Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series)

by Scheuer, Michael

  Why is this important? Well, there are those reasons that most senior policymakers and bureaucrats find trivial: men and women from the CIA and other U.S. agencies risk their lives to acquire data about the camps, and American taxpayers pay extortionate taxes to make sure their government acquires the information needed to protect them and their children. And still, clear threats to the United States are left free to operate and strengthen. Leaving these trivialities aside, the story of the unmolested training camps is important because between 1982 and late 2001 those facilities produced tens of thousands of well-trained terrorists and insurgents, and those outside of eastern and southeastern Afghanistan are still producing fighters. The rough and open-source-based estimates for the total number of men trained in just the best-known Afghan training camps—al-Faruq, Darunta, Khaldun, Khowst, etc.—range between 40,000 and 100,000. Looking at the camps the U.S. government knew of—and remember, it is certain that Washington did not identify all of them—total numbers may well be five or ten times higher than the figure for those trained at the Afghan camps. That is, in the worst case, there could have been up to a million Islamists trained in camps around the world during the two decades after 1982.12

  If that is not bad enough, it must be recalled that most of the world’s Islamist training camps were created not only to train indigenous fighters—as in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Sudan—but also to welcome nonlocal Muslims for training and perhaps some actual combat experience. These nonlocals were then sent home to undertake military action there. On returning, they did indeed undertake military operations, but they also set about training those who could not afford the cost (or procure the travel documents needed) to travel to a training camp abroad. And it is a sure bet that those trained at home by those trained abroad then went on to train others at home. Therefore the total number of fighters produced by the training camps increased geometrically, and there is yet no study that suggests a plausible methodology for pegging even a ballpark total figure. This brief look at the geometric expansion of the body of trained Islamist fighters over two decades, however, suggests that claims made by senior commanders in the U.S.-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan to have killed four thousand in the former and three to four thousand in the latter amount to a barely discernible dent in the cadre trained since 1982.13

  And what kind of paramilitary training did these fighters receive? Well, it varied from camp to camp, but a recent book by a former al-Qaeda fighter suggests that, at least in bin Laden’s camps, the training was well suited to produce the formidable mujahedin that U.S. forces are now encountering around the world. Describing his mid-1990s training at al-Qaeda’s Khaldun camp, Omar Nasiri explains that he learned to use “a huge variety of weapons.”

  Abu Suhail [a senior al-Qaeda trainer] introduced me to guns I had never seen before. Most were German and Russian weapons from World War II [Tokarov, Makarov, Walther PKK, SIG-Sauer, and Luger pistols]…Once I learned those, Abu Suhail taught me how to use the larger machine guns. First I trained on the Uzi…After that I trained on two more Soviet military guns: the Degtyarev DP, a light machine gun from the 1920s, and the RPD, which was introduced much later. It is a belt-fed machine gun with a built-in bipod. Abu Suhail finally taught me the legendary weapons invented by Mikhail Kalashnikov. First the Kalashnikov AK-47, a gas-operated rifle…And then I learned how to use the famous PK and PKM. These are fully automatic machine guns, fed from an ammunition belt…Finally, we moved on to larger artillery [sic]. First, we learned the Dushkas: the DShK and the DSkKM 12.7 [caliber machine guns]…After the Dushkas, we learned the RPGs, an early version first used in the 1960s, and then the RPG-18, a lighter, short-range version, which was easier to carry because it was collapsible. Finally, we learned how to use the RPG-22, a version invented in the 1980s. It is so powerful it can penetrate a meter of concrete or four hundred millimeters of armor. We had all these weapons at Khaldun, and were able to practice on every one of them…We never had to conserve ammunition, and there was always something new to try.14

  While there remains much unclear and much to learn about the camps and their training regimens, it is a rock-solid certainty that those elected to protect Americans since 1982 (and their counterparts in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) did nothing to halt the geographic spread and continual operation of terrorist training camps. Since 9/11 only the most prominent training camps in Afghanistan have been destroyed, and media reporting clearly suggests that their loss has been made good by camps that have been built in the tribal areas along Pakistan’s western border.15 The issue of training camps, I think, shows that very often the failure to act to protect Americans is just as damaging as making decisions that disinvest in U.S. national security. The mujahedin units that the armed forces of the United States and its allies face today, as well as the insurgents’ massive reserves of trained manpower, are the responsibility of elected U.S. policymakers and their senior diplomatic and intelligence officials. These men and women decided to study the nuances and dance the ballet of international politics rather than make the protection of American lives their first priority. They sat, they watched, and—wrapped in their own self-importance and worldly sophistication—they did nothing.16 Oddly, the post-9/11 investigatory commissions found no fault with those individuals who allowed the uninterrupted operation of training camps, and the contribution they made to the growth of al-Qaeda’s capabilities. Indeed, the Kean-Hamilton commission could not find the moxie even to comment when Richard Clarke, who had watched but not generated action against the camps for all of the 1990s, condemned the George W. Bush administration for not attacking the al-Qaeda camps after it took office. Clarke told the 9/11 commissioners that he could not understand “why we continue to allow the existence of large-scale al Qida [sic] bases where we know people are being trained to kill Americans.”17 Could it be that the Bush team was simply following Mr. Clarke’s decade-long demonstration of supine behavior?

  1989: Afghanistan—Intervening to Ensure Disaster

  On February 15, 1989, there began a process that was destined to prove the incompetence of U.S. officials in conducting overseas political interventions, as well as the futility of making the “building of democracies” a central goal of U.S. foreign policy. On that date the world witnessed the last Soviet military commander in Afghanistan walk over the Friendship Bridge spanning the Amu Darya River and step onto the soil of the then-Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. That general’s footfall marked the Red Army’s defeat by the Afghan mujahedin and their non-Afghan allies—among which were both Muslims and such infidel entities as the U.S. Treasury and the CIA. The Afghan Islamists had defeated a superpower, and the glory and honor of that victory belongs exclusively to them. Western journalists and politicians have since made an industry out of the concept of “Afghan blowback,” the supposed rise and radicalization of Islamist militants because of U.S. support for the Afghan mujahedin, but this was and is nonsense.18

  Undeniably the United States supplied billions of dollars in cash, military equipment, ordnance, and the other sinews of war in what became the largest and most successful covert-action program ever conducted by the CIA under the president’s orders. And I had the great honor of being a bit player in that effort from 1985 until early 1992. From the perspective I had, and as history shows, the CIA did an extraordinary job in making sure that the Afghans could kill Soviet soldiers as quickly and efficiently as possible using AK-47s and other arms from World War II and the Korean War (with the important exception of Stinger missiles), instead of the Lee-Enfield rifles and even muzzle-loaders left over from Britain’s imperial Afghan misadventures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As long as the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, the focus and goals of the U.S. covert-action program were clear: help the Afghans kill increasing numbers of Soviet military personnel until Moscow decided to throw in the towel. For the CIA, the heroes of the Afghan program were its financial and logistics officers, who ensured the mujahedin had th
e wherewithal to keep Soviet blood flowing, and its clandestine officers in the field who made sure that most U.S. arms and cash went to the Afghan Islamist leaders who were actually in the field killing Soviets and not to the so-called “moderate” Afghans who fought their war dressed in three-piece suits and battled each other for Western media attention and bigger cuts of the U.S.-and Saudi-provided swag.

  And then the Soviets withdrew, and the roof caved in for the United States and the West generally. As the Afghan Islamist groups who beat the Red Army saddled up to undertake the fighting that remained to defeat Afghan Communist leader Najibullah’s Soviet-supported regime in Kabul, U.S. and Western diplomats, most of whom had turned up their noses while the CIA and other intelligence services did a decade of the dangerous work of arming the mujahedin, spotted a chance to go a-nation-building. The task of defeating Najibullah’s regime turned out to take thirty-eight months and concluded in April 1992. During this period the Afghan Islamists fought the Afghan Communists, were bedeviled by Pakistani authorities who, searching for a quick victory, pushed them into several bloody defeats in semiconventional battles, fought with each other with increasing ferocity, and unknowingly were led to lose all they had gained by the feckless intervention and interference of U.S. and Western diplomats.

  Through all of this post-Soviet-withdrawal mayhem, U.S. and Western policymakers made another massive disinvestment in their nations’ long-term national security. Instead of running as fast and as far as they could from Afghanistan (the advice offered by Thomas Twetten and Frank Anderson, then respectively the CIA’s deputy director for operations and chief of the Near East Division), Washington, London, the UN, and other NATO foreign ministries deployed and detonated the West’s most powerful weapon of mass destruction: diplomats obsessed with building Western-style, secular democracies in places where they are not wanted, especially in Islamic cultures that view them as an affront to God. Instead of leaving the Afghans to recover their own political balance after nearly fifteen years of war and the dire social and economic costs of the barbarous Soviet occupation, the U.S.-led West joined the UN to send diplomats to teach the Afghans how to govern themselves, as if the Afghans were brand new to politics and not a political culture that was already well and stubbornly established when Alexander the Great and his army invaded nearly four hundred years before Christ’s birth. A bevy of U.S. diplomats of ambassadorial rank, among them Peter Tomsen, Robert Oakley, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Phyllis Oakley, arrived in Afghanistan to lead the great unwashed mass of Afghan Muslims in the creation of a secular and democratic Afghan Monticello on the banks of the Kabul River.

  These smart, talented, good-hearted, and well-intentioned men and women never had a chance and in the end did a great deal more harm than good for U.S. interests, a self-inflicted fiasco that their successors are repeating and deepening today in Afghanistan and Iraq at a time when the stakes are much greater for America. U.S. diplomats, U.S. AID officials, and hundreds of Western nongovernmental organizations flooded the Afghan playing field armed with large amounts of money and expectations entirely inapplicable to those of the people they were trying to help. Ambassador Tomsen, for example, spoke often about building a Hamiltonian federal system in Afghanistan,19 and Ambassador Phyllis Oakley brought in groups of American lawyers (as if the Afghans had not suffered enough under the Soviets) to lecture Afghan tribesmen on the niceties of due process, human rights, and the rule of law. Simultaneously, Ambassadors Robert Oakley and Zalmay Khalilzad spent untold hours trying to teach Afghan resistance leaders the ins and outs of parliamentary government, fiscal responsibility, and the protection of minority rights. Always polite, patient, and hospitable, the Afghans listened intently to their professorate of ambassadors, took the money that was on offer, and proved themselves unable and more often unwilling to implement anything they were taught. Why? Because the U.S., Western, and UN diplomats wanted to deal with Afghans like those who had fled to overseas exile during the war against the Soviets or who belonged to resistance groups that talked but did not fight. They wanted to deal with people who resembled themselves in style and temperament, men who were mannered, well-coiffed, wore suits, spoke English or French, were educated in India or the West, and were at most nominal Muslims—after all, no polity needs too much of that religion stuff. In short, the West preferred to deal with those Afghans who had played a minor role in the struggle against the Red Army or had safely spent the war abroad.

  To the surprise of Western diplomats but not of anyone with common sense, the Afghan leaders who had fought the Red Army had no intention of ceding control of their country to a government installed, paid for, and protected by foreigners. By deliberately leaving the Islamist Afghan mujahedin on the outside looking in, the West ensured that no weak but coherent Afghan central government would emerge (the only type of central government the Afghans will tolerate) and that the civil war that began to take shape as the Soviet withdrawal was completed would evolve into a nationwide Hobbesian conflict of all against all.

  The upshot of this democracy-spreading U.S.-Western involvement, then, was not the now-dominant urban legend of Western abandonment after Soviet withdrawal but an involvement that guaranteed that post-jihad Afghanistan would not find a way toward either the anathema of secular democracy or the political stability potentially possible through the use of the tools and practices of a two-millennia-old, tribal-dominated polity. Indeed, the Western spanner in the Afghan works helped to foster a national environment of intertribal strife, crime, banditry, narcotics trafficking, and ethnic animosity so dire that the rise of the harsh Koran-based rule of the Taliban would be welcomed because it brought reliable law and order in its train. Thus 1989 marked the start of a period in which the West missed a chance to let the Afghans find their own political equilibrium and resume their traditional, intense insularity. By seeking to install a secular democracy, it ensured that Afghanistan would grow from a nonthreat to the United States to the home of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Sadly, the 1989 effort in Afghanistan would not be the last time U.S. governing elites would embark on attempts to install democracy abroad and succeed only in killing Americans and bleeding their wealth.20

  1990–91: More Steps on the Road to Defeat

  If there were ever turning-point years for the United States, setting the stage for almost everything negative that occurred to it after 9/11, they are surely 1990 and 1991. Responding in panic to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990, Saudi king Fahd coerced his bought-and-paid-for clerics into defying the Prophet Muhammad’s prohibition against the presence of non-Muslims on the Arabian Peninsula. Warned by many dissenting Saudi clerics and prominent citizens—including Osama bin Laden—that once U.S. forces arrived on the peninsula they would never leave, King Fahd nonetheless approved the U.S. deployment and foolishly accepted Washington’s word that U.S. forces would be withdrawn after Iraq was defeated. Poor, silly Fahd, he did not know that Washington went to war without the slightest intention of winning, and so U.S. forces are still on the peninsula today, seventeen years later. The now-dead king’s lasting legacy to the Saudi state will be that his decision to allow deployment marked the first step toward the final destruction of the al-Saud regime.

  As 1990 became 1991, the Saudi Arabia–based, U.S.-led coalition bombed the daylights out of Iraq’s infrastructure; the U.S. military stupidly televised its killing of Muslims to the entire Islamic world, then drove Iraqi ground forces out of Kuwait in one hundred hours and won—nothing. Saddam survived, his military and intelligence forces survived, the societies of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the other Arabian Peninsula states began a journey toward Islamic radicalization, and the many bureaucrats who masquerade as U.S. generals actually believed they had won a decisive victory and would henceforth be able to conduct wars with virtually no casualties.

  What the 1991 U.S.-led war against Iraq did was to prove to Saddam and our other enemies in the Islamic world (nation-states and transnational actors) that U.S. presidents
and officials would speak loudly, rattle sabers endlessly, and then apply their mighty club with resolute daintiness so the world—and especially the European elites they so much admired—would not think too badly of those in power in Washington. In 1991, as in 2003, we let nearly a half-million Iraqi military personnel not only survive but also flee to safety with their guns, thereby living to fight and kill U.S. soldiers and Marines another day. President George H. W. Bush’s contention that destroying Iraq’s ground forces and dethroning Saddam would have meant capturing Baghdad, and thereby destabilizing the Middle East, was and is a false rationalization serving to disguise moral cowardice. Then-general Colin Powell (before he degenerated into just one more tacking, pragmatic politician) was right: once we decided on war, the job at hand was to surround the Iraqi army, kill all of it, and let the chips fall where they might. Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Barry McCaffrey accomplished the surrounding requirement of Powell’s doctrine, but Bush and his cabinet decided to let those they had identified as the enemies of America survive, escape, re-form, and reequip. As I write, nearly 3,900 service personnel have died in Iraq because the first President Bush and his team did not have the courage of their convictions to destroy Saddam’s state when they had the chance.