Afghanistan (20 page)

The failure of the airliner plot did not end the threat from the Vortex but was merely an indication of the new direction Al Qaeda had taken and an additional indicator of the importance of this region in world affairs. The 2007 plot for attacks in Copenhagen was reported to have been organized from Pakistan.
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In Germany, the 2007 plot for an attack on Ramstein Air Base also had links back to Pakistan.
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In Belgium, suspects arrested in 2008, thought to be planning a suicide attack, included members trained in Afghanistan.
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Senior western European government officials have identified Pakistan-based terror as the biggest single threat to western Europe, eclipsing that originating with alienated indigenous communities.

The threat of indigenous radicalization with links to Al Qaeda has
now spread to the US, even though, by 2009, relatively few US citizens or permanent residents had been established to have trained with Al Qaeda and then returned to the US.
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In the eight years after 9/11, 693 terror suspects, a third of them citizens, were prosecuted in the US, a third of them for terrorism.
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The US, with its diverse population with worldwide links, is said to have connections with terrorist networks in 60 countries. Al Qaeda has been targeting recruits in the US.
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While the death of the first US-recruited suicide bomber (in Somalia in 2009) and other homegrown US terrorist threats had no immediately apparent Al Qaeda links, the impact of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent prosecution of what were seen as home-grown “sleeper cells” has led to concern that such potential terrorists may be able to follow Al Qaeda’s example or even, through personal contacts, draw on Al Qaeda-related expertise.

The Terrorist Threat to Afghanistan

Al Qaeda has retained its vanguard nature and is still trying to achieve leadership through conflict in the Islamic world. Afghanistan is but one front in Al Qaeda’s global offensive, with its most important role being seen as helping to rally Muslims against the “Zionist-Crusader” invasion. The director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, LTG Michael D. Maples, said, in 2006, “Al Qaeda will remain engaged in Afghanistan for ideological and operational reasons.”
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In 2008, Al Qaeda was estimated to have 150–500 cadre and fighters in the Pakistani borderlands plus operational control over one to two thousand central Asians.
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While numerically small and not a major combatant force in the insurgency in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda is important in providing outside ideas, concepts, and personnel, according to COL Patrick McNiece, ISAF deputy director of intelligence in 2008.
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He qualified it in this way: “Afghans are proud enough that they will not be led by Al Qaeda, but they will take money, ideas and, for many, TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures].” “Al Qaeda is very involved in training and facilitating the arrival of foreigners,” including the teenage madrassa students from Pakistan and elsewhere that make up many of the suicide bombers.
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Afghanistan itself is not a hotbed of terrorists, nor do Afghans have a history of participation in terrorism. No
Afghans participated in the 11 September 2001 attacks or other high-profile attacks in the West. The long and bitter Afghan jihad against the Soviets in 1978–92 did not include a campaign against Soviet or third-country targets outside of the region. Indeed, it was marked by an almost complete absence of such activities. Afghanistan’s history of physical and intellectual remoteness from the ideas running through the Islamic world included resistance to multinational terrorism. When Afghans showed up carrying weapons outside their country in the 1990s, as in Bosnia or Chechnya, they were largely low-level former mujahideen in search of money and status (many married local wives) unavailable to them at home. Just as availability of employment and education did not prevent middle-class young men from the Arab world and Europe’s Islamic communities from being involved in terrorist action in the West, the lack of these same opportunities, conversely, did not lead to Afghans becoming terrorists.

Despite this lack of participation, ironically, no single country has been as affected by Al Qaeda and transnational Islamic terrorism as Afghanistan. Al Qaeda made pre-2001 Afghanistan the headquarters of its campaign to establish a global Khalifait. It operated in close alliance with, and ended up controlling, the Taliban—which, while they shared Al Qaeda’s worldview, was primarily concerned with waging Afghanistan’s bloody civil war and bringing Afghan society and life into line with its fundamentalist view of Islamic practice. Al Qaeda and its allied Pakistani terrorist groups such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba had previously added additional horrors to that of Afghan’s 1992–2001 civil war, massacring Shia Afghans in Mazar-e-Sharif and devastating the Hazara Jat and the Shomali Plain. Pre-2001, Kabul under the Taliban had attracted not only Al Qaeda but also other terrorist groups and a large number of Muslim common criminals.

The impact of transnational terrorism in Afghanistan was seen when two Al Qaeda assassins killed Ahmad Shah Massoud on 9 September 2001. The Al Qaeda plan brought in two killers from Europe. It took over a year of Al Qaeda’s meticulous planning to get them in striking range of Massoud. It appears to have been the work of the same Al Qaeda planners that made possible the suicide bombing of the USS
Cole
. Even after 11 September 2001, Al Qaeda’s history of violence in Afghanistan,
both providing fighting men in the civil war and carrying out atrocities, means that it has still killed many more Afghans than Westerners.

While Al Qaeda is apparently not looking to recreate the effective control of a state it enjoyed in pre-2001 Afghanistan, they make effective use of the new sanctuary that has emerged in Pakistan’s borderlands. Since 2001, Al Qaeda has apparently learned that it is counterproductive to take over states or build mass movements. They now focus on escalating, extremely violent terrorist attacks. Al Qaeda will also act to take advantage of vacuums created by an absence of state power, especially in Pakistan.
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In 2008–09, Al Qaeda’s military commander for Afghanistan was an Egyptian, Mustafa Abu al Yazid (known as Shaikh Said), who was reported killed by the Pakistani military in 2008 but was apparently still operating in 2009.
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He is thought to be part of the core of Al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership, along with Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and Abu Yahya al-Libi. His statements have pointed to the growing number of non-Afghans fighting inside Afghanistan (for which Al Qaeda is claiming responsibility) as well as terrorist attacks in India as a reflection of the fact that they are winning the conflict. By 2008–10, the improving security situation in Iraq and the increasing hostility toward foreign fighters meant that many would-be jihadis instead made their way to Pakistan to fight in Afghanistan. Veterans of Al Qaeda in Iraq were providing training to Afghan and Pakistani insurgents as well these incoming foreigners.

Terrorism in Afghanistan since 2001 has reflected the actions of Al Qaeda and its transnational allies as well as the Afghan Taliban and its insurgent allies. The rapid increase in these attacks from 491 in 2005 to 1127 in 2007 was an indication of the start of the deterioration of the security situation that had reached crisis proportions in 2008–10.
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In 2008, there were widespread Western press reports, citing intelligence sources, that the Pakistani ISI had had a direct role in several of that year’s terrorist actions in Afghanistan. These included the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul and attacks aimed at Karzai or leadership figures, most notably the 2008 Karzai assassination attempt and the 2007 Baghlan suicide bombing. Such attacks have also targeted Kabul-based Afghans and foreigners, as seen by the 2007
Hotel Serena attack, the 2008 Ministry of Culture and Information attack, and the 2009 suicide attack on the Ministry of Justice.

To Al Qaeda, suicide bombing is not just effective terrorist tactics against an infidel that lacks resolve; it is a key part of their ideology and appeal to those it recruits.
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While the Taliban was already aware of suicide bombing techniques through their links to the Tamil guerrillas in Sri Lanka, it was Al Qaeda that introduced suicide bomb attacks to Afghanistan, starting with the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud on 9 September 2001 by attackers who Al Qaeda had recruited in Europe. By 2003, suicide bombers had emerged as part of the Afghan insurgency. But it was only after Al Qaeda’s recruiting and training foreign suicide bombers started to have an impact in 2005–06 that the numbers of attacks increased.
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More recently, the suicide bombers have been reportedly predominantly from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghanistan’s interior minister Mohammed Hanif Atmar said “Central Asians are used as expendable assets by terrorists. Uighurs have not been seen in Afghanistan as yet, though we do have reports they are harbored across the border. Al Qaeda has run out of assets.”
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But the suicide bomber remains an alien concept to the region, which is why the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have put an emphasis on murdering religious and leadership figures that criticize suicide bombers.
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Mass-casualty attacks, suicide or otherwise, against soft targets, leaving lots of bodies, Muslim or otherwise, have generally not been the terrorist tactics of choice in post-2001 Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the terrorists have been more selective, primarily sending suicide bombers against targets where there is a generalized antipathy, even if not outright hostility, among the Afghan population. But the amount of collateral damage remains high. Large numbers of Afghan civilians have been killed in such attacks, including a group of schoolchildren killed by the 2007 Baghlan attack.

In addition to the terrorist threat coming across the border from Pakistan, terrorism is certainly one of the Afghan insurgency’s most important tactics. Most modern insurgencies have made use of terrorism as a tactic in the theater of operations or in the enemy homeland. But they have generally maintained a unity of command, effort, and objective. It
is uncertain how much that is the case in Afghanistan. An example of a politically active leader who participates in both the terrorist conflict and the insurgency is Sirajjuddin Haqqani, who has links to both Al Qaeda and the Taliban but is a member of neither and has been linked to the Serena Hotel attack in Kabul in 2007. To Afghanistan’s interior minister Dr. Mohammed Hanif Atmar, “Terror attacks represent weakness, not strength. . . . No one with a political objective would be so careless about the population. The fact that they do not care about their image shows their hopelessness. They can still threaten life but have no capability to derail processes or challenge the government.”

The Obama administration’s March 2009 Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy identified its core objective to be: “The strategy starts with a clear, concise, attainable goal: disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens.”
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US involvement in Afghanistan has been driven by the counter-terrorist focus before it was involved in the conflicts threatening the future of that country and Pakistan. But defeating Al Qaeda will mean more than killing or capturing bin Laden and the elusive high-level leadership: it will be creating a situation where whatever comes after them will not find even better conditions for transnational terrorism than bin Laden did when he returned to Afghanistan in 1996.

Terrorism is not a threat that, even if individuals are taken out or plots are thwarted, can be totally defeated. It can be marginalized, weakened, or contained.
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Negotiations with those carrying out terrorism (as opposed to insurgency) are unlikely. Al Qaeda is not interested in returning to Kabul or functioning as governors in rural Afghanistan. They are more interested in showing Afghanistan as one of many fronts in the invasion of the Islamic world by the enemy. Restoring peace, a functioning civil society, and a private sector economy in Afghanistan would not even be guarantees against terrorism. The ability of numerically small terrorist organizations to pose a threat even to highly developed nations with proficient intelligence and security services is a warning not just to Afghanistan, but to all nations. They are reminders that it is not just or even primarily the poor and oppressed who have made terrorist campaigns long and costly.

Removing Western forces from Afghanistan or even the whole of the
Islamic world would not remove the oxygen from the terrorist threat to “The Primary Enemy.” Al Qaeda’s mission is not about removing troops anyway. It is about changing the Islamic world to conform to their ideology. The appearance of foreign troops in the Islamic world is just an example of how degraded current regimes are, that they require armed infidels to protect them from the devout. The groundwork for Al Qaeda’s terrorist offensive grew in the 1990s when there was minimal Western involvement in Afghanistan and the Arab-Israeli peace process was progressing. Even then, Al Qaeda had no qualms about targeting the Strasbourg Cathedral Christmas Market in an abortive plot in 2000 or destroying Indonesian churches in the Christmas Eve 2000 bombings.

Nor will development in Afghanistan or Pakistan by itself provide an effective counter to future terrorism. A peaceful and affluent democracy with well-developed governmental and social welfare institutions is certainly no barrier against terrorism, as the history of a previous generation of European terrorist organizations demonstrates.

The terrorist war against Afghanistan is not likely to succeed. Nor is it intended to. Al Qaeda leaders such as bin Laden’s lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri have explicitly condemned negotiations, which is how insurgencies tend to end, along with any acceptance of partial or temporary solutions en route to ultimate success.
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Al Qaeda’s specialty is destruction. The extremist essence of Al Qaeda makes it hard for them to work with the Afghan insurgents who, in 2008–10, constituted the major threat to Afghanistan.