For instance, as the Iraq War was heating up in 2005, a letter
attributed to al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri asked if
the embattled al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq might be able to spare
$100,000 to relieve a cash squeeze facing the group’s top leaders in
hiding, presumably inside Pakistan near the Afghan border.
Instead
of money going from Pakistan to Iraq, the cash was flowing the opposite
way. U.S. intelligence analysts recognized that this was not the way
one would normally treat a “central front.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s
“
Al-Qaeda’s Fragile Foothold.”]
In another captured letter sent
to Jordanian terrorist Musab al-Zarqawi before his death in June 2006,
a top aide to bin Laden known as “Atiyah” upbraided Zarqawi for his
reckless, hasty actions inside Iraq.
The message from Atiyah,
who is believed to be a Libyan named Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, emphasized
the need for Zarqawi to operate more deliberately in order to build
political strength and drag out the U.S. occupation. “Prolonging the
war is in our interest,” Atiyah told Zarqawi.
[To view this
excerpt in a translation published by the Combating Terrorism Center at
West Point,
click here. To read the entire letter,
click here. ]
So,
instead of seeking a quick ouster of U.S. forces from Iraq and using it
as a base for launching a global jihad – as Bush and his supporters
claim – al-Qaeda actually saw its strategic goals advanced by keeping
the United States bogged down in Iraq.
To some U.S. analysts,
the logic was obvious: “prolonging” the Iraq War bought al-Qaeda time
to rebuild its infrastructure in Pakistan, where the Islamic
fundamentalist extremists have long had sympathizers inside the
Pakistani intelligence services dating back to the CIA’s war in
Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Charlie Wilson’s Blowback
That
CIA war, lionized in the new movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” funneled
billions of dollars in U.S. covert money and weapons through Pakistani
intelligence to Afghan warlords and to Arab jihadists who had flocked
to Afghanistan to drive out the Russian infidels. One of those young
jihadists was a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden.
While
relying on Pakistani intelligence to assist the Afghan rebels, the
Reagan administration also averted its eyes from Pakistan’s clandestine
development of nuclear weapons, an apparent trade-off for Pakistan’s
help in giving the Soviet bear a bloody nose in Afghanistan. [For
details, see Robert Parry’s
Secrecy & Privilege.]
After the
Soviets withdrew in 1989, the war dragged on, with a triumphant United
States unwilling to broker a deal with the secular Afghan government
that the Soviets left behind. George H.W. Bush’s administration wanted
these “Soviet puppets” dragged from their offices and killed (as some
eventually were), replaced by the CIA-backed Islamic fundamentalists.
Then,
in 1990, the alliances began to shift. U.S. military bases inside Saudi
Arabia, which were established for driving Iraqi forces out of Kuwait,
offended bin Laden and alienated him from his patrons in the Saudi
royal family.
When the U.S. bases remained after the liberation
of Kuwait in 1991, bin Laden began to view his old American allies as
another band of infidels encroaching on Muslim lands. So, bin Laden’s
fellow jihadists in Afghanistan shifted their sights onto a new enemy
and developed a new organization known as “the base,” or al-Qaeda.
For
obvious reasons, the Bush administration has sought to blur this
complicated history for the American people. It takes some of the shine
off the glorious Cold War victories of Ronald Reagan and George H.W.
Bush.
Dark Backdrop
But this shadow struggle at the end
of the Cold War was the backdrop for the 9/11 attacks, which in turn
led to Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan, ousting bin Laden and his
fundamentalist Taliban allies, but failing to catch bin Laden, Zawahiri
and other key leaders.
Then, rather than finishing the job in
Afghanistan, Bush made an abrupt detour into Iraq, a decision rife with
settling old scores and other unspoken justifications, but which Bush
sold to the American public as necessary because Iraq’s secular
dictator Saddam Hussein was in league with the fundamentalist bin Laden
and might give him WMDs.
When that justification proved false
and a stubborn Iraqi insurgency emerged to challenge the U.S.
occupation, Bush initially presented the resistance as an al-Qaeda
offshoot operating under bin Laden’s control.
Again, U.S.
intelligence saw a different problem: Sunni and Shiite Iraqis
contesting the American presence and competing for dominance with each
other, while a violent smattering of foreign jihadists like Zarqawi
tried to insinuate themselves into the Sunni faction and spread havoc.
Though
Bush eventually acknowledged that most of Iraqi resistance was
homegrown, he still asserted that al-Qaeda planned to use Iraq as the
launching pad for a global “caliphate” from Spain to Indonesia, another
alarmist claim that scared some Americans into backing Bush’s war
policies.
“This caliphate would be a totalitarian Islamic empire
encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from
Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia,” Bush said
in a typical reference to this claim in a Sept. 5, 2006, speech. “We
know this because al-Qaeda has told us.”
But many analysts saw
Bush’s nightmarish scenario as preposterous, given the deep divisions
within the Islamic world and the hostility that many Muslims feel
toward al-Qaeda, including its recent much-heralded rejection by more
moderate Iraqi Sunnis in Anbar province.
Also, according to a
National Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus view of the
U.S. intelligence community in April 2006, “
the global jihadist
movement is decentralized, lacks a coherent global strategy, and is
becoming more diffuse.” [Emphasis added.]
The NIE also concluded
that the Iraq War – rather than weakening the cause of Islamic
terrorism – had become a “cause celebre” that was “cultivating
supporters for the global jihadist movement.”
The grinding Iraq
War – now nearing its fifth year – also prevented the United States
from arraying sufficient military and intelligence resources against
the reorganized al-Qaeda infrastructure in Pakistan and the rebuilt
Taliban army reasserting itself in Afghanistan.
Hopes Dashed
So,
when the Bush administration supported former Prime Minister Bhutto’s
return to Pakistan in October 2007, the wishful thinking was that she
could somehow energize the more moderate elements of Pakistani politics
and marginalize the Islamic extremists.
But the overstretched
U.S. military and intelligence services could do little in helping to
protect Bhutto beyond hectoring Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf
to give his political rival more security. Musharraf, who himself has
dodged multiple assassination attempts, either couldn’t or wouldn’t
ensure Bhutto’s safety.
Now, with Bhutto’s death and with unrest
sweeping Pakistan, Bush’s Iraq War backers are sure to argue that these
developments again prove the president right, that an even firmer hand
is needed to combat terrorism and that the next president must be
someone ready to press ahead with Bush’s concept of a “long war”
against Islamic extremism.
But the reality again appears
different. Though rarely mentioned in the American press, the evidence
is that bin Laden and other extremists have cleverly played off Bush’s
arrogance and belligerence to strengthen their strategic hand within
the Muslim world.
By keeping Bush focused on Iraq, al-Qaeda and
its allies also bought time to transform themselves into a more lethal
threat in Pakistan, with the danger that the new turmoil could win
al-Qaeda its ultimate prize, control of a nuclear bomb. [For more on
this history, see our new book
Neck Deep.]
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