The Iraq war may have convinced Middle Eastern leaders that the United States is a better ally than an enemy in military affairs. In truth, the Iraq war probably did nothing to solve the problems of the Arab world, which is to find some accommodation between fundamental Islam as mutated by nationalism and the challenges of twenty-first-century economic modernization and global interdependence. Will the Iraq war simply reinforce the Arab perception that Israel dictates American regional policies? If the Iraq war is a tragedy from the perspective of American national security policy, it is because it had so little to do with the global war on terrorism. It may not increase the chances of Israel’s survival, and it is probably irrelevant to the course of the Iranian Revolution. Iran may be the ultimate strategic winner in the war, since Iraq will no longer be a threat.
The Obama Administration and the War in Afghanistan, 2009–2012
The destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq diverted attention from the pursuit and punishment of al-Qaeda’s leaders. The war, in fact, made Osama bin Laden look clever and undefeated. The counterterrorism community in Washington and in the field had kept its eyes open and saw the geographic spread and increased incidence of terror in the decade after 9/11 and the first Afghanistan campaign. Despite its fragmentation and flight in 2001–2002, al-Qaeda had found safe havens in southeastern Afghanistan and the ill-policed tribal border areas of the FATA and the two Waziristan provinces. The Pashtun Taliban had also retained its internal order through the Mullah Omar, also in hiding. By 2003 the Taliban had returned to southern Afghanistan.
Without much prompting from Osama bin Laden, Islamic terrorists followed 9/11 and the Afghan war with increased attacks across the globe. In the next decade, jihadis carried out deadly bomb attacks in Great Britain, Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Turkey, Spain, Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Kenya, and India. This list is not complete. Unlike Europe, where Muslim populations are proportionately large, poor, unemployed, and unassimilated, America’s 2.4 million Muslims are fragmented by race, geography, cultural origin, and levels of income, not to mention varieties of Islam. A Somali woman operating an airport snack bar in Columbus, Ohio, has little in common with a male Iranian millionaire in Houston, Texas. Working within personal rights laws more restrictive than in Europe for those combating terrorism, American police still had fewer problems identifying and arresting terrorists. The fact that there has been no repetition of 9/11 dulled American public awareness of the real global war on terrorism being waged elsewhere by other nations and American counterterrorism teams. Some nations blame the United States for giving Islamicists a cause for holy war. In addition to its ties to Israel, America’s de facto alliance with Saudi Arabia irritates other nations because the House of Saud listens closely to its own radical-conservative Wahhabi clerics. Some Saudis export people and resources to Muslim extremists outside of Saudi Arabia, although the House of Saud crushes dissenters at home. Pakistan’s toleration of the Taliban makes it a feeble ally or incomplete enemy. Another exporter of terrorism, Iran, has been run by an anti-American regime since 1979. Muslim extremists have plagued Indonesia and the Philippines. The 9/11 tragedy brought a spike in international sympathy for the United States that rapidly waned with the invasion of Iraq.
Terrorism remains a global problem. By a rough accounting, the victims of terrorist bombings in Europe and the Muslim world (and not counting Iraq and Afghanistan, 2001–2011) now exceeds the number of deaths of 9/11 and the American military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the worst offenders is Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), a Pakistani terrorist group with links to Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence (ISI) agency. The attacks by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) on the Indians illustrates the deadliness and persistence of just one Muslim terrorist group. LeT detonated thirteen bombs in Mumbai on March 12, 1993, killing 257 people and wounding 700. Eight years later, LeT renewed its attacks on India by assaulting the Parliament building in New Delhi, killing twelve. In August 2003, two bombs in Mumbai killed 44 and wounded 150. On July 11, 2006, the same terrorist group set off seven bombs in an eleven-minute period in the Mumbai commuter train system. The bombs killed 209 and wounded 700 riders. LeT suicide bombers on November 26–29, 2008, attacked ten crowded targets in Mumbai, killing 164 people and wounding 308 bystanders. The world watched the historic Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel burn while Indian special police battled with the bombers. Lashkar-e-Taiba is only one of forty-six such groups operating in India.
The fate of post-liberation Afghanistan demonstrated how inattentive the Bush administration was after 2002. Afghanistan had a proven anti-Taliban president, Hamid Karzai, who was momentarily acceptable to the Northern Alliance warlords. Under UN and NATO approval, an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) of 30,000 patrolled the major cities. In 2004 ISAF and the Karzai government spent $4 billion in U.S. aid money to organize a new Afghan National Army (ANA) and police force. This force struggled to reach a goal of 150,000 in 2008. At the end of 2009, the ANA had only 94,000 soldiers for an area and population larger than Iraq. The Afghan army and police (the Afghan National Security Forces or ANSF) faced serious problems. First, the private armies of the Northern Alliance in the non-Pashtun provinces had no intention of disarming or serving in the ANSF outside their Hazara, Turkoman, Uzbek, and Tajik homelands. Second, in the Pashtun provinces, about half of Afghanistan, the ANSF faced a resurgent Taliban. By 2006 the Taliban had established shadow governments and guerrilla units among most of the Pakistani border and southern provinces. The Karzai government followed traditional practices of appointing personal and tribal loyalists to the ANSF and administrative posts and paid them with half of the aid dollars. Often with no special ties to the people they were supposed to govern and protect, ANSF commanders concentrated on extortion and corruption and not confronting the Taliban. Between 2002 and 2007, terrorist attacks on government and ANSF targets jumped tenfold.
The ISAF units followed rules of engagement that allowed them to fight only in self-defense or as part of an ANSF operation as foreign advisers. The mission was to protect the twenty-six Provincial Reconstruction Teams, the nation-builders. When Taliban units attacked ISAF units, the incidents seemed designed to tempt the foreigners to overreact and alienate the Afghan villagers. Moreover, while forty-three nations sent troops to Afghanistan, only ten nations (other than the United States) sent units of battalion strength or larger, the minimum force for pacification operations. Spain, Italy, and Germany put almost 10,000 troops in the northern and western provinces already policed by the Northern Alliance, and France put its 3,000 crack troops inside Kabul as a palace guard. American units tried to guard the Pakistani border provinces, while the British, Canadians, and the Dutch occupied the heart of Talibanland in the south. In 2007, ISAF numbered 37,000. In ISAF only the British, Dutch, and Canadians in southern Helmand Province attempted limited attacks on Taliban strongholds.
The battle for Musa Qala, Helmand Province, 2006–2007, was typical of ISAF operations and frustrations in pacifying the Pashtun provinces. In October 2006 a British brigade occupied the town and region and established a progovernment shura (town council), but in February 2007 the Taliban returned, executed the local leaders, and prevented a brigade of the Afghan army and police from restoring any permanent control. The Taliban initiated the attacks, broken only by NATO air strikes. In October 2007 a different British brigade of 1,200 from four understrength battalions surrounded Musa Qala and cautiously squeezed the Taliban back into Musa Qala town while under long-range mortar and machine-gun fire. The key to success was the defection of a local warlord of Taliban persuasion and his 400-man clan army. To exploit this event, a U.S. airborne battalion assaulted Musa Qala in helicopters on December 7 and took the town after a six-hour battle, losing one dead and six wounded. The British brigade then defeated a Taliban counterattack. President Karzai appointed as governor the Taliban general who had defected and gave him an ANA brigade to hold the region and
supervise a campaign to stop growing opium poppies.
The Musa Qala district was still a battleground when the 2d Battalion, 4th Marines escorted an ANSF company back into the region in 2009–2010. In ten years 812 ISAF and ANSF soldiers had died in Musa Qala from snipers, ambushes, rocket and mortar attacks, and IEDs. The villagers were hostile or uncooperative. Whole villages had been abandoned. The jackals howled at night while raiders on motorcycles raced toward ISAF outposts to attack them, then disappeared into the dry hills. Pashtun translators, working for $865 a month and a U.S. visa, seldom located Taliban hideouts. The Uzbeks and Tajiks in the ANSF were no more at home than the Marines. In 2010 the number of ISAF troops in Helmand province reached 25,000. The pattern of ISAF casualties demonstrates two phenomena: the growing Taliban threat and the ISAF shift to more aggressive offensive operations. In 2004 ISAF military fatalities numbered 60(52 Americans), then jumped to 295 (155 Americans) in 2008. When ISAF doubled in strength in 2009 to 71,000, the result of an American surge of over 30,000 troops, fatalities doubled to 521 (317 Americans), climbed to 711 in 2010, then fell back to 446 in 2011 as the counterinsurgency campaign had some successes and ISAF passed more missions to the Afghanis. By the end of 2011 American deaths had reached 1,777 and the allies 950 (382 British). The “boots on the ground” strength of American troops in Afghanistan in 2010–2011 reached 90,000.
Much of the continuing violence in Afghanistan is hidden by the use of civilian contractors, who numbered 113,491 by 2012. Twenty-two percent are American citizens, the others from Afghanistan and all over Europe and Asia. The contractors are attractive targets for raiders that kill and plunder. The largest employer, L-3 Communications, has already lost 370 dead and 1,789 wounded. The next favorite target is the ISAF caterer, the Supreme Group, which has suffered 240 dead. Of the foreigners in Afghanistan only the American and British armed forces have lost more members than the contractors.
Although the Bush administration recognized the growing Taliban menace, it passed this political snowdrift on to a new president in 2009. Barack Obama knew something about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which he experienced as a U.S. senator. He decided to be cautious and inquisitive before enlarging the American commitment to Afghanistan. One issue was the legitimacy and effectiveness of Hamid Karzai, reelected in 2009 in balloting reeking with fraud. Linked to the Karzai regime were international charges of corruption and opium trading. Karzai argued with some justification that the Taliban would be worse than he was and that his enemy was not just the Taliban but the Islamicists in ISI and the Pakistani army, who wanted him replaced. Karzai did not care what the American domestic media and liberal politicians thought of him as long as they did not treat him like Saddam Hussein or the late Shah of Iran. Obama did not regard Karzai as an indispensable president, but he did not encourage the State Department or the CIA to look for alternatives. Instead he followed a late-stage Bush policy of putting more pressure on Pakistan. The United States had pressed Pakistan to form a civilian government, which it had in 2008 with the election of Asif Ali Zardari, but he had none of the public respect extended to General Musharraf or Zardari’s assassinated wife, the iconic Benazir Bhutto. Almost doubling U.S. foreign aid to Pakistan ($2 billion in 2008, $3.6 billion in 2010) helped buy better Pakistani cooperation against some terrorists. This cooperation focused on al-Qaeda’s “foreigners” and the part of the Taliban not sponsored by Pakistani Islamicists. The Obama administration decided to risk relations with Pakistan by mounting Predator drone missions and Special Operations Forces raids into Pakistan without prior warning. At least that is the cover story. In 2008 Predator strikes into Pakistan numbered ten, in 2010 forty-five. The raids into Pakistan scored their greatest success on May 2, 2011, when SEAL Team Six on Army special operations helicopters raided a fortified compound near Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden when he resisted capture. After a number of identification tests, bin Laden was buried at sea. His cause most certainly survived, though weakened by his death and a decade’s worth of intelligence material brought out by SEAL Team Six. The death of bin Laden did nothing to end the Taliban’s bid to surround Kabul with captive rural provinces.
The Obama administration had already approved another “Surge” in December 2009 and watched 15,000 soldiers and Marines attack the Taliban heartland around Kandahar. To manage the campaign, the president sent General Stanley A. McChrystal, USA, the jedi knight of counterterrorism who had commanded the joint special operations units in Iraq for seven years. He replaced a harried General McKiernan, perceived as too “traditional” by the White House. Although Obama later relieved McChrystal for some published critical remarks about the Afghan and American governments, the Petraeus-McChrystal population-centric pacification campaign went on without check in 2011. In the meantime, the administration quit hectoring Karzai in public and focused on long-term economic and infrastructure development. As the ANSF slowly assumed more combat missions, American deaths (all causes) dropped below ten a week, the point at which the war became truly forgotten again except by the Afghans and the 140,000 officers and men of the ISAF who still make their appointed rounds in search of the Taliban.
The shift of emphasis in the 2009–2010 campaign plan for Afghanistan was its stress on partnership with the Afghans and the avoidance of civilian casualties, key principles of counterinsurgency. Leader decapitation and band destruction remained important but as a handmaiden to population control. The emphasis on air strikes in 2007–2009 had raised civilian casualties and public ire. President Karzai went to the UN in 2008 and complained about the incidence of civilian casualties caused by ISAF-controlled air strikes. The head of the UN assistance mission in Afghanistan supported Karzai. At whatever risk, ISAF patrols could no longer rely only on drones and fighter-bombers to clear villages. They would also have to depend more on their Afghan allies, also perilous. In February 2010, ISAF and Afghan army and special police began Operation MOSHTARAK, the ultimate “clear and hold” campaign to break the Taliban grip on Helmand province. With 15,000 troops, about half ISAF and half Afghani, the objective of MOSHTARAK (“together”) was control of the city of Marja and its poppy-growing region.
The novel aspects of MOSHTARAK were the level of Afghan combat participation, the patience of the advance, and the commitment of “holding” forces of administrators, public works personnel, police, and economic nation-builders. The slowness of MOSHTARAK reflected two determining factors: avoiding civilian casualties (only twenty-eight killed in five months) and the Taliban use of mines and IEDs as its main defense. Four Marine and one Army battalions and three British and one Canadian battalions provided the ISAF advance combat units and suffered forty-eight KIAs while killing perhaps two hundred and fifty to three hundred Taliban fighters. The key operational concept was to isolate the Marja region with helicopter-borne blocking forces in eleven different locations and spread “clearing” forces from these enclaves into the farming villages around Marja. The Taliban defenders numbered no more than 500, half of whom died in house-to-house battles. Marja fell after two weeks of some intense but small-scale engagements. The battle for Marja, however, did not end, since snipers and bombers plagued the ISAF and Afghan occupiers for the rest of the year. Whether Afghan security forces could reduce the opium trade and hold the Taliban at bay without ISAF remained questionable.
A war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan required a war in Pakistan and a war by the Pakistani army against terrorists it had once sponsored—and still did. Partisans like the al-Haqqani network had become part of Pakistan’s war of subversion against India in Kashmir and along its border. The United States has spent $20 billion on Pakistan and bought selective cooperation. The Pakistanis gave up Khalid Sheikh Mohammed of 9/11 infamy, but cannot find Mullah Omar. The al-Haqqani terrorists conducted bomb attacks on the U.S. and Indian embassies in Kabul in 2011. Pakistani politicians and generals may cooperate with American agents in secret, but they also encourage public anti-Americanism, inclu
ding violence. To avoid Pakistani interference, the United States now ships 60 to 70 percent of its supplies to Afghanistan through two rail-and-truck routes that begin in Latvia and Turkey and end in the Muslim republics above Afghanistan.
Since the Pakistani government would not accept joint operations into the FATA, the Americans turned to armed drones as their striking weapon. Operating in a crowded sky of target-acquisition and surveillance drones, Predators and MQ-9 Reapers stalk their victims. Since 2007, the drone strikes by Pakistani count have killed 964 people, 793 of them Pakistanis. Another analysis sees the strikes in a mounting tempo, 53 in 2009 and 118 in 2010 with at least 100 more in 2011. To put these statistics in perspective, the Pakistanis claim that 25,000 people have died inside their borders since 2003. The CIA-managed drone campaign continues outside Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2011, in two different attacks in Yemen, drones killed three terrorists of Arab descent who also happened to be U.S. citizens, which raises some challenging legal questions.
The global war on terrorism has extracted a high price in lives and treasure. It also coincided with a decade of growing economic hardship for many Americans. The war seemed to contribute to the country’s economic woes by distorting American foreign policy. The defense budget in George W. Bush’s years doubled from $304 billion (2001) to $616 billion (2008). The national debt climbed from 32.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (2001) to 53.5 percent of GDP (2009). Indebtedness to the People’s Republic of China climbed from $78 billion (2001) to $1.1 trillion (2011). One analysis estimates that the global war on terrorism has cost $1.65 trillion. Another $800 billion in expenses may be paid in the years ahead. Adding the costs of homeland security ($589 billion), the United States will spend $3.8 trillion on war and counterterrorism, or $6.6 million for every dollar al-Qaeda spent to send four planes on a suicide mission. Americans would have rejected any administration that did not pursue Osama bin Laden, but the strategy of the hunt remains debatable.
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