Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (36 page)

The 2003 invasion of Iraq encouraged many of these local plots, including the train bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. In their aftermaths, European law and security forces stopped plots from coming to fruition by stepping up coordination and tracking links among local extremists, their friends, and friends of friends, while also improving relations with young Muslim immigrants through community outreach. Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have taken similar steps.

Now we need to bring this perspective to Afghanistan and Pakistan—one that is smart about cultures, customs, and connections. The present policy of focusing on troop strength and drones, trying to win over people by improving their lives with Western-style aid programs, only continues a long history of foreign involvement and failure.

Of course, antiterrorism measures are only as effective as the local governments that execute them. Afghanistan’s government is corrupt, unpopular, and inept. So what do we do? There’s no Taliban central to talk to (although the United States and NATO are talking to locals who fight them, with some local successes). To be a Taliban today means little more than to be a Pashtun tribesman who believes that his fundamental beliefs and customary way of life, including the right to bear arms to defend the tribal homeland and protect its women, are threatened by foreign invaders.
²⁸

While most Taliban claim loyalty to Afghanistan’s Mullah Omar, this allegiance varies greatly: Pakistani Taliban leaders, including Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed by an American drone in August 2009, and his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, wounded by a drone in early 2010, rejected Mullah Omar’s call to forgo suicide bombings against Pakistani civilians. Although American officials constantly pressure Pakistan to root out the Haqqani fighters, who are perhaps the deadliest foes of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s military considers the Haqqanis assets to influence the future shape of Afghanistan once the Americans leave.
²⁹
Pakistani security forces also use other branches of the Mehsud who call themselves “Taliban” in the fight against Americans in Afghanistan, to battle fellow Taliban who attack Pakistan.
³⁰

We hold the Taliban together. Without us, their deeply divided coalition could well fragment. The resurgent strength of today’s Taliban depends on support by notoriously unruly Pashtun hill tribes in Pakistan’s border regions unsympathetic to the original Taliban program of homogenizing tribal custom and politics under one rule. And the Taliban could well kick out Bin Laden if he became more of a headache to them than we are: Al Qaeda may have close relations to the Haqqani network of the Zadran tribe in North Waziristan and to the Shabi-Khel subtribe of the Mehsud out of South Waziristan, but Qaeda isn’t so popular with many Taliban factions and forces.

We have already been through one round of cranking up forces in Afghanistan, and it backfired. Until 2004, the U.S.-led NATO coalition had a modest footprint in Afghanistan of about 20,000 troops, mainly to protect Kabul, and there were few terrorist acts such as suicide attacks and roadside bombings: fewer than ten from 2001 to 2004. During 2005, the coalition started to ratchet up troop levels in order to wipe out the last vestiges of the Taliban and to eradicate poppy crops. According to data collected by Robert Pape, suicide attacks increased by an order of magnitude—with 9 in 2005, nearly 100 in 2006, 142 in 2007, and 148 in 2008.
³¹
There were 739 roadside bombings in 2006, nearly 2,000 in 2007, and more than 3,200 in 2008. Unlike Iraq, nearly all suicide attacks and roadside bombings have targeted coalition forces and installations rather than the civilian population.

In August 2009, General Stanley McChrystal, the top allied commander in Afghanistan, reported that the situation had become “serious…. We face not only a resilient and growing insurgency; there is also a crisis of confidence among Afghans—in both their government and the international community—that undermines our credibility and emboldens the insurgents.”
³²
Thus a radical change in U.S. policy was needed for two reasons: “Our conventional warfare culture” has alienated the people, and there is a lack of “responsive and accountable government” to win them over. The report recommended “radically expanded coalition forces at every echelon,” to gain the initiative and to protect “those critical areas where the population is most threatened.” And so in 2010, additional Western forces were deployed in all major regions, including the Pashtun areas in the south and east, bringing the total to well over a hundred thousand, on par with Soviet military involvement thirty years before.

There was precious little in the McChrystal report to suggest that our continuing support of the central government would make it any less corroded. As one senior U.S. counternarcotics official put it to me in September 2009:

My personal opinion is that Karzai’s brother is a crook and is involved in constructing the framework of what Afghanistan is becoming, where there is no other economy than the drug trade. With the fox in the henhouse, the hens will never be safe. [The departments of] Defense and State have spent close to ten billion [dollars] to counter [the drug economy] in Afghanistan. If you look at just eradication, it’s close to four billion. There were some years where we eradicated less than five hundred hectares per year, or more than ten million per hectare, which doesn’t make sense.

Even a “good” year, like 2008, saw only 5,000 hectares eradicated out of more than 150,000 cultivated. A 3 percent risk on losing a crop deters nobody from planting poppies for huge profit.
³³

The Taliban were morally rigid and did detestable things, especially to women, but by and large they weren’t corrupt. The people hardly loved the Taliban, but appreciated that they stopped widespread rape and pillage and effectively brought order to the country. The original Taliban were just as aggressive as the Communists in trying to use military force to impose a single political administration and worldview on the fractious Afghan population. But the Taliban were far less centralized, and their worldview was far less alien to the Pashtun tribes whose children, orphaned and separated from their elders by the war against the Communists and then civil war, had become the foot soldiers of the Taliban’s New Order.

General McChrystal’s report relied on celebrity politicos (like Anthony Cordesman) and a few experienced with Afghanistan’s people (like former National Public Radio reporter Sarah Chays).
³⁴
The five teams of the “Human Terrain System” experiment in Helmand, Paktia, and other Afghan Pashtun areas, which embedded uniformed and armed cultural anthropologists in infantry units, also provided “peripheral input” (as one team member put it to me). Nevertheless, the report was a public relations and political success. It prodded President Obama to commit thirty thousand more troops to a counterinsurgency effort against a major segment of the Afghan population, with the focus on converting a deeply unpopular and corrupt regime into a unified, centralized state for the first time in that country’s history.

Unlike Al Qaeda, the Taliban are interested in
their
homeland, not ours. True, some now threaten to attack American cities in retaliation for hundreds of their family and friends recently killed by drones, such as Hakimullah Mehsud and his cousin Qari Hus-sain Mehsud, who trains suicide bombers for the Pakistani Taliban and claimed support for would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, as “revenge for the rain of drones.” But other Pakistani Taliban vociferously deny any wish to attack America. Things are different now from what they were before 9/11. The Taliban know how costly keeping Qaeda can be. There’s a good chance that enough of the factions in the loose and fractious Taliban coalition would decide for themselves to disinvite their troublesome guest if we contained them by maintaining pressure without trying to subdue them or hold their territory, intervening only when we see movement to help Al Qaeda or act beyond the region. A long leash on the Taliban is likely to be far more effective than a short one. And in the fight against violent extremism more generally, as far as our direct involvement goes, less just may be more.
³⁵

CHAPTER 16
THE TERROR SCARE: EXAGGERATING THREATS AT HOME
AND ABROAD

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.

—FRANCIS BACON

PINK ELEPHANTS

A woman was standing at a bus stop, wildly flailing her umbrella. A curious onlooker approached and asked, “Why do you keep waving your umbrella about?”

The woman replied with some annoyance that such an idiotic question should be asked of her: “Why, to keep the pink elephants away, of course.”

“But, my dear lady,” the onlooker protested, “there are no pink elephants around.”

The woman, exasperated, retorted, “Precisely, because I keep them away.”

The Pink Elephant Fallacy is an example of the simplest of all failures of critical thought, circular reasoning. We are told that U.S. troops fight in Iraq and Afghanistan to keep Al Qaeda from attacking the United States. Some say, “But there is no evidence that Al Qaeda now has the means or plans to attack the United States.” The answer they get is: “Precisely, because our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan keep Al Qaeda away.”
¹

At a town hall meeting in Shanghai with Chinese students in late 2009, President Obama reiterated George W. Bush’s claim that “the greatest threat to United States security are terrorist networks like Al Qaeda,”
²
an opinion echoed in Europe.
³
But how great a threat is terrorism, really? Certainly 9/11 was a massive, murderous attack, but not one with serious effects on America’s national fabric—apart from those caused by the country’s fitful
reaction
to the attack, which continues to focus on wiping out the threat by means of our might rather than containing it with the help of others who manage some things better.

By itself contemporary terrorism cannot destroy our country or our allies or even seriously damage us. However, we can do grievous harm to ourselves by taking the terrorists’ bait and reacting in ill-conceived, uninformed, and uncontrolled ways that inflate and so empower our enemies, alienate our friends, and frighten our own citizens into believing that they must give up basic liberties in order to survive. It is in this sense that terrorism does pose an existential threat: to our most sacred values of individual freedom and choice, to our sense of personal and collective security, and to any hope of peace of mind. Our fitful reaction also risks empowering extremist elements in less secure states, such as Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, which could end up producing a true strategic menace.

THE NEW WAVE

The cases we’ve looked at suggest that the growth and development of terrorist networks is largely a decentralized and evolutionary process, based on contingent adaptations to unpredictable events and improbable opportunities, more the result of localized tinkering (of fragmentary connections between semi-autonomous parts) than intelligent design (hierarchical command and control). As in any natural evolutionary process, individual variation and environmental context are the creative and critical determinants of future directions and paths. To ignore variation and context is to entirely miss the character of natural group formation and development, along with better chances for intervention and prevention of enemy attacks from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

Ever since the second U.S.-led interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the rapid spread of Internet access, we are witnessing a more egalitarian (at least among males), less educated and materially well off, and more socially marginalized wave of would-be jihadi martyrs. Those few who are willing to commit to extremist violence usually emerge in small groups of action-oriented friends. They frequently come from the same neighborhood and interact during sporting activities, such as playing soccer together or becoming camping and hiking companions who learn to take care of one another under trying conditions. Increasingly, they may first meet in a chat room, where anonymity on the Worldwide Web paradoxically helps to forge intimate emotional ties among people who might otherwise physically put one another off. They learn to live in a conceptually closed community of comrades bound to a cause, which they mistake for the real world. Although more nationally oriented militant groups, such as Hamas and Lebanese Hizbollah, have tended to resemble the earlier Al Qaeda in being generally more educated, skilled, and well-off economically than the surrounding population, they, too, are beginning to show regression to a more meager state. (Though Hizbollah, which is backed by the Iranian state and adheres to a Shi’ite tradition of a strong religious hierarchy alien to the Sunni, retains a well-organized and worldwide chain of command and control.)

In the United States, most arrests and convictions for terrorism have involved entrapment by law enforcement agents of jihadi wannabes usually far from being able to actually execute a plot. Because the path that leads to extremist violence usually involves numerous contingent and even random factors, it’s far from likely that most of those arrested would have gone on to violence on their own or through their natural milieu. In 2003 the FBI arrested Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker who met Qaeda people in Pakistan and then wanted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches, a crackpot plan as likely to succeed as selling the bridge to Warren Buffett. Another half-baked scheme involved four Muslim immigrants in the Philadelphia area who were convicted in December 2008 of plotting to storm Fort Dix in New Jersey (and perhaps also the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware) disguised as pizza deliverymen. The investigation was prompted by a clerk at a local store who informed police that he was asked by one of the men to copy a tape containing scenes of militants firing into the air and calling for jihad. It’s pretty clear government informants prodded the men into making incriminating comments for wiretaps.