The Longest War (54 page)

While bin Laden has enjoyed a certain amount of personal popularity in much of the Muslim world, that has not translated into mass support for al-Qaeda in the manner that Hezbollah enjoys such support in Lebanon. That is not surprising—there are no al-Qaeda social welfare services or schools. An al-Qaeda hospital is a grim oxymoron. Even al-Qaeda’s leaders are aware of the problem of their lack of mass support. In the
2005 letter sent by Zawahiri
to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s number two urged the terrorist leader in Iraq to prepare for the U.S. withdrawal from the country by not making the same mistakes as the Taliban, who had alienated the masses in Afghanistan.

Fourth, the militants keep adding to their list of enemies, including any Muslim who doesn’t exactly share their ultrafundamentalist worldview. Al-Qaeda has said it is opposed to all Middle Eastern regimes; the Shia; most Western countries; Jews and Christians; the governments of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Russia; most news organizations; the United Nations; and
international nongovernmental organizations. It’s very hard to think of a category of person, institution, or government that al-Qaeda does not oppose. Making a world of enemies is never a winning strategy.

Given the religio-ideological basis of al-Qaeda’s jihad, the condemnation being offered by religious scholars and fighters once close to the group was arguably the most important development in stopping the spread of the group’s ideology since 9/11. These new critics, in concert with mainstream Muslim leaders, created a powerful coalition countering al-Qaeda’s ideas. Simultaneously al-Qaeda began losing significant traction with ordinary Muslims. The numbers of people having a
favorable view of bin Laden
or supporting suicide bombings, for instance, in the two most populous Muslim countries, Indonesia and Pakistan, dropped by at least half between 2002 and 2009.

By the end of the second Bush term it was clear that al-Qaeda and allied groups were losing the “war of ideas” in the Islamic world, not because America was winning that war—quite the contrary: most Muslims had a
quite negative attitude toward the United States
—but because Muslims themselves had largely turned against the ideology of bin Ladenism.

It is human nature to be concerned mostly with threats that directly affect one’s own interests, and so as jihadi terrorists started to target the governments of Muslim countries and their civilians, this led to a hardening of attitudes against them. Until the terrorist attacks of May 2003 in Riyadh, for instance, the Saudi government was largely in denial about its large-scale al-Qaeda problem. The Saudi government
subsequently arrested
thousands of suspected terrorists, killed more than a hundred, and arrested preachers deemed to be encouraging militancy. A similar process also happened in Indonesia, where Jemaah Islamiyah, the al-Qaeda affiliate there, was more or less out of business within half a decade of 9/11, its
leaders in jail or dead
, and its
popular legitimacy
close to zero.

Zawahiri acknowledged in his autobiography that the most important strategic goal of al-Qaeda is to seize control of a state, or part of a state, somewhere in the Muslim world, explaining that “
without achieving this goal
our actions will mean nothing.” But after 9/11, al-Qaeda had lost control of Afghanistan, where it had once had a large role, and its attempt in Iraq to set up a state that dominated the Sunnis dramatically backfired.

A decade after 9/11, by Zawahiri’s own standard, the group had achieved “nothing.”

Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing; after they have exhausted all other possibilities.

—Winston Churchill

A
couple of weeks after assuming office, President Barack Obama was interviewed in the White House by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. Cooper asked Obama: “
I’ve noticed
you don’t use the term ‘war on terror.’ … Is there something about that term you find objectionable or not useful?” Obama replied: “I think it is very important for us to recognize that we have a battle or a war against some terrorist organizations.” Cooper followed up: “So that’s not a term you’re going to be using much in the future?” Obama said: “What I want to do is make sure that I’m constantly talking about al-Qaeda and other affiliated organizations because we, I believe, can win over moderate Muslims to recognize that that kind of destruction and nihilism ultimately leads to a dead end.”

Obama may have abandoned the Global War on Terror (GWOT) framing of the Bush administration but he did not embrace the view that was common on the left of his Democratic Party and among many Europeans, who have lived through the bombing campaigns of various nationalist and leftist terror groups for decades: that al-Qaeda was just another criminal/terrorist group
that could be dealt with by law enforcement alone. After all, a terrorist organization like the Irish Republican Army would call in warnings before its attacks and its
largest massacre
only killed twenty-nine people. By contrast, al-Qaeda had declared war on the United States repeatedly during the late 1990s and then had made good on that declaration with attacks on American embassies, a U.S. warship, the Pentagon, and the financial heart of the United States, killing thousands of civilians without warning—acts of war by any standard. Al-Qaeda was obviously at war with the United States and so Obama understood that to respond by simply recasting the GWOT as the GPAT, the Global Police Action against Terrorists, would be both foolish and dangerous.

For Obama, America was still at war but the conflict was now bounded, as he put it, to “
al-Qaeda and its allies
.” Within a year of Obama assuming office, one of those allies demonstrated that this war was far from over.
On Christmas Day
of 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a twenty-three-year-old from a prominent Nigerian family who had graduated a year earlier from the top-flight University College London with a degree in engineering, boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam, which was bound for Detroit with some three hundred passengers and crew on board. Secreted in his underwear was a bomb made with eighty grams of PETN, a plastic explosive that was not detected at airport security in Amsterdam or the Nigerian city of Lagos, from where he had originally flown. He also carried a syringe with a chemical initiator that would set off the bomb.

As the plane neared Detroit the young man, who was only fifteen at the time of the 9/11 attacks, tried to initiate his bomb with the chemical, setting himself on fire and suffering severe burns. Some combination of his own ineptitude, faulty bomb construction, and the quick actions of the passengers and crew who subdued him and extinguished the fire prevented an explosion that might have brought down the plane near Detroit killing all on board and also likely killing additional Americans on the ground. Immediately after he was arrested Abdulmutallab told investigators that the explosive device “was
acquired in Yemen
along with instructions as to when it should be used.”

The Northwest Airlines plot had been presaged in almost every detail a few months earlier, several thousand miles to the east of Detroit.
On August 28
, the Saudi deputy minister of interior, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, survived a bombing attack launched by an al-Qaeda cell based in Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s southern neighbor. Because he leads Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda, the prince is a key target for the terrorist group.

Prince Nayef was responsible for overseeing the kingdom’s terrorist rehabilitation program, and some two dozen important members of al-Qaeda had previously surrendered to him in person. Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri, the would-be assassin, a Saudi who had fled to Yemen, posed as a militant willing to surrender personally to Prince Nayef. During the month of Ramadan,
traditionally a time of repentance
in the Muslim world, Asiri gained an audience with the prince at his private residence in Jeddah, presenting himself as someone who could also persuade other militants to surrender. Pretending that he was reaching out to those militants, Asiri briefly called some members of al-Qaeda to tell them that he was standing by Prince Nayef. After he finished the call, the bomb blew up, killing Asiri but only slightly injuring the prince, who was a few feet away from his would-be assassin. A Saudi government official characterized the prince’s narrow escape as a “miracle.”

According to the official Saudi investigation, Asiri concealed the bomb in his underwear; it was made of PETN, the same plastic explosive that would be used in the Detroit case, and he exploded the
hundred-gram device
using a detonator with a chemical fuse, as Abdulmutallab would attempt to do on the Northwest flight. Prince Nayef’s assassin also had had to pass through metal detectors before he was able to secure an audience with the prince. (It was also PETN that Richard Reid, the al-Qaeda recruit who tried to bring down the American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami, had used in his shoe bomb almost exactly eight years before the attempt to bring down the Northwest flight. According to a senior U.S. counterterrorism official, it is “rare” for PETN to be used in terrorist attacks.)

Shortly after the failed attacks on both Prince Nayef and the Northwest passenger jet, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen took responsibility for the operations and released photographs of the two bombers taken while they were in Yemen. A Saudi counterterrorism official said that “after the attack on the prince, the fear of using similar techniques against airplanes, which was discussed openly in the media, has encouraged al-Qaeda cells to
try it
.” The official also explained that American government agencies had participated in the forensic investigation of the Prince Nayef plot, which meant that they should have been aware that a PETN bomb concealed in underwear would evade metal detectors.

The plot to bring down the Northwest flight demonstrated that al-Qaeda was still targeting commercial aviation, which after 9/11 had become one of the hardest targets in the world. And it also demonstrated that the group
retained some ability to mount large-scale plots against American targets despite all the damage that had been inflicted on the group. If Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had succeeded in bringing down Northwest Airlines Flight 253, the bombing would not only have killed hundreds but would also have had a large effect on the U.S. economy, already reeling from the effect of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and would have devastated the critical aviation and tourism businesses.

If the attack had succeeded it would also have dealt a crippling blow to Obama’s presidency. According to the
White House’s own review
of the Christmas Day plot, there was sufficient information known to the U.S. government to determine that Abdulmutallab was likely working for al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen and that the group was looking to expand its terrorist attacks beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Yet the intelligence community “did not increase analytic resources working” on that threat. Also information about the possible use of a PETN bomb by the Yemeni group was well-known within the national security establishment, including to John Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, who was personally briefed by Prince Nayef about the
assassination attempt
against him. As Obama admitted in a meeting of his national security team a couple of weeks after the Christmas Day plot, “We
dodged a bullet
.”

On January 21
, 2009, on his second day in the Oval Office, surrounded by a photo-op-ready bevy of sixteen retired generals and admirals, President Obama signed executive orders that made good on the best line in his inaugural address: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” As he appeared to be drawing down a curtain on the “war on terror,” Obama ordered the Guantánamo prison to be closed within a year, officially ended the use of secret prisons by the CIA, and required all interrogations to follow the noncoercive methods of the Army field manual. And he ordered a
six-month review
of all the cases of the 245 prisoners then held at Guantánamo, which effectively ended any of the trials going on at the base. These moves seemed to presage a wholesale rollback of Bush’s “war on terror.”

The issue of what the Obama administration would do with the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo boiled down to how dangerous these prisoners actually were.
Sixty had already been cleared for release
by the Bush administration but some would likely face persecution if they returned to their
home countries, in particular, a hapless group of seventeen Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs. In 2009 some of those Uighurs were flown to the island nation of Bermuda, where they were released.

There were also
some one hundred Yemenis
in the prison camp who could not, for the foreseeable future, be returned to Yemen because of the Yemeni government’s weak prison system. There had been not one but
two jailbreaks
in Yemen in recent years by men involved in the USS
Cole
attack.