Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (6 page)

The second reason terrorist camps lay undisturbed for nearly twenty years is that there were always other “nuances” in international politics that made it inconvenient for U.S. officials to take definitive military or covert action against camps that trained Islamist fighters to kill the citizens of America and its allies. We could not hit Hezbollah’s camps, for example, because it might disrupt one of the always recurring and always false positive trends in Arab-Israeli relations; we could not take out camps on the island of Mindanao because it might complicate negotiations between the Philippine government and one or another of the groups of militant Moro Muslims; and we could not attack Salman Pak camp because Iraq was a Soviet client and an attack might disrupt détente or then perestroika. During my career, no senior U.S. official was better at using the nuance dodge than Richard A. Clarke, the NSC’s longtime chief of counterterrorism. In his memoir Mr. Clarke delivers a perfect depiction of how the nuance argument works, showing how that even after the USS
Cole
was nearly sunk, Washington found it more important to help the Israelis than to bomb the al-Qaeda camps where some of the 9/11 attackers may well have been training. “Time was running out on the Clinton administration,” Clarke wrote of the weeks after the attack on the
Cole
,

If you work in the U.S. Intelligence Community, you become very familiar with the “nuance” argument; it comes up almost without fail each and every time an opportunity is developed or chanced upon to use military force or covert action to attack and destroy a threat to American citizens. When intelligence officers produce a black and white option such as “Here is a training camp; it is producing men who will kill Americans; this is how it can be destroyed,” they are more often than not congratulated for fine detective work by senior IC officials and the senior grandees of the National Security Council. These individuals take the information and then wrap themselves in the sophisticated cloak of nuance, arguing that the intelligence is excellent but the officers who gathered it simply do not understand how an attack at this particular time, on this or that specific training camp, would be detrimental to maintaining a balance beneficial to the United States in the “ballet of international politics.” The yield from this process is always the same: the Nuancers emerge victorious, no action is taken, and the final score is nuance 1, American security 0. The net result: the CIA’s archives hold a lengthy shelf of terrorist training camp yearbooks featuring mind-numbing levels of detail on camps that were never attacked.
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Why is this important? Well, there are those reasons that most senior policymakers and bureaucrats find trivial: men and women from the CIA and other U.S. agencies risk their lives to acquire data about the camps, and American taxpayers pay extortionate taxes to make sure their government acquires the information needed to protect them and their children. And still, clear threats to the United States are left free to operate and strengthen. Leaving these trivialities aside, the story of the unmolested training camps is important because between 1982 and late 2001 those facilities produced tens of thousands of well-trained terrorists and insurgents, and those outside of eastern and southeastern Afghanistan are still producing fighters. The rough and open-source-based estimates for the total number of men trained in just the best-known Afghan training camps—al-Faruq, Darunta, Khaldun, Khowst, etc.—range between 40,000 and 100,000. Looking at the camps the U.S. government knew of—and remember, it is certain that Washington did not identify all of them—total numbers may well be five or ten times higher than the figure for those trained at the Afghan camps. That is, in the worst case, there could have been up to a million Islamists trained in camps around the world during the two decades after 1982.
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If that is not bad enough, it must be recalled that most of the world’s Islamist training camps were created not only to train indigenous fighters—as in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Sudan—but also to welcome nonlocal Muslims for training and perhaps some actual combat experience. These nonlocals were then sent home to undertake military action there. On returning, they did indeed undertake military operations, but they also set about training those who could not afford the cost (or procure the travel documents needed) to travel to a training camp abroad. And it is a sure bet that those trained at home by those trained abroad then went on to train others at home. Therefore the total number of fighters produced by the training camps increased geometrically, and there is yet no study that suggests a plausible methodology for pegging even a ballpark total figure. This brief look at the geometric expansion of the body of trained Islamist fighters over two decades, however, suggests that claims made by senior commanders in the U.S.-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan to have killed four thousand in the former and three to four thousand in the latter amount to a barely discernible dent in the cadre trained since 1982.
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And what kind of paramilitary training did these fighters receive? Well, it varied from camp to camp, but a recent book by a former al-Qaeda fighter suggests that, at least in bin Laden’s camps, the training was well suited to produce the formidable mujahedin that U.S. forces are now encountering around the world. Describing his mid-1990s training at al-Qaeda’s Khaldun camp, Omar Nasiri explains that he learned to use “a huge variety of weapons.”

While there remains much unclear and much to learn about the camps and their training regimens, it is a rock-solid certainty that those elected to protect Americans since 1982 (and their counterparts in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) did nothing to halt the geographic spread and continual operation of terrorist training camps. Since 9/11 only the most prominent training camps in Afghanistan have been destroyed, and media reporting clearly suggests that their loss has been made good by camps that have been built in the tribal areas along Pakistan’s western border.
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The issue of training camps, I think, shows that very often the failure to act to protect Americans is just as damaging as making decisions that disinvest in U.S. national security. The mujahedin units that the armed forces of the United States and its allies face today, as well as the insurgents’ massive reserves of trained manpower, are the responsibility of elected U.S. policymakers and their senior diplomatic and intelligence officials. These men and women decided to study the nuances and dance the ballet of international politics rather than make the protection of American lives their first priority. They sat, they watched, and—wrapped in their own self-importance and worldly sophistication—they did nothing.
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Oddly, the post-9/11 investigatory commissions found no fault with those individuals who allowed the uninterrupted operation of training camps, and the contribution they made to the growth of al-Qaeda’s capabilities. Indeed, the Kean-Hamilton commission could not find the moxie even to comment when Richard Clarke, who had watched but not generated action against the camps for all of the 1990s, condemned the George W. Bush administration for not attacking the al-Qaeda camps after it took office. Clarke told the 9/11 commissioners that he could not understand “why we continue to allow the existence of large-scale al Qida [sic] bases where we know people are being trained to kill Americans.”
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Could it be that the Bush team was simply following Mr. Clarke’s decade-long demonstration of supine behavior?

1989: Afghanistan—Intervening to Ensure Disaster

On February 15, 1989, there began a process that was destined to prove the incompetence of U.S. officials in conducting overseas political interventions, as well as the futility of making the “building of democracies” a central goal of U.S. foreign policy. On that date the world witnessed the last Soviet military commander in Afghanistan walk over the Friendship Bridge spanning the Amu Darya River and step onto the soil of the then-Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. That general’s footfall marked the Red Army’s defeat by the Afghan mujahedin and their non-Afghan allies—among which were both Muslims and such infidel entities as the U.S. Treasury and the CIA. The Afghan Islamists had defeated a superpower, and the glory and honor of that victory belongs exclusively to them. Western journalists and politicians have since made an industry out of the concept of “Afghan blowback,” the supposed rise and radicalization of Islamist militants because of U.S. support for the Afghan mujahedin, but this was and is nonsense.
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Undeniably the United States supplied billions of dollars in cash, military equipment, ordnance, and the other sinews of war in what became the largest and most successful covert-action program ever conducted by the CIA under the president’s orders. And I had the great honor of being a bit player in that effort from 1985 until early 1992. From the perspective I had, and as history shows, the CIA did an extraordinary job in making sure that the Afghans could kill Soviet soldiers as quickly and efficiently as possible using AK-47s and other arms from World War II and the Korean War (with the important exception of Stinger missiles), instead of the Lee-Enfield rifles and even muzzle-loaders left over from Britain’s imperial Afghan misadventures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As long as the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, the focus and goals of the U.S. covert-action program were clear: help the Afghans kill increasing numbers of Soviet military personnel until Moscow decided to throw in the towel. For the CIA, the heroes of the Afghan program were its financial and logistics officers, who ensured the mujahedin had the wherewithal to keep Soviet blood flowing, and its clandestine officers in the field who made sure that most U.S. arms and cash went to the Afghan Islamist leaders who were actually in the field killing Soviets and not to the so-called “moderate” Afghans who fought their war dressed in three-piece suits and battled each other for Western media attention and bigger cuts of the U.S.-and Saudi-provided swag.

And then the Soviets withdrew, and the roof caved in for the United States and the West generally. As the Afghan Islamist groups who beat the Red Army saddled up to undertake the fighting that remained to defeat Afghan Communist leader Najibullah’s Soviet-supported regime in Kabul, U.S. and Western diplomats, most of whom had turned up their noses while the CIA and other intelligence services did a decade of the dangerous work of arming the mujahedin, spotted a chance to go a-nation-building. The task of defeating Najibullah’s regime turned out to take thirty-eight months and concluded in April 1992. During this period the Afghan Islamists fought the Afghan Communists, were bedeviled by Pakistani authorities who, searching for a quick victory, pushed them into several bloody defeats in semiconventional battles, fought with each other with increasing ferocity, and unknowingly were led to lose all they had gained by the feckless intervention and interference of U.S. and Western diplomats.

Through all of this post-Soviet-withdrawal mayhem, U.S. and Western policymakers made another massive disinvestment in their nations’ long-term national security. Instead of running as fast and as far as they could from Afghanistan (the advice offered by Thomas Twetten and Frank Anderson, then respectively the CIA’s deputy director for operations and chief of the Near East Division), Washington, London, the UN, and other NATO foreign ministries deployed and detonated the West’s most powerful weapon of mass destruction: diplomats obsessed with building Western-style, secular democracies in places where they are not wanted, especially in Islamic cultures that view them as an affront to God. Instead of leaving the Afghans to recover their own political balance after nearly fifteen years of war and the dire social and economic costs of the barbarous Soviet occupation, the U.S.-led West joined the UN to send diplomats to teach the Afghans how to govern themselves, as if the Afghans were brand new to politics and not a political culture that was already well and stubbornly established when Alexander the Great and his army invaded nearly four hundred years before Christ’s birth. A bevy of U.S. diplomats of ambassadorial rank, among them Peter Tomsen, Robert Oakley, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Phyllis Oakley, arrived in Afghanistan to lead the great unwashed mass of Afghan Muslims in the creation of a secular and democratic Afghan Monticello on the banks of the Kabul River.