4 September 2011
The Strategy of 9/11
By Gwynne Dyer
Writing recently in the Washington Post, Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at the Rand Corporation think tank, claimed that the 9/11 attacks ten years ago were not a strategic success for al-Qaeda. He’s right. Osama bin Laden’s strategy did fail, in the end – but not for the reason that Jenkins thinks.
Jenkins argues that Osama bin Laden believed the US was a paper tiger because it had no stomach for casualties. Kill enough Americans, and the United States would pull out of the Middle East, leaving the field free for al-Qaeda’s project of overthrowing all the secular Arab regimes and imposing Islamist rule on everybody.
In bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa declaring war on America, Jenkins pointed out, he claimed that the US would flee the region if attacked seriously. Indeed, bin Laden gave the rapid US military withdrawal from Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and the equally rapid retreat of American forces from Somalia in 1993 after 18 US soldiers were killed in Mogadishu, as examples of American cowardice.
Other al-Qaeda commanders disagreed, Jenkins says, warning that the 9/11 attacks would enrage the United States and “focus its fury on the terrorist group and its allies, but bin Laden pushed ahead. When the United States did (invade Afghanistan), bin Laden switched gears, claiming that he had intended all along to provoke the United States into waging a war that would galvanise all of Islam against it.”
Jenkins is quite explicitly saying that bin Laden never realised that the United States would respond violently when his organisation murdered thousands of Americans. He would have been dismayed when the US invaded Afghanistan and destroyed his training camps. And therefore, the think-tank expert concludes, the United States did not fall into a trap that bin Laden had deliberately laid for it when it invaded Afghanistan.
Well, that’s one point of view. Here’s another. Bin Laden was fully aware that the United States would invade Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks, and he wanted it to do so. He believed that the US would then get mired in a long and bloody guerilla war in Afghanistan, a replay of the war against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s in which bin Laden himself had first risen to prominence.
Military commanders are always planning to re-fight the last war; terrorist commanders are no different. Bin Laden hoped that a protracted guerilla war in Afghanistan, with American troops killing lots of Muslims, would indeed “galvanise all of Islam” against the United States.
So why didn’t he say that beforehand? Why did he claim that the United States would flee screaming at the first atrocity, if he really expected it to invade Afghanistan? Because revolutionaries who resort to terrorism always talk freely about their goals, but they NEVER publicly discuss their strategy for achieving them. They can’t, because the strategy is so profoundly callous and cynical.
Terrorists generally have rational political goals – usually a revolution of some kind. In bin Laden’s case, he wanted Islamist revolutions across the Muslim world, but he had been notably unsuccessful in whipping up popular support for such revolutions. So how could he build that support? Well, how about luring the United States into invading a Muslim country?
Revolutionary groups often resort to terrorism if they think they lack popular support. Their aim is to trick their much more powerful opponent (usually a government) into doing terrible things that will alienate the population and drive it into their arms: it’s the political equivalent of jiu-jitsu.
They are trying to bring horror and death down on the population by triggering a government crack-down or a foreign occupation, in the hope that it will radicalise people and turn them into supporters of the terrorists’ political project. But the people they seek to manipulate must believe that it was the oppressors or the foreign occupiers, not the terrorists, who pulled the trigger. That’s why bin Laden lied about his strategy.
He probably didn’t even warn his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan that he was planning 9/11, because they would not have welcomed the prospect of being driven from power and having to fight another ten-year guerilla war against another invading superpower.
Bin Laden’s strategy was not original with him: he had been fighting as a guerilla and a terrorist leader for fifteen years by the time of 9/11, and people of this sort have ALWAYS read all the standard texts on their chosen trade. The notion of using the opponent’s strength against him absolutely permeates the “how to” books on guerilla war and terrorism, from Mao to Marighella.
So bin Laden dug a trap, and the United States fell into it. In that sense his strategy succeeded, and the guerilla war that ensued in Afghanistan did much to turn Arab and Muslim popular opinion against America. (The invasion of Iraq did even more damage to America’s reputation, but that really wasn’t about terrorism at all.)
In the long run, however, bin Laden’s strategy failed, simply because his project was unacceptable and implausible to most Muslims. And the most decisive rejection of his strategy is the fact that the oppressive old Arab regimes are now being overthrown, for the most part nonviolently, by revolutionaries who want democracy and freedom, not Islamist rule.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 7, 11 and 12. (“Military…States”; and “They…superpower”)
20 June 2011
Leaving Afghanistan
By Gwynne Dyer
It’s beyond satire. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, telling the New York Times what he had learned during his long tenure under Presidents Bush and Obama, explained that “I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice.” Gosh, Bob, does that mean you wouldn’t invade Iraq next time?
Afghanistan, by contrast, was a “war of necessity” in Gates’s terms: official Washington believed that further bad things like 9/11 might happen to the United States if US troops didn’t go to Afghanistan to root out the al-Qaida terrorists (mostly Arabs) who had been given bases there by the country’s Taliban leadership. It wasn’t a very subtle strategy, but it was certainly driven by perceived US national interest.
Which was the point being made by President Hamid Karzai, the man whom the United States put in power after the 2001 invasion: “[The Americans] are here for their own purposes, for their own goals, and they’re using our soil for that.”
Well, of course. The only other possible explanation for their presence would be that Washington had sent half a million young Americans to Afghanistan over the past ten years in some quixotic quest to raise the Afghan standard of living and the status of Afghan women. That’s ridiculous. Obviously, the motive was perceived US national interest.
So how to explain the furiously emotional response of Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador to Afghanistan? Speaking at Herat University, he raged: “When Americans…hear themselves described as occupiers, told that they are only here to advance their own interest…they are filled with confusion and grow weary of our effort here.”
“Mothers and fathers of fallen soldiers, spouses of soldiers who have lost arms and legs – they ask themselves about the meaning of their loved one’s sacrifice. When I hear some of your leaders call us occupiers, I cannot look these mourning parents, spouses and children in the eye and give them a comforting reply.”
Karl, they won’t be very comforted if you tell them that their loved ones died for Afghanistan. Tell them that they died defending America. Except, of course, that it may not have been a very useful way of defending America.
All the al-Qaeda camps were quickly smashed after 9/11, and by the end of 2001 Osama bin Laden had escaped across the border into Pakistan, where he remained until his death last month. Most of the surviving al-Qaeda cadres also fled to Pakistan, and US intelligence says that there are only a couple of hundred left in Afghanistan.
So why have American troops been in Afghanistan for almost ten years? To keep the Taliban from power, they say, but it’s unlikely that the Taliban leadership ever knew about al-Qaeda’s plans for 9/11. Why would they support an action that was bound to provoke a US invasion and drive them from power? Why would bin Laden risk letting them know about the attack in advance? The US has probably been barking up the wrong tree for a long time.
Now the Taliban are back in force, and the war is all but lost. The US may think it is about “terrorism” and al-Qaeda, but for Afghans it is just a continuation of the civil war that had already been raging for almost a decade before the US invasion. The Taliban, almost entirely drawn from the Pashtun ethnic group, captured Kabul in 1996, but they never managed to conquer the other, smaller ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan.
The United States stumbled into this civil war under the delusion that it was fighting Islamist terrorists, but in fact it has simply ended up on the side of the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. That’s who mans the “Afghan National Army” that the Western powers have been trying to build up with so little success: only three percent of its soldiers are Pashtuns, although Pashtuns account for 42 percent of the population.
So long as the US forces remain, the Taliban can plausibly claim that they are fighting a jihad against the infidels, but once the Americans leave the war will probably return to its basic ethnic character. That means that the Pashtuns are just as unlikely to conquer the north after the US departure as they were before the invasion.
In the end, some deal that shares out the spoils among the various ethnic groups will be done: that is the Afghan political style. The Taliban will get a big share, but they won’t sweep the board. The American interlude will gradually fade from Afghan consciousness, and the Afghan experience will vanish from American memory a good deal faster.
But in the meantime, President Barack Obama has promised to start withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan next month, and that will be very tricky. Few Americans know much about Afghan realities, and they have been fed a steady diet of patriotic misinformation about the place for a decade.
If the US ambassador to Kabul can get so emotional about a plain statement of fact, imagine how the folks at home will respond when US troops leave Afghanistan without a “victory”. Obama will be lucky to pull this off without a serious backlash.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6, 7 and 8. (“Mothers…Afghanistan”)
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
10 May 2011
Leaving Afghanistan
By Gwynne Dyer
”With a single bound, our hero was free”, as writers of pulp fiction used to say when they saved their hero from some implausible but inescapable peril. Barack Obama could now free himself from Afghanistan with a single bound, if he had the nerve.
The death of Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda, matters little in practical terms, but Obama could use it as a means of deflating the grossly exaggerated “terrorist threat” that legitimises the bloated American security establishment. He could also use it to escape from the war in Afghanistan.
If he acted in the next few months, while his success in killing the terrorist-in-chief still makes him politically unassailable on military matters, he could start moving U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, and even begin to cut the Homeland Security Department down to size. His political enemies would accuse him of being “soft on defence”, but right now the accusation would not stick.
The HSD’s reason for being is the “terrorist threat”. Drive home the point that bin Laden is dead, and that there has been no terrorist attack in the West at even 1/50 the scale of the 9/11 attacks for the past five years, and its budget becomes very vulnerable.
Obama promised in 2009 that the first of the 30,000 extra U.S. troops he sent to Afghanistan in that year will be withdrawn this July. It would be harder to get the remaining 70,000 American troops and the 50,000 other foreign troops out—but it is now within his reach.
Since it is politically impossible for a U.S. president to acknowledge military defeat, for half a century the default method for extracting American troops from lost wars has been to “declare a victory and leave”. It was pioneered by Henry Kissinger in the Vietnam era, it worked for the junior Bush in Iraq, and Obama could use it to get out of Afghanistan.
It just has to look like a victory of sorts until one or two years after all the American troops are gone, so that when the roof falls in, it no longer looks like the Americans’ fault. Kissinger talked about the need for a “decent interval” between the departure of U.S. troops and whatever disasters might ensue in Vietnam, and the concept applies equally to Obama and Afghanistan.
The case for getting Western troops out of Afghanistan now rests on three arguments. Firstly, that the Taliban, the Islamist radicals who governed the country until 2001 and are now fighting Western troops there, were never America’s enemies. Al-Qaeda (which was almost entirely Arab in those days) abused their hospitality by planning its attacks in Afghanistan, but no Afghan has ever been involved in a terrorist attack against the West.
Secondly, the Taliban never controlled the minority areas of the country even during their five years in power, so why assume that they will conquer the whole country if Western troops leave? President Hamid Karzai’s deeply corrupt and widely hated government would certainly fall, but Afghanistan’s future would probably be decided, as usual, by a combination of fighting and bargaining between the major ethnic groups.
And thirdly, Western troops will obviously leave eventually. Whether they leave sooner or later, roughly the same events will happen after they go. Those events are unlikely to pose a threat to the security of any Western country—so why not leave now, and spare some tens of thousands of lives?
This last argument is of course disputed by the U.S. military, who insist (as soldiers usually do) that victory is attainable if they are only given enough resources and time. But Karzai’s government is beyond salvage, and this month’s strikingly successful Taliban attacks in Kandahar city discredit the claim that pro-government forces are “making progress” in “restoring security”.
Western armies have fought dozens of wars in the Third World since the European empires began to collapse 60 years ago, and they lost almost every one. The local nationalists (who sometimes calling themselves Marxists or Islamists) cannot beat the foreign armies in open battle, but they can go on fighting longer and take far higher casualties.
Afghanistan fits the model. When a delegation from Central Asia visited a U.S. base in Afghanistan, one of the delegates was a former Soviet general who had fought in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. He listened patiently as eager young American officers explained how new technology and a new emphasis on “winning hearts and minds” would defeat the insurgency.
Finally his patience snapped. “We tried all that when we were here and it didn’t work then, so why should it work now?” he asked. Answer: it won’t.
Osama bin Laden’s death has given Obama a chance to leave Afghanistan without humiliation. Just wait a couple of months to guard against the improbable contingency of a big terrorist revenge attack, and then start bringing the troops home. Once the Taliban are convinced that he is really leaving, they would probably even give him a “decent interval”.
Will this actually happen? Probably not, for in terms of domestic U.S. politics it would be a gamble, and Barack Obama is not a gambler.
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2 May 2011
After Bin Laden
By Gwynne Dyer
Ding, dong, the witch is dead. Osama bin Laden, the author of the 9/11 atrocity in the United States and various lesser terrorist outrages elsewhere, has been killed by American troops in his hide-out in northern Pakistan. At last, the world can breathe more easily. But not many people were holding their breaths anyway.
President Barack Obama issued the usual warning when he announced that bin Laden had been killed by American troops in a compound in the city of Abbottabad: “The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda. Yet his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al-Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us.” But that wasn’t quite right either.
No doubt attacks will continue to be made in the Arab world in the name of al-Qaeda, but the original organisation created by bin Laden has been moribund for years. Outside the Arab world, there have been no major terrorist assaults for about five years now, and bin Laden’s death is unlikely to change that. The whole enterprise was never what it seemed.
Bin Laden was a revolutionary before he was a terrorist. His goal was to overthrow existing Arab governments and replace them with regimes that imposed an extreme form of the Salafist (Islamist) doctrine on the people instead.
Once all the Muslims had accepted that doctrine, bin Laden believed, they would benefit from God’s active support and triumph over the outside forces that held them back. Poverty would be vanquished, the humiliations would end, and the infidels (“the Zionist-Crusader alliance”) would be defeated. It was essentially a form of magical thinking, but his strategic thinking was severely rational.
Successful revolutions bringing Salafist regimes to power were the key to success, but for the revolutions to succeed they must win mass support among Arab and other Muslim populations. Unfortunately, only a very small proportion of Muslims accepted Salafist ideas, so some way must be found to win them over. That’s where the terrorism came in.
Terrorism is a classic technique for revolutionaries trying to build popular support. The objective is to trick the enemy government, local or foreign, into behaving so badly that it alienates the population and drives people into the arms of the revolutionaries. Then, with mass popular support, the revolutionaries overthrow the government and take power.
This kind of terrorism has been used so often, and the strategy behind it is so transparently obvious, that no 21st-century government should ever fall for it. But if the terrorist attacks kill enough people, it is very hard for the government being attacked not to over-react, even if that plays into the terrorists’ hands. The pressure at home for the government to “do something” is almost irresistible.
The Bush administration duly over-reacted to 9/11 and invaded two Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, on a futile quest to “stamp out terrorism” – which was, of course, exactly what bin Laden and his colleagues wanted the United States to do.
However, almost ten years after 9/11, it is clear that bin Laden’s strategy has failed even though the United States fell into the trap he had set for it. Muslims everywhere were appalled by the suffering inflicted on Afghans and Iraqis, and many condemned the United States for its actions, but they didn’t turn to the Salafists instead.
When popular revolutions finally did begin to happen in the Arab world five months ago, they were non-violent affairs seeking the same democracy that secular countries in the West and elsewhere already enjoy. The Salafists have become virtually irrelevant.
Which is not to say that there will never be another terrorist attack on the United States. Bin Laden had not been in operational control of al-Qaeda for many years, because regular communication with the outside world would have allowed US forces to track him down long ago: the compound in Abbottabad had neither telephone nor internet connections. The real planners and actors are still out there somewhere.
The question is: what can the Salafists possibly do now that would put their project back on track? And the answer – the only answer – is to goad the United States into further violence against Muslims, in retaliation for some new terrorist atrocity against Americans.
There have been no major attempts by al-Qaeda to attack the United States in the past ten years because it was already doing what the terrorists wanted. Why risk discrediting President George W. Bush by carrying out another successful terrorist attack, even if they had the resources to do so?
But the probability of a serious Salafist attempt to hit the US again has been rising ever since American troops began to pull out of Iraq, and President Obama’s obvious desire to get out of Afghanistan raises it even further. Bin Laden’s strategy has not delivered the goods for the Salafists, but they have no alternative strategy.
Bin Laden’s death would provide a useful justification for another attempt to hit the US, but it wouldn’t really be the reason for it – and it probably wouldn’t succeed, either. Bin Laden’s hopes died long before he did.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 8 and 12. (“This kind…irresistible”; and “Which…somewhere”)
Gwynne Dyer’s latest book, “Climate Wars”, is distributed in most of the world by Oneworld.