The Unites States’ obsession with the threat from Al-Qaeda urgently needs debunking. It has led national security chiefs and politicians dangerously astray — including President Barack Obama himself.
Traumatised by the terrorist attacks on the American heartland of September 11, 2001, the United States launched two catastrophic and unnecessary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, at great cost to its armed services, its finances and its reputation. That was by no means the full extent of the damage.
The War on Terror also caused the United States to create a monstrously-inflated national security-industrial complex, that today employs nearly a million people with high security clearances, seriously eroding America’s precious civil liberties; it caused the CIA to become a para-military organisation as concerned with extra-judicial assassinations as with its traditional intelligence-gathering; and it has driven President Obama to rely on missile strikes from unmanned drones which, as well as killing the occasional Islamic fighter, slaughter large numbers of innocent civilians, arousing fierce hostility to the United States.
The drone strikes are widely thought to create far more militants than they kill. Barbara Bodine, who served as U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 1997 to 2011, says that drone attacks “most assuredly do far more harm than good.”
All these subjects and many more are explored in detail in The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda (Oxford University Press), an important new book by Fawaz Gerges, Professor of Middle East Studies and International Relations at the London School of Economics. It should be required reading in the White House. In an ideal world, his scathing critique of American security policies should induce American officials and politicians to change course.
I must declare an interest. I strongly recommend Professor Gerges’ book because he expresses, better than I could have done, many of the ideas which I have put forward in my columns over the years.
His basic argument is that Al-Qaeda is by no means the strategic, existential threat it is made out to be by the pundits of terrorism. It is a small, weak organisation, with limited tactical aims — “more of a security irritant,” Gerges maintains, “than a strategic threat.” The figures are striking. At the height of its powers in the late 1990s, Al-Qaeda comprised some 3,000 to 4,000 armed fighters. Today, its ranks have dwindled to 300, if not fewer. In Afghanistan, there is now, for all practical purposes, no Al-Qaeda.
The mistake the United States continues to make in Afghanistan is to link the Taliban to Al-Qaeda, rejecting any separation between them. But they are very different. The Taliban are a local, essentially Pashtun force, dedicated to protecting the country’s tribal and Islamic traditions and ridding it of foreigners. Al-Qaeda — at least in its heyday — aspired to be a transnational jihadi movement.
Yemen is another country where Al-Qaeda is usually said to pose a major strategic threat. But, as Gerges argues, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) — formed by the 2009 merger of the Saudi and Yemeni branches – has no more than between 50 and 300 core operatives, mostly semi-literate rookies with little combat experience.
Yet, a decade after September 11, overreaction is still the hallmark of the U.S. War on Terror. Americans and Westerners are fed a constant diet of catastrophic scenarios and scare tactics. The result, Gerges says, is that Americans have internalized an exaggerated fear of terrorism. Obama himself has bought “the doomsday scenario offered by his national security team.” This American overreaction provides the oxygen that sustains Al-Qaeda.
The fear of terrorism has not only taken hold of the imagination of Americans, it also drives government policy. But all the War on Terror really does, Gerges maintains, is legitimize Al-Qaeda’s failed ideology and expand the worldwide circle of the West’s enemies.
In the Muslim world as a whole — in Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the Maghreb, in Indonesia and elsewhere – Al-Qaeda now faces a hostile environment with fewer recruits and shelter. Ordinary Muslims join the authorities in chasing al-Qaeda away from their neighbourhoods and streets.
AQAP has attempted to carry out a few terrorist acts abroad — such as the attack on the Saudi counter-terrorism chief Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, the failed underwear bomber, the would-be New York subway bomber, and the foiled Times Square bomber – but its real focus is local. In Yemen, for example, it is attempting to use its tribal connections to gain a foothold in the southern secessionist movement, one of the several rebellions threatening the regime of President Ali Abdallah Salih. It remains first and foremost a Yemeni problem, one that must be tackled from within.
Gerges cites two incidents among many, which have inflamed Yemeni opinion against President Saleh and his American allies. The first he mentions occurred in December 2009 when a US Navy ship off the coast of Yemen fired a double cruise missile, loaded with cluster bombs, at what it thought was an Al-Qaeda training camp. Instead, the strike killed 41 members of the Haydara family in a Bedouin encampment. In May 2010, a U.S. cruise missile killed Jabir al-Shabwani, deputy governor of Ma’rib province, and four of his escorts. He had reportedly been seeking to persuade the militants to lay down their arms. The killing sent shock waves through the Saleh regime, undermining its legitimacy in the eyes of the tribes and the public at large. Saleh paid blood money to Shabwani’s family to avoid a bloodbath.
Gerges might have added that on Match 17 this year, a U.S. drone killed forty people in Pakistan, dealing a blow to U.S.-Pakistan relations. How many of the forty victims were innocent civilians? Of all Arabs, Yemenis currently voice the strongest anti-American sentiments. But such incidents also trigger a backlash among scores of disillusioned and frustrated young Muslims, living in Western societies.
Instead of investing in economic development and good governance in Yemen, the United States has squandered precious resources combating AQAP. In 2010, for example, the United States gave Yemen $250m to fight Al-Qaeda, but only $42m for development and humanitarian assistance. Clearly, the figures should be reversed.
What is to be done? Plots against Western societies will persist, Gerges believes, so long as the United States is embroiled in wars in Muslim lands. The root causes of many recent home-grown terror plots lie in the raging conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere.
The longer the United States wages war on terrorism in Afganistan-Pakistan, the more durable the threat. Pakistan’s slide into anarchy will be a far greater catastrophe for American interests and regional stability than the current mess in Afghanistan. There is an urgent need, he writes, to speed up the withdrawal of Western, and particularly American, boots from Muslim territories.
What other lessons does he recommend? The first is that US policymakers must bring a closure to the War on Terror. Second, there must be a concerted effort to debunk the terrorism narrative and break Al-Qaeda’s hold on the American imagination. And third, the United States should stop viewing the Middle East through the terrorism prism, the Israeli prism and the black-gold prism — oil.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).
Copyright © 2011 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global
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Released: 08 November 2011
Word Count: 1,178
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