The 9/11 Wars (66 page)

The collateral damage inflicted by the rising number of air strikes from American unmanned drones in the FATA also drove communities towards the militants. Though undoubtedly an effective means of eliminating known militants and putting their associates under considerable pressure – men like Mehsud in the FATA in the summer of 2008 were sleeping outside to avoid being caught in a building and spent much of their time conducting purges against supposed informants – the drone strikes were a blunt instrument and killed many civilians. This was another reason for the Mahmund tribe of Bajaur taking arms against their fellow Bajauris and against the Pakistani government. Damadola, the Bajaur village which became the headquarters of local militants and was thought to have sheltered Ayman al-Zawahiri on a number of occasions, had been hit by a series of air strikes from 2005 onwards. Each time the cost of killing a handful of militants was the deaths of dozens of villagers.
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In one strike an estimated eighty-three ‘Taliban militants’ were killed when a
medressa
was hit, though identifying who among the dead were militants and who were the sons of locals was hard. Another destroyed a series of compounds where al-Zawahiri was thought to be spending the night. ‘They dropped bombs from planes, and we were in no position to stop them or tell them we were innocent … I don’t know Zawahiri. He was not at my home. No foreigner was at my home at the time the planes came and dropped bombs,’ said Shah Zaman, a jeweller from Damadola who lost a son and a daughter in the attack.
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AL-QAEDA IN THE FATA

In June 2008, a strange and tense meeting had taken place in a compound high in the tribal area of South Waziristan. Six volunteers, two from France and four from Belgium, had decided to confront the man who was looking after their training as militants. He was a Syrian they knew as Driss, who they believed to be part of al-Qaeda. Before leaving their homes, they had watched al-Qaeda videos on the internet and seen images of massed battalions of
mujahideen
training on assault courses, exciting ambushes of American troops, tired but triumphant young fighters returning from battle and inspiring speeches by Osama bin Laden, they told him. But after five months in Pakistan’s frontier zones they had done nothing more than some basic training on small arms, a day of shooting, spent an afternoon watching an instructor build a bomb and had many, many hours of religious instruction. Worse, they had had to spend hundreds of euros of their own money to buy their own weapons and equipment and to pay an extortionate weekly rent for the miserable accommodation offered by a local family.
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They had been deceived, they boldly told the Syrian. The videos had lied.

The response was unsympathetic and unapologetic. Of course the videos were misleading, Driss told them, they were a ‘trick … to intimidate enemies and to attract new recruits’.
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The exchange went right to the heart of one of the most controversial questions among analysts of al-Qaeda and the global Islamic militant movement of which it was a part in the seventh year of the 9/11 Wars. How close was the image of al-Qaeda projected through the internet and other media to the reality? What exactly was the capacity of the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’? What was life like for the leadership, for the more junior members or for the raw Western recruits who made their way to the tribal zones? And what were al-Qaeda’s relations with other groups such as the Pakistani Taliban or the Afghan insurgent networks? These were questions Western and other security services had been trying for many years to answer – without a great deal of success.

Their difficulties were in part self-inflicted, in part a result of the extreme operating environment in the FATA and the surrounding regions. In 2008, at the time when Driss and the volunteers were having their talk, the last confirmed location of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri was still Tora Bora, nearly seven years before. Even in the days of relatively good CIA and ISI relations in the early years of the hunt for the fugitive leaders, ideas of their location were based on informed speculation rather than fact. Debates over whether the top two leaders were together, whether they were moving or ‘hunkered down’, whether they were in a Pakistani city or, as almost everyone thought, near the border, continued interminably. ‘Anyone who says he knows is a liar,’ one US Intelligence official told the author. Various hypotheses were advanced about the state of bin Laden’s health including the idea, first circulated in the late 1990s, that the fugitive, fifty-one in 2008, might suffer from a serious kidney disorder. To the disappointment of many, it had become clear that, though bin Laden suffered from lower-back pain common in people of his height, which had meant occasional use of a walking cane and an end to his favourite pastime of horse-riding, there was no evidence of any other medical problem. For his part, al-Zawahiri, though approaching sixty, appeared in good health. Periodic breaks in communication sometimes raised hopes that one or other might be dead or seriously ill but always ended with a new video surfacing, often containing references to recent events that clearly indicated both men had been very much alive only weeks before. As late as 2006, the vast bulk of American intelligence came from the interviews of detainees – hardly the best method to obtain live and actionable information.
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Excepting the interception of a courier suspected of having been recently in contact with one or other of the pair in the immediate aftermath of the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003 and the information that had sparked the attempts to kill al-Zawahiri in Bajaur around 2006, there had been no ‘strong lead’ on the whereabouts of either man.
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Tracking the senior al-Qaeda leadership was a dispiriting task, involving the verification and cross-referencing of thousands of leads on hundreds of individuals. The CIA teams assigned to the job were frequently changed to keep them motivated.

Nor were the resources being directed at the operation as significant as many outside the world of intelligence thought. The Iraq war had drained the effort to find bin Laden. ‘By April, May 2002, we began losing people to the groups that were preparing for the Iraq war,’ said Mike Scheuer, who, having headed the CIA’s bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, went on to be chief adviser to his successor from 2001 to 2004. ‘We were losing Arabic speakers. Very experienced people.’ Bob Grenier, the then head of the Islamabad CIA station, remembered that ‘a large number of the best and most experienced people were drawn off pretty early from Afghanistan and switched to Iraq, especially those with extensive counter-terrorism experience or regional specialists.’
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The 5th Special Forces Group, which included the best linguists, was sent to the Gulf and replaced in Afghanistan by the 7th Special Forces Group, largely composed of Spanish-speakers with Latin American experience. Ron Nash, British ambassador in Afghanistan in the autumn of 2003, remembered later how the ‘extremely useful’ small groups of the UK’s SAS and SBS who had been assuring security and gathering intelligence in far-flung Afghan provincial capitals in a low-key but effective way were all withdrawn by the end of the summer of 2002.
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Art Keller, a CIA counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation specialist who himself volunteered for a tour in South Waziristan in 2006, described those operatives who ended up in Pakistan as ‘the scrapings of the barrel’.
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Given one week to read up on the region before being dispatched, Keller spent six months as one of a small number of CIA officers, guarded by Pakistani special forces and chaperoned by the ISI, stationed in a Pakistani military base in Wana, the biggest town in South Waziristan in 2006. Life was not easy, either professionally or personally. The Americans, forbidden to leave the base, were supposed to generate the intelligence that would allow the Pakistanis to act. There were a number of problems with this arrangement, however. The first was the ‘extreme reluctance’ of the Pakistanis to mount operations, which Keller attributed to heavy casualties sustained on previous botched raids. The second was the cumbersome procedure for initiating any action. Target information – for example the location of a key al-Qaeda organizer – would be passed to the ISI in the Wana base for immediate action. It would then be sent up the ISI chain of command, who would ask for verification from their officers on the ground, before going to the Pakistani army, whose own intelligence service would verify again, before finally being sent to the Pakistani army’s operations planning section. A successful raid, specialists say, needs intelligence on where a target
will
be in four hours, not where he was a couple of days before. This convoluted system also meant that drone strikes, which also had to be signed off by the ISI, remained a rarity. A third problem was simply logistics. As Keller was not allowed to venture out of the base in Wana, everything he did was through Pakistani liaison officers or via electronic means. ‘I spent my days reading traffic from other stations and going through communications intercepts,’ Keller remembered. ‘Meeting sources was very hard.’ Not that the information that did come in was particularly useful. Sightings of bin Laden were ‘a dime a dozen’ but in the end never checked out. Any halfway reliable lead was usually impossible to verify. Finally, there were the normal administrative fiascos that occur within any organization, even the CIA. When he was finally given a tip on a possible recent location for the al-Qaeda leader himself, Keller’s emails got snarled up in a bureaucratic tangle when someone forgot to copy in the Islamabad CIA station and thus provoked an in-house political battle. ‘If the American people really knew what the hunt for bin Laden actually meant, they would not be particularly impressed,’ Keller said.
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In fact, al-Qaeda militants faced a difficult choice. True security meant finding a bolt hole and severing almost every link with the outside world. But this had enormous practical drawbacks, particularly for anyone involved in training, planning, recruitment, strategic liaison, communication or fundraising. For those whose tasks required at least a degree of exposure, whether people like Driss, the European volunteers’ disappointing mentor, or more senior al-Qaeda militants, there was, however, another line of defence that mitigated the danger of working in the open. This was the sympathy of local communities. From its earliest days, al-Qaeda’s success or failure had depended on its ability to reach out to local groups and leverage local conditions. An overwhelmingly Arab organization with the vast bulk of its members and supporters from Libya, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, it had always existed in ‘foreign’ territory. Even in 2008, there were no Pakistanis – or even Afghans – among al-Qaeda senior ranks, and though bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and other such international militants did have some residual connection with the NWFP and FATA from the 1980s and 1990s, including contacts with major powerbrokers such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, the frontier zone was still far from their natural environment.
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In a good illustration of this, the meeting between Driss and his charges had seen a Syrian arguing in Arabic with two Frenchmen and four Belgians of north African origin in the middle of a Pashtun-dominated part of Pakistan. What al-Qaeda therefore undertook after drawing breath following their flight from Afghanistan in 2001 was a classic ‘grafting operation’ of the type that bin Laden had executed so well to secure himself a safe haven in Sudan during his time there in the early and mid 1990s and then again on arriving in Afghanistan immediately in 1996, when he had been able not just to convince the Taliban to give him shelter but to steadily gain greater and greater influence over the leadership and ideology of the movement. Even if he personally might be able to protect himself by withdrawing into some kind of sealed bunker, making sure that the FATA continued to be hospitable and thus secure for his followers was a vital task. Bin Laden applied the same tactics as had worked a half-decade before: a carefully orchestrated ‘charm offensive’ towards the local communities whom he needed to convince that their interests and those of his group coincided. The ‘global’ campaign of al-Qaeda needed to be superimposed or mapped on to local conditions without provoking the kind of backlash that had been seen in Iraq and various other theatres. Though it remained delicate, this task was rendered considerably easier by the dramatically raised levels of radicalization in the border zone at the time and, of course, by the previous local traditions of revivalist rebellions against various ‘outside’ authorities. Bin Laden’s vision of al-Qaeda as a vanguard striving to defend true Islam thus meshed easily with the self-image of local communities who already saw themselves as guardians and repositories of an uncorrupted Islamic culture fighting to preserve their autonomy against the people of the plains and the cities, the Pakistani Army, the government, foreign imperialists, modernizers et al. Fusing Pashtun and global jihadi identity required only the relatively small step of adding the war against a ‘global alliance of crusaders and Zionists’ to the various foes aligned in an already deeply reactionary, intolerant worldview. As the al-Qaeda leadership had found over previous years, astute propaganda, careful outreach and very significant sums of money were, particularly in a conflict environment, an effective combination. One poll in 2008 suggested that 70 per cent of the 20 million people in the North West Frontier province and the FATA viewed bin Laden ‘favourably’.
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