The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  Another positive development was the emergence of Iraqi politics conducted by parliamentary maneuver rather than with rockets. A legitimate criticism of the security gains in Iraq was that they weren’t matched by concomitant political progress. But a provincial election law was finally passed in September 2008 and provincial elections followed on January 31, 2009. The election went largely peacefully and Iraqis voted for more nationalist, secular-leaning parties over the religious parties that had won in the elections of 2005.

  The long-contentious Status of Forces Agreement that was finally hammered out between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government and passed by the Iraqi parliament in late November 2008 was another sign of deepening political maturity. This agreement provided a framework for the incoming Obama administration to plan the withdrawal of all American soldiers by the end of 2011. The Bush administration did not get caveats inserted into the agreement that would have prolonged the occupation potentially indefinitely; Iraqi politicians who voted for the agreement had a date certain for a complete American withdrawal, and the Iranians who were, in effect, another partner in the negotiations, because of the influence they wielded over Iraq’s Shia parties, secured a guarantee that Iraq would not be used by American forces for offensive operations against other countries.

  Emma Sky, the political adviser to the U.S. military in Iraq, points out that the agreement had a key clause that U.S. forces had to be out of the cities by June 2009: “Now making us do that was huge, because without that clause we would have always found a reason that we couldn’t leave the cities. Violence would never be down to a good enough level to justify it.” On June 30 the last American units pulled out of Iraq’s cities. Sky remembers the “Sovereignty Day” celebrations and watching the Iraqi Security Forces march by, and thinking, “I just never believed we would get to this day. It was really, really huge. For them, to actually see that we had no long-term interest in occupying their country; that this was genuine.”

  More than half a decade after Casey, Abizaid, and Rumsfeld had first decided that their most important goal in Iraq was to put a more Iraqi face on the American occupation, it was now finally realized with the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq’s cities. But to get there had required a wholesale change in U.S. strategy; putting at first an even more American face on the occupation by putting more GI boots on the ground in some of Iraq’s toughest neighborhoods, which helped to stanch the bloodbath that had engulfed the country.

  None of these positive developments was to suggest that the Iraq War was somehow post facto worth the blood and treasure consumed—more than 4,500 American soldiers dead and thirty thousand wounded; at least one hundred thousand Iraqis killed; costs to U.S. taxpayers that will rise above a trillion dollars; and jihadist terrorist attacks that had increased around the world sevenfold in the three years following the 2003 invasion.

  It bears recalling that almost none of the goals of the war as described by proponents of overthrowing Saddam were achieved. An alliance between Saddam and al-Qaeda wasn’t interrupted because there wasn’t one, according to any number of studies, including one by the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Pentagon’s own internal think tank. There was no democratic domino effect around the Middle East; quite the opposite: the authoritarian regimes became more firmly entrenched. Peace did not come to Israel, despite the prediction of the well-known academic Fouad Ajami, writing before the war in Foreign Affairs that the road to Jerusalem went through Baghdad. Nor did the war pay for itself, as posited by Paul Wolfowitz, who told Congress in 2003 that oil revenues “could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We’re dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” Quite the reverse: Iraq was a giant money sink for the American economy. The supposed threat to the United States from Saddam wasn’t ended because there wasn’t one to begin with. And in his place arose a Shia-dominated Arab state, the first in modern history. Meanwhile, American prestige overseas evaporated, while the U.S. military was stretched to the breaking point.

  And Al-Qaeda in Iraq might still regain a role despite its much weakened state today. In 2008 there was a sense that al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate was on the verge of defeat. The American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, said, “You are not going to hear me say that al-Qaeda is defeated, but they’ve never been closer to defeat than they are now.” Al-Qaeda had by then certainly lost the ability to control large swaths of the country and a good chunk of the Sunni population as it had two years earlier, but the group proved surprisingly resilient, as demonstrated by the fact that it pulled off a number of bombings in Baghdad in 2010 that killed hundreds.

  The jury is, in short, still out or whether the Iraq War was the United States’ most spectacular foreign policy blunder of the past several decades, or whether, out of the wreckage, something resembling a coherent Iraq will eventually arise. Petraeus famously asked Rick Atkinson, the Washington Post reporter who was embedded with him during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, “Tell me how this ends?” That question remains a good one today. Petraeus’s successor as the top commander in Iraq, General Raymond Odierno, says that the Iraqi government elected in 2010 will be the key to answer that question. “They will really be the government that decides whether Iraq continues to move towards a more open economy, and move towards a more democratic process, or do they decide to move back towards a more closed economy, back to an Islamic state or a dictatorship.… From what I’m seeing, they’re going to go towards a democratic process and an open economy, but we’ll see.”

  For President Bush, the surge was the single most consequential decision of his presidency, a decision that he made against the advice of almost the entire leadership of the military and in the face of opposition from much of the foreign policy establishment, and at a time when his favorability ratings with the American people were in the tank, hovering around 30 percent in most polls. The military historian Eliot Cohen says, “There’s only one guy who deserves the credit. And that’s George W. Bush. He deserves all the blame for the other stuff, too. He deserves the blame, but he deserves the credit … for supporting the surge decision, but also the Petraeus decision, and both are very important.”

  In part because of the surge, as well as the other factors considered in this chapter, al-Qaeda suffered a strategic defeat in Iraq. For the Arab leaders of al-Qaeda, the large role their Iraqi affiliate played during the Iraq War was a source of considerable pride, as was reflected in the several tapes issued by bin Laden in which he crowed about the successes of Iraq’s insurgents against American forces. But after Al-Qaeda in Iraq was put on the run in 2007, bin Laden was largely silent on the issue of Iraq. And the declining fortunes of Al-Qaeda in Iraq were, in fact, a harbinger of the decline of the larger al-Qaeda organization and movement.

  Chapter 17

  The Jihad Within

  Striking the World Trade Center, I consider that to be a criminal act.

  —Abdullah Anas to Al Arabiya television in 2005; Anas had

  once been bin Laden’s companion-in-arms during

  the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan

  Will al-Qaeda eventually be condemned to what President Bush once eloquently termed “history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies”? To a large degree that depends not on the West but on the Islamic world, for it is Muslims who are making the choices that are leading to the marginalization of both al-Qaeda and the ideology of “bin Ladenism” that it has spawned. Indeed, it is mainstream Islam itself that poses the largest ideological threat to al-Qaeda.

  Despite a widespread view in the West that Muslim religious leaders had not done enough to condemn the 9/11 attacks, within days of the assaults Mohamed Tantawi, the grand mufti of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the foremost center of Sunni learning, denounced them saying “attacking innocent people is not courageous, it is stupid and will be punished on the day of judgment.” Around the same time, another leading Sunni
cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, said “Islam, the religion of tolerance, holds the human soul in high esteem, and considers the attacks against innocent human beings a grave sin.” And the most senior cleric in Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz Abdullah al-Sheikh, similarly issued a fatwa stating, “These matters that have taken place in the United States … are expressly forbidden and are amongst the greatest of sins.”

  Around half a decade after 9/11, a surprising wave of criticism about the legitimacy of al-Qaeda’s actions also emerged from some of Osama bin Laden’s onetime religious mentors and former companions-in-arms. The repercussions for al-Qaeda could not be underestimated, because, unlike most mainstream Muslim leaders, al-Qaeda’s new critics had the jihadist credentials to make their criticisms bite. One of the most prominent was Abdullah Anas, who had fought side by side with the Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud in Afghanistan for years during the 1980s. At that time Anas and bin Laden were close friends. Anas’s jihadist credentials were further burnished by the fact that he is the son-in-law of Abdullah Azzam, the godfather of the global jihad movement. In a wide-ranging 2006 interview in Al-Sharq al-Awsat, one of the leading newspapers in the Arab world, Anas said that al-Qaeda’s suicide bombings in London a year earlier were “criminal” acts and that “blowing up a train here and a restaurant that leads to the death of innocent victims—as happened in London and elsewhere—will not force the United States to change its policy.” Al-Qaeda’s leaders did not respond to Anas’s well-publicized condemnations as he is difficult to impugn, as both a jihadi war hero and the son-in-law of the founder of the modern jihadist movement.

  Around the sixth anniversary of September 11, al-Qaeda received another blow from one of bin Laden’s erstwhile heroes, Sheikh Salman al-Awdah. Awdah, a leading Saudi religious scholar, addressed al-Qaeda’s leader on MBC, a widely watched Middle East TV network: “My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed … in the name of al-Qaeda?” What was noteworthy about Awdah’s statement was that it was not a boilerplate condemnation of terrorism, or even of 9/11, but a personal rebuke of bin Laden, something clerics in the Muslim world had generally shied away from.

  Dressed in the long, flowing black robe fringed with gold that is worn by those accorded respect in Saudi society, Awdah recalled first meeting with bin Laden in the northern Saudi region of Qassim in 1990, and finding him to be a “simple man without scholarly religious credentials, an attractive personality who spoke well.” Awdah explained that he had publicly criticized al-Qaeda for years but was now directing his criticism at bin Laden himself: “I don’t expect a positive effect on bin Laden personally as a result of my statement. It’s really a message to his followers.”

  Awdah’s rebuke was also significant because he is considered one of the fathers of the Sahwa, the fundamentalist awakening movement that had swept through Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. His sermons against the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia following Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait helped turn bin Laden against the United States. And bin Laden told CNN in 1997 that Awdah’s imprisonment three years earlier by the Saudi regime was one of the reasons he was calling for attacks on American targets. Awdah was also one of twenty-six Saudi clerics who in 2004 handed down a religious ruling urging Iraqis to fight the U.S. occupation. He was, in short, not someone al-Qaeda could paint as either an American sympathizer or a tool of the Saudi government.

  More doubt about al-Qaeda was planted in the Muslim world when Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, an important ideological influence on al-Qaeda, withdrew his support for the terrorist organization in a 2007 book written from his prison cell in Cairo. Sharif, generally known as “Dr. Fadl,” is the author of the 1993 tract The Basic Principles in Making Preparations for Jihad and an architect of the doctrine of takfir, arguing that Muslims who did not support armed jihad or who participated in elections were kuffar, unbelievers.

  So it was an unwelcome surprise for al-Qaeda’s leaders when Dr. Fadl’s new book, Rationalization of Jihad, was serialized in an independent Egyptian newspaper in November 2007. Dr. Fadl ruled that al-Qaeda’s bombings in Muslim nations were illegitimate and that terrorism against civilians in Western countries was wrong. He also took on al-Qaeda’s leaders directly in an interview with Al Hayat newspaper. “Zawahiri and his Emir Bin Laden [are] extremely immoral,” he said. “I have spoken about this in order to warn the youth against them.” And a year later, leaders of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which had once loosely aligned themselves with bin Laden, turned against al-Qaeda, issuing statements against the terrorist group’s ideology from their prison cells in Libya and their offices in London.

  Why did militants and clerics once considered allies by al-Qaeda’s leaders turn against them? To a large extent it is because al-Qaeda and affiliated groups had increasingly adopted the doctrine of takfir, by which they claimed the right to decide who was a “true” Muslim, something that in mainstream Islamic theology is something only Allah can truly know. Al-Qaeda’s Muslim critics knew what resulted from this takfiri view: first the radicals deemed some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals started killing them. From 2003 this could be seen most dramatically in Iraq, where al-Qaeda’s suicide bombers killed thousands of Iraqis, many of them targeted simply because they were Shia.

  Additionally, al-Qaeda and its affiliates had killed thousands of Muslim civilians elsewhere since 9/11, including the hundreds of ordinary Afghans killed every year by the Taliban, and the scores of Jordanians massacred at a wedding at a hotel in Amman in November 2005. For groups that claimed to be defending Muslims this was not impressive. All this created a dawning recognition among Muslims that the ideological virus that had unleashed 9/11 and the terror attacks in London and Madrid was the same virus that was now also wreaking havoc in the Islamic world.

  Conscious that al-Qaeda was getting seriously damaged by all this criticism, in December 2007 Ayman al-Zawahiri and his handlers took the unprecedented step of soliciting questions from anyone over the Internet, which the deputy al-Qaeda leader then answered four months later in a Q&A format online. The Q&A did not go well. When Zawahiri was asked how he could justify al-Qaeda’s killings of Muslim civilians, he answered defensively in dense, recondite passages that referred readers to other dense, recondite things he had already said about the matter. Someone identifying himself as “Madaris Jughrafiya” (a geography teacher) asked, “Excuse me, Mr. Zawahiri, but who is killing with your Excellency’s blessing the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco and Algeria. Do you consider that to be Jihad?” Bin Laden himself released a tape trying to tamp down this line of attack, in which he said that “the Muslim victims who fall during the operations against the infidel Crusaders are not the intended targets.”

  Is al-Qaeda going to dissipate as a result of the rising tide of criticism it faces in the Muslim world? Not in the short term. Though losing the favor of Muslim populations certainly doesn’t help al-Qaeda, history shows that small violent groups from the anarchists of the early twentieth century to the leftist terrorists of the 1970s can sustain their bloody work for years with virtually no public support.

  However, encoded in the DNA of apocalyptic jihadist groups like al-Qaeda are the seeds of their own long-term destruction because they have four crippling strategic weaknesses. First, their victims are often Muslim civilians. This is a real problem for al-Qaeda as the Koran forbids both killing civilians and fellow Muslims. Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, for instance, lost a great deal of support after its campaign of attacks in 2003 that killed mostly Saudis. By 2007, Saudi society, which had once been cheerleaders for bin Laden, had turned against al-Qaeda; only 10 percent of Saudis had a favorable view of the terrorist network.

  Second, al-Qaeda and its allies don’t offer a positive vision of the future. We know what bin Laden is against, but what’s he really for? If you asked him he would say the restoration of the caliphate. By that he does not mean the restoration of something like the last cal
iphate, the Ottoman Empire, a relatively rational polity, but rather the imposition of Taliban-style theocracies stretching from Indonesia to Morocco. A silent majority of Muslims don’t want that. Many Muslims admire bin Laden because he “stood up” to the West, but that doesn’t mean they want to live in his grim Islamist utopia. Afghanistan under the Taliban is not an attractive model of the future for most Muslims.

  Third, the jihadist militants are incapable of turning themselves into genuine mass political movements because their ideology prevents them from making the kind of real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in normal politics. Bin Laden’s principal political grievance, the large-scale U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, ended in 2003, yet bin Laden has never acknowledged this change. And to satisfy his political demands fully would involve stamping out all American influence in the Muslim world; destroying the state of Israel; the overthrow of every Middle Eastern regime; the rollback of India from Kashmir; the installation of Taliban regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan; the ending of any democratic elections anywhere in the Islamic world—the list goes on and on.

  While bin Laden has enjoyed a certain amount of personal popularity in much of the Muslim world, that has not translated into mass support for al-Qaeda in the manner that Hezbollah enjoys such support in Lebanon. That is not surprising—there are no al-Qaeda social welfare services or schools. An al-Qaeda hospital is a grim oxymoron. Even al-Qaeda’s leaders are aware of the problem of their lack of mass support. In the 2005 letter sent by Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s number two urged the terrorist leader in Iraq to prepare for the U.S. withdrawal from the country by not making the same mistakes as the Taliban, who had alienated the masses in Afghanistan.