Concluding the War, Learning the Lessons of Defeat
For the United States, the war in Afghanistan has been lost. By failing to recognize that the only achievable U.S. mission in Afghanistan was to destroy the Taliban and al-Qaeda and their leaders and get out, Washington is now faced with fighting a protracted and growing insurgency. The only upside of this coming defeat is that it is a debacle of our own making. We are not being defeated by our enemies; we are in the midst of defeating ourselves. It makes one believe, or at least hope, that there is still some validity to Winston Churchill’s maxim that God always protects drunks and the United States of America.
How did we manufacture this defeat? By deciding not to continue the military campaign to the point that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were annihilated. By incorrectly assuming that a six-month demonstration of our massive military power had permanently cowed the enemy and that we safely could move on to reconstruction activities aimed at bringing pluralistic democracy and secularism to an ethnically divided and intensely tribal Islamic land. By removing the tough but effective law-and-order regime the Taliban had established over most of Afghanistan and then failing utterly to replace it with a regime as good, causing increasing numbers of Afghans to yearn for the Taliban’s harsh but effective security system. Most especially, by believing that the lessons of history did not apply to the United States. We let the enemy escape across open borders; we concluded that winning the Afghan cities equated to winning the war; we believed that Afghans wanted representative government more than security for their families; we stayed six-plus years in a country where a foreigner’s welcome begins to decay the day he arrives; we believed we could do with a small, multinational force of 50,000 troops and civility what the Red Army could not do with 120,000 troops and the utmost barbarity; and we thought that by establishing a minority-dominated semisecular, pro-Indian government, we would neither threaten the identity nor raise the ire of the Pashtun tribes nor endanger Pakistan’s national security.33
In view of the willful historical ignorance apparent in Washington’s Afghan strategy and operations, it is important that, after the U.S.-led coalition is defeated in Afghanistan, Americans not let their political and military leaders off the hook of responsibility. These leaders are already beginning to claim—and the claims will grow shriller over time—that the coming U.S. defeat is the result of the unexpected consequences flowing from well-intended U.S. actions. Charity demands that we give U.S. leaders the benefit of the doubt when they claim that they did not intend the consequences that are causing us to lose the war. But we must not allow them to evade culpability for their historical ignorance. Unintended consequences are not always unpredictable consequences, and in Afghanistan (as well as in Iraq) the disasters that have befallen America since 2001 were predictable in the context of historical experience. For the continuing utility of learning history and the predictability of what the United States is now experiencing in Afghanistan, reflect on the following passage from the eminent classicist Frank L. Holt. Such reflection surely will discredit the official alibi of unintended consequences. “Alexander’s reputation as a military genius, though richly deserved,” Holt writes of a time two millennia past,
cannot mask some of the miscalculations he pioneered in Bactria [the Greek name for Afghanistan]…Alexander’s soldiers had been trained to wage and win major battles, but the king now shifted them into new and uncomfortable roles. One minute they were asked to kill with ruthless and indiscriminate intensity, the next they were expected to show deference to survivors…
The mythical Hydra provides a defining image of Afghan warfare through the years. The ability of the foe to regenerate itself demoralizes even the most self-assured invaders. This kind of hydra-like warfare exacts a heavy toll on everyone, and its effects are psychological as well as physical. The smashing victories of Alexander’s troops against the armies of Darius had occurred years earlier, closer to home…In those campaigns the veterans with Alexander had grown accustomed to a comforting expectation: when they fought someone, they absolutely prevailed, and the defeated enemy always stayed defeated. This arrogance of power, as so often since, lost its punch in Afghanistan. The place and its people took no heed of recent history, ignored the strength and sophisticated modernity of the invaders, and cared little for the time-honored conventions of treaties and truces. They fled like bandits if confronted with overwhelming force, then attacked whenever the odds were better. You could never tell if you were winning the war or not.34
CHAPTER 4
Iraq—America Bled White by History Unlearned
A too great inattention to past occurrences retards and bewilders our judgment in every thing; while on the contrary, by comparing what is past with what is present, we frequently hit on the true character of both, and become wise with very little trouble.
Thomas Paine, 1777
He who is the author of war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.
Thomas Paine, 1777
The hen is the wisest of all the animal creation, because she never cackles until after the egg is laid.
Abraham Lincoln, 1863
As Thomas Paine noted in his more lucid moment above, history is important. This lesson was drilled into me as an undergraduate by Jesuit and lay professors in the department of history at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. Those good men taught, and I accepted, that we get wisdom and an ability to realistically analyze our lives and our world from studying history. When I began researching my first book on bin Laden, my hold on the general history of the Islamic world was pretty superficial and needed to be greatly expanded. I hope it has improved, although some would argue it has regressed. Be that as it may, I initially turned to the works of Bernard Lewis, a scholar regularly ranked as the West’s finest interpreter and analyst of the Muslim world. And indeed Dr. Lewis did not disappoint; his work is voluminous, imaginative, detailed, and provocative. In an article he published in November 1998, for example, I learned a fact about which I was theretofore at best dimly aware. I was educated in an era that left many Americans believing that Jerusalem was the most important holy site for both Muslims and Jews, but Dr. Lewis corrected that perception, writing that while Arabia, Iraq, and Jerusalem were the most sacred sites in Islam, Westerners were not familiar with “the sequence and emphasis” Muslims attached to the three sites. “For Muslims, as we in the West sometimes tend to forget but those familiar with Islamic history and literature know,” Dr. Lewis explained,
the holy land par excellence is Arabia—Mecca, where the Prophet was born; Medina, where he established the new Muslim state; and the Hijaz, whose people were the first to rally to the new faith and become its standard bearers. Muhammad lived and died in Arabia, as did the Rashidun caliphs, his immediate successors at the head of the Islamic community. Thereafter, except for a brief interlude in Syria, the center of the Islamic world and the scene of its major achievements was Iraq, the seat of the caliphate for half a millennium. For Muslims, no piece of land once added to the realm of Islam can ever be finally renounced, but none compares in significance with Arabia and Iraq.1
I thus learned from Dr. Lewis the overwhelming historical and religious importance of Iraq in the Islamic worldview. Later, the ever-reliable guide Osama bin Laden buttressed my understanding through his many statements and interviews on the subject of Iraq’s vital importance to Islam.2 In an indirect way, Americans and Westerners also were warned about the dangers of occupying Iraq by the intensely negative Muslim reaction to the 1990 introduction of U.S.-led military forces into the Arabian Peninsula. That event was the last straw for bin Laden and to this day is a red flag for Islamists worldwide.3 If the West’s perceived violation of what Lewis called Arabia—now the multiple nation-states on the Arabian Peninsula—caused a state of war between the United States and the Islamist forces led by bin Laden, was it not reasonable to assume that the invasion and occupation of Iraq—second in importance only to
Arabia—might well also cause a bloody fracas?
Nearly five years after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it seems clear that not only did U.S. political and military leaders fail to read and understand Islamic history before they decided to invade Iraq, but also may not yet have done so. Writing in The New York Times on October 18, 2006, the Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein discussed his several-month examination of U.S. counterterrorism capabilities and the extent to which official Washington understands America’s Islamist enemies. One of Mr. Stein’s basic questions for U.S. officials was “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” Why was he asking? Explaining that this was not a “gotcha question” meant to embarrass the official being interviewed, and that he was not seeking detailed descriptions of the sects’ theological differences, Stein said he was only looking for an answer that provided the basics: “Who’s on what side today and what does each want?” Stein thought the following statement of reality justified an expectation that U.S. officialdom ought to know the rudiments of an enemy that currently is beating America in two insurgencies.
The 1,400-year Shia-Shiite rivalry playing out in Baghdad’s streets raises the specter of a breakup of Iraq into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states. A complete collapse in Iraq could provide a haven for al-Qaeda operatives within striking distance of Israel, even Europe. And the nature of the threat from Iran, a potential nuclear power with protégés in the Gulf States, northern Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, is entirely different from that of al-Qaeda.4
Certainly this was a fair enough reason to ask the Shia-or-Sunni question. And what were the results? Per Mr. Stein, “So far most Americans I have interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not only intelligence and law-enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing U.S. spy agencies.”5 Stein relates that the FBI is a hub of ignorance about Islam (no surprise there—senior FBI officers have long been resolutely proud of being clueless about all things Muslim), but the breadth of ignorance found by Stein betrays several factors that are more troubling than simple ignorance. First, the thousands of volumes about Islamic history, theology, and politics that the federal government bought after 9/11 appear to have not been cracked open and studied by many of America’s civil servants. The saying “That’s history, why waste time on it?” still seems to hold sway across the bureaucracy. Worse, the fact that these volumes lay unread suggests that U.S. officialdom still does not take the threat posed by nonstate actors—like al-Qaeda, its allies, and the Iraqi resistance—as seriously as it does the threat from nation-states. From my own experience, I never heard a senior U.S. official say that “I deal with the Soviet Union, but I do not need to know anything about Marx, Engels, Lenin, the Soviet order-of-battle, or Communist ideology.” The USSR was a traditional nation-state, and officials, academics, and pundits were eager to learn all they could about its lineage, philosophy, motivations, armaments, and methods of operation. That Stein has found such enduring, post-9/11 ignorance augurs a continued series of bleedings and lethal surprises for America at the hands of Islamist nonstate actors. And in another irony for Americans, their leaders have abandoned one of the few Cold War behaviors that should have been properly retained—the ethos of knowing your enemy.
The reality is that if U.S. leaders had done their Islamic homework prior to invading Iraq, they would have known what a huge hornet’s nest they were ordering the U.S. military to kick over. Perhaps the Bush team might even have decided not to invade once it had digested the stark, near-certainty of disaster that such a review of history would have exposed. “What ifs,” of course, are fascinating to debate, but ultimately we have to deal with reality as it is, not as it might have been. That fact does not, however, diminish the importance of a government knowing the historical context in which its actions are about to be taken. Representative Terry Everett (R-Alabama), the vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence, eloquently noted the importance of historical context after Mr. Stein explained to him the differences between Shiites and Sunnis. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” Mr. Everett told Stein with a truly disarming candidness, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing out there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but in the whole area.”6
Stein’s experience certainly was shared by many intelligence officers over the past several decades. In my own experience, I encountered U.S. senators who were surprised to learn that Muslims were going to govern Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew in 1989, and we all saw and heard leading neoconservatives, like Richard Perle and R. James Woolsey, argue that so deep was the hatred of Sunnis and Shias for America that they had set aside sectarian differences and were cooperating in attacks against the United States. One wonders if those gentlemen and their jejune neoconservative colleagues have noticed how closely Shias and Sunnis are cooperating in the wake of the Iraq war that the neocons wanted and that their country is now losing. Taken together, the experiences that Mr. Stein and many U.S. intelligence officers have had with Islam-ignorant U.S. officials underscore the validity of the judgment of the Atlantic’s Robert D. Kaplan that “the greater the disregard of history, the greater the delusions regarding the future.”7 Such is not the stuff from which an effective U.S. national security policy can be made.
Going to War
In discussing America’s war in Iraq, I must make two personal points. First, I am not an expert on Saddam Hussein, his regime, or the nation of Iraq and its people. My knowledge of Saddam and Iraq derives from having worked on identifying the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s responsibility for trying to murder the first president Bush in 1993 and a much longer stint (1986–2004) watching how Saddam reacted to and dealt with Sunni extremist leaders and groups. I am therefore not an expert on the threat that Saddam’s Iraq posed to the United States in the spring of 2003, but I am absolutely confident that there was a near-zero threat from the terrorism subset of the overall Iraqi threat. Most of the public’s perception of a terrorist threat from Iraq came from a tendency among U.S. officials and media to conflate terrorist threats to Israel and those to America, and the prolonged and fortunately unsuccessful attempt by neoconservatives and their echoes at The Weekly Standard—especially Stephen Hayes8—to persuade Americans that there was a close working relationship between Saddam’s Iraq and bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
The second point is that it has always seemed unfair to me to accuse the George W. Bush administration of “lying” about the existence of a WMD arsenal in Iraq at the time of the 2003 invasion. In 2002–3 most of the world’s countries, not just the United States, believed that Saddam had WMD; the disagreement was over what should be done about them—more inspections or direct military action. The Bush team’s mistake, it seems to me, is that it waited far too long before confessing that there were no mass-destruction weapons in Iraq; but again, the entire world anticipated finding such weapons there. Had I been asked about the threat from Iraq, I would have argued that even if Saddam had such weapons, he had no means of getting them to North America; again, Saddam’s potential WMD threat to his Arab neighbors and Israel was equated—with the indispensable and deceitful neoconservative assistance—with a WMD threat to America. It also is a near certainty that Saddam never would have used WMD against Israel or Saudi Arabia, knowing that he would earn a catastrophic nuclear response from the former and devastating retaliation from the U.S. protectors of the latter. Saddam, moreover, would never have given WMD—weapons or technology—to al-Qaeda or other Islamists because he knew that the Islamists hated him nearly as much as they did Washington and Tel Aviv. In short, Washington failed to use the one Cold War strategy that was perfectly applicable to Iraq: it was a nation-state that could be neutered by continuing to apply the Cold War doctrine of containment. The Bush administration now has a second chance to use containment vis-à-vis the more dangerous but still emine
ntly containable Iran, another state that may pose a threat to Israel while posing none to the United States, unless provoked.9 We will see if they are smart enough to do so.
The real criticism of the Iraq war, it seems to me, should focus on the Bush administration’s decision to start a second war before it had come anywhere close to annihilating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. By the spring of 2002 the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) realized that the administration had decided to go to war with Iraq. There was no announcement to that effect, of course, but the intent was evident as the flow of officers sent to beef up the post-9/11 war against al-Qaeda ended and experienced Arabic-speaking officers were reassigned from CTC to Middle East posts and to the task forces at CIA headquarters charged with preparing for the Iraq war. While this shift was occurring, the pace of operations against al-Qaeda continued to accelerate, and successful captures of senior al-Qaeda leaders and their associates kept accumulating. Those involved with attacking al-Qaeda—unlike the White House, the Joint Chiefs, and both parties in Congress—recognized that the war in Afghanistan was just beginning and that it was premature to draw human resources away from the effort against al-Qaeda. The White House and Congress should also have recognized that it was daft to start a second infidels-attack-Islam war that would ensure that the first would be irretrievably lost, and that would speed the transformation of bin Laden and al-Qaeda from a man and an organization into a philosophy and a worldwide movement.
Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Page 16
