On February 18, 2008, Pakistanis went to the polls and overwhelmingly rejected Musharraf’s political party, installing a civilian government led by Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who then maneuvered Musharraf into retirement and himself assumed the presidency. To signal their contempt for Pakistan’s new civilian government, militants detonated a truck bomb outside Islamabad’s Marriott hotel, long a gathering place for the capital’s elite, killing about fifty-five on September 20, 2008, just hours after Zardari had made his first speech as president in the Parliament. The attack was likely masterminded by an al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan, Osama al-Kini. It was the deadliest terrorist atrocity in the capital’s history, turning the Marriott into a giant fireball, and may have been planned to take out the entire Pakistani cabinet, which reportedly had been scheduled to eat dinner there following Zardari’s speech. The venue for the dinner was changed at the last minute.
There were some promising signs that the Pakistani establishment began to wake up to its domestic militant threat in the waning days of the second Bush administration. In July 2008, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told reporters in Lahore, “Pakistan is not fighting the war of any other country. The war on terror is in our own interests.” When Gilani made this comment, the government had just launched an operation against Mangal Bagh, a former bus driver, who had turned himself into an Islamist capo in the Khyber tribal agency.
Despite years of hysterical analysis by the commentariat in the United States, as the Obama administration came into office Pakistan was not poised for an Islamist takeover similar to what had happened in the Shah’s Iran. There was no major religious figure around whom opposition to the Pakistani government could form, and the alliance of pro-Taliban parties known as the MMA, which had come to power in two of Pakistan’s four provinces in 2002 and had implemented some window-dressing measures such as banning the sale of alcohol to non-Muslims, did nothing to govern effectively. In the election in 2008 it was annihilated at the polls. Ordinary Pakistanis were also increasingly fed up with the tactics used by the militants. Between 2005 and 2008, Pakistani support for suicide attacks dropped from 33 percent to 5 percent.
Despite American criticisms that the Pakistanis could do more to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Pakistan’s officer class felt strongly that their country was doing as much as it could to combat the militants, citing as evidence the nearly 3,000 Pakistani soldiers and police who had died fighting the militants between 2001 and the start of 2010, a number that outweighed the some 1,500 NATO and U.S. forces who had died during the same time period fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan.
While there was no doubt that elements of the Pakistani army had done much to combat the militants, suspicions lingered about the military intelligence agency ISI, which had been instrumental both in the rise of the Taliban and in a number of the Kashmiri militant groups. The most dramatic evidence of the continued links that some in ISI maintained with terrorists was the suicide bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7, 2008, which killed more than fifty, the worst attack in the capital since the fall of the Taliban seven years earlier. Both the U.S. and Afghan governments said the bombing was aided by elements of the ISI, an assertion they based on intercepted phone calls between the plotters and phone numbers in Pakistan.
The Mumbai attacks in late November 2008 also underlined how little things had really changed inside Pakistan’s jihadi culture since 9/11. The Pakistani group that carried out the attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), had, as we have seen, been officially banned in January 2002, but that did not prevent it from organizing the sixty-hour attack on Mumbai, much of it carried live by news channels around the world. The series of assaults was often described as “India’s 9/11.” LeT dispatched ten militants armed with assault rifles and grenades from Karachi on a boat out to sea, where they hijacked an Indian trawler for the five-hundred-mile trip to the oceanfront city of Mumbai. Once in Mumbai the terrorists sprayed gunfire at passengers at the central train station, took hostages, and executed guests at two five-star hotels, the Taj and the Oberoi, and attacked residents of the Nariman House Jewish center, leaving some 170 dead in their wake.
The Mumbai attacks also demonstrated the fact that Pakistan had lost control of its jihadists, who sought to undermine the creeping rapprochement between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir issue, something that Musharraf had, to his credit, pushed forward in the years after LeT’s attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001. The steps toward peace between the two countries were small but symbolic—restored bus and flight services between them and joint cricket matches—but these “confidence building measures” were exactly the kinds of steps toward a deal over Kashmir that LeT and the Mumbai attackers sought to sabotage.
What was worrying as Pakistan headed into the second decade of the twenty-first century was the fact that its economy was in free fall, a plunge that had preceded the global financial crisis. And the high Pakistani fertility rate put the country on track to become the fifth-largest country in the world by 2015 with a population of almost 200 million. The combination of a sharply rising population with not enough jobs will likely play into the hands of the militants, who often recruit young men with time on their hands. Unless Pakistan can change that equation the plague of the militant groups will only continue.
Chapter 16
The Fall of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Rise of an Iraqi State
Just because you invade a country stupidly doesn’t mean you have to leave it stupidly.
—Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency adviser to
General David Petraeus
Security may be ten percent of the problem, or it may be ninety percent, but whichever it is, it’s the first ten percent or the first ninety percent. Without security, nothing else we do will last.
—John Paul Vann, one of the leading proponents of
counterinsurgency warfare during the Vietnam War
In the summer of 2006, Sterling Jensen, a lanky, intense twenty-eight-year-old Mormon with a talent for languages, wasn’t in Utah anymore; he was living in Ramadi, perhaps the most dangerous city in what was then perhaps the most dangerous country on the planet. Jensen had volunteered to go to Iraq to work as an interpreter with the U.S. military and was assigned to the 1st Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, which took over responsibility for Ramadi in June 2006.
But there wasn’t much of anything to take over. Al-Qaeda had made Ramadi the capital of its soon-to-be-named “Islamic State of Iraq,” presiding over Mogadishu levels of violence while banning smoking, music, and television. The group’s enforcers killed anyone who didn’t follow their dictates to the letter and local tribal sheikhs who did not bend to their will. In the city of some three hundred thousand there were no public services and only one hundred cops would dare to show up for work. Ramadi and much of the surrounding Anbar province had become a nightmarish mash-up of the Taliban and al-Qaeda’s appallingly violent leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose signature execution method was the televised beheading.
Even Saddam Hussein had left the staunchly independent Sunni tribes of Anbar pretty much to their own devices—mostly small-bore smuggling rackets—and the tribes did not appreciate al-Qaeda muscling into their turf, nor did they subscribe to its vision of a Taliban-style utopia. In the summer of 2006, masked Anbar tribesmen began a covert campaign of killing al-Qaeda members. Jensen remembers: “We were finding dead people with signs on them saying, ‘This was what you get when you work with al-Qaeda.’” American commanders were pleasantly surprised by the dead al-Qaeda foot soldiers who were showing up in the streets of Ramadi but were puzzled as to who might be engineering the killings.
On September 9, 2006, a number of Anbar tribal sheikhs went public with their plan to destroy al-Qaeda. They named their movement Sahwa, meaning “Awakening.” Colonel Sean MacFarland, the U.S. brigade commander in Ramadi, met with the Awakening leader, Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, and his tribal allies at the cha
rismatic sheikh’s house. Abdul Sattar had good reason to loathe al-Qaeda, members of which had killed his father and three of his brothers, acts that demanded revenge in the tribal code. And Abdul Sattar was also quietly making good money working as a contractor for the Americans.
Abdul Sattar announced to the crowd of some fifty sheikhs, “The coalition forces are friendly forces, not occupying forces!” Some of the tribal leaders seemed nervous about this idea but within six months many of them were also allied with the United States. This was quite a surprising development, as the insurgency then gripping Iraq was largely led by Sunni groups, and all the more so because the U.S. Marines, which had bases around Anbar, had assessed in a secret intelligence report just three weeks earlier that al-Qaeda effectively ruled the province.
But the Anbar Awakening sheikhs would soon change that. Jensen, who had learned Arabic in Syria and Morocco and was interpreting the exchanges between Colonel MacFarland and the Awakening tribal leaders, collared the American commander during a break in their first meeting with the sheikhs, saying, “I think this is awesome.” MacFarland enthused, “I love it.” Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, the leader of the Awakening, would later be rewarded with a meeting with President Bush during one of his surprise visits to Iraq, but al-Qaeda still managed to kill him on September 13, 2007. However, killing the leader of the Anbar Awakening did not do anything to halt the spread of the tribal rebellion against Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
The American-Sunni tribal alliance would help to bring a measure of stability to Iraq. AQI, which more than any other group had brought the country to the brink of complete collapse, was by 2008 on life support. It was something of an assisted suicide because AQI had forced on the Sunni population Taliban-style strictures, which had alienated its natural allies. And American commanders in Iraq followed Napoleon’s excellent advice, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” General George W. Casey, the ground commander in Iraq, had ordered Colonel MacFarland in 2006 not to take Ramadi in an aggressive assault, as the United States had done in neighboring Fallujah two years earlier.
At the same time that he was allying with the Anbar sheikhs, MacFarland started putting small American combat outposts into hot spots in Ramadi to live side by side with the population to protect them, a tactic that had worked the previous year in the anarchic city of Tal Afar in northern Iraq for Colonel H. R. McMaster, who is credited, among others, with developing the “clear, hold, and build” strategy that was to become a commonplace of American counterinsurgency operations. In Tal Afar, McMaster had established twenty-nine small outposts in the city to separate the Sunnis and Shia then waging a ghastly war in which headless corpses would be left to rot on the streets.
This was the exact opposite of the U.S. strategy of the time, which was to hand over ever more control to the Iraqi army and police and withdraw the bulk of American soldiers to massive (misnamed) “Forward Operating Bases,” known as FOBs. Camp Victory, the main U.S. base in Baghdad, housed an astonishing fifty thousand soldiers. This strategy gave birth to the wonderful neologism fobbits to describe the FOB dwellers, who enjoyed Starbucks-style coffee, giant flat-screen TVs, PXs that channeled Walmart and Target, and football-field-sized DFACs (dining facilities) groaning with enough food to feed the populations of small African countries. From the FOBs out would sally armored Humvee patrols, which had little or no understanding of the country they were supposedly pacifying.
By contrast, the on-the-ground intelligence provided by Sunni tribesmen to American forces living “among the population” in Ramadi during the winter of 2006 meant that more and more IED caches were being found, as well as the hiding places of al-Qaeda cells in Anbar’s western deserts. The tribes also began providing recruits for the police, who now showed up for work in the thousands. As neighborhoods became safer, MacFarland poured Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) funds into projects such as building schools, and a virtuous circle of rising security brought more jobs and reconstruction to Ramadi. By the summer of 2008 the city looked just like any other scrappy town in the Middle East with small shops open for business along its main roads. By then the surrounding Anbar province was also one of the safest regions in the country.
At the height of its power, on February 22, 2006, AQI bombed the Golden Mosque at Samarra, one of the most important pilgrimage sites for the Shia, turning the already nasty Iraqi sectarian conflict into a full-blown civil war. 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. And in a country with an unemployment rate of something like 50 percent, AQI was paying its foot soldiers salaries and raking in money from various oil-smuggling scams, kidnapping rings, extortion schemes, and overseas donations.
In late April 2006, as AQI appeared to be unstoppable, the group’s shadowy leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, showed the world his face for the first time in a video posted to jihadist websites. Zarqawi was taped pontificating to a group of hooded acolytes and shooting off a machine gun in the desert, but within a couple of months he was dead.
The breakthrough that nailed Zarqawi was the patient (noncoercive) interrogation of a Sunni insurgent who eventually told his American interrogators that the best way to find the al-Qaeda leader was by tracking his “spiritual advisor,” a man who would change cars several times before meeting with Zarqawi and who would invariably use a blue car just before the meeting took place. That information was enough to track Zarqawi to a remote desert compound, where he was killed with two five-hundred-pound bombs dropped from an F-16 on June 7, 2006.
In much of Shia Iraq there was celebratory gunfire, feasting, and cheers at the news of Zarqawi’s death. And privately Osama bin Laden might not have mourned Zarqawi’s death as excessively as he would publicly profess when he said on an audiotape released two weeks later, “The Muslim nation was shocked by the death of its courageous knight, the lion of jihad.” The thuggish Jordanian had proved difficult to control and had even managed the neat trick of tarnishing the al-Qaeda brand with his excessive violence.
Despite Zarqawi’s death, the violence in Iraq continued to spiral upward throughout the remainder of 2006, reaching a peak around the New Year of 2007. The civil war that Zarqawi had helped to precipitate was so much larger than any one man. Air Force interrogator Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym), who had played a critical role in eliciting the information from the detainee that had led to locating Zarqawi, recalls, “It was obvious that just because Zarqawi was killed that Sunnis weren’t going to drop their arms and go, ‘OK, you beat us.’ And we could have killed every foreigner in Iraq and it wouldn’t have solved the insurgency.”
As its stock fell precipitously with Iraq’s Sunni population, al-Qaeda recognized belatedly that it needed to put a more Iraqi face on the group. Zarqawi was himself, of course, a Jordanian, and four months after his death AQI changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and appointed an Iraqi, Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, to be its nominal boss. But with the death of Zarqawi, AQI no longer had a charismatic leader.
A cache of al-Qaeda documents discovered in the fall of 2007 by U.S. forces in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar provided the best account of what was then going on inside al-Qaeda’s operation. One of the Sinjar documents was an unsigned oath of allegiance to the group that was meant to be signed by tribal leaders in Diyala province; it well illustrated AQI’s tone-deaf approach to local politics. The leaders had to swear to reject tribal rules, not something that any self-respecting Sunni tribal leader could possibly agree to.
By early 2008 the foreign-fighter flow into Iraq had declined from around 120 a month to around forty-five a month, which was a key to peace, since roughly half of these foreign fighters were volunteers for suicide missions. And a year later the foreign-fighter flow had slowed to a dribble of only five or six a month. As a result AQI defaulted to increasingly using women as suicide attackers. Needle
ss to say, this did little for its poor image in Iraq.
AQI was also demoralized; in November 2007 American soldiers raided a house in northern Iraq and found the diary of an al-Qaeda leader in the area, a man who called himself Abu Tariq, “the emir of al-Layin and al Mashadah sectors.” The diary lamented that his force, which had once been six hundred strong, was down to twenty men. Abu Tariq blamed local Sunni tribes for “changing course” and bringing about his group’s present travails. Similarly, a letter found by the U.S. military around the same time and written by an unnamed emir of AQI referred to the situation in Anbar province in western Iraq as being “an exceptional crisis.” The letter also cited the difficulties foreign fighters eager to participate in suicide operations were having, forced to wait for months in the western desert regions of Iraq with nothing to do because the organization was under such pressure.
By early 2008, Al-Qaeda in Iraq was a wounded organization. U.S. military officials said that by then they had killed 2,400 suspected members of AQI and captured 8,800, whittling the group’s strength down to 3,500. The situation became so grave for AQI that in October 2007, bin Laden accused his Iraqi affiliate of fanaticism and exhorted the Sunni insurgent groups to unite. “Beware of division.… The Muslim world is waiting for you to gather under one banner,” he said.
The Longest War Page 35
