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

by Scheuer, Michael

  And how many troops do the United States and NATO have in Afghanistan to defeat an accelerating insurgency and install a Western-style secular democracy? About fifty thousand at this writing. Yes, no kidding, fifty thousand. And in that total there are contingents—Germans and Danes, for example—whose rules of engagement make their primary tasks school-building, police-training, and well-digging, not combat meant to kill insurgents. Even among the national contingents most aggressively fighting the Taliban—Americans, Canadians, British, and Australians—one has to be concerned about the number of fighters that can actually be fielded. In this era of the increasing electronic sophistication of conventional military forces—computers, communications gear, precision weapons, etc.—the number of support personnel today must be a larger percentage of the total force than was the case with the 120,000-man contingent that the Soviet Union fielded in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. This is especially the case because Moscow’s forces were equipped with small arms, rocket-launchers, tanks, artillery, and armored vehicles that were first produced during and just after World War II. It always has surprised me that no one in the U.S. media ever asks the U.S. secretary of defense or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff what the “tooth-to-tail ratio” is for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, or in Iraq for that matter. I suspect that the number of actual combat troops that can be fielded on any given day is only a fraction of the fifty-thousand-man total and smaller than the reciprocal total for the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and their allies. A truthful answer to this question would, I think, shock Americans with how much their leaders are asking to be done by so few U.S. and NATO soldiers.

  So, faced with a waning welcome, hamstrung by geographical ignorance, and using a combat force probably not large enough to occupy and control a country the size of South Carolina, the U.S.-led coalition then proceeded to behave as if it were fighting a traditional nation-state: it invaded, took Kabul and the other major Afghan cities, and declared victory. Western leaders mistakenly interpreted the joy of Kabulis over the arrival of their occupiers (Kabul is the least representative Afghan city; it was a haven for Western hippies in the 1960s and was Communist-run in the 1970s and 1980s) and projected that belief over the rest of the country and settled in to reconstruct and democratize the country.24 Meanwhile the Taliban and al-Qaeda evacuated across open borders at all four points of the compass to fight another day, and the rural Afghan population—that is, the poorest and most religious of the country’s people—began to feel the deterioration of law and order that accompanied the temporary overthrow of the Taliban regime. The truth is that Afghans missed the Taliban almost before they were gone because of the postinvasion resurgence of banditry in rural Afghanistan.

  Believing that the Afghan war was over, the U.S.-led coalition began holding elections, rebuilding damaged structures and roads, and fielding Provincial Reconstruction Teams to build schools, inoculate children, and refurbish irrigation systems. In addition, hundreds of Western NGOs raced to get to Kabul and then to the countryside, thereby reinforcing a growing perception among Afghans that their country was again in the hands of non-Muslim conquerors. At this point we again run into one of those quaint and always-wrong assumptions that the West operates on when it intervenes in a Muslim country. Whether in Washington, London, or The Hague, the most basic assumption of nation-building is that if poor, illiterate, unhealthy Muslims are given potable water, schooling, prenatal care, and voting booths, they will abandon their faith, love Israel, demand visits by Salman Rushdie, and encourage their daughters to be feminist with a moral sense alien to most of the Islamic world—that is, they will try to become Europeans.

  This, of course, has never occurred in the wake of a Western intervention in a Muslim country. Islam invariably becomes more, not less, important to the inhabitants of an invaded Muslim country, and while improvements in water, disease resistance, and schoolbooks are appreciated, they are not religiously transforming. We simply end up with Muslims who are better educated, healthier, and more militantly Islamic. This has happened in countries (Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and several of the Balkan states) and in prison camps; in Guantanamo Bay, for example, we are building a truly dedicated and virulently anti-U.S. mujahedin battalion, the members of which will have the best-cared-for teeth in the Islamic world. But through it all, U.S. and Western leaders, the UN, and untold numbers of NGO spokespersons continue to sell shopworn lies to Western electorates—that nation-building will yield secularists who will desire only to live in peace with their Western conquerors. This type of thinking will ultimately prove calamitous for the United States and Europe because it assumes Muslims can be bribed from their faith by imposed material improvements and because it continues to ignore the source of Muslim animosity toward the West: the impact of our foreign policies and our increasing military presence in the Islamic world. In essence, Muslims see the secular Western mores brought to the poor and illiterate of the Islamic world as the baggage of infidel invaders, and it is more likely to produce Islamist enemies than postmodern, European-like atheistic hedonists.25 Ask yourself, for example, how much the comprehensive system of social-welfare benefits in the European Union has stopped or even slowed the growth of Islamist militancy across Europe.

  Waging the Afghan War, a Micro View: If Only U.S. Leaders Knew History!

  Since I resigned from the CIA in November 2004, the question I have been most often asked is “Why have we not captured or killed bin Laden?” My answer is seldom fully satisfactory to the questioner, as I try to explain that bin Laden takes advantage of mountainous terrain; stays with welcoming and protecting tribes that regard him as a guest and an Islamic hero; has nearly a quarter-century of experience living and fighting in the region; has a record of standing by the Afghans in their war against the USSR; and has scarce U.S. forces on the ground looking for him. I sometimes add that America is paying the price for its Republican and Democratic leaders’ decisions not to kill bin Laden when they had repeated chances to do so. This last comment, however, often leads to acrimony, as some questioners assume I am either a Clinton-basher or a Bush-detractor (I am both on their failure to defend America) and that such partisanship makes me a shill for one or the other party, or an intelligence officer trying to find political scapegoats to blame for the CIA’s failure to collect intelligence good enough to allow bin Laden to be eliminated.26

  The best answer to the question, however, would be that we have not captured or killed bin Laden and are losing the war in Afghanistan because U.S. leaders and generals here blithely ignored that country’s two-plus millennia of history. As noted, scholars and retired intelligence officers far smarter than I am have explained that Afghan history teaches that the country cannot be successfully invaded and controlled. In advice meant for the Bush administration and U.S. military leaders, the eminent British historian and great friend of the United States Sir John Keegan wrote on September 20, 2001, that Afghanistan is “unstable, fractious, and ultimately ungovernable” and urged Washington to steer well clear of a “general war and of policies designed to change the society or government in Afghanistan.”27 Sir John was not arguing that America should refrain from attacking Afghanistan—9/11 was an act of war—but rather that its focus should be on its only true objective: to quickly kill bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, and as many of their lieutenants and foot-soldiers as possible. History, Sir John said, held the key for the United States.

  Efforts to occupy and rule [Afghanistan] usually ended in disaster. But straightforward punitive expeditions…were successful on more than one occasion. It should be remembered that, in 1878, the British did indeed succeed in bringing the Afghans to heel [with a punitive expedition]. Lord Roberts’ march from “Kabul to Khandahar” was one of Victoria’s celebrated wars. The Russians, moreover, foolishly did not try to punish rogue Afghans, as Roberts did, but to rule the country. Since Afghanistan is ungovernable, the failure of their [1979–92] effort was predictable…America should not seek to change t
he regime, but simply to find and kill the terrorists. It should do so without pity.28

  Get in fast, kill faster, and get out still faster, was Sir John’s sage advice. And for anyone caring to read a bit of history, these recommendations were seconded by the very British general to whom Sir John referred, Lord Roberts of Khandahar. “It may not be very flattering to our amour propre,” Roberts wrote to his military and political superiors after the success of his 1878 punitive expedition, “but I feel sure that I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us the less they will dislike us. Should Russia in future years attempt to conquer Afghanistan, or invade India through it, we should have a better chance of attaching the Afghans to our interests if we avoid all interference with them in the meantime.”29

  Notwithstanding the ready availability of such sound advice from a distinguished pro-U.S. scholar, as well as a general who is perhaps the only infidel military practitioner who was ever successful in Afghanistan, U.S. leaders said, Thanks for the comments, but history does not pertain to America, and we will—like Sinatra—do it our way. They did, and they will suffer a calamitous loss in Afghanistan because of it.

  Beyond failing to read history, U.S. leaders have conducted the hunt for Osama bin Laden without giving any evidence that they are aware of what the U.S. government knew before the 2001 invasion about bin Laden and his wide-ranging ability to operate along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Killing bin Laden once he was cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora was necessary not only to punish the author of 9/11 but to prevent him from escaping into an area he knows extremely well. Based on information gathered since the late 1980s, U.S. leaders should have been aware that on arriving in Pakistan in 1979–80, bin Laden established close working relationships with Afghan Islamist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizbi Islami insurgent group30 and with the Pakistani Islamist leader Qazi Hussein Ahmed and his Jamaat-e Islami political party. Both of those organizations were then and are now active in the tribal regions. In those first Afghan-jihad years, bin Laden—probably with the help of the Saudi intelligence service under Prince Turki—also developed a relationship with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) and the Pakistani army, both of which facilitated his access to the border regions during the Afghan jihad. Bin Laden also had a basis for finding sanctuary in the Pashtun tribal lands straddling the Pakistan-Afghanistan border through the activities of an Islamist NGO called the Makhtab al-Khidimat, or Services Bureau, which he and Shaykh Abdullah Azzam founded in the early 1980s to assist the Afghan mujahedin. Since the 1980s the Makhtab and tens of other Muslim NGOs have been active in the tribal areas in both humanitarian and military affairs. Overall, bin Laden spent almost a decade before al-Qaeda was formed in 1988 developing working relationships with Pashtun tribal leaders on the Pakistani side of the border and with the galaxy of Islamic NGOs (most sponsored by Saudi Arabia or other states on the Arabian Peninsula) that first set up shop in Peshawar, then spread into Afghanistan, and over time established offices across Pakistan. Most of the latter remain active today, contributing to the ongoing Islamization of Pakistani society.

  On the Afghan side of the border, bin Laden began in about 1985 to cultivate ties with Yunis Khalis’s Hizbi Islami faction, which had earlier split with Hekmatyar, and this gave him access to Nangarhar province and the adjacent areas in Pakistan; like Hekmatyar, Khalis and his commanders would be instrumental in facilitating bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora in 2001. At the same time bin Laden built a durable relationship with Khalis’s top commander, Jalaluddin Haqqani, in the area around Khowst in Paktia province and the adjacent areas of Waziristan controlled by Haqqani’s Zadrani tribe. Indeed, bin Laden appears to have gained his first combat experience by leading a team of combat engineers in support of Haqqani’s fighters. The team used construction equipment brought to Afghanistan from the bin Laden family’s company in Saudi Arabia. It also appears that bin Laden made some of his first contacts with Kashmiri insurgents—fighters who later formed the Harakat ul-Ansar and Lashkar-e Tayba—at the Khowst-area training camps run by Haqqani. In addition, by the mid-1980s bin Laden enjoyed a strong relationship with the Islamic Union party of Abdur Rasul Sayyaf, who currently is a member of the Afghan parliament. Bin Laden first trained some of his Arab fighters at Sayyaf’s Sada Military Academy in northern Waziristan on the Pakistani side of the border, and he later built a camp of his own in an area controlled by Sayyaf’s group in the Jaji area of Paktia province.

  Finally, throughout the Afghan jihad bin Laden worked to ingratiate himself in Konar province and the area known as Nurestan, the northern-most Afghan sections of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Toward this end, he took advantage of Hekmatyar’s presence in the area and of the close ties Shaykh Azzam had with Ahmed Shah Masood’s forces and the Afghan Jamiat Islami party, to which Masood belonged. Bin Laden built on the latter by sending funding and military trainers and advisers to Masood; al-Qaeda’s first military commander would use the nom de guerre Abu Ubayda al-Panshjeri, a name he earned while serving with Masood and operating out of the Panshjer Valley. Bin Laden also took advantage of the work Saudi Salafi NGOs and missionary organizations had long been doing on both sides of the border in the Nurestan-Konar-Chitral (Pakistan) area, efforts that have made the area the most thoroughly Salafist-oriented region in Afghanistan. Bin Laden has said that he would have preferred to move in May 1997 from the Jalalabad area to Konar because of its remoteness and the prominence of Salafism there but decided that it was politically necessary to accept the Taliban’s invitation to move to Khandahar.

  Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, therefore, had plenty of friendly contacts and allies along most of the length of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border at the time of the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. And the Taliban, of course, is dominated by men drawn from the Pashtun tribes that live on both sides of the border and so had an even easier time securing assistance for their escape. This information was available to the U.S. government well before the invasion and shaped the analysis that the Intelligence Community provided at the time. The core of that assessment was simply that bin Laden’s al-Qaeda had a wide variety of exit points along the border, stretching from Konar to Baluchistan, and would find no shortage of tribes, political groups, and insurgent organizations on both sides of the border that would be ready to assist their evacuation from Afghanistan. In addition, al-Qaeda could count on the networks of Islamic NGOs in Karachi, Peshawar, Quetta, and Lahore to assist those cadres leaving Pakistan once they exited the tribal regions on the border. The assessment also stressed that Pakistan’s border forces were lightly armed militias that were drawn from the local tribes and were beholden to and took their orders from tribal leaders, not from political or military authorities in Islamabad. Because the Pashtun tribes along the border were pro-Taliban and pro–al-Qaeda, Pakistan’s border forces would pose no obstacle to the Islamists’ evacuation. Finally, the assessment stressed that the Pakistani military and intelligence services would be very inclined to assist Taliban forces evacuating Afghanistan and that it would be naïve to believe they would not likewise assist al-Qaeda fighters, notwithstanding President Musharraf’s pledge to the contrary. In this regard, leading Saudi figures probably pressed Musharraf not to place too much emphasis on border control. Some support for this conclusion can be found in the fact that the Pakistani military did not stop Qazi Hussein Ahmed’s Jamaat-e Islami and the Kashmiri Lashkhar-e Tayba—both supported by wealthy Saudi donors—from moving cadres from eastern Pakistan into the western border areas to assist fleeing Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

  Faced with this well-documented reality, the U.S. government proceeded to ignore the clear and absolute necessity of deploying sufficient U.S. and coalition forces to close the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and instead relied on Pakistan to do so.31 By seeking proxies to do its dirty work and by putting an unconscionably small number of troops in Afghanistan, Washington ensured that most al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters would escape with their arms to
fight another day. And then things got much worse.

  After bin Laden’s escape and a spasm of inconclusive U.S. military operations concluding at Shahi Kowt in March 2002,32 Washington’s Afghan policy, which had bipartisan support, was dominated by policies that could only have come from unreformed Cold War thinkers. Washington’s fixation on nation-states focused U.S. efforts in Afghanistan on trying to build a secular, pluralistic polity just as it did in Germany and Japan after World War II and the countries of Eastern Europe after the Soviet collapse. Washington installed Masood’s minority-groups-dominated Northern Alliance in Kabul as the governing regime and put at its head Hamid Karzai, a detribalized Pashtun who had spent most of the war against the USSR abroad. In so doing U.S. officials did not seem aware that they were undoing by force of infidel arms a three-plus-century tradition of Pashtun rule in Afghanistan; if they knew of this tradition, they ahistorically and foolishly concluded that the Afghan world started anew on the day of the U.S.-led invasion. The subsequent elections for parliament and president put more Pashtuns into the central government, but the Pashtun tribes perceived that the United States was keeping both the levers of military power and the revenue coffers firmly in the hands of the Afghan minorities—their historic ethnic enemies—and the Westernized Pashtun elite. The upshot was, ironically, that because Washington decided to remake Afghan society in America’s image rather than a two-millennia-old Afghan image, it ensured that not even a nominally effective nation-state—which is the best that has ever existed in Afghan history—would be created during the U.S. occupation. For the Pashtuns, the advent of elections and democracy in Afghanistan simply meant that their enemies would hold power and that therefore their only sensible option was to support the return of the Taliban and al-Qaeda to power and with them seek the reestablishment of their traditional political primacy by military means.