The 9/11 Wars (84 page)

The Navy SEALs collected computers, stacks of documents and scores of hard drives and USB keys from the compound where bin Laden had been living. They left the children, the wives and the bodies of the two brothers. The youngest wife, a twenty-nine-year-old Yemeni who had married bin Laden eleven years earlier, told Pakistani security forces who arrived on the scene after the Americans had left that she and her daughter, ten-year-old Safiya, had lived in the compound for five years.
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This raised the possibility that bin Laden had been in Abbottabad for half a decade. With hindsight, there was nothing that indicated that this might not have been the case. It appeared that bin Laden, having almost certainly spent years immediately after his flight from Afghanistan either in a major Pakistani city or more likely in the FATA, had indeed decided to trade operational effectiveness for security, probably moving into the Abbottabad safehouse soon after it was completed in 2005. The house had no internet access or telephone lines, and communication, the CIA team examining the material seized there soon found, had relied on a laborious system by which bin Laden would write emails that would then be sent by a courier, usually one of the two brothers, from a distant internet café. He had, however, been kept aware of developments within al-Qaeda and its affiliate groups and of ongoing plans for attacks. A notebook found by the Americans was full of jottings: a calculation of how many US citizens would have to be killed to force Washington to disengage entirely from the Middle East, remarks on the suitability of various candidates for senior positions within the group, comments on which American officials other than the president it was worth targeting and apparent outrage over a suggestion by one contributor to the magazine
Inspire
that a farm machine or tractor be fitted with blades for an attack in America. This, bin Laden tetchily noted, he could not endorse as it would lead to ‘indiscriminate killing’ and was thus not ‘something that reflects what al-Qaeda does’.
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There were also indications that bin Laden was planning – or perhaps simply dreaming of – a bid to unite all the disparate factions fighting the US-led coalition in Afghanistan into a grand alliance under his leadership. This would have been the al-Qaeda leader’s most ambitious attempt to date to appropriate a local struggle for his own global one.
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The death of bin Laden naturally raised many questions. What, many asked, was the al-Qaeda leader doing in Abbottabad? With relatively good road links in all directions, including into rugged terrain to the north-west, from where Afghanistan or the militant stronghold of Bajaur would not be too hard to reach, the town had certain advantages. That the safehouse was in a discreet suburb favoured by retired army officers and was close to Pakistan’s main military academy clearly posed a risk but also offered freedom from fear of missile attack and the benefits of being genuinely seen as a highly unlikely place for the world’s most wanted fugitive to hide. The chief attraction, of course, was, in the often makeshift, make-do world of militancy, that the safehouse already existed, created by Arshad Khan.

Did someone in the Pakistani security establishment know of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad? Though sympathy for much of what bin Laden stood for was deep in the ISI, in the army and among the population at large, it seems likely that the al-Qaeda leader’s ability to hide ‘in plain sight’ was more evidence of the institutional weakness of the country, the incompetence of senior officers and of systemic failure within the intelligence services than anything more sinister. Though there was plenty of evidence of support for local and regional Islamic extremists by the ISI, there was no solid proof of the agency ever assisting international militants. Indeed, the record of the ISI when it came to operations against such figures was relatively good. In the absence of hard evidence, the ISI, though justifiably criticized for its role in supporting insurgents in Afghanistan and for running, with increasing difficulty, Pakistani militant groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba, was probably not directly implicated in sheltering bin Laden. The fact that, according to references among the data seized in the compound, there were indications that, around a year before he died, bin Laden himself had pondered a possible truce with local Pakistani authorities, along the lines of that which militants in London in the 1990s had thought they had concluded with the British government, reinforces this conclusion.
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The question of the complicity – or stunning incompetence – of Pakistan’s security establishment naturally had a regional dimension. The death of bin Laden immediately triggered another crisis in Pakistani–American relations, already at a low point. Behind the rhetoric, though, the thinking in Washington remained that Pakistan was simply ‘too big to be allowed fail’ and that continuing aid, though perhaps with better focus and criteria, needed to be made available even if patience with the country’s security establishment was wearing extremely thin. Demands were made again for the detention or ‘rendering’ of Mullah Mohammed Omar and several other senior militants, but more in hope than in anticipation of any immediate action. Pakistani public reaction swung between a vociferous assertion of a variety of conspiracy theories, anger at the army, anger at the Americans and anger at bin Laden. A major theme was a diffuse, inchoate but nonetheless real sense of shame.

The real ‘game changer’, however, was in Afghanistan. With bin Laden gone, not only was Obama (and to some extent key allies such as the UK) presented with an opportunity to accelerate the drawdown of forces there, scheduled to begin in the summer, but the president, with eighteen months to go before an election, now faced even greater difficulty in persuading domestic opinion that the long, gruelling and hugely expensive war in Afghanistan still needed to be fought. Less than 100 international militants were believed to be in Afghanistan in the spring of 2011, of whom only ‘a handful’ were interested in targeting the West.
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US military expenditure alone there was nearly $10 billion each month. ‘Are we moving towards transition? Yes. Are we trying to get out of Afghanistan as fast as we can? Absolutely not. There is no scurry for the exit,’ insisted one US official in Kabul.
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Allies such as the UK earnestly repeated the same sentiments all while trying to accelerate a political settlement by lifting sanctions on former Taliban. But with all Western activity in their country increasingly framed around 2014 – the agreed date by which international combat troops would be gone – such statements inevitably did little to reassure nervous Afghans. Many felt, not unreasonably, that once the soldiers had left aid and attention would disappear too. ‘It will be chaos. It will be civil war. Everything we have gained will go,’ Fatima Karimi, a twenty-nine-year-old student teacher, told the author as she picnicked with her family by a river on the outskirts of Kabul a month and a day after bin Laden’s death. Despite the spread of chicken, fried potato cakes, salad and melon, the atmosphere was far from festive. The Karimi family were from the Shia religious and Hazara ethnic minorities and had much to lose.
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Kabul may have been calmer in the spring of 2011, but it was an anxious place.

For al-Qaeda, there was obviously the question of bin Laden’s succession. This was never going to be a simple issue. Though al-Zawahiri was clearly the leading candidate to take on the leadership of al-Qaeda, his candidacy was not without controversy. Irascible, argumentative and lacking in charisma, even if his experience was respected, the fifty-nine-year-old Egyptian did not have universal support either within the ‘hardcore’ or among affiliates. Al-Zawahiri’s pragmatism also angered the many middle-ranking militants committed to a purely literal extremist reading of Islamic texts.
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As an Egyptian, he was less well placed than bin Laden had been as a Saudi to mediate between factions within the group. But the younger leaders like Abu Yahya al-Libi were far from ready to take on any such a high-profile role. Further fragmentation of the group, the networks, even the ideology appeared likely, at least in the short and mid term. Ten days after bin Laden’s death a statement from al-Qaeda’s al-Fajr online media centre issued a new call to arms. ‘Do not consult anyone about killing Americans or destroying their economy,’ the statement said. ‘We … incite you to carry out acts of individual terrorism with significant results, which only require basic preparation. We say to every
mujahed
Muslim, if there is an opportunity, do not waste it.’ An appeal to the social movement created over previous years, this was the quintessential expression of a strategy of ‘leaderless jihad’.

A week later, bin Laden’s final public words were broadcast. The dead leader welcomed the Arab Spring and predicted, as he had done so many times before, ‘winds of change blowing over the entire Muslim world’. There was little of the sanguinary rhetoric that had marked previous statements and no calls for violent attacks. ‘Let the truth ring out,’ bin Laden said. ‘Remember those that go out with a sword are true believers, those that go fight with their tongue are true believers, and those that fight in their hearts are true believers.’ The release of the tape was barely noticed in the Islamic world. Most people were much more interested in the news from Libya, where fighting between rebels and Gaddafi’s forces continued amid Western air strikes, or from the Yemen, where President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime appeared close to falling, or from Syria, where security forces had killed and tortured thousands in violent repression of protestors calling for democratic reform, than in the late bin Laden’s familiar exhortations.

Elements of the material seized by the Americans continued to be selectively leaked over the months following the Abbottabad raid. The claim that a stash of pornography had been found appeared a fairly transparent and clumsy effort to blacken the dead al-Qaeda leader’s posthumous reputation among current or potential followers. Little emerged to support repeated public assessments by US officials that bin Laden had been deeply involved in the detailed day-to-day running of the group either. One video released by the CIA unequivocally reinforced the sense of a historical figure whose time had passed. It showed bin Laden, stroking his beard, wrapped in a blanket with a woollen cap on his head, sitting on the floor in a room probably in the Abbottabad compound, watching a television set on a desk beside a blacked-out window. On the screen ran images of a younger man – the viewer himself in 2002 or 2003 – wearing a combat jacket and walking through wooded hills, then further footage of the al-Qaeda leader firing an AK-47 in around 2000, some pictures of the 9/11 attacks and finally a sequence of fighters on an assault course somewhere amid dusty desert hills. Then the pictures were gone and only a blank screen remained.

Conclusion: The 9/11 Wars

THE 9/11 WARS:
THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

So as the end of the first decade of the 9/11 Wars approached, some of the answers to the questions that the sight of the American forces spread out in the sand, scrub and pitted concrete at Bagram all those years before had become clear.

Certainly the nature of the conflict was now more evident. The qualities established in those early campaigns – at Tora Bora, in the streets of Baghdad as the insurgency in Iraq took hold or in the dust of Majjar al-Kabir, where the six Redcaps were to die, in Abu Ghraib, in the bombings of nightclubs in Bali and consulates in Istanbul – had been consolidated as time had passed. This new war was chaotic and scattered, with few heroes and many villains. It was a conflict where gain and loss had been determined as much by the relative venality or brutality of participants as by courage or resourcefulness. It was a conflict marked by violence to civilians, to prisoners and by an appalling ignorance among many decision-makers of the local conditions, the circumstances and the cultures of other protagonists. It was, at the end of its first ten years as at its beginning, still marked by the extreme diversity of the scores of interwoven wars that it comprised.

These wars existed on multiple levels. At the local level, they were a mass of private battles, fratricidal skirmishes, communal clashes, often sparked by specific incidents of misgovernance or injustice, some pitting village against village, neighbourhood against neighbourhood, tribe against tribe. At the next level, the wars were often about the participation of a particular group in politics at a provincial or national level. Frequently they involved conflicts about the definition of a certain ethnic or religious group’s position within a state. Only at the final level, the biggest in scale, could some of these conflicts be integrated into an overarching cosmic conflict pitting the West and its allies against radical Islam. Each level provided a different prism through which the overall conflict could be seen. Not all were equally valid. Only by glossing over the local specificities of all its component elements could the 9/11 Wars be seen a war between religions, between the secular and the faithful, between the West and the East or between global ‘haves’ and global ‘have-nots’. Such generalizations, with their easy assumptions and seductive simplicity, at best highlighted only one element of the overall conflict, at worst obscured and distorted the nature of the phenomenon they supposedly described.

As their first decade ended, enough of the course of the 9/11 Wars was also now evident to be able to tentatively offer a prediction for what the next years of the conflict might bring. After the stunning violence of their beginning in the autumn of 2001 and the short lull in 2002 and early 2003 the Wars had grown in extent and intensity to a peak in around 2005 and 2006. This was followed by a relative decline that was partially – but not totally – offset by rising levels of localized violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The most recent phase of the conflict, still ongoing in the summer of 2011, had seen a fragile stabilization, leaving it finely balanced. Despite a continuing level of violence that was undoubtedly much higher than in the years preceding the 9/11 attacks, there was nothing to indicate an imminent global conflagration as had once been feared. Indeed, the events in the Arab world in early 2011 suggested that such an eventuality was extemely unlikely. The most probable scenario for the coming years of the 9/11 Wars was thus that this delicate equilibrium would be maintained for the foreseeable future with violence and militancy shifting between new nodes of activism and geographic zones according to local circumstances, the emergence of new leaders and the creation of new groups.
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Generational shifts and heightened expectations after the ‘Arab Spring’ would be important factors in determining the level of any violence. The ability of local regimes and rulers to defuse demands for reform and of new governments to meet the new hopes for peace, prosperity and, in particular, ‘dignity’ of hundreds of millions of people would be crucial in determining its location. An important factor too would be the adaptability of al-Qaeda in all its manifestations, following bin Laden’s death. But though any renewed militancy would cause problems, it was nonetheless unlikely to pose an existential threat, either to the West or to the Islamic world.