The Longest War (44 page)

Why was the post-9/11 threat from al-Qaeda lower in the United States than it was in the United Kingdom? For all of President Bush’s obvious missteps,
as he left office after his second term his defenders pointed out that he had “kept America safe” from attack (although that was obviously not the case on 9/11). Bush was not shy about taking credit for this. Al-Qaeda, he explained in 2006, had failed to strike the United States a second time “because our government has changed its policies—and given our military, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel the tools they need to fight this enemy and protect our people.” And a fair-minded observer might ask: Was it possible that, despite all he got wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush somehow managed to get this right?

There is little doubt that some of the measures the Bush administration and Congress took after 9/11 made Americans safer. First, the Patriot Act accomplished something quite important, which was to break down the legal wall that had been blocking the flow of information between the CIA and the FBI. Second, the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center led to various government agencies sharing data and analyzing it under one roof (although the center was the brainchild of the 9/11 Commission, whose establishment the Bush administration had fought against for more than a year). Third, the FBI moved from being largely a crime-solving organization to one more driven by intelligence-gathering, assigning two thousand agents to national security cases and
hiring an additional two thousand intelligence analysts
. This was supplemented by the creation of some one hundred Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country integrating the FBI with local law enforcement. Fourth, it became much harder for terrorists to get into the country thanks to no-fly lists. Before 9/11 the total number of suspected terrorists banned from air travel totaled just sixteen names; nine years later there were around four thousand.

One of the most dramatic instances of how heightened security measures prevented potential terrorists from arriving in the United States was the case of Raed al-Banna, a thirty-two-year-old Jordanian English-speaking lawyer who was denied entry at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on June 14, 2003, because border officials detected “
multiple terrorist risk factors
.” A year and a half later, on February 28, 2005, Banna conducted a suicide bombing in Hilla, Iraq, that killed 132 people; his fingerprints were found on the severed hand chained to the steering wheel of his bomb-filled truck.

Finally, cooperation between U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies was generally strong after September 11. For instance, al-Qaeda’s 2006 plot to bring down the seven American and Canadian airliners leaving Heathrow
was disrupted by the joint work of U.S., British, and Pakistani intelligence services.

That said, a key reason the United States escaped a serious domestic terrorist attack had little to do with either the Bush or Obama administrations. In sharp contrast to sections of the Muslim populations in European countries such as Britain, the American Muslim community—generally a higher-skilled group of immigrants than their European counterparts—has overwhelmingly rejected the ideological virus of militant Islam. The “American Dream” has generally worked well for Muslims in the United States, who are both better educated and wealthier than the average American.
More than a third
of Muslim-Americans have a graduate degree or better, compared to less than one in ten of the population as a whole.

For European Muslims there is no analogous “British Dream,” “French Dream,” or, needless to say, “EU Dream.” None of this is to say that the limited job opportunities and segregation that are the lot of many European Muslims are the
causes
of terrorism in Europe—only that such conditions may create favorable circumstances in which al-Qaeda can recruit and feed into bin Laden’s master narrative that the infidel West is at war with Muslims in some shape or form all around the world. And in the absence of those conditions, militant Islam has never gained much of an American foothold—largely sparing the United States from the scourge of homegrown terrorism. This is fundamentally a testament to American pluralism, not any action of the American government.

Between 9/11 and the fall of 2010 only fourteen Americans were killed in jihadist terrorist attacks in the United States, something that would hardly have been predicable in the immediate aftermath of al-Qaeda’s assaults on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. However, in 2009 there were a record 43 jihadist terrorism cases against U.S. citizens and residents, indicating that while the American melting pot had successfully absorbed the vast majority of American Muslims, a tiny—but growing minority—were now embracing the ideology of violent jihad.

Only jihad
can bring peace to the world.

—Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban in 2007

C
arry out a thought experiment in which al-Qaeda was founded in Iran in the late 1980s and remains headquartered there today, while the Taliban, which was substantially aided by the Iranian government during the 1990s, is now headquartered in Iran. And then add to this toxic brew the notion that Iranian nuclear scientists met with Osama bin Laden before 9/11, and that still other senior officials in Iran’s nuclear program proliferated nuclear technology to rogue states such as Libya.

Needless to say, if all of this were the case then the United States would almost certainly have gone to war against Iran following 9/11. But, of course, none of this is true, and instead it was in Pakistan—nominally an ally of the United States—that al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders rebased themselves following their expulsion from Afghanistan in the winter of 2001. And it was veterans of Pakistan’s nuclear program who met with bin Laden in Kandahar in the months before 9/11 to discuss his pressing interest in atomic weapons, and it was A. Q. Khan, the dean of Pakistan’s nuclear program, who sold nuclear
weapons technology to a rogues’ gallery that included Libya’s bizarre dictator Muammar Ghaddafi.

To understand why the Taliban and al-Qaeda rebased themselves in Pakistan following the fall of the Taliban regime it is helpful to recall a little of the country’s history. Pakistan’s on-and-off conflict with India, in particular over the disputed Kashmir region, was critical to the rise of the Pakistani
military-jihadi complex
. One-third of Kashmir is
on the Pakistani side
of the border and the rest is on the Indian side, but the majority of Kashmiris are Muslims and they wish to secede from predominantly Hindu India. India and Pakistan have fought two full-blown wars, in 1947 and 1965, over the region whose high mountains and lakes suggestive of Switzerland belie its violent history.

Unable to best the much larger Indian army in battle, Pakistan’s government supported the rise of Kashmiri militant groups that could infiltrate Indian-held Kashmir and tie down tens of thousands of Indian soldiers. In doing so they fused the political dispute over Kashmir with Pakistan’s increasing religiosity and created a state-sanctioned jihad movement. Pakistan’s generals supplemented their policy of supporting Kashmir jihadi groups with a doctrine they termed “strategic depth,” which meant they wanted to ensure that they had a pliant, pro-Pakistani Afghan state on their western border in the event that India attacked over their eastern border. In practice, the doctrine of strategic depth led Pakistan to support militant Pashtun Islamists in Afghanistan like the Taliban, who the Pakistani government believed were most closely aligned with their own anti-Indian policies.

After their near-death experience in Afghanistan during the winter of 2001, members of al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies didn’t disintegrate: they simply moved across the border, a few hundred miles into Pakistan, comfortably out of range of the U.S. military. In a sense, al-Qaeda was just going home, since it was in the Pakistani city of Peshawar in 1988 that bin Laden had founded the group. The Taliban also felt at home in Pakistan. Indeed,
several of their leaders
had attended the Haqqania madrassa just outside of Peshawar, known as the Harvard of the Taliban.

In their first years on the run, many of al-Qaeda’s leaders avoided Pakistan’s remote tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, choosing instead to live in the anonymity of its teeming cities. In particular, Karachi, a barely governable megacity of fifteen million people on Pakistan’s southern coast, emerged after 9/11 as a
hub of jihadist violence
perpetrated by a toxic alliance between al-Qaeda, Kashmiri militant groups, and Sunni sectarian fanatics
who had long been at war with Pakistan’s Shia minority. After 9/11, militants in Karachi bombed the Sheraton hotel, killing a group of French defense contractors; mounted three attacks on the U.S. consulate, one of which killed a dozen Pakistanis; and killed the American journalist Daniel Pearl.

Karachi’s slums are violent no-go areas for the police, making the city an attractive place to hide for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the 9/11 operational commander, as it was for Omar Sheikh, a British-Pakistani militant released from an Indian jail following the hijacking of an Indian Airlines jet to Kandahar in 1999. Omar Sheikh and KSM would fatefully cross paths during the murder of Daniel Pearl, which perhaps better than any one single event demonstrates the nexus between Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence agency, ISI, and Kashmiri militant groups tied to al-Qaeda such as Jaish-e-Mohammed (“Army of Mohammed”).

One of the
Wall Street Journal
’s star reporters, Pearl had made a name for himself writing deeply reported, often quirky stories from around Asia and the Middle East. As a journalist working in the Muslim world, Pearl had made no secret of his Jewish ancestry.
This would make Pearl
an inviting target for Omar Sheikh and later too for KSM, once al-Qaeda itself became involved in his abduction.

As the 9/11 attacks unfolded, Pearl had recently married Mariane, a French radio journalist, and she was pregnant with their first child. The Pearls, who were then based in New Delhi, traveled together to Pakistan. There Danny, as he was universally known, began
reporting on the various Pakistani militant groups
. One in particular aroused his interest, an obscure sect named Jamaatul-Fuqra (“Party of the Poor”), which recruited African-Americans from its base in the Pakistani city of Lahore and maintained a number of communes in the United States. Of particular interest to Pearl in mid-January 2002 was Richard Reid, the British-Jamaican “shoe bomber,” who had recently tried to blow up an American Airlines flight with explosives hidden in his sneakers. Reid had visited the Fuqra headquarters in Lahore before 9/11.

Pearl
set out to interview Fuqra’s founder
, Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, who, unlike many Pakistani militant clerics, shunned the spotlight. The contacts he reached out to in Pakistan’s militant community did not lead Pearl to the shadowy cleric but instead to Omar Sheikh, posing as someone who could arrange a meeting with Gilani. Omar Sheikh was quite adroit at conning Pearl; in his breezy email exchanges with the reporter, Sheikh played hard to get, apologizing for delays in setting up the supposed meeting with
Gilani because he had given Pearl some incorrect contact information, or because his wife was supposedly gravely ill in the hospital.

The last person to see Pearl before his abduction on the night of January 23, 2002, was Karachi businessman Jameel Yusuf, the chief of the Citizen Police Liaison Committee, a group that he had founded in the mid-1990s to help the police solve the epidemic of kidnappings then gripping the city. Yusuf recalled that Pearl “
dropped in to talk
to me about the reforms after September 11th—How much is the international community doing to strengthen the law enforcement agencies?” Yusuf was struck, as were many others, by Pearl’s engaging and open manner: “Very humble down to earth person.”

Yusuf remembered that during their meeting Pearl received two calls on his cellphone. Pearl told the caller that he was close by and would be able to meet at 7
P.M
. Pearl then met with Omar Sheikh in a fast-food restaurant, where he made the fatal mistake of agreeing to be driven to another location. Pearl did not show up later that night at the house he was living in, which prompted a search in which Yusuf was quickly involved since his organization was the leading investigator of kidnappings in Karachi. Yusuf remembers their worst fears being confirmed when they examined the phone number of Pearl’s last caller. “It was a prepaid telephone card, not traceable.”

The Pearl case was the first act of anti-American terrorism conducted by the al-Qaeda network after 9/11. And it would be the first time that members of the network, rabid anti-Semites to a man, would specifically target a Jew. Until Pearl’s kidnapping, international journalists had had little reason to fear doing their jobs in Pakistan. Now the rules had changed.

On January 24, an email was sent to a number of reporters in Pakistan from the account [email protected]. The message demanded the release of all Pakistani prisoners in American custody, including those held at the just-opened Guantánamo Bay prison camp. The email said “CIA officer” Daniel Pearl was now in the custody of “The
National Movement
for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty.” Attached to the message was a photo of a handcuffed Pearl wearing a pink and blue jogging suit. A man was holding a gun to Pearl’s head.