Blowback from the Iraq war peterbergen.com 
[ This seems to be the Bergen article, in full, from m1e.net , also cited in  Message 21815159 . Unfortunately , the formatting is a little lame, what can you do? ]
Blowback from the Iraq war
By Peter Bergen and Alec Reynolds
november / december 2oo5
Blowback Revisited
Today’s Insurgents in Iraq Are Tomorrow’s Terrorists
Peter Bergen and Alec Reynolds
Volume 84 • Number 6
The contents of Foreign Affairs are copyrighted.©2005 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
Blowback Revisited
Today’s Insurgents in Iraq Are Tomorrow’s Terrorists
Peter Bergen and Alec Reynolds
When the United States started sending
guns and money to the Afghan mujahideen
in the 1980s, it had a clearly defined Cold
War purpose: helping expel the Soviet
army, which had invaded Afghanistan in
1979. And so it made sense that once the
Afghan jihad forced a Soviet withdrawal
a decade later, Washington would lose
interest in the rebels. For the international
mujahideen drawn to the Afghan conflict,
however, the fight was just beginning.
They opened new fronts in the name of
global jihad and became the spearhead
of Islamist terrorism. The seriousness of
the blowback became clear to the United
States with the 1993 bombing of the World
Trade Center: all of the attack’s participants
either had served in Afghanistan or were
linked to a Brooklyn-based fund-raising
organ for the Afghan jihad that was later
revealed to be al Qaeda’s de facto U.S.
headquarters. The blowback, evident in
other countries as well, continued to increase
in intensity throughout the rest of the
decade, culminating on September 11, 2001.
The current war in Iraq will generate a
ferocious blowback of its own, which—as
a recent classified cia assessment predicts—
could be longer and more powerful than
that from Afghanistan. Foreign volunteers
fighting U.S. troops in Iraq today will
find new targets around the world after
the war ends. Yet the Bush administration,
consumed with managing countless crises
in Iraq, has devoted little time to preparing
for such long-term consequences.
Lieutenant General James Conway, the
director of operations on the Joint Staª,
admitted as much when he said in June
that blowback “is a concern, but there’s
not much we can do about it at this point
in time.” Judging from the experience
of Afghanistan, such thinking is both
mistaken and dangerously complacent.
COMING HOME TO ROOST
The foreign volunteers in Afghanistan
saw the Soviet defeat as a victory for Islam
against a superpower that had invaded
a Muslim country. Estimates of the
number of foreign fighters who fought in
Afghanistan begin in the low thousands;
some spent years in combat, while others
came only for what amounted to a jihad
vacation. The jihadists gained legitimacy
and prestige from their triumph both within
the militant community and among ordinary
Muslims, as well as the confidence to
carry their jihad to other countries where
they believed Muslims required assistance.
When veterans of the guerrilla campaign
returned home with their experience,
ideology, and weapons, they destabilized
once-tranquil countries and inflamed
already unstable ones.
Algeria had seen relatively little terrorism
for decades, but returning mujahideen
founded the Armed Islamic Group (known
by its French initials, GIA). GIA murdered
thousands of Algerian civilians during the
1990s as it attempted to depose the government
and replace it with an Islamist
regime, a goal inspired by the mujahideen’s
success in Afghanistan. The gia campaign
of violence became especially pronounced
after the Algerian army mounted a coup
in 1992 to preempt an election that Islamists
were poised to win.
In Egypt, after the assassination of
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981
prompted a government crackdown, hundreds
of extremists left the country to train
and fight in Afghanistan. Those militants
came back from the war against the Soviets
to lead a terror campaign that killed more
than a thousand people between 1990 and
1997. Closely tied to these militants was the
Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman,
“the Blind Sheikh,” whose preaching,
according to the 9/11 Commission, had
inspired Sadat’s assassins. Abdel Rahman’s
career demonstrates the internationalization
of Islamist extremism after Afghanistan.
The cleric visited Pakistan to lend his support
to the Afghan jihad and encouraged
two of his sons to fight in the war. He
also provided spiritual direction for the
Egyptian terrorist organization Jamaat
al-Islamiyya and supported its renewed
attacks on the Egyptian government in
the 1990s. He arrived in the United States
in 1990—at the time, the country was regarded
as a sympathetic environment for
Islamist militants—where he began to
encourage attacks on New York City landmarks.
Convicted in 1995 in connection
with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade
Center, Abdel Rahman is serving a life
sentence in the United States. But his
influence has continued to be felt: a 1997
attack at an archaeological site near the
Egyptian city of Luxor that left 58 tourists
dead and almost crippled Egypt’s vital
tourism industry was an eªort by Jamaat
al-Islamiyya to force his release.
The best-known alumnus of the Afghan
jihad is Osama bin Laden, under whose
leadership the “Afghan Arabs” prosecuted
their war beyond the Middle East into
the United States, Africa, Europe, and
Southeast Asia. After the Soviet defeat,
bin Laden established a presence in Sudan
to build up his fledgling al Qaeda organization.
Around the same time, Saddam
Hussein invaded Kuwait and hundreds of
thousands of U.S. troops arrived in Saudi
Arabia. The U.S. military presence in “the
land of the two holy places” became
al Qaeda’s core grievance, and the United
States became bin Laden’s primary target.
Al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in
Africa in 1998, nearly sank the U.S.S. Cole
in Yemen in 2000, and attacked the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.
Bin Laden expanded his reach into Southeast
Asia with the assistance of other
terrorists who had fought in Afghanistan,
such as Riduan Isamuddin, known as
Hambali, who is the central link between
al Qaeda and the Indonesian terror group
Jemaah Islamiyah, and Ali Gufron, known
as Mukhlas, a leading planner of the
2002 Bali bombing that killed more than
200 people.
ON-THE-JOB TRAINING
The Afghan experience was important
for the foreign “holy warriors” for several
reasons. First, they gained battlefield
experience. Second, they rubbed shoulders
with like-minded militants from around
the Muslim world, creating a truly global
network. Third, as the Soviet war wound
down, they established a myriad of new
jihadist organizations, from al Qaeda to
the Algerian gia to the Filipino group
Abu Sayyaf.
However, despite their grandiose
rhetoric, the few thousand foreigners who
fought in Afghanistan had only a negligible
impact on the outcome of that war. Bin
Laden’s Afghan Arabs began fighting the
Soviet army only in 1986, six years after
the Soviet invasion. It was the Afghans,
drawing on the wealth of their American
and Saudi sponsors, who defeated the
Soviet Union. By contrast, foreign volunteers
are key players in Iraq, far more
potent than the Afghan Arabs ever were.
Several factors could make blowback
from the Iraq war even more dangerous
than the fallout from Afghanistan. Foreign
fighters started to arrive in Iraq even before
Saddam’s regime fell. They have conducted
most of the suicide bombings—including
some that have delivered strategic successes
such as the withdrawal of the un and most
international aid organizations—and the
Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, another
alumnus of the Afghan war, is perhaps
the most eªective insurgent commander
in the field. Fighters in Iraq are more
battle hardened than the Afghan Arabs,
who fought demoralized Soviet army
conscripts. They are testing themselves
against arguably the best army in history,
acquiring skills in their battles against
coalition forces that will be far more useful
for future terrorist operations than
those their counterparts learned during
the 1980s. Mastering how to make improvised
explosive devices or how to
conduct suicide operations is more relevant
to urban terrorism than the conventional
guerrilla tactics used against the Red Army.
U.S. military commanders say that techniques
perfected in Iraq have been adopted
by militants in Afghanistan.
Finally, foreign involvement in the
Iraqi conflict will likely lead some Iraqi
nationals to become international terrorists.
The Afghans were glad to have Arab
money but were culturally, religiously,
and psychologically removed from the
Afghan Arabs; they neither joined
al Qaeda nor identified with the Arabs’
radical theology. Iraqis, however, are closer
culturally to the foreigners fighting in Iraq,
and many will volunteer to continue other
jihads even after U.S. troops depart.
IN BAGHDAD AND IN BOSTON
President George W. Bush and others
have suggested that it is better for the
United States to fight the terrorists in
Baghdad than in Boston. It is a comforting
notion, but it is wrong on two counts. First,
it posits a finite number of terrorists who
can be lured to one place and killed. But
the Iraq war has expanded the terrorists’
ranks: the year 2003 saw the highest incidence
of significant terrorist attacks in two
decades, and then, in 2004, astonishingly,
that number tripled. (Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld famously complained
in October 2003 that “we lack metrics to
know if we are winning or losing the global
war on terror.” An exponentially rising
number of terrorist attacks is one metric
that seems relevant.) Second, the Bush
administration has not addressed the
question of what the foreign fighters will
do when the war in Iraq ends. It would be
naive to expect them to return to civilian
life in their home countries. More likely,
they will become the new shock troops of
the international jihadist movement.
For these reasons, U.S. allies in Europe
and the Middle East, as well as the United
States itself, are vulnerable to blowback.
Disturbingly, some European governments
are already seeing some of their citizens
and resident aliens answer the call to fight
in Iraq. In February, the Los Angeles Times
reported that U.S. troops in Iraq had
detained three French militants—and that
police in Paris had arrested ten associates
who were planning to join them. In June,
authorities in Spain arrested 16 men, mostly
Moroccans, on charges of recruiting suicide
bombers for Iraq. In September, prosecutors
in the United States indicted a Dutch
resident, Iraqi-born Wesam al-Delaema,
for conspiring to bomb U.S. convoys in
Fallujah. These incidents presage danger
not only for European countries, but also
for the United States, since European
nationals benefit from the Visa Waiver
Program, which aªords them relatively
easy access to the United States.
But it is Saudi Arabia that will bear
the brunt of the blowback. Several studies
attest to the significant role Saudi nationals
have played in the conflict. Of the 154 Arab
fighters killed in Iraq between September
2004 and March 2005, 61 percent were
from Saudi Arabia. Another report concluded
that of the 235 suicide bombers
named on Web sites since mid-2004 as
having perpetrated attacks in Iraq, more
than 50 percent were Saudi nationals.
Today, the Saudi government is exporting
its jihadist problem instead of dealing
with it, just as the Egyptians did during
the Afghan war.
A SWITCH IN TIME
American success in Iraq would deny
today’s jihadists the symbolic victory that
they seek. But with that outcome so
uncertain, U.S. policymakers must focus
on dealing with the jihadists in Iraq now—
by limiting the numbers entering the fight
and breaking the mechanism that would
otherwise generate blowback after the war.
The foreign jihadists in Iraq need to
be separated from the local insurgents
through the political process. Success
in that mission will require Iraq’s Sunni
Arabs to remain consistently engaged in
the political process. Shiite and Kurdish
leaders will have to back down from their
eªorts to create semiautonomous states in
the north and the south. But the prospects
for these developments appear dim at the
moment, and reaching a durable agreement
may increasingly be beyond U.S. influence.
To raise the odds of success, the United
States must deliver more security to central
Iraq. This means securing Iraq’s borders,
especially with Syria, to block the flow
of foreign fighters into the country. The
repeated U.S. military operations in
western Iraq since May have shown that
at present there are insu/cient forces to
disrupt insurgent supply lines running
along the Euphrates River to the Syrian
border. Accomplishing this objective
would require either more U.S. troops or
a much larger force of well-trained Iraqi
troops. For the moment, neither of those
options seems viable, and so additional
U.S. soldiers should be rotated out of Iraq’s
cities and into the western deserts and
border towns, transitioning the control
of certain urban areas to the Iraqi military
and police.
Foreign governments must also silence
calls to jihad and deny radicals sanctuary
once this war ends. After the Soviet defeat,
jihadists too often found refuge in places
as varied as Brooklyn and Khartoum, where
radical clerics oªered religious justifications
for continuing jihad. To date, some governments
have not taken the necessary
steps to clamp down on the new generation
of jihadists. Although the Saudis largely
silenced their radical clerics following the
terrorist attacks in Riyadh in May 2003,
26 clerics were still permitted late in 2004
to call for jihad against U.S. troops in Iraq.
The United States must press the Saudi
government to end these appeals and
restrict its nationals from entering Iraq.
In the long run, measures against radical
preaching are in Riyadh’s best interest,
too, since the blowback from Iraq is likely
to be as painful for Saudi Arabia as the
blowback from Afghanistan was for Egypt
and Algeria during the 1990s.
Finally, the U.S. intelligence community,
in conjunction with foreign intelligence
services, should work on creating a database
that identifies and tracks foreign
fighters, their known associates, and
their spiritual mentors. If such a database
had been created during the Afghan
war, the United States would have been far
better prepared for al Qaeda’s subsequent
terror campaign.
President Jimmy Carter’s national security
adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, once
asked of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan:
“What is most important to the history of
the world? The Taliban or the collapse
of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up
Muslims or the liberation of Central
Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Today, the Bush administration is implicitly
arguing a similar point: that the
establishment of a democratic Iraqi state
is a project of overriding importance for
the United States and the world, which
in due course will eclipse memories of the
insurgency. But such a viewpoint minimizes
the fact that the war in Iraq is already
breeding a new generation of terrorists.
The lesson of the decade of terror that
followed the Afghan war was that underestimating
the importance of blowback
has severe consequences. Repeating the
mistake in regard to Iraq could lead to
even deadlier outcomes.. |
