Pakistan Before and After Osama

Preface

A round 07:45 in the morning of 2 May 2011 two consecutive calls on my cellphone pulled me out of bed.

‘Osama has been found and killed in Abbottabad,’ said the caller, my younger brother. This electrifying revelation worked more than what the early morning coffee does to you. Taken over by a strong feeling of shock and shame, I recalled what observation Amrullah Saleh, the former chief of Afghan intelligence – National Directorate of Security (NDS), had made at a conference organized by the Jamestown Foundation in Washington on 13 December 2010.

‘Unless all these boys [OBL, Mulla Omar, Hekmatyar] are pulled out of the basements of their hideouts in Pakistan, there will be no peace in Afghanistan, nor will the violence come down,’ Saleh had thundered in a gathering of almost 350 people at the National Press Club, where I was also to read a paper on the troubles in the border regions.

Saleh repeated those words immediately after Operation Neptune’s Spear and claimed his people had traced Osama bin Laden back in 2007.

‘I was pretty sure he was in the settled areas of Pakistan because in 2005 it was still very easy to infiltrate the tribal areas, and we had massive numbers of informants there,’ he said. ‘They could find any Arab but not Bin Laden. Our intelligence became more precise in 2007 when we believed he was hiding in Mansehra, a town a short distance from Abbottabad where the NDS had identified two al-Qaida safe houses,’ Saleh said.¹

Saleh also sent former President Pervez Musharraf in a fit of rage when told Osama bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan. ‘Am I the President of the Republic of Banana?’ Saleh recalled Musharraf reacting. Saleh adds, ‘Then he turned to President Karzai and said, Why have you brought this Panjshiri guy to teach me intelligence?’ The spat happened during a meeting between Afghani President Hamid Karzai and Musharraf, Saleh had told us during the Jamestown Foundation conference.²

Saleh, an ethnic Tajik from the Panjshir valley, northern Afghanistan, is known for his penchant for Pakistan-bashing, and this was one of the reasons why Karzai removed him from the NDS in summer 2010. His occasional public outbursts against Pakistan made it impossible for the two countries to even speak of ‘intelligence sharing’ and thus was seen as the major hurdle in the way of better bilateral relations.

And now, on 2 May 2011, with the discovery of Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted and dangerous man in Abbottabad, Pakistan’s equivalent of the US West Point Academy named after Maj. Abbott, people like Karzai and Saleh felt vindicated.

I had lived in the town in the early 1980s, and have since been visiting friends there. In fact, we visited a special Pakistan Independence Day ceremony at the Pakistan Military Academy on 14 August 2010 when the Pakistan Chief of Army Staff (CoAS) Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani had addressed cadets in the presence of several hundred guests. A year later on 23 April to be precise, we were among a number of journalists and writers invited again to witness a graduation ceremony, where Gen. Kayani gave a passionate speech while addressing fresh graduates of the academy. ‘Our security forces have broken the back of terrorists and the nation will soon prevail over the menace,’ Kayani promised. The general also asserted that the Pakistan army was completely aware of internal and external threats to the country. Ironically, none of us would have imagined that Osama bin Laden and his family lived within 2 kilometres of the academy, and probably listening to Kayani’s speech, which was resounding across the valley because of multiple loudspeakers placed around the parade ground.

This proximity to the academy, as well as the Pakistani government’s expression of ignorance about the US commando raid on the Bin Laden compound, therefore invited unprecedented jeer and flak from all and sundry. ‘This is the mother of all embarrassments, showing us either to be incompetent – it can’t get any worse than this, Osama living in a sprawling compound a short walk from that nursery school of the army, the Pakistan Military Academy and, if we are to believe this, our ever-vigilant eyes and ears knowing nothing about it – or, heaven forbid, complicit,’ Ayaz Ameer, one of the most prolific writers and critics of the armed forces, wrote in his column.³

Most observers described the killing of Bin Laden in a dramatic, Rambo-reminiscent thriller as Pakistan’s worst intelligence and security debacle since the fall of Dhaka in 1971, when former East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Never before did Pakistan cut such a sorry figure and its military leadership looked so incompetent and stupid, and helpless at the same time, reeling under the burden of shame and embarrassment indeed.

The entire episode kicked up a new storm, centred on demands for resignations of the top civilian and army leadership including President Asif Ali Zardari, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the then head of the mighty Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Many ridiculed the army for incompetence, and chided Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani as ‘impotent and toothless’.

There seemed no end to criticism and within days even perennial critics of the army such as Kamran Shafi noticed the need to advise sanity amid the chorus of demands that both the army and the ISI chiefs be dismissed forthwith.

Pasha and Kayani, instead of being asked to resign, should be asked to clean up the mess created by their predecessors and nourished by themselves... demolish the strategic depth nonsense; revert the army to training; stop baking bread and making pastries in officers messes; close the shaadi-ghars [wedding halls] operating out of officers’ clubs; stop the use of officers’ messes as restaurants selling burgers and tikkas to all and sundry; make the CSDs defence-specific, not general merchants to all; stop the business of real-estate dealing and tarting up cantonments and selling off the land to the highest bidder. MOST of all, to give up running the foreign policy of Pakistan, and letting the professionals do their jobs without colonels of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) breathing down their necks; and last but not least stop targeting their own people.⁴

Shafi is a former army major who is meanwhile extremely critical of the armed forces’ involvement in the domestic policy and its hold of the foreign policy.

Shafi had a point; if Kayani and Pasha resign, the persons who replace them will still carry on General Headquarters’ (GHQ) mindless policies. ‘If such little matters like resignations can change their rigid and stupid stance on strategic affairs then East Pakistan should have been the watershed moment. But what actually happened? The army assassinated its own saviour,’ Shafi wrote in a direct reference to the execution of former premier Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto by former dictator Gen. Zia-ul-Haq in April 1979.⁵

Personally, I also thought that the issue at hand was much larger than mere resignations of a few individuals. Foreign policy failures and adverse political and economic circumstances demanded a comprehensive overhaul of the system in favour of the civilian authority. The army must give up control of foreign and domestic affairs, most demanded. Once again, and by default, the simmering issue of sovereignty resurfaced in the national discourse, although the CIA had pressed ahead with the drone strikes despite repeated Pakistani protestations. By April 2012, the number of such strikes had reached nearly 295.⁶

‘The fact also is that our sovereignty was sold to America when our civil-military bureaucracy entered into unequal military pacts with the US in the 1950s, when it offered Pakistan as a front-line state for America in its war against the USSR when the rest of the post-colonial world was cobbling an autonomous non-aligned movement, when it sold our Sufi soul to various jihadi organizations sponsored (as the modern-day equivalents of America’s founding fathers as per President Ronald Reagan) and paid for by America in Afghanistan,’ argued Najam Sethi, one of the country’s best known political analysts and editor-in-chief of the Friday Times in his weekly editorial.

Sethi, a former socialist, went on to argue that the military has fashioned a national security doctrine to suit its manufacture of a national security state. ‘This is based on a palpable and continuing threat from India to undo Pakistan. In its latest formulation, the threat is supposed to emanate from India’s capacity to harm Pakistan rather than its intentions to make peace, which is a recipe for an arms race and not an antidote to war.’ It was indeed Pakistan’s hour of shame that drew criticism, cynicism, and ridicule from all over. Even the Pakistan Ex-Servicemen Association (PESA), a group of retired armed forces’ officers, demanded (in a Declaration for New Social Contract, 5 May 2011) that the civil and military leadership ‘come clean and reveal the entire truth about the facts, timing, and objectives surrounding the Bin Laden operation, to the people of Pakistan who are the true owners and stakeholders of our nation.’

Failure to fulfil constitutional mandates of office whether civil or military must be investigated and result in removal from office of functionaries including, and especially from, the highest levels, PESA demanded. One of its members, former navy chief Fasih Bokhari went a step further: ‘All those who violated Article 6 – the armed principal criminal, his armed and unarmed accomplices – to be tried, post haste. But even that wouldn’t happen without the military withdrawing into its constitutional boundaries first,’ Bokhari explained in a note on the pakistanpress.com blog.

Bokhari was obviously alluding to the military’s repeated interference in, and pre-dominance of politics and, the ensuing reluctance to confine itself to its primary duties that is, defence of the country’s frontiers.

Article 6 of the Constitution envisages death for those responsible for violating the Constitution – a crime classified as ‘treason’. Ever since he left the country in late 2008, Pakistan has been debating whether to try Pervez Musharraf for treason under this article for his October 1999 coup and actions thereafter.

As for Bin Laden’s long, undetected presence in their country, most Pakistanis condemned it as a ‘gross intelligence failure’. Some even derided the intelligence apparatus and asked for investigations as to how Bin Laden could escape arrest for years. Some dubbed 2 May as the most shameful day that exposed the many lies they had been living with. Others went to the extent of accusing the ISI of having harboured him. Who protected him and whether it was an institutional support, or an act by a few local individuals who must have been concerned more about the mission of Bin Laden rather than the implications if Bin Laden were to be found here. Ideology, and not the national duty, would have been the prime motive for those in the know of Bin Laden and his family’s presence in Abbottabad.

Pakistani journalist Saleem Shafi claims that loyalists of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former mujahideen leader, and meanwhile part of the tripodal insurgency raging in Afghanistan, had evacuated Bin Laden from Tora Bora where-after Bin Laden lived in the eastern Afghan Kunar province, far-northern Pakistan, Peshawar, and Waziristan before settling down in Abbottabad. Other sources, including a former Bin Laden aide Awar Gul, claim the Al Qaeda leader escaped Tora Bora with the help of Maulvi Yunus Khalis, the late mujahideen leader and head of his own faction of Hezbe Islami Afghanistan, Khalis belonged to the Ningarhar province, where Tora Bora mountains are located, and oversaw a vast socio-political and jihadist network of supporters.

This book analyses the pre- and post-Bin Laden Pakistan. Why and how this country became home to the world’s most wanted terrorist; Bin Laden’s escape from the Tora Bora Mountains in Eastern Afghanistan in December 2001 to his last stand in Abbottabad, and finds answers to the questions surrounding his stay in Pakistan as well as the US blitz raid on his hideout in the wee hours of 2 May 2011. Had the world’s most wanted person at all been living in the same place for all those years? How did he manage to stay undetected, together with his big family, including an eight-month-old son? Who from within the security establishment provided the safety network to the family? What stakes did the Pakistan army and the ISI had at all – if they were complicit – in protecting the most hunted person? Were they oblivious to the calls for rebellion that Bin Laden’s deputy, Dr Ayman al Zawahiri, used to issue against the government and the army of Pakistan – branding them both as US agents. Why Bin Laden fascinated certain people and groups within Pakistan (discussed in chapter Impact on Pakistan: Radicals Within).

This book also analyses the present-day Pakistan in the light of two different narratives pertaining to the circumstances around the killing of Bin Laden – one stitched together in Washington and the other woven in Pakistan by those sceptical of the Washington version – about the long history of the US involvement in the region. The chequered history of its relations with Pakistan, and how differences over how to tackle Al Qaeda and its local affiliates continue to sour and strain the ties between the two ‘allies’ are discussed in a separate chapter on Pakistan-US relations.

Chapter Bin Laden Galvanizes Af-Pak takes a look at the nexus between jihadist militants, criminal mafias and bureaucracy and how this has helped in the spawning of trans-border crime as well; with examples from daily life, the book attempts to explain how the venture, that began in the name of jihad in the early 1980s with the US money and the ISI facilitation, has both militarized and criminalise the region.

What we have witnessed in the last decade – circumstances arising out of the USA-led counterterror war in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s role in it – essentially stems from two politically conflicting narratives, both embedded in their particular geo-political context. Both countries publicly commit themselves to cooperation for pursuing ‘sshared objectives’ and translating ‘visions for development’ into practice, yet divergences in interpretations and the strategic outlook keep upsetting the edgy relationship.

And herein lies the core of the conflict; mutually conflicting narratives that influence and shape the Pakistan-US relations, particularly since 9/11, and this also explains the storm kicked up by the raid on Bin Laden’s mansion in Abbottabad on 2 May, which the authorities eventually pulled down eight months later, apparently to prevent it from becoming a sacred place, particularly for Bin Laden’s followers.

What we, therefore, see today in Pakistan is the consequence of its skewed foreign policy – centred on Kashmir and Afghanistan – which has as a result brought the country in direct conflict with Afghanistan, India, and the United States. All three countries meanwhile hold a consensus view of the Pakistani security establishment which they believe continues to be a big source of instability in the region. The Pakistani establishment, on the other hand, looks increasingly paranoid about the unusual agreement among the three countries and is still predicating its policies and actions on the presumption that these three countries are out to overrun Pakistan. And that is what is probably preventing a correction in its approach.

NOTES

1.   The Guardian, 5 May 2011.

2.   Ibid.

3.   The News, 6 May 2011.

4.   Shafi argued in one of his several email interventions on the [email protected] blog within days of Bin Laden’s elimination.

5.   Former East Pakistan became Bangladesh in December 1971 following protracted protests by nationalists and an insurgency led by the militant wing of founder Sheikh Mujeebur Rehman’s Awami League, supported by the Indian army. Surrounded in a hostile environment and cut off from West Pakistan, the Pakistani army – almost 90,000 – eventually surrendered, paving way for the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent country.

6.   http://counterterrorism.newamerica.net/drone..

Introduction

W ith the elimination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the history of conflict and the US involvement in it moved a full circle. The fact that Afghanistan became the birthplace of Al Qaeda and the eventual shelter to Bin Laden on the run should, therefore, not have come as a surprise at all. Neither was Bin Laden’s last reported hideout in Pakistan an unexpected revelation. This phenomenon is rooted in history, as illustrated by the two landmark books such as Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile (2003), a former producer of ‘60 Minutes’, and The Devil’s Games by Robert Dreyfuss (2005), one of the best known American journalist.

‘Throughout the 1980s the Afghan mujahideen were, in effect, America’s surrogate soldiers in the brutal guerrilla war that became the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, a defeat that helped trigger the subsequent collapse of the Communist empire.’¹ Charlie Wilson’s War is a juicy and succinct account of how Charlie Wilson, ‘a maverick congressman from east Texas, conspired with a rogue CIA operative to launch the biggest, meanest and most successful covert operation in the Agency’s history’.

George Crile explains, ‘Afghanistan was a secret war that the CIA fought and won without debates in Congress or protests in the street. It was not just the CIA’s biggest operation, it was the biggest secret war in history, but somehow it never registered on the American consciousness. When viewed through the prism of 9/11, the scale of that US support for an army of Muslim fundamentalists seems almost incomprehensible. In the course of a decade, billions of rounds of ammunition and hundreds of thousands of weapons were smuggled across the border on the backs of camels, mules, and donkeys.’

And the oil-rich Saudi Arabia was an equal partner in a war that killed some 28,000 Soviet soldiers and had engaged nearly 300,000 fighters, only half of them Afghans and Pakistanis. The rest came from other continents, specifically from the Middle Eastern and African countries.

A meeting between William Casey, the then CIA director, and the Saudi King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz in early 1980 at Jeddah had served as the foundation for the CIA and the Saudi Arabian Intelligence to fund the anti-Moscow campaign in Afghanistan, according to Crile.

‘What can you do to help us?’ Casey had asked King Fahd. But Fahd, no stranger to the workings of American politics, had countered by introducing a note of reality into the discussion. ‘That’s not a fair question. What I tell you, I will do. But you have your Congress to deal with, so you do what you can, and I’ll match it.’ Knowing the king’s vast resources, Casey had sprung to his feet, arms extended, saying: ‘You have got a deal.’²

This deal indeed opened the floodgates of money for all those Islamists who were overflowing with a passion to fight the infidels – the Russian communists – regardless of who they were and where they were. This is what Robert Dreyfuss explains in his Devil’s Games; a comprehensive account of the American foreign policy that for decades ‘miscalculated its support for Islamic fundamentalism’.

Drawing on archival research and interview with policy makers and defence and foreign-service officials, Robert Dreyfuss argues that America’s ‘historic alliance with the Islamic right is greatly to blame for the emergence of Islamist terrorism in the 1990’. Dreyfuss meticulously documents CIA’s funding of the Iranian ayatollahs in the coup that restored Iran’s Shah to power, the United States support for Saudi Arabia’s efforts to create a worldwide Islamic bloc as an antidote to Arab nationalism, and the long-standing ties between Islamic fundamentalists and the leading banks of the West. Dreyfuss also chronicles how a secretive clique of American strategists in the 1970s exploited political Islam to conduct a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan leading directly to the rise of the Taliban.

‘These power games and cabals construed at secret chambers at Langley, Riyadh, and Islamabad – all in pursuit of national interests and the desire to bleed and contain the Soviet Russians – also gave birth to a new breed of fighters-turned terrorists, symbolized by none other than Osama bin Laden.’³

It is quite an irony that the American CIA, which played a major role in bringing the Muslim fighters from across the world to get them trained by the Pakistani ISI against the Soviet Union, is currently pitched against the first and second generation of jihadis that the Pakistani and American security establishments themselves had fostered.

‘… jihadists drawn to the fighting from other parts of the world, especially from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf… would be the raw material for Osama bin Laden and the fledgling Al Qaeda organization that grew out of the jihad. The so-called Arab Afghans included Bin Laden himself, Ayman al Zawahiri of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, and tens of thousands of jihadists from the Arab states, Indonesia, the Philippines, Chechnya, and other far-flung corners of the Muslim world,’ writes Robert Dreyfuss.⁴ He also reminds us that after the Soviet Russians pulled out of Afghanistan in February 1989, these Arab guerrillas went home to Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Central Asia to continue the jihad and practise the skills of sniper shootings, sabotage, car bombing they had learnt from their America-led mentors.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981, himself visited countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan to enlist their support in 1980.

And these countries readily accepted the requests; ‘number of countries in the Muslim world decided it would be prudent to send Islamist militants to the Afghan war, perhaps thinking that they were killing two birds with one stone: they were pleasing the United States, which was looking for recruits, and they were getting rid of some troublemakers. Sadat, like other leaders, perhaps felt that most of them would be killed during the jihad.’⁵

‘Muslim governments emptied their prisons and sent these bad boys over there,’ says a CIA official who spent several years as station chief in Pakistan during the jihad. Not only were they packaged and shipped to Afghanistan, but they received expert training from US Special Forces. ‘By the end of 1980,’ wrote John Cooley, ‘US military trainers were sent to Egypt to impart the skills of the US Special Forces to those Egyptians who would, in turn, pass on the training to the Egyptian volunteers flying to the aid of the mujahideen in Afghanistan.⁶

[President] Jimmy Carter’s administration also created a secret fund of $500 million to create terror outfits to fight the Soviets. Nicknamed Operation Cyclone this fund was kept secret even from [the US] Congress and the American public. Subsequently, the Reagan administration and Saudi Arabia provided $3.5 billion to General Zia’s regime for the funding of madrassas for the Afghan jehad militants who were trained by the CIA in the Brooklyn School in New York and in Virginia. In Pakistan they were trained by the British MI6 and the Inter Services-Intelligence which worked with the CIA on the project. The idea was to create Mujahedeen to fend off the [S]oviets who were advancing in search of a warm water port.⁷

Many were trained on facilities inside the United States itself under Brzezinski’s oversight, and at various US facilities on the East Coast by Green Berets and Navy SEALs, according to Dreyfuss.

‘Under ISI direction, the mujahideen received training and malleable explosives to mount car bomb and even camel bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed to kill Soviet soldiers and commanders,’ wrote Steve Coll in his book Ghost Wars.

‘Casey endorsed these techniques despite the qualms of some CIA career officers,’ Coll says. ‘This is a rough business,’ said the CIA’s Bill Casey. ‘If we’re afraid to hit the terrorists because somebody’s going to yell assassination, it’ll never stop. Soon, the CIA and ISI were providing stealth-like explosive devices to the mujahideen, including bombs disguised as pens, watches, cigarette lighters, and tape recorders.’⁸

The alliances of expedience since the Afghan jihad indeed served as the catalyst for the morphing of volunteers into trans-nationalist militants and terrorists. Outfits such as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e Taiba, and Jaishe Mohammad – all those who turned their guns at India in Kashmir – had their origins in the same jihad too. Following in the footsteps of the American CIA, the Pakistani ISI also found it expedient to support these outfits for its dreams on Kashmir, and thus knit an alliance that has now spun out of control, partly because elements within these organizations look at the Pakistani security establishment with suspicion, largely because of its role in the war against terrorism. Tactics (fidayeen or self-termination attacks) employed in strikes on the General Headquarters (10 October 2009), the Naval base PNS-Mehran, Karachi (22 May 2011), or several raids on police and para-military facilities in Lahore and Peshawar and its periphery suggest that some of the groups are acting in the service of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, and presumably other foreign interests.

More than 200 deaths of at least eight major attacks within six weeks of the killing of Bin Laden left little doubt that Pakistan is now arrayed against a lethal breed of terrorists, inspired by and linked to Qaeda, which are ratcheting up violence in the country, which they believe has betrayed them in favour of the ‘Great Satan’ (the United States).

The events of the last two decades in particular demonstrate that the use of proxies in the name of jihad for political objectives has turned out to be violently disastrous, and, instead of winning friends, created many enemies for the region. Al Qaeda is one of those inimical forces; raised on the American tax-payers’ money – matched in cash by the Saudi kingdom – the organization prospered as long as the Pakistani security establishment and the Saudi monarchs viewed it favourably and treated it as a strategic partner because of the common friends that is, the Afghan Taliban.

Bin Laden belonged to the generation of Islamist volunteers from all over the world who had stayed in and transited through Pakistan for their onward journey to Afghanistan until a couple of years after 9/11. This relationship turned sour with the March 2004 Kaloosha operation near Wana, South Waziristan, where Al Qaeda’s Uzbek affiliates and locals inflicted heavy casualties on the Pakistan army.

It all began when the Pakistan army challenged the Uzbeks, in an attempt to dissuade them from targeting opponents in Waziristan. This marked the beginning of the end of the partnership, premised until then on false hopes. The March 2007 operation against Uzbek Al Qaeda, again in Kaloosha, dealt the final blow to Pakistan’s romance with foreign militant Islamists. With this, clear battle lines were drawn between the security establishment and Al Qaeda, which gradually galvanized ever more Afghan and Pakistani followers and facilitators not only in the border regions but also on mainland Pakistan.

It is primarily America versus Al Qaeda Central (AQC) as well as the Pakistan army versus Afghani and Pakistani Al Qaeda auxiliaries battling it out in the plains and mountains of both countries. Although the CIA-drone strikes have taken out more than two dozen of them, some of the AQC operatives are still nestled in the mountainous border region, presumably guiding operation here as well as elsewhere. But largely, they are on the run because of the shrinking space for them.

The American invasion of Iraq provided even greater impetus to these trans-nationalist movements who are all driven by the desire to resist the US-led ‘Western imperialism’.

As a consequence, a synergy or fusion of interests and similarity of causes has emerged between the traditionalist clergy and the radical reformists – largely led and influenced by Al Qaeda and supported by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri – in South and Southwest Asia, a sort of synthesis between Islamist militants and traditional mullahs.

This mission, basically the Al Qaeda ideology, also resonated in a video statement by Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri.

‘The whole world is an open field for us. As they attack us everywhere, we will attack them everywhere. As their armies got together to wage war on us, our nation will get together to fight them…. The shells and missiles that tear apart the bodies of Muslims in Gaza and Lebanon are not purely Israeli. Rather, they come and are financed by all countries of the Crusader alliance. Thus, all those who took part in the crime should pay the price. We cannot just stand idly by in humiliation while we see all these shells fall on our brothers in Gaza and Lebanon.’⁹

According to David Kilcullen, the renowned Australian theorist on counter-insurgency and counterterrorism and former senior counter-insurgency advisor to Gen. David Petraeus, the former commander-in-chief of the US-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda’s military strategy ‘appears to be aimed at bleeding the United States to exhaustion and bankruptcy, forcing America to withdraw in disarray from the Muslim world so that its local allies collapse, and simultaneously to use the provoking and alienating effects of US intervention as a form of provocation to incite a mass uprising within the Islamic world, or at least to generate and sustain popular support for AQ.’¹⁰ Kilcullen points to a Bin Laden statement he had issued in late 2004, outlining his strategic approach:

All that we have mentioned has made it easy to provoke and bait this [U.S.] Administration. All we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the furthest point East to raise a cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make the [U.S.] generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without achieving for it anything of note ... so we are continuing this policy of bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing and nothing is too great for Allah.¹¹

Al Qaeda’s Pakistani affiliates – Lashkar-e Taiba, Lashkar-e Jhangvi, Jaishe Mohammad, Sipah-e Sahaba Pakistan, and several new-born entities such as Jundullah, Harkatul Jehad al Alami, and Tehreek-e -Taliban Pakistan – are all using the same dictum against Pakistan itself; bleeding and exhausting it. More than 325 suicide bombings, roughly 1200 targeted attacks on security forces – army, police, and para-military – and more radicalized mainland that is, Punjab and the Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa provinces – bear scars of this campaign that clearly stems from Bin Laden’s and Zawahiri’s declaration of jihad against the US and its allies such as Pakistan, which they condemn as a collaborator of America. The exhausted and outstretched army – almost 147,000 permanently deployed in the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan, and over 100,000 stationed along the border to India – and a stagnating economy are some of the debilitating consequences of Bin Laden’s anti-US campaign from inside Pakistan. Neither did the CIA nor the ISI envision that injecting the idea of jihad into the minds of religious zealots from all over the world would serve as a catalyst for a generation of ‘real jihadists’ like Bin Laden, who would eventually bite the hands that fed them, and thus embark on a conflict – embedded in the salafi version of Islam that aims to spread Islam through force – that as of 2011 does not promise any lasting end.

What we face today, in the words of David Kilcullen, is Guerrilla Terrorism that transitioned from the ‘expeditionary terrorism’.

Kilcullen describes the 9/11 attacks as ‘expeditionary terrorism’:

Al Qa’ida formed the team for the attacks in one country, assembled them in another, ran the logistics and financial support for the operation out of a third, and then clandestinely inserted the team across international borders to attack its target. They infiltrated 19 people into the United States: essentially, an expeditionary raiding approach. ¹²

Al Qaeda and its Afghan affiliates are following the same approach in Afghanistan, and their Pakistani auxiliaries have adopted the guerrilla warfare as a means to pursue their objectives; inflicting as many cuts as possible into the body and soul of the country in order to trigger fear, uncertainty, and causing socio-political unrest.

While the US possess the financial strength and capacity to absorb the heavy costs of war, Pakistan seems to be struggling hard to cope with the financial burden as well as the socio-political fallout of an adventurous policy it adopted in the late 1980s.

The 9/11 events, the US response to it, and Bin Laden’s vow of a conclusive jihad against ‘infidels’ have certainly changed the world, at least parts of the world like Afghanistan and Pakistan, for the worse. With a strident US trying to maintain its supremacy in Asia in the face of two rising giants – India and China – more conflict of mutually exclusive competing interests is yet to come, unfortunately.

NOTES

1.    Introduction to Charlie Wilson’s Wars, Vanguard Books, Pakistan, 2003 and Atlantic Monthly Press, USA.

2.    Ibid.

3.    Robert Dreyfuss, The Devil’s Games: How the United States Helped Unleash the Fundamentalist Islam, Metropolitan Books, 2005.

4.    The Devil’s Games, p.274.

5.    Ibid.

6.    John Cooley, Unholy Wars, Pluto Press, London, 1999, pp.31, 32.

7.    Mohammad Amir Rana, Jihad-e-Kashmir-aur-Afghanistan, Mashaal Books, Lahore, 2002.

8.    Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, New York, The Penguin Press, 2004.

9.    BBC, 2006.

10.  David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the midst of a big one, Oxford University Press, 2009, p.29.

11.  Osama bin Laden’s statement, November 2004, ‘Bin Laden: Goal is to Bankrupt US’, 1 November 2004, http://articles.cnn.com/2004-11-01/world/binladen.tape_1_al-jazeera-qaeda-bin?_s=PM:WORLD.

12.  David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the midst of a big one, p.29.

      1      

The Raid:

Operation Neptune’s Spear

‘Geronimo EKIA’

This is how a member of the US Navy SEALs Team Six reported after Osama bin Laden’s assassination. ‘Geronimo’ was the code name for Bin Laden, who took a bullet to the chest, and another one to the head ‘before going down’. Bin Laden was code-named after the infamous Apache warrior who fought with Mexico and United States for many decades till his capture.

Osama bin Laden was dead almost instantly after receiving a bullet from the raiding sharp-shooter. His youngest wife Amal told Pakistani officials a few months later.

This was on Sunday morning (Washington), 1 May 2011, shortly past midnight in Pakistan, as President Barack Obama and several senior officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton watched mesmerized, and sometimes horrified, as the special forces kept relaying the video of the action back to Washington.

The SEAL team boarded a Boeing C-17 Globemaster at Naval Air Station Oceana on 26 April, a few miles from Dam Neck. After a refuelling stop at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the C-17 continued to Bagram Airfield, north of Kabul. It spent a night in Bagram and moved to Jalalabad next day to prepare for the final assault.

Besides personal interviews with Pakistani intelligence officials and some of those directly or indirectly involved with the interrogation of Osama bin Laden’s family members, the author has relied on the following as the primary sources for this section on the Operation Neptune’s Spear.

Press Briefing transcript provided by senior administration officials at the White House 1 May 2011 immediately after the Operation Neptune’s Spear to get Osama bin Laden.

The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/death-of-osama-bin-laden-phone-call-pointed-us-to-compound--and-to-the-pacer/2011/05/06/AFnSVaCG_story_2.html.

The NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/world/asia/03intel.html?_r=1&sq=White%20House%20officials%20canceled%20all%20West%20Wing%20&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all.

The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/05/osama-bin-laden-afghan-intelligence-abbottabad-lead?INTCMP=SRCH.

The Financial Times, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/de0f8988-780f-11e0-b90e-00144feabdc0.html.

‘Getting Bin Laden’, Nicholas Schmidle, in The New Yorker, 8 August 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_schmidle?printable=true#ixzz1Z7BjGmPQ.

Chuck Pfarrer, SEAL Target Geronimo: The inside story of the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2011.

These seventy-nine American commandos, according to the White House brief, boarded four helicopters (two HH-60 Blackhawks codenamed Razor 1 and 2, and two CH 47 Chinooks), which had taken off from Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan, descended on the compound after a 90-minute flight. On the way into Abbottabad, the helicopters traversed the tribal region Mohmand, a hilly region, then skirted the north of Peshawar before approaching the target compound.

The Black Hawks, each of which had two pilots and a crewman from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the Night Stalkers, had been modified to mask heat, noise, and movement; the copters’ exteriors had sharp, flat angles, and were covered with radar-dampening ‘skin’.

Besides this narrative that came from the official US sources such as the White House Brief, the most riveting account came from Amal, who remembers the dramatic moments in graphic detail until the minute she fainted after receiving a bullet in the thigh.

‘It heard like a storm, as if very strong winds had begun sweeping the windows,’ Amal revealed before the Abbottabad Commission. ‘We were all asleep when the metal crackling noise woke us up.’ Some of the rooms, and most of those in the annex were covered with metal sheets. Some sheets had also been used for partitions. ‘We thought the sheets were cracking because of the strong wind,’ Amal said referring to the muffled noise coming from the stealth Black Hawks. Investigators later found out that the strong wind generated by rotor blades had even dislodged some of the sheets.¹

The first Black Hawk, according to the old guard who lived outside the compound, had first dropped commandos over the annex. The obvious purpose was to first neutralize Bin Laden’s guards. There