Authors: David Isby
By 2008, it was the Al Qaeda versions of events—including, for example, the brutal murder of a foreign aid worker in Kabul claimed by the Afghan Taliban in October 2008—that were picked up and used by the global English-language media while the Afghan government and the international coalition forces, despite their large expenditures of spokesmen and psychological operations, took several news cycles before they had their version before the world media. The view that could have been put before the people of Afghanistan, that this murder has violated their obligation to hospitality and has shamed them by killing a young woman who came a long way to help injured Afghans, never appeared. The divided “information warriors” of the Afghan government, independent news media, US, and ISAF, each conscious of its own turf and subject to external constraints and multiple layers of bureaucracy, conceded this particular battle of ideas to Al Qaeda. That terrorists and insurgents kill both Muslims and those foreigners that have come to help them must be brought before the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Narratives are important in the Vortex. The tribal lineages of the Pushtuns are narratives. The Northern Alliance’s pride in withstanding first the Soviets and then the Taliban is a narrative, one that cannot be matched by returning exiles or those that fought with the Soviets, and hence it has been used to legitimate the claims of their leadership of access to power. Narratives transmit Pushtowali and Afghaniyat, rather than an explicit code. In creating the narrative that inks many of its efforts aimed at Afghanistan in its war of ideas, Al Qaeda has sought to portray the current conflict in Afghanistan in terms of Izzat (honor).
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Al Qaeda has used its narrative of an assault on the Islamic world to
justify insurgency in Afghanistan.
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Al Qaeda created and gave to the post-2001 Afghan Taliban the narrative “Islam is under attack” as well as using it themselves. Al Qaeda was able to claim their own powerful narrative—that of resilience after defeat and of the US thwarted—that has become all the more compelling as memories of 11 September 2001 faded and the costs of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza increased. These are sophisticated psychological and information operations that produce effective propaganda and make conditions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan more difficult and dangerous.
During the war against the Soviets and even during Afghanistan’s internal conflicts of 1992–2001, Afghans generally did not see themselves as part of a larger struggle affecting the entire Islamic world. That many now do is in part because of the access to multiple media sources, but it is also the result of Al Qaeda’s strength in the battle of ideas, which has enabled it to define conflicts in Afghanistan in ways that make them harder to resolve, as well as the failure of post-2001 Kabul and its foreign supporters to effectively respond. More so than their pre-2001 predecessors, the Afghan Taliban and other insurgents are increasingly willing to link their struggle to an international resistance to what they portray as US-Zionist invasion and oppression. Afghans were in the past less concerned about Israeli-Palestinian issues than their own crises. In place of this worldview, Al Qaeda has offered to what proved to be receptive audiences the theme that “non-Muslims are invading the Muslim world” and that the natural leaders of resistance are the Afghans, who have never been conquered by an outside invader, be they British or Soviet. Al Qaeda has helped add Americans to that list. They have helped define the US and coalition presence as occupiers rather than guests in the eyes of many Afghans. Even among Afghans that have never heeded Al Qaeda, the years of friction inherent in a foreign military presence, of nationalist sensibilities offended, road accidents with convoys, collateral damage incidents, house searches, raids, and detention, have caused more of them to oppose its continued presence.
Al Qaeda-inspired themes have been powerful in Afghanistan and Pakistan for many reasons, but none has been more important than the Western presence in Afghanistan. Resentment of this presence has been
successfully tied to Islam as well as nationalism, mobilizing many of Afghanistan’s Pushtuns against a government that can be presented as a client of a Zionist-Crusader war on Islam as well as corrupt and failing to deliver social justice.
The Vortex also fits with Al Qaeda’s internal narrative and its self-image. Al Qaeda’s leaders see themselves as
firkan
(knights) that go forth from a stronghold to do great things autonomously.
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This fits too with the traditional Pushtun view of the Frontier—especially on the Pakistani side—as a place from which raiders, representing an exemplary and exceptional Islam, strike against targets in the plains, whether governed by infidels or takfir Muslims.
Shia Muslims are, like the Zionist-Crusaders and the takfir Muslim leaders that accommodate them, a target of Al Qaeda’s narrative. Anti-Shia ideology contributed to the Pakistan Taliban attacking the Shia Touray Pushtuns starting in November 2007 and has inspired an increasing level of anti-Shia violence in Pakistan by 2008–10.
Transnational Terror from the Vortex
The transnational terrorist threats emerging from the Vortex include: those aimed at Afghanistan, those aimed at Pakistan (and India), and that targeted at “the primary enemy” of the US, UK, and the West. The global mission is more important to Al Qaeda than the war in Afghanistan they use to justify their narrative of Islam under attack. The main task of Al Qaeda in Pakistan is to prepare for new attacks on the primary enemy. According to Bruce Riedel, a US counter-terrorism expert and retired CIA officer, “Al Qaeda is recruiting and training individuals with Western European passports in their camps in Pakistan. There’s only one reason they’re doing that. They don’t need guys with British and French passports to attack the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad.”
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If the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan appears remote in the West, their connection to Al Qaeda and its allies literally has their name on it; they are targeting the West and, just as Al Qaeda started this campaign years before the Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, even a future withdrawal would be unlikely to bring it to a halt.
Even when Al Qaeda dominated Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in the
years before 2001, terrorism did not spread across its borders isotropically. Rather, the Afghanistan-based Al Qaeda’s Declaration of War on America issued in 2000 promised war not in Afghanistan but against the West. Al Qaeda’s choice and their timing has reflected their focus on the “primary enemy” in America and Europe, such as the 2004 Madrid bombing attacks, immediately before the Spanish election. Awareness of the importance of timing was also seen in the October 2000 terrorist attack on the destroyer USS
Cole
in Aden harbor, at a time when its proximity to the US presidential election made retaliation appear unlikely. Bin Laden’s appearance on television on 29 October 2004, immediately before the US presidential election, was thought to be intended to remind the US electorate of the Al Qaeda threat. When Al Qaeda acts, it reflects its nature as a transnational threat.
Al Qaeda has been able to use its relationship with Pakistani-based groups to implement its strategy of striking at the “primary enemy” worldwide, even though these groups had previously limited their operations to striking at targets in the region. Pakistani journalist Ahmad Rashid said “These people are militants who have been fighting in Kashmir, who have been fighting in other places and who are linked to Al Qaeda and are providing assistance to Pakistani groups worldwide. We saw, for example, the London [transport] bombing in July [2005]. They were clearly linked back to some of these Pakistani militant groups, who in turn were linked back to al Qaeda.”
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The Vortex’s connection to transnational Islamic terrorism in the Anglo-American world has been revealed by attacks, arrests, and prosecutions. The support infrastructure in the Vortex, accessed by insurgents and terrorists alike, is attached to a network powered by a metaphorical “main circuit cable” that runs the Atlantic, from the US to the UK to Karachi all the way to the FATA, the origins of much of that metropolis’s population, and from there runs to Afghanistan.
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Significantly, Pakistani radical groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba have moved beyond their focus on India and Kashmir to participate in global terrorist planning. This has enabled them to use this same support infrastructure to present a terrorist threat to the US and UK, building on Al Qaeda’s model.
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Al Qaeda has been able to work with other transnational jihadist organizations, through shared networks, to tap into the “culturally uprooted” among Europe’s Muslim population. Al Qaeda has uniquely positioned itself to feed and then take advantage of the social and psychological factors that are driving its members or those sympathetic to terrorist organizations’ goal even if not their methods. Most of the people that it has attracted to Al Qaeda or linked groups are not driven by poverty (except vicarious poverty) or by a longing for reform in their home country. Rather, many are motivated to exact retribution for real or imagined transgressions by the West against Islam.
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Al Qaeda has demonstrated an ability to appeal to individuals who, although neither poor nor uneducated, feel lost or have a deep-seated desire to empower themselves and serve a higher purpose. Those who feel themselves to be second-class citizens with no future even if they are nominally in the middle class, and those experiencing cultural victimization and political pointlessness, are particular targets for Al Qaeda or similar groups (especially those Pakistan-based groups that had their origins in the Kashmir insurgency, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba).
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Marginalized individuals, such as those in prison or converts that need to prove their sincerity as Muslims, are often among those recruited. In Europe, successful professionals have gone on to become suicide bombers. Terrorism is nothing if not empowering.
The links between the UK and terrorist organizations operating in the Vortex are strong. The UK security services are aware of attempts by subversive and terrorist organizations to infiltrate and radicalize British Muslims dating back to the 1980s.
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In 2004, the Home Office estimated that Al Qaeda and aligned terrorist groups had some 10–15,000 supporters in the UK.
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It is estimated that some 3–4,000 British Muslims, most of Pakistani background, have been trained in camps, most in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
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A smaller number were trained in Yemen or elsewhere. Some subsequently left the UK, including those who joined insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan. Few have been sanctioned, and most remain living in the UK.
While the number of active terrorist cells in the UK’s Muslim population is small, Al Qaeda and associated organizations provide these
terrorists, as they do with the Taliban in Afghanistan, specific direction for high value operations as well as sharing planning and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). The 7 July 2005 terrorist bombings of London were carried out by native-born British terrorists, using the tactics of simultaneous attacks on soft targets and the use of powerful peroxide-based liquid explosives that originated with Al Qaeda.
Starting in 2005–06, Pakistan-based Al Qaeda exerted greater hands-on direction of their networked supporters in the UK and Europe than in those Islamic countries where there was a “franchise” Al Qaeda presence. British intelligence sources have changed their characterization of the UK-Pakistani threat from a mere characterization to the assertion that the “command and control is provided by Al Qaeda in Pakistan.” Dame Eliza Manningham-Butler, then director general of MI5, said in a public speech in November 2006 that Al Qaeda’s command and control was still linked to “numerous plots to kill people and to damage our economy. . . . What do I mean by numerous? Five? Ten? No, nearer 30 that we currently know of. These plots often have links back to Al Qaeda in Pakistan and through these links Al Qaeda gives guidance and training to its largely British foot soldiers here on an extensive and growing scale.”
The “foot soldiers” she referred to are largely provided by radicalized individuals of the estimated 800,000 Pakistanis in the UK. In contrast to the relatively large number of supporters or even those that have undergone training, Western anti-terrorism experts estimate that there are hundreds of supporters with an active commitment to terrorism, certainly a much smaller commitment to political violence than was seen in home-grown movements such as those in Northern Ireland in recent decades. The UK’s Pakistani community has a greater degree of societal integration with the UK as a whole than most of the Muslim communities on the continent and has the ability to travel on a British passport for attacks on the US. There are an estimated 400,000 trips between Pakistan and the UK a year, many of them lasting several months, beyond the capabilities of any monitoring system to keep track. Only a small percentage of this community needs to embrace terrorism to create a formidable terrorist threat.
The Transatlantic airline terrorist plot, whose members were arrested in the UK in August 2006 following a joint Anglo-American investigation with Pakistani cooperation, demonstrated the importance of Vortex-based Al Qaeda in directing the UK-based terrorist threats through directives and resources that moved down the main circuit cable from the FATA. The targeting of no less than 10 airliners—to be destroyed simultaneously, cutting the main transatlantic air links between the US and UK—was consistent with the Al Qaeda focus. The tactics also had the Al Qaeda mark. They apparently already had 20 volunteer suicide bombers trained. Some had already made their martyrdom videos.
The 2006 airline plot was significant in that it was not being carried out by a haphazard collection of individuals but rather represented a cohesive action by teams of self-radicalized terrorists, directed by Al Qaeda in Pakistan as part of a multi-year, well-planned, and nearly well-executed process. It marked a break of post-2002 Al Qaeda action in striking soft targets, instead hitting a hard target set, civil aviation, and using advanced-technology liquid explosives. This was not the degraded Al Qaeda’s first apparent attack post-2001, hitting soft targets such as synagogues in Tunisia and weddings in Amman. Rather, it appeared to aim at nothing less than provoking a US-UK military response against Al Qaeda’s base in the FATA that would, ideally for them, have the impact of splintering the Pakistani state and putting them in the position of helping their Pakistani allies put together the pieces.