leader of Lashkar-e-Toiba, continued to be viewed as potential strategic assets rather than as dangerous liabilities.
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With every indication being that the Pakistanis’ ‘spoiling’ strategy in Afghanistan was likely to be successful there was little reason for much change there either. The Pakistani security establishment was still committed to making sure they had a de facto right of veto, via their support for Taliban elements, over any political settlement in Afghanistan. There was no major assault by the army into North Waziristan, despite strong American pressure. Militant attacks, often indiscriminate, continued to intensify. In December, forty-five died when a suicide bomber – possibly a woman – detonated a device among a crowd queuing to receive United Nations food aid. In all 2010 saw 2,113 militant, insurgent and sectarian attacks, in which 2,193 people died and nearly 6,000 were injured.
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In January 2011, Salman Taseer, the moderate and outspoken governor of the Punjab, was shot dead in Islamabad by one of his own bodyguards, who was led away smiling after the murder. Taseer was killed for having vocally supported a Christian woman who had been accused of blasphemy and faced the death sentence. The lack of explicit condemnation by many of Pakistan’s political leaders was as striking as the public celebration that accompanied his killing in some places. More than 1,000 lawyers volunteered to defend Taseer’s killer for free. Clerics across the country condoned the assassination.
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A month later, the shooting of two men by an American ‘diplomat’, in fact a CIA contractor, in Lahore led to a protracted diplomatic row and a new low for relations between Pakistan and the USA. If the summer of 2010 had been bloody, that of 2011 promised to be worse.

Then there was Iraq. Here again the broad trends established in recent years continued. Iraq still teetered between slow but definitive improvement and rapid regression. The bombings of government forces and religious minorities perpetrated by the various networks linked to al-Qaeda, who hoped to restart the sectarian civil war of 2004 to 2007, killed hundreds through the summer of 2010 and intensified as the autumn went on. The daily average of deaths from suicide bombs or gunfire and executions in Iraq through 2010 was 17.34, which maintained the country’s position as the most violent place in terms of terrorism in the world.
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More than 150 people – 89 civilians, 41 police and 21 soldiers – were killed in December 2010 alone.
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The social conservatism of the Shia working classes and most Sunnis continued to broaden and deepen. There was little sign that the dangerous politicization of the security forces was at all diminished. The economic situation of most people saw little if any amelioration. For much of the year, the political process was paralysed. Elections in March had resulted in an impasse. The more moderate secular and non-sectarian party of Ayad Allawi had won the polls by a slim margin but finally – after ten or more months of negotiations – it was the incumbent, Nouri al-Maliki, who formed a government. The end of the American combat mission in Iraq on August 31, 2010 and the subsequent draw-down of troops was marked by widespread violence which, though anticipated, nonetheless shook many. The Kurds in the north continued to separate themselves economically, culturally and politically from the rest of the country. Major problems such as the future of the contested city of Kirkuk or the partition of the growing oil revenues remained unresolved, potential flashpoints for future strife. In January 2011, Muqtada al-Sadr returned to Iraq from Iran, where he had spent much of the previous four years studying to become an ayatollah. The thirty-seven-year-old cleric, whose representatives had won enough seats in the parliamentary elections to play a deciding role in the subsequent negotiations, spoke first at Najaf, the holy city. He gave thanks to God for the successful transition of his al-Mahdi Army into a political party, pledged support to the government and promised to fight on against ‘our joint enemy: America, Israel and Britain’.
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Both inside and outside Iraq, many watched nervously. ‘I am happy that the US leave but they left a destroyed country controlled by bad people,’ said Amal Kamel, a twenty-year-old student at a Baghdad college.
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Yet anyone who sensed a renewed drift into stagnation in the Middle East as 2010 turned to 2011 was about to be surprised. In early January 2011, food riots in Algeria had rattled the authorities and led to calls to calm – ‘Islam is serenity’ – from government-backed clerics as the youthful population seethed. The regime had held on, but the disturbances presaged a greater upheaval. First it was the turn of Tunisia, where the self-immolation of an out-of-work graduate who had tried to eke out a living as a fruit and vegetable seller triggered an uprising that led to the deposition of the corrupt and repressive president, Zine el Abidine ben Ali. From Tunisia, with its population of 10 million, the spirit of rebellion spread. Within a week of ben Ali’s downfall, crowds had poured onto the streets in Egypt, calling for an end to the thirty-one-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak. After three further weeks of extraordinary scenes, of battles in central Cairo between protestors and pro-Mubarak thugs, a settlement was reached which saw the veteran leader deposed and the army effectively take power pending elections in the autumn. The news immediately sparked demonstrations in Bahrain, Kuwait, Algeria, Yemen, Syria, Morocco and in Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya. In the latter the protests, first repressed with the loss of hundreds of lives, turned into a fully fledged revolt as the Libyan leader’s extensive security apparatus collapsed across much of the country. With some irony, bulldozers brought in for the use of the scores of overseas companies that had moved into Libya since Gaddafi had opened its economy to foreign investment a decade before were used to attack military bases in and around Benghazi, the eastern port city two hours’ drive from the Egyptian border, which soon became the de facto capital of ‘Free Libya’. Gaddafi and those security forces which remained loyal hit back, bloodily retaking towns to the west of Tripoli and fighting their way east along the coast towards the rebel strongholds until forced to halt by airstrikes involving French jets and British and American missiles that, this time, were sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. By the third week of March, the ‘Arab Spring’ had seen popular pressure achieve in the space of just over two months what decades of Islamic militant activism had been unable to do: unseat two of the hated ‘hypocrite, apostate’ dictators of the Middle East, destabilize the rule of a third and mobilize hundreds of millions across the entire region. An entirely new political, social, cultural and ideological cycle in the region appeared to be starting.

Yet, though undoubtedly constituting a radical break, these events could only be properly understood and explained by reference to the more general effects and evolution of the 9/11 Wars. Indeed, the events of early 2011 reinforced rather than contradicated a number of key trends and key lessons picked out earlier in this narrative. The first was that violence, revolt and revolution in the Islamic world is not rooted simply in a supposed clash between reactionary societies and ‘modernity’ in the form of the West; nor do they depend solely on the actions or interventions of Western leaders. No society is fixed, changeless or stuck in a ‘medieval time-warp’. One of the reasons many observers were taken by surprise by the events of early 2011 was the perception that places like Egypt, Libya or Bahrain had somehow been bypassed by the major political, cultural, technological developments elsewhere. The Arab world, in the words of one prominent commentator, had been ‘insulated from history for the last 50 years’.
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This, of course, was total rubbish, as misleading as the descriptions of Saudi Arabia as a ‘medieval monarchy’ or Afghanistan as a ‘thirteenth-century country’, and further evidence of the stubborn Western tendency to see Muslim-majority societies as backward or timeless that had coloured so much policy-making and analysis with such damaging results for so long.
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All countries in the Islamic world, as elsewhere in the developing world and beyond, had undergone a series of dynamic, unpredictable and complex internal transitions in recent decades which, if perhaps less than evident to outside observers, were no less profound for all that. Across the Middle East, the decades of political stasis had disguised rapid social evolution.
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In Egypt, it was the combination of new economic growth – up to 8 per cent in 2007, only slightly less in the following years – with old cronyism, corruption, patronage and increasingly extreme inequality that proved explosive. This came at a time when demographics ensured a very large population of young people, a critical minority of whom had acquired an unprecedented capacity for social and political organization through the use of new social media. The same was true of Libya, where the revolt started in the economically marginalized eastern zones which had not benefited from Gaddafi’s tentative steps towards economic liberalization, and whose tribes were less loyal to the regime. In Libya, the technologically savvy Westernized middle class prominent among the protestors in Egypt were less evident. The rebellion there had slightly different roots, a more traditional structure and a more populist tone as a result. Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, average levels of education had not been rising over previous years, and schoolteachers in the newly liberated port city of Benghazi pointed out the spelling mistakes in the revolutionary slogans daubed on walls to reporters.
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However, whatever their exact age or background, as protestors spilled out on to streets across the whole region, they ensured that it became increasingly difficult to see the Muslim or Arab world as a reactionary brake on the rest of the planet’s steady ride towards a prosperous, stable and peaceful ‘modernity’.