Similarly, in 2007 a group of observant Muslims—a mix of Albanians, a Turk, and a Palestinian—living in southern New Jersey and angered by the Iraq War told a government informant they had a plan to kill soldiers stationed at the Fort Dix Army base. One of the group made an amateur mistake when he went to a Circuit City store and asked for a videotape to be transferred to DVD. On the tape a number of young men were shown shooting assault weapons and shouting “Allah Akbar!” during a January 2006 training session. An alarmed clerk at the store alerted his superiors; quickly the FBI became involved in the case and an informant was inserted inside the group.
One of the plotters, Serdar Tatar, knew the Fort Dix base well because he made deliveries there from his family’s pizza parlor. The Fort Dix plotters assembled a small armory of rifles and pistols and regularly conducted firearms training in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. They also went on paint-ball trips together, a not uncommon form of bonding for jihadist militants living in the West. The plotters also looked into purchasing an array of automatic weapons. And on August 11, 2006, the ringleader, Mohamad Shnewer, surveilled the base and told the government informant, “This is exactly what we are looking for. You hit four, five, six Humvees and light the whole place [up] and retreat completely without any losses.”
Another group that planned to attack U.S. military installations was led by Kevin Lamar James, an African-American convert to Islam who formed a group dedicated to holy war while he was jailed in California’s Folsom Prison during the late 1990s. James, who viewed his outfit as “Al-Qaeda in California,” cooked up a plan to recruit five people, in particular those without criminal records, to help him with his plans. One of his recruits had a job at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), which James thought could be useful. In notations he made of potential targets, James listed LAX, the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles, a U.S. Army base in Manhattan Beach, California, and “Army recruiting centers throughout the country.”
James’s crew planned to attack a U.S. military recruiting station in L.A. on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, as well as a synagogue a month later during Yom Kippur, the most solemn of Jewish holidays. Members of the group financed their activities by sticking up gas stations; their plans only came to light during the course of a routine investigation of a gas station robbery when police in Torrance, California, found documents that laid out the group’s plans for jihadist mayhem.
Between 9/11 and the summer of 2010 the government had charged or convicted at least twenty Americans and U.S. residents who had direct connections to al-Qaeda and were conspiring with the group to carry out some type of attack; another nine had attended one of al-Qaeda’s training camps but did not have an operational terrorist plan; and two dozen other militants aspired to help al-Qaeda in some other way but had failed to connect with the group because of their own incompetence or because they had been ensnared by a government informant.
Typical of the latter group was the posse of mostly Haitian-Americans who imagined they had sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2006 in Liberty City, Miami, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. After their arrests Attorney General Alberto Gonzales commented, “Homegrown terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda.” As far as the Liberty City group was concerned this was nonsense; the group of men, who were arrested for plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, smoked a great deal of marijuana and subscribed to the obscure beliefs of an outfit called the Moorish Science Temple; so nascent were their terrorist plans that they never even bothered to travel to Chicago. A government informant from Yemen who portrayed himself as an emissary from al-Qaeda had provided them with military-style boots, money, and weapons. It took putting the Liberty City crew on trial three times to get a jury to convict them.
The domestic terrorism cases during the latter years of Bush’s second term and Obama’s first years in office were a mix of purely “homegrown” militants of limited or no competence, like the Liberty City crew; jihadist lone wolves like Major Hasan and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, who nonetheless both were able to pull off deadly attacks against U.S. military targets; “self-starting” radicals with no connections to al-Qaeda but inspired by its ideas, like the Torrance, California, cell who posed a serious threat to Jewish and military targets and whose plans for mass mayhem were, crucially, not driven forward by an informant; homegrown militants opting to fight in an overseas jihad with an al-Qaeda affiliate, such as the Somali-American recruits to Al Shabab; militants like David Headley, who played an important operational role for the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is acting today with an increasingly al-Qaeda–like agenda; and finally those American citizens like Najibullah Zazi, who had managed to plug directly into al-Qaeda Central in Pakistan’s tribal regions.
Some of the men drawn to jihad in America in the decade since 9/11 looked like their largely disadvantaged and poorly integrated European Muslim counterparts. The Afghan-American al-Qaeda recruit, Najibullah Zazi, a high school dropout, earned his living as an airport shuttle bus driver; the Somali-American community in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis where some of the young men who volunteered to fight in Somalia had grown up is largely ghettoized. Family incomes there average less than fifteen thousand dollars a year and the unemployment rate is 17 percent. Bryant Neal Vinas, the kid from Long Island who volunteered for a suicide mission with al-Qaeda, skipped college, washed out of the U.S. Army, and later became a truck driver, a job he quit for good in 2007. Three of the five men in the Fort Dix cell were illegal immigrants who supported themselves with construction or delivery jobs.
Decades ago the anger and disappointments or thirst for adventure of some of these men might have been funneled into revolutionary anti-American movements like the Weather Underground or Black Panthers. Today, militant jihadism provides a similar outlet for the rage of disaffected young men, with its false promises of a total explication of the world, which is grafted onto a profound hatred for the West, in particular the United States.
This raises the question of what kind of exact threat to the homeland was posed by this cohort of militants, who ran the gamut from incompetent “homegrowns” to American citizens trained by al-Qaeda. If Zazi had managed to detonate his bombs on Manhattan’s subway lines he could have killed scores of Americans, as his plan looks similar to that of the al-Qaeda–directed bombers in London who killed fifty-two commuters in 2005 with the same kind of hydrogen-peroxide-based bombs that Zazi was assembling in his Denver motel room. But the Zazi case also represented the outer limit of al-Qaeda’s capabilities inside the United States in the decade after 9/11, indicating that al-Qaeda no longer posed a national security threat to the American homeland of the type that could launch a mass-casualty attack sufficiently large to reorient completely the country’s foreign policy as the 9/11 attacks had done, and instead represented a second-order threat similar to that posed by American domestic terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 when he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.
Some claimed the reason that al-Qaeda had not successfully attacked the United States again after 9/11 was that the group was waiting to match or top the attacks on Washington and New York. In 2006, Michael Scheuer, the former head of CIA’s bin Laden unit, asserted that “they are not interested in an attack that is the same size as the last one.” This proposition could not be readily tested, as the absence of a 9/11-scale attack on the United States was, in this view, supposedly just more evidence for the assertion that al-Qaeda was waiting to hit the States with a massive attack. Of course, al-Qaeda wanted to mount an attack on the States on the scale of 9/11 or larger but intent is not the same thing as capability. And the Zazi case forcefully demonstrated that al-Qaeda was not waiting to launch “the big one,” but was in fact content to get any kind of terrorist operation going in the United States, even a relatively small-bore attack.
A frequent question after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon was why did
n’t al-Qaeda mount an attack on a mall in some midwestern town, thus showing the American public its ability to attack in Anywheres-ville, USA? For the Muslims around the globe whom al-Qaeda is trying to influence, an attack on an obscure, unknown town in the Midwest would have little impact, which explains al-Qaeda’s continuing fixation on attacks on cities and targets well-known in the Islamic world. That explains Zazi’s travel to Manhattan from Colorado and al-Qaeda’s many attempts to bring down American passenger jets in the past decade. That is not, of course, to say that someone influenced by bin Laden’s ideas—but not part of al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates—might not attempt an attack in the future in some obscure American town, but the terrorist organization itself remains fixated on symbolic targets.
After 9/11, al-Qaeda did continue to pose a substantial threat to U.S. interests overseas and it demonstrated that it could still organize an attack that would kill hundreds of Americans, as was the plan during the “planes plot” of 2006 and the attempt to bring down Northwest Flight 253 three years later as it flew between Amsterdam and Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009.
No Western country was more threatened by al-Qaeda than the United Kingdom. Despite the relatively serious terror cases emerging in the United States as the Bush administration transitioned to that of Obama, America did not have a jihadist terrorism problem anywhere on the scale of Britain, where in 2009 British intelligence identified as many as two thousand citizens or residents who posed a “serious” threat to security, many of them linked to al-Qaeda, in a country with only a fifth of the population of the United States.
Why was the post-9/11 threat from al-Qaeda lower in the United States than it was in the United Kingdom? For all of President Bush’s obvious missteps, as he left office after his second term his defenders pointed out that he had “kept America safe” from attack (although that was obviously not the case on 9/11). Bush was not shy about taking credit for this. Al-Qaeda, he explained in 2006, had failed to strike the United States a second time “because our government has changed its policies—and given our military, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel the tools they need to fight this enemy and protect our people.” And a fair-minded observer might ask: Was it possible that, despite all he got wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush somehow managed to get this right?
There is little doubt that some of the measures the Bush administration and Congress took after 9/11 made Americans safer. First, the Patriot Act accomplished something quite important, which was to break down the legal wall that had been blocking the flow of information between the CIA and the FBI. Second, the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center led to various government agencies sharing data and analyzing it under one roof (although the center was the brainchild of the 9/11 Commission, whose establishment the Bush administration had fought against for more than a year). Third, the FBI moved from being largely a crime-solving organization to one more driven by intelligence-gathering, assigning two thousand agents to national security cases and hiring an additional two thousand intelligence analysts. This was supplemented by the creation of some one hundred Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country integrating the FBI with local law enforcement. Fourth, it became much harder for terrorists to get into the country thanks to no-fly lists. Before 9/11 the total number of suspected terrorists banned from air travel totaled just sixteen names; nine years later there were around four thousand.
One of the most dramatic instances of how heightened security measures prevented potential terrorists from arriving in the United States was the case of Raed al-Banna, a thirty-two-year-old Jordanian English-speaking lawyer who was denied entry at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on June 14, 2003, because border officials detected “multiple terrorist risk factors.” A year and a half later, on February 28, 2005, Banna conducted a suicide bombing in Hilla, Iraq, that killed 132 people; his fingerprints were found on the severed hand chained to the steering wheel of his bomb-filled truck.
Finally, cooperation between U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies was generally strong after September 11. For instance, al-Qaeda’s 2006 plot to bring down the seven American and Canadian airliners leaving Heathrow was disrupted by the joint work of U.S., British, and Pakistani intelligence services.
That said, a key reason the United States escaped a serious domestic terrorist attack had little to do with either the Bush or Obama administrations. In sharp contrast to sections of the Muslim populations in European countries such as Britain, the American Muslim community—generally a higher-skilled group of immigrants than their European counterparts—has overwhelmingly rejected the ideological virus of militant Islam. The “American Dream” has generally worked well for Muslims in the United States, who are both better educated and wealthier than the average American. More than a third of Muslim-Americans have a graduate degree or better, compared to less than one in ten of the population as a whole.
For European Muslims there is no analogous “British Dream,” “French Dream,” or, needless to say, “EU Dream.” None of this is to say that the limited job opportunities and segregation that are the lot of many European Muslims are the causes of terrorism in Europe—only that such conditions may create favorable circumstances in which al-Qaeda can recruit and feed into bin Laden’s master narrative that the infidel West is at war with Muslims in some shape or form all around the world. And in the absence of those conditions, militant Islam has never gained much of an American foothold—largely sparing the United States from the scourge of homegrown terrorism. This is fundamentally a testament to American pluralism, not any action of the American government.
Between 9/11 and the fall of 2010 only fourteen Americans were killed in jihadist terrorist attacks in the United States, something that would hardly have been predicable in the immediate aftermath of al-Qaeda’s assaults on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. However, in 2009 there were a record 43 jihadist terrorism cases against U.S. citizens and residents, indicating that while the American melting pot had successfully absorbed the vast majority of American Muslims, a tiny—but growing minority—were now embracing the ideology of violent jihad.
Chapter 15
Pakistan: The New Base
Only jihad can bring peace to the world.
—Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban in 2007
Carry out a thought experiment in which al-Qaeda was founded in Iran in the late 1980s and remains headquartered there today, while the Taliban, which was substantially aided by the Iranian government during the 1990s, is now headquartered in Iran. And then add to this toxic brew the notion that Iranian nuclear scientists met with Osama bin Laden before 9/11, and that still other senior officials in Iran’s nuclear program proliferated nuclear technology to rogue states such as Libya.
Needless to say, if all of this were the case then the United States would almost certainly have gone to war against Iran following 9/11. But, of course, none of this is true, and instead it was in Pakistan—nominally an ally of the United States—that al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders rebased themselves following their expulsion from Afghanistan in the winter of 2001. And it was veterans of Pakistan’s nuclear program who met with bin Laden in Kandahar in the months before 9/11 to discuss his pressing interest in atomic weapons, and it was A. Q. Khan, the dean of Pakistan’s nuclear program, who sold nuclear weapons technology to a rogues’ gallery that included Libya’s bizarre dictator Muammar Ghaddafi.
To understand why the Taliban and al-Qaeda rebased themselves in Pakistan following the fall of the Taliban regime it is helpful to recall a little of the country’s history. Pakistan’s on-and-off conflict with India, in particular over the disputed Kashmir region, was critical to the rise of the Pakistani military-jihadi complex. One-third of Kashmir is on the Pakistani side of the border and the rest is on the Indian side, but the majority of Kashmiris are Muslims and they wish to secede from predominantly Hindu India. India and Pakistan have fought two full-blown wars, in 1947 and 1965, over the region whose high mountains
and lakes suggestive of Switzerland belie its violent history.
Unable to best the much larger Indian army in battle, Pakistan’s government supported the rise of Kashmiri militant groups that could infiltrate Indian-held Kashmir and tie down tens of thousands of Indian soldiers. In doing so they fused the political dispute over Kashmir with Pakistan’s increasing religiosity and created a state-sanctioned jihad movement. Pakistan’s generals supplemented their policy of supporting Kashmir jihadi groups with a doctrine they termed “strategic depth,” which meant they wanted to ensure that they had a pliant, pro-Pakistani Afghan state on their western border in the event that India attacked over their eastern border. In practice, the doctrine of strategic depth led Pakistan to support militant Pashtun Islamists in Afghanistan like the Taliban, who the Pakistani government believed were most closely aligned with their own anti-Indian policies.
After their near-death experience in Afghanistan during the winter of 2001, members of al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies didn’t disintegrate: they simply moved across the border, a few hundred miles into Pakistan, comfortably out of range of the U.S. military. In a sense, al-Qaeda was just going home, since it was in the Pakistani city of Peshawar in 1988 that bin Laden had founded the group. The Taliban also felt at home in Pakistan. Indeed, several of their leaders had attended the Haqqania madrassa just outside of Peshawar, known as the Harvard of the Taliban.
In their first years on the run, many of al-Qaeda’s leaders avoided Pakistan’s remote tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, choosing instead to live in the anonymity of its teeming cities. In particular, Karachi, a barely governable megacity of fifteen million people on Pakistan’s southern coast, emerged after 9/11 as a hub of jihadist violence perpetrated by a toxic alliance between al-Qaeda, Kashmiri militant groups, and Sunni sectarian fanatics who had long been at war with Pakistan’s Shia minority. After 9/11, militants in Karachi bombed the Sheraton hotel, killing a group of French defense contractors; mounted three attacks on the U.S. consulate, one of which killed a dozen Pakistanis; and killed the American journalist Daniel Pearl.
The Longest War Page 32
