The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  AQI also recorded detailed battle plans for attacks that would take place over the course of three months; the organization maintained pay sheets for brigade-size units of hundreds of men; it recorded the detailed minutes of meetings, kept prisoner rosters, maintained death lists of enemies, and kept the records of vehicles in its motor pool. Most chillingly, AQI’s Anbar branch videotaped eighty executions, which were not used for propaganda purposes but simply as a record of having done the job. The tapes showed prisoners thrown from bridges with ropes tied around their necks.

  AQI was well financed, as was demonstrated by a 2005 letter from al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in which he requested a $100,000 transfer from al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate to al-Qaeda headquarters in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Al-Qaeda’s “border emirate,” on Iraq’s Syrian border, recorded income of $386,060 and spending of $173,200 in a six-month period during 2007.

  AQI also brought many tactical innovations to its terror campaign, for instance deploying two vehicles for double suicide attacks, as it did for the November 18, 2005, bombing of the Hamra hotel in Baghdad, which housed a number of Western journalists and security contractors. One suicide truck bomb breached the concrete blast wall protecting the hotel, followed quickly by a flatbed truck loaded with explosives that plowed though the breached area and then detonated, killing at least six.

  AQI’s suicide campaign increasingly used female suicide bombers, something that other Salafi jihadist groups had largely avoided. In one Iraqi province alone, Diyala, there were twenty-seven suicide bombings by women between 2007 and 2009. And the campaign also saw the innovation of husband-wife suicide teams. In November 2005, Muriel Degauque, a Belgian woman who worked as a baker’s assistant, and her husband were recruited by AQI from Belgium to carry out suicide attacks on American convoys in Iraq. Degauque became the first female European jihadist to launch a suicide operation anywhere. And only hours after Degauque’s attack, Sajida al-Rishawi, a thirty-five-year-old Iraqi woman also recruited by AQI, walked into a wedding reception at the Radisson hotel in Amman, dressed festively, as was the man accompanying her, Hussein Ali al-Samara, whom she had married just days earlier. Under their clothes they were both wearing explosive belts. According to the televised confession she later gave, when her belt failed to explode her husband pushed her out of the hotel and exploded his device.

  Al-Qaeda also deployed children as suicide bombers. In late August 2008, a fifteen-year-old girl wearing a suicide vest turned herself in to police in Baquba, in the region near Baghdad where Degauque had killed herself. And AQI exploited the mentally unstable, strapping bombs, for instance, to two women, one of whom had undergone psychiatric treatment for depression or schizophrenia, who together killed around one hundred in Baghdad’s central market on February 1, 2008.

  It was above all in the manufacture of homemade bombs, known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), that the insurgents made warp-speed innovations. The first IEDs were simple “passive” victim-operated trip devices. They then progressed to cell-phone-triggered devices; IED “daisy chains” of multiple charges rigged together; and bombs relying on infrared triggers. Another innovation was the use of chlorine in bombs, although the insurgents stopped this tactic in 2007, in part because the gas was not especially effective.

  The insurgents would often set off multiple IED explosions close together, the first one to cause casualties and the second to maim or kill first responders tending to the injured and dying, or those investigating the scene of the attack. Sergeant Brian Doyne, an Army bomb tech who had served in Afghanistan and was in Iraq on his first tour, responded to an IED targeting an American tank south of Tikrit on February 24, 2005. Doyne recalled: “At first look you really don’t know there’s anything else to this incident.” But as Doyne was gathering evidence at the scene of the bombing, a second and then a third bomb detonated, and at the age of twenty-six he lost both his left arm and left eye.

  In many ways it was a car- and truck-bomb war, since this was the delivery method for many of the most effective attacks of the insurgency. Typically the insurgents would use 155 mm Chinese shells left over from Saddam’s arsenals as the basic bomb, an explosive charge that came already wrapped in a steel case, which was guaranteed to produce plenty of high-velocity fragments. When the bomb went off those fragments would travel faster than the speed of sound, and if one hit a person’s head, it would likely burst it open.

  During World War II, 3 percent of American combat deaths were caused by mines or booby traps. By 1967, during the Vietnam War, the figure rose to 9 percent. In Iraq during the latter half of 2005, IEDs were the leading cause of American combat deaths; by October 2007 some one thousand American soldiers had been killed by homemade bombs. Some of those deaths might have been avoidable, but only one in ten of the some nine thousand military transport trucks in Iraq in 2004 were armored.

  Three years into the Iraq War, AQI seemed all but unstoppable. A classified Marine intelligence assessment dated August 17, 2006, found that AQI had become the de facto government of the western Iraqi province of Anbar, which is strategically important as it borders Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia and makes up about a third of the landmass of Iraq. The Marine report’s downbeat conclusion: AQI had become “an integral part of the social structure in western Iraq” and was so deeply entrenched in Anbar that it could not be defeated there with a “decapitating strike that would cripple the organization.” In addition, AQI controlled a good chunk of the exurban belts around Baghdad, the “Triangle of Death” to the south of the capital, and many of the towns north of it, up the Tigris River to the Syrian border. Thus AQI controlled territory larger than New England and maintained an iron grip on much of the Sunni population. And in a country with a stratospheric unemployment rate, AQI was paying its foot soldiers salaries and raking in millions of dollars from various oil smuggling scams, kidnapping rings, extortion schemes, and overseas donations. In other words, the Bush administration had presided over the rise of precisely what it had said was one of the key goals of the Iraq War to destroy: a safe haven for al-Qaeda in the heart of the Arab world.

  It was not only militants who were radicalized by the Iraq War. When the United States went to war against the Taliban in the wake of 9/11, it was understood by many around the world as a just war. The war in Iraq drained that reservoir of goodwill and dragged the United States into what many saw as a conflict with Muslims in general. The Iraq War was widely viewed by Muslims as a classic “defensive” jihad. This was not an arcane matter of Islamic jurisprudence, but in fact a key reason why thousands of Americans died in Iraq, and also the reason that the al-Qaeda movement was reinvigorated by the conflict. The Koran has two sets of justifications for holy war. One concerns a “defensive” jihad, when a Muslim land is under attack by non-Muslims, while another set of justifications concerns grounds for an “offensive” jihad, which countenances unprovoked attacks on infidels. Muslims consider the defensive justifications for jihad to be the most legitimate.

  The Bush-appointed Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, contradicted the findings of his own intelligence agencies when he testified to Congress in January 2007 that he was “not certain” that the Iraq War had been a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and stated, “I wouldn’t say there has been a widespread growth of Islamic extremism beyond Iraq. I really wouldn’t.”

  In fact, a study by New York University’s Center on Law and Security comparing the period after September 11 through the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 with the period from March 2003 through September 2006, found that the rate of deadly attacks by jihadists had actually increased sevenfold after the invasion. Even excluding terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, fatal attacks by jihadists in the rest of the world increased by more than one-third in the three years following the invasion of Iraq. The Iraq War, of course, did not cause all of this terrorism, but it certainly increased the tempo of jihadist attacks from London to Kabul to Amman.

  The adminis
tration’s focus on war in Iraq also undermined America’s place in the world in other ways. A poll taken a few months after the 2003 invasion found that Indonesians, Jordanians, Turks, and Moroccans all expressed more “confidence” that bin Laden would “do the right thing” than that President Bush would.

  On May 1, 2003, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush announced that “major combat operations” in Iraq had ended. The defeat of Saddam Hussein, he told the American people, was “a crucial advance in the campaign against terror.” For the umpteenth time Bush once again bracketed Saddam and 9/11: “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001 and still goes on.” The president went on to describe the 9/11 attacks, “the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble,” as if this had any bearing on the Iraq War. The president also made the definitive statement that Saddam was “an ally of al-Qaeda,” something that his own intelligence agencies had determined was not the case before the war.

  There is no question that the United States liberated Iraqis from Saddam’s demonic tyranny, but that argument was not what persuaded Americans that a preemptive war against the Iraqi dictator was in their best interests. They were hustled to war by the invocation of putative Iraqi mushroom clouds and the argument that there was a genuine and threatening Saddam–al-Qaeda–WMD nexus. The war against Saddam wasn’t conducted under the banner of the liberation of the Iraqi people, but rather under the banner of winning the war on terrorism. And by that standard it was a failure, giving the jihadist movement around the world a new battlefront and a new lease on life.

  What the Bush administration did in Iraq is what bin Laden could not have hoped for in his wildest dreams: America invaded an oil-rich Muslim nation in the Middle East, the very type of imperial adventure that bin Laden had long predicted was the United States’ long-term goal in the region; the United States deposed the secular socialist Saddam, whom bin Laden had long despised; the war ignited Sunni and Shia fundamentalist fervor in Iraq; and it provoked a “defensive” jihad that galvanized jihadi-minded Muslims around the world.

  Chapter 11

  Almost Losing the War the United States Thought It Had Won

  It is very important to keep our focus on this war in Afghanistan. It’s a classic military mistake to leave a partially defeated enemy on the battlefield in one form or another.

  —Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, at a Pentagon news

  conference on December 10, 2001, just days before Osama bin

  Laden disappeared from Tora Bora

  You have all the watches and we have all the time.

  —saying commonly attributed to the Taliban

  Kabul under the Taliban was simultaneously quiet, grim, and boring. Black-turbaned vigilantes roamed its streets like wraiths dispensing their ferocious brand of “Islamic” justice. Curfew started at 9 P.M. and by 8 P.M. the streets were deserted except for the young Taliban soldiers in turbans who stood at every traffic circle, carefully checking passing vehicles. Some wore kohl, a black eyeliner that gave them a look both feline and foreboding. The Taliban had banned pretty much any form of diversion and entertainment and had presided over the total collapse of the economy. A doctor earned only six dollars a month. Government ministries worked without computers, their offices unheated in the brutal Kabul winter. There were no banks and the treasury of the country consisted of a box from which the Taliban leader Mullah Omar distributed wads of cash; the Taliban had pulled Afghanistan back into the Middle Ages.

  In the years after the fall of the Taliban the capital slowly sprang to life. Kabuli men shaved off their beards while others celebrated by listening to music, flying kites, and watching television, pleasures that had long been denied them. The money-changers down by the Kabul River started doing a roaring trade and packed movie houses played Bollywood flicks. On Chicken Street, the decrepit Madison Avenue of the capital, a bookshop sold American and British newspapers. Other shops offered rich coats of fox fur and tiger skin. There were even traffic jams, the first time that the city had seen them since Afghanistan had been plunged into a series of wars more than two decades earlier. Refugees don’t return to places they don’t see having a real future and in 2002 alone almost two million Afghans came home from neighboring Pakistan and Iran. And there were millions of Afghan kids in school, including, of course, many girls.

  Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold in the south of the country, was now firmly in the grip of the United States. Kandahar airport, where once Taliban soldiers had shown off their anti-aircraft missiles to members of the international media, was now a vast U.S. base housing thousands of soldiers, as well as a twenty-four-hour coffee shop, a North Face clothing store, a day spa, and a PX the size of a Walmart. Next door, what had once been a base for bin Laden was now an American shooting range, while in downtown Kandahar, Mullah Omar’s gaudy compound was home to American Special Forces units.

  The relative absence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda throughout Afghanistan during 2003 meant fewer U.S. casualties. Forty-eight U.S. servicemen were killed there that year, the lowest number of American deaths for any year in the decade after the fall of the Taliban. And by mid-2005 the Afghan government had succeeded in disarming almost all of the private warlord-led militias that had plagued Afghanistan since the early 1990s. More than sixty thousand men were disarmed and tens of thousands of light and heavy weapons were handed in to the government, all part of a larger pattern of seeming progress in Afghanistan.

  During his first years in power, the new Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, seemed like a shrewd player of the kind of hardball politics that would have warmed the heart of Lyndon Johnson. Karzai forced Ismail Khan, the powerful governor of the western province of Herat, to resign, giving him instead the consolation prize of the ministry of energy. Uzbek strongman Abdul Rashid Dostum was given a job in 2003 with a fancy title but no real power at the ministry of defense. The next year Karzai dropped Mohammad Fahim from his post as minister of defense; the power-hungry general had awarded himself the title of Field Marshal after the fall of the Taliban. With these moves Karzai not only skillfully neutralized his most powerful rivals, men who could field their own private armies, but he also increased the authority of the central government.

  The presidential election held on October 9, 2004, was a success by any standard. Ten million Afghans registered to vote, far more than was initially projected, and almost half of those who signed up were women. The day of the election Afghans streamed to the polls. In conservative Pashtun areas such as Gardez—where weeks earlier insurgents had fired rockets at Karzai’s helicopter, and where even fully covered women are rarely seen on the streets—turnout was heavy. Groups of women clad in blue burqas besieged polling stations in Gardez, eager to vote.

  In the end, Karzai won 55 percent of the vote against more than a dozen other candidates in a reasonably fair election. Eight million Afghans voted, a more than 70 percent voter turnout, a rate not seen in any American presidential election since 1900. The election was the high watermark of Afghanistan’s recovery. An ABC/BBC poll taken in 2005 captured this well. Eighty-three percent of Afghans approved of President Karzai’s work and the same number expressed a favorable opinion of the United States, unheard-of in a Muslim nation. Eight in ten Afghans supported the presence of U.S. and other international forces on their soil, while only 8 percent supported the Taliban. Three out of four Afghans said their living conditions were better than they had been under the Taliban and roughly the same number felt that the country was heading in the right direction. Contrast that with Iraq, where ABC/BBC also polled in 2005 and found that less than one in five Iraqis supported international forces in their country and were evenly split on the question of whether their lives were better or worse following the American-led invasion.

  The generally positive feelings Afghans had about their future and the role that the international community was playing in their country—attitudes that laste
d for several years after the fall of the Taliban—were not entirely surprising when you considered what the country had suffered through during the previous grim two decades of its history: the occupation by the Soviets, the civil war that followed, and the rule of the Taliban, which brought a certain measure of security to the country but at the cost of forcing Afghans to live under an authoritarian, theocratic state incapable of delivering the most basic of services.

  Almost every Afghan had a member of their immediate family who had been killed or maimed in the wars of the previous decades, and the whole country seemed to be in the grip of post-traumatic stress disorder. No country in history had been subjected to a communist occupation, followed by warlordism, followed by rigid Islamist fundamentalist rule—approaches to politics and economics that individually could have crippled any country, but in combination were devastating to ordinary Afghans.

  There were many grim statistics one could enumerate about how damaged the country was after decades of war, but suffice to say that even several years after the United States had toppled the Taliban, the countries of Afghanistan and Burkino Faso, in central Africa, were running neck and neck on their abysmal quality-of-life indicators. Life expectancy for an Afghan was forty-two, while in neighboring Iran it was seventy. And despite the tens of billions of dollars in aid supposedly spent on Afghan reconstruction, the Kabul River, which snakes through the center of the city, was still clogged with garbage and raw sewage many years after the departure of the Taliban.

  One of the homes of Kabul’s ubiquitous street kids underlined the grinding poverty that was the lot of the vast majority of Afghans. Muzhgan, a slight, shy eleven-year-old girl, begged on the street and collected scraps of paper and cardboard for cooking fuel, while her fourteen-year-old sister Hamida worked in a textile factory. Their father, Abdullah, a day laborer, was unemployed throughout the long winter months when building construction stopped. Luckily, Muzhgan attended the Aschiana School, which provided her a hot lunch and some schooling, as it did for some six thousand other street kids in the Kabul area who would otherwise have gone hungry and uneducated. Together with her sister, Muzhgan brought in ten dollars a week, which was barely enough to cover the rent on the well-kept one-room home they shared with six other members of their family in one of Kabul’s burgeoning slums. Theirs was the lot of millions of the residents of Kabul.