The Longest War (53 page)

The jury is, in short, still out or whether the Iraq War was the United States’ most spectacular foreign policy blunder of the past several decades, or whether, out of the wreckage, something resembling a coherent Iraq will eventually arise. Petraeus famously asked Rick Atkinson, the
Washington Post
reporter who was embedded with him during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, “Tell me how this ends?” That question remains a good one today. Petraeus’s successor as the top commander in Iraq, General Raymond Odierno, says that the Iraqi government elected in 2010 will be the key to answer that question. “
They will really be
the government that decides whether Iraq continues to move towards a more open economy, and move towards a more democratic process, or do they decide to move back towards a more closed economy, back to an Islamic state or a dictatorship.… From what I’m seeing, they’re going to go towards a democratic process and an open economy, but we’ll see.”

For President Bush, the surge was the single most consequential decision of his presidency, a decision that he made against the advice of almost the entire leadership of the military and in the face of opposition from much of the foreign policy establishment, and at a time when his favorability ratings with the American people were in the tank, hovering
around 30 percent
in most polls. The military historian Eliot Cohen says, “There’s only one guy who deserves the credit. And that’s George W. Bush. He deserves all the blame for
the other stuff, too. He deserves the blame, but he deserves the credit … for supporting the surge decision, but also the Petraeus decision, and both are very important.”

In part because of the surge, as well as the other factors considered in this chapter, al-Qaeda suffered a strategic defeat in Iraq. For the Arab leaders of al-Qaeda, the large role their Iraqi affiliate played during the Iraq War was a source of considerable pride, as was reflected in the several tapes issued by bin Laden in which he
crowed about
the successes of Iraq’s insurgents against American forces. But after Al-Qaeda in Iraq was put on the run in 2007, bin Laden was largely silent on the issue of Iraq. And the declining fortunes of Al-Qaeda in Iraq were, in fact, a harbinger of the decline of the larger al-Qaeda organization and movement.

Striking the World Trade
Center, I consider that to be a criminal act.

—Abdullah Anas to Al Arabiya television in 2005; Anas had
once been bin Laden’s companion-in-arms during
the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan

W
ill al-Qaeda eventually be condemned to what President Bush once eloquently termed “
history
’s unmarked grave of discarded lies”? To a large degree that depends not on the West but on the Islamic world, for it is Muslims who are making the choices that are leading to the marginalization of both al-Qaeda and the ideology of “bin Ladenism” that it has spawned. Indeed, it is mainstream Islam itself that poses the largest ideological threat to al-Qaeda.

Despite a widespread view in the West that Muslim religious leaders had not done enough to condemn the 9/11 attacks, within days of the assaults Mohamed Tantawi, the grand mufti of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the foremost center of Sunni learning, denounced them saying “attacking innocent people is not courageous, it is
stupid and will be punished
on the day of judgment.” Around the same time, another leading Sunni cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, said “Islam, the religion of tolerance, holds the human soul in high
esteem, and considers the attacks against innocent human beings
a grave sin
.” And the most senior cleric in Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz Abdullah al-Sheikh, similarly issued a fatwa stating, “These matters that have taken place in the United States … are expressly forbidden and are amongst the
greatest of sins
.”

Around half a decade after 9/11, a surprising wave of criticism about the legitimacy of al-Qaeda’s actions also emerged from some of Osama bin Laden’s onetime religious mentors and former companions-in-arms. The repercussions for al-Qaeda could not be underestimated, because, unlike most mainstream Muslim leaders, al-Qaeda’s new critics had the jihadist credentials to make their criticisms bite. One of the most prominent was Abdullah Anas, who had fought side by side with the Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud in Afghanistan for years during the 1980s. At that time Anas and bin Laden were close friends. Anas’s jihadist credentials were further burnished by the fact that he is the son-in-law of Abdullah Azzam, the godfather of the global jihad movement. In a wide-ranging 2006 interview in
Al-Sharq al-Awsat
, one of the leading newspapers in the Arab world, Anas said that al-Qaeda’s suicide bombings in London a year earlier were “criminal” acts and that “blowing up a train here and a restaurant that leads to the death of innocent victims—as happened in London and elsewhere—
will not force the United States
to change its policy.” Al-Qaeda’s leaders did not respond to Anas’s well-publicized condemnations as he is difficult to impugn, as both a jihadi war hero and the son-in-law of the founder of the modern jihadist movement.

Around the sixth anniversary of September 11, al-Qaeda received another blow from one of bin Laden’s erstwhile heroes, Sheikh Salman al-Awdah. Awdah, a leading Saudi religious scholar, addressed al-Qaeda’s leader on MBC, a widely watched Middle East TV network: “
My brother Osama
, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed … in the name of al-Qaeda?” What was noteworthy about Awdah’s statement was that it was not a boilerplate condemnation of terrorism, or even of 9/11, but a
personal
rebuke of bin Laden, something clerics in the Muslim world had generally shied away from.

Dressed in the long, flowing black robe fringed with gold that is worn by those accorded respect in Saudi society, Awdah recalled first meeting with bin Laden in the northern Saudi region of Qassim in 1990, and finding him to be a “simple man without scholarly religious credentials, an attractive personality who spoke well.” Awdah explained that he had publicly criticized al-Qaeda for years but was now directing his criticism at bin Laden himself: “I don’t
expect a positive effect on bin Laden personally as a result of my statement. It’s really a
message to his followers
.”

Awdah’s rebuke was also significant because he is considered one of the fathers of the
Sahwa
, the fundamentalist awakening movement that had swept through Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. His sermons against the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia following Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait helped turn bin Laden against the United States. And bin Laden told CNN in 1997 that Awdah’s imprisonment three years earlier by the Saudi regime was
one of the reasons
he was calling for attacks on American targets. Awdah was also one of
twenty-six Saudi clerics
who in 2004 handed down a religious ruling urging Iraqis to fight the U.S. occupation. He was, in short, not someone al-Qaeda could paint as either an American sympathizer or a tool of the Saudi government.

More doubt about al-Qaeda was planted in the Muslim world when Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, an important ideological influence on al-Qaeda,
withdrew his support
for the terrorist organization in a 2007 book written from his prison cell in Cairo. Sharif, generally known as “Dr. Fadl,” is the author of the 1993 tract
The Basic Principles in Making Preparations for Jihad
and an architect of the doctrine of
takfir
, arguing that Muslims who did not support armed jihad or who participated in elections were
kuffar
, unbelievers.

So it was an unwelcome surprise for al-Qaeda’s leaders when Dr. Fadl’s new book,
Rationalization of Jihad
, was serialized in an independent Egyptian newspaper in November 2007. Dr. Fadl ruled that al-Qaeda’s bombings in Muslim nations were illegitimate and that
terrorism against civilians
in Western countries was wrong. He also took on al-Qaeda’s leaders directly in an interview with
Al Hayat
newspaper. “Zawahiri and his Emir Bin Laden [are]
extremely immoral
,” he said. “I have spoken about this in order to warn the youth against them.” And a year later, leaders of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which had once loosely aligned themselves with bin Laden,
turned against al-Qaeda
, issuing statements against the terrorist group’s ideology from their prison cells in Libya and their offices in London.

Why did militants and clerics once considered allies by al-Qaeda’s leaders turn against them? To a large extent it is because al-Qaeda and affiliated groups had increasingly adopted the doctrine of
takfir
, by which they claimed the right to decide who was a “true” Muslim, something that in
mainstream Islamic theology
is something only Allah can truly know. Al-Qaeda’s Muslim critics knew what resulted from this
takfiri
view: first the radicals deemed some Muslims
apostates; after that, the radicals started killing them. From 2003 this could be seen most
dramatically in Iraq
, where al-Qaeda’s suicide bombers killed thousands of Iraqis, many of them targeted simply because they were Shia.

Additionally, al-Qaeda and its affiliates had killed thousands of Muslim civilians elsewhere since 9/11, including the hundreds of ordinary Afghans killed every year by the Taliban, and the scores of Jordanians massacred at a wedding at a hotel in Amman in November 2005. For groups that
claimed to be defending Muslims
this was not impressive. All this created a dawning recognition among Muslims that the ideological virus that had unleashed 9/11 and the terror attacks in London and Madrid was the same virus that was now also wreaking havoc in the Islamic world.

Conscious that al-Qaeda was getting seriously damaged by all this criticism, in December 2007 Ayman al-Zawahiri and his handlers took the unprecedented step of soliciting questions from anyone
over the Internet
, which the deputy al-Qaeda leader then answered four months later in a Q&A format online.
The Q&A did not go well
. When Zawahiri was asked how he could justify al-Qaeda’s killings of Muslim civilians, he answered defensively in dense, recondite passages that referred readers to other dense, recondite things he had already said about the matter. Someone identifying himself as “Madaris Jughrafiya” (a geography teacher) asked, “Excuse me, Mr. Zawahiri, but who is killing with your Excellency’s blessing the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco and Algeria. Do you consider that to be Jihad?” Bin Laden himself released a tape trying to tamp down this line of attack, in which he said that “the Muslim victims who fall during the operations against the infidel Crusaders are
not the intended targets
.”

Is al-Qaeda going to dissipate as a result of the rising tide of criticism it faces in the Muslim world? Not in the short term. Though losing the favor of Muslim populations certainly doesn’t help al-Qaeda, history shows that small violent groups from the anarchists of the early twentieth century to the leftist terrorists of the 1970s can sustain their bloody work for years with virtually no public support.

However, encoded in the DNA of apocalyptic jihadist groups like al-Qaeda are the seeds of their own long-term destruction because they have four crippling strategic weaknesses. First, their victims are often Muslim civilians. This is a real problem for al-Qaeda as the Koran forbids both killing civilians and fellow Muslims. Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, for instance, lost a great deal of support after its campaign of attacks in 2003 that killed mostly
Saudis. By 2007, Saudi society, which had once been cheerleaders for bin Laden, had turned against al-Qaeda;
only 10 percent of Saudis
had a favorable view of the terrorist network.

Second, al-Qaeda and its allies don’t offer a positive vision of the future. We know what bin Laden is
against
, but what’s he really
for
? If you asked him he would say the restoration of the caliphate. By that he does not mean the restoration of something like the last caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, a relatively rational polity, but rather the imposition of Taliban-style theocracies stretching from Indonesia to Morocco. A silent majority of Muslims don’t want that. Many Muslims admire bin Laden because he “stood up” to the West, but that doesn’t mean they want to live in his grim Islamist utopia. Afghanistan under the Taliban is not an attractive model of the future for most Muslims.

Third, the jihadist militants are incapable of turning themselves into genuine mass political movements because their ideology prevents them from making the kind of real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in normal politics. Bin Laden’s principal political grievance, the large-scale U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, ended in 2003, yet bin Laden has never acknowledged this change. And to satisfy his political demands fully would involve stamping out all American influence in the Muslim world; destroying the state of Israel; the overthrow of every Middle Eastern regime; the rollback of India from Kashmir; the installation of Taliban regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan; the ending of any democratic elections anywhere in the Islamic world—the list goes on and on.