|
The Myth
of al-Qaeda in Iraq
Fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq is the last big argument for
keeping U.S. troops in the country. But the military's
estimation of the threat is alarmingly wrong.
By Andrew Tilghman
09/09/07 "Washington
Monthly" -- --- In
March 2007, a pair of truck bombs tore through the Shiite
marketplace in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, killing more
than 150 people. The blast reduced the ancient city center to
rubble, leaving body parts and charred vegetables scattered amid
pools of blood. It was among the most lethal attacks to date in
the five-year-old Iraq War. Within hours, Iraqi officials in
Baghdad had pinned the bombing on al-Qaeda, and news reports
from Reuters, the BBC, MSNBC, and others carried those remarks
around the world. An Internet posting by the terrorist group
known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) took credit for the destruction.
Within a few days, U.S. Army General David Petraeus publicly
blamed AQI for the carnage, accusing the group of trying to
foment sectarian violence and ignite a civil war. Back in
Washington, pundits latched on to the attack with special
interest, as President Bush had previously touted a period of
calm in Tal Afar as evidence that the military's retooled
counterinsurgency doctrine was working. For days, reporters and
bloggers debated whether the attacks signaled a "resurgence" of
al-Qaeda in the city.
Yet there's reason to doubt that
AQI had any role in the bombing. In the weeks before the attack,
sectarian tensions had been simmering after a local Sunni woman
told Al Jazeera television that she had been gang-raped by a
group of Shiite Iraqi army soldiers. Multiple insurgent groups
called for violence to avenge the woman's honor. Immediately
after the blast, some in uniform expressed doubts about al-
Qaeda's alleged role and suggested that homegrown sectarian
strife was more likely at work. "It's really not al-Qaeda who
has infiltrated so much as the fact [of] what happened in 2003,"
said Ahmed Hashim, a professor at the Naval War College who
served as an Army political adviser to the 3rd Cavalry Regiment
in Tal Afar until shortly before the bombing. "The formerly
dominant Sunni Turkmen majority there," he told PBS's
NewsHour With Jim Lehrer soon after the bombing, "suddenly
... felt themselves having been thrown out of power. And this is
essentially their revenge."
A week later, Iraqi security
forces raided a home outside Tal Afar andarrested two men
suspected of orchestrating the bombing. Yet when the U.S.
military issued a press release about the arrests, there was no
mention of an al-Qaeda connection. The suspects were never
formally charged, and nearly six months later neither the U.S.
military nor Iraqi police are certain of the source of the
attacks. In recent public statements, the military has backed
off its former allegations that al-Qaeda was responsible,
instead asserting, as Lieutenant Colonel Michael Donnelly wrote
in response to an inquiry from the Washington Monthly,
that "the tactics used in this attack are consistent with
al-Qaeda."
This scenario has become common.
After a strike, the military rushes to point the finger at
al-Qaeda, even when the actual evidence remains hazy and an
alternative explanation—raw hatred between local Sunnis and
Shiites—might fit the circumstances just as well. The press
blasts such dubious conclusions back to American citizens and
policy makers in Washington, and the incidents get tallied and
quantified in official reports, cited by the military in
briefings in Baghdad. The White House then takes the reports and
crafts sound bites depicting AQI as the number one threat to
peace and stability in Iraq. (In July, for instance, at
Charleston Air Force Base, the president gave a speech about
Iraq that mentioned al-Qaeda ninety-five times.)
By now, many in Washington have
learned to discount the president's rhetorical excesses when it
comes to the war. But even some of his harshest critics take at
face value the estimates provided by the military about AQI's
presence. Politicians of both parties point to such figures when
forming their positions on the war. All of the top three
Democratic presidential candidates have argued for keeping some
American forces in Iraq or the region, citing among other
reasons the continued threat from al-Qaeda.
But what if official military
estimates about the size and impact of al-Qaeda in Iraq are
simply wrong? Indeed, interviews with numerous military and
intelligence analysts, both inside and outside of government,
suggest that the number of strikes the group has directed
represent only a fraction of what official estimates claim.
Further, al-Qaeda's presumed role in leading the violence
through uniquely devastating attacks that catalyze further
unrest may also be overstated.
Having been led astray by flawed
prewar intelligence about WMDs, official Washington wants to
believe it takes a more skeptical view of the administration's
information now. Yet Beltway insiders seem to be making almost
precisely the same mistakes in sizing up al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Despite President Bush's
near-singular focus on al-Qaeda in Iraq, most in Washington
understand that instability on the ground stems from multiple
sources. Numerous attacks on both U.S. troops and Iraqi
civilians have been the handiwork of Shiite militants, often
connected to, or even part of, the Iraqi government.
Opportunistic criminal gangs engage in some of the same heinous
tactics.
The Sunni resistance is also
comprised of multiple groups. The first consists of so-called
"former regime elements." These include thousands of ex-officers
from Saddam's old intelligence agency, the Mukabarat, and from
the elite paramilitary unit Saddam Fedayeen. Their primary goal
is to drive out the U.S. occupation and install a Sunni-led
government hostile to Iranian influence. Some within this broad
group support reconciliation with the current government or
negotiations with the United States, under the condition that
American forces set a timetable for a troop withdrawal.
The second category consists of
homegrown Iraqi Sunni religious groups, such as the Mujahadeen
Army of Iraq. These are native Iraqis who aim to install a
religious-based government in Baghdad, similar to the regime in
Tehran. These groups use religious rhetoric and terrorist
tactics but are essentially nationalistic in their aims.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq comprises the
third group. The terrorist network was founded in 2003 by the
now-dead Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. (The extent of
the group's organizational ties to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda is
hotly debated, but the organizations share a worldview and set
of objectives.) AQI is believed to have the most non-Iraqis in
its ranks, particularly among its leadership. However, most
recent assessments say the rank and file are mostly radicalized
Iraqis. AQI, which calls itself the "Islamic State of Iraq,"
espouses the most radical form of Islam and calls for the
imposition of strict sharia, or Islamic law. The group
has no plans for a future Iraqi government and instead hopes to
create a new Islamic caliphate with borders reaching far beyond
Mesopotamia.
The essential questions are: How
large is the presence of AQI, in terms of manpower and attacks
instigated, and what role does the group play in catalyzing
further violence? For the first question, the military has
produced an estimate. In a background briefing this July in
Baghdad, military officials said that during the first half of
this year AQI accounted for 15 percent of attacks in Iraq. That
figure was also cited in the military intelligence report during
final preparations for a National Intelligence Estimate in July.
This is the number on which many
military experts inside the Beltway rely. Michael O'Hanlon, a
senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings
Institution who attended the Baghdad background briefing,
explained that he thought the estimate derived from a
comprehensive analysis by teams of local intelligence agents who
examine the type and location of daily attacks, and their
intended targets, and crosscheck that with reports from Iraqi
informants and other data, such as intercepted phone calls.
"It's a fairly detailed kind of assessment," O'Hanlon said.
"Obviously you can't always know who is behind an attack, but
there is a fairly systematic way of looking at the attacks where
they can begin to make a pretty informed guess."
Yet those who have worked on
estimates inside the system take a more circumspect view. Alex
Rossmiller, who worked in Iraq as an intelligence officer for
the Department of Defense, says that real uncertainties exist in
assigning responsibility for attacks. "It was kind of a running
joke in our office," he recalls. "We would sarcastically refer
to everybody as al-Qaeda."
To describe AQI's presence,
intelligence experts cite a spectrum of estimates, ranging from
8 percent to 15 percent. The fact that such "a big window"
exists, says Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of the CIA's
Counterterrorism Center, indicates that "[those experts] really
don't have a very good perception of what is going on."
It's notable that military
intelligence reports have opted to cite a figure at the very top
of that range. But even the low estimate of 8 percent may be an
overstatement, if you consider some of the government's own
statistics.
The first instructive set of
data comes from the U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty. In March, the organization analyzed the online postings
of eleven prominent Sunni insurgent groups, including AQI,
tallying how many attacks each group claimed. AQI took credit
for 10 percent of attacks on Iraqi security forces and Shiite
militias (forty-three out of 439 attacks), and less than 4
percent of attacks on U.S. troops (seventeen out of 357).
Although these Internet postings should not be taken as proof
positive of the culprits, it's instructive to remember that
PR-conscious al- Qaeda operatives are far more likely to
overstate than understate their role.
When turning to the question of
manpower, military officials told the New York Times in
August that of the roughly 24,500 prisoners in U.S. detention
facilities in Iraq (nearly all of whom are Sunni), just
1,800—about 7 percent—claim allegiance to al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Moreover, the composition of inmates does not support the
assumption that large numbers of foreign terrorists, long
believed to be the leaders and most hard-core elements of AQI,
are operating inside Iraq. In August, American forces held in
custody 280 foreign nationals—slightly more than 1 percent of
total inmates.
The State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research (INR), which arguably has the best
track record for producing accurate intelligence assessments,
last year estimated that AQI's membership was in a range of
"more than 1,000." When compared with the military's estimate
for the total size of the insurgency—between 20,000 and 30,000
full-time fighters—this figure puts AQI forces at around 5
percent. When compared with Iraqi intelligence's much larger
estimates of the insurgency—200,000 fighters—INR's estimate
would put AQI forces at less than 1 percent. This year, the
State Department dropped even its base-level estimate, because,
as an official explained, "the information is too disparate to
come up with a consensus number."
How big, then, is AQI? The most
persuasive estimate I've heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the
author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year
intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with
military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq.
He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters,
comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency.
"Al-Qaeda in Iraq," according to Nance, "is a microscopic
terrorist organization."
So how did the military come up
with an estimate of 15 percent, when government data and many of
the intelligence community's own analysts point to estimates a
fraction of that size? The problem begins at the top. When the
White House singles out al-Qaeda in Iraq for special attention,
the bureaucracy responds by creating procedures that hunt down
more evidence of the organization. The more manpower assigned to
focus on the group, the more evidence is uncovered that points
to it lurking in every shadow. "When you have something that is
really hot, the leaders start tasking everyone to look into
that," explains W. Patrick Lang, a retired U.S. Army colonel and
former head of Middle East intelligence analysis for the
Department of Defense. "Whoever is at the top of the pyramid
says, 'Make me a briefing showing what al-Qaeda in Iraq is
doing,' and then the decision maker says, 'Aha, I knew I was
right.'"
With disproportionate resources
dedicated to tracking AQI, the search has become a
self-reinforcing loop. The Army has a Special Operations task
force solely dedicated to tracking al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Defense
Intelligence Agency tracks AQI through its Iraq office and its
counterterrorism office. The result is more information culled,
more PowerPoint slides created, and, ultimately, more attention
drawn to AQI, which amplifies its significance in the minds of
military and intelligence officers. "Once people look at
everything through that lens, al-Qaeda is all they see," said
Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who also worked at the U.S.
State Department's Office of Counterterrorism. "It sort of
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Ground-level analysts in the
field, facing pressures from superiors to document AQI's
handiwork, might be able to question such assumptions if they
had strong intelligence networks on the ground. Unfortunately,
that's rarely the case. The intelligence community's efforts are
hobbled by too few Arabic speakers in their ranks and too many
unreliable informants in Iraqi communities, rendering a hazy
picture that is open to interpretations.
Because uncertainty exists, the
bar for labeling an attack the work of al-Qaeda can be very low.
The fact that a detainee possesses al-Qaeda pamphlets or a
laptop computer with cached jihadist Web sites, for example, is
at times enough for analysts to link a detainee to al-Qaeda.
"Sometimes it's as simple as an anonymous tip that al-Qaeda is
active in a certain village, so they will go out on an operation
and whoever they roll up, we call them al-Qaeda," says Alex
Rossmiller. "People can get labeled al-Qaeda anywhere along in
the chain of events, and it's really hard to unlabel them." Even
when the military backs off explicit statements that AQI is
responsible, as with the Tal Afar truck bombings, the perception
that an attack is the work of al-Qaeda is rarely corrected.
The result can be baffling for
the troops working on the ground, who hear the leadership
characterizing the conflict in Iraq in ways that do not
necessarily match what they see in the dusty and danger-laden
villages. Michael Zacchea, a lieutenant colonel in the Marine
Reserves who was deployed to Iraq, said he was sometimes
skeptical of upper-level analysis emphasizing al-Qaeda in Iraq
rather than the insurgency's local roots. "It's very, very
frustrating for everyone involved who is trying to do the right
thing," he said. "That's not how anyone learned to play the game
when we were officers coming up the ranks, and we were taught to
provide clear battlefield analysis."
Even if the manpower and number
of attacks attributed to AQI have been exaggerated—and they
have—many observers maintain that what is uniquely dangerous
about the group is not its numbers, but the spectacular nature
of its strikes. While homegrown Sunni and Shiite militias engage
for the most part in tit-for-tat violence to forward sectarian
ends, AQI's methods are presumed to be different—more dramatic,
more inflammatory, and having a greater ripple effect on the
country's fragile political environment. "The effect of al-Qaeda
has been far beyond the numbers that they field," explains
Thomas Donnelly, resident fellow for defense and national
security at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
"The question is, What attacks are likely to have the most
destabilizing political and strategic affects?" He points, as do
many inside the administration, to the February 2006 bombing of
the Golden Mosque in Samara, a revered Shiite shrine, as a
paramount example of AQI's outsize influence. President Bush has
laid unqualified blame for the Samara bombing on al-Qaeda, and
described the infamous incident—and ensuing sectarian
violence—as a fatal tipping point toward the current unrest.
But is this view of AQI's
vanguard role in destabilizing Iraq really true? There are three
reasons to question that belief.
First, although spectacular
attacks were a distinctive AQI hallmark early in the war, the
group has since lost its monopoly on bloody fireworks. After
five years of shifting alliances, cross-pollination of tactics,
and copycat attacks, other insurgent groups now launch equally
dramatic and politically charged attacks. For example, a second
explosion at the Samara mosque in June 2007, which destroyed the
shrine's minarets and sparked a wave of revenge attacks on Sunni
mosques nationwide, may have been an inside job. U.S. military
officials said fifteen uniformed men from the Shiite-run Iraqi
Security Forces were arrested for suspected involvement in the
attack.
Second, it remains unclear
whether the original Samara bombing was itself the work of AQI.
The group never took credit for the attack, as it has many other
high-profile incidents. The man who the military believe
orchestrated the bombing, an Iraqi named Haitham al-Badri, was
both a Samara native and a former high-ranking government
official under Saddam Hussein. (His right-hand man, Hamed Jumaa
Farid al-Saeedi, was also a former military intelligence officer
in Saddam Hussein's army.) Key features of the bombing did not
conform to the profile of an AQI attack. For example, the
bombers did not target civilians, or even kill the Shiite Iraqi
army soldiers guarding the mosque, both of which are trademark
tactics of AQI. The planners also employed sophisticated
explosive devices, suggesting formal military training common
among former regime officers, rather than the more bluntly
destructive tactics typical of AQI. Finally, Samara was the
heart of Saddam's power base, where former regime fighters keep
tight control over the insurgency. Frank "Greg" Ford, a retired
counterintelligence agent for the Army Reserves, who worked with
the Army in Samara before the 2006 bombing, says that the
evidence points away from AQI and toward a different conclusion:
"The Baathists directed that attack," says Ford.
Third, while some analysts
believe that AQI drafts Baathist insurgents to carry out its
attacks, other intelligence experts think it is the other way
around. In other words, they see evidence of native insurgent
forces coopting the steady stream of delusional extremists
seeking martyrdom that AQI brings into Iraq. "Al-Qaeda can't
operate anywhere in Iraq without kissing the ring of the former
regime," says Nance. "They can't move car bombs full of
explosives and foreign suicide bombers through a city without
everyone knowing who they are. They need to be facilitated."
Thus new foreign fighters "come through and some local Iraqis
will say, 'Okay, why don't you go down to the Ministry of
Defense building downtown.'" AQI recruits often find themselves
taking orders from a network of former regime insurgents, who
assemble their car bombs and tell them what to blow up. They
become, as Nance says, "puppets for the other insurgent groups."
The view that AQI is neither as
big nor as lethal as commonly believed is widespread among
working-level analysts and troops on the ground. A majority of
those interviewed for this article believe that the military's
AQI estimates are overblown to varying degrees. If such
misgivings are common, why haven't doubts pricked the public
debate? The reason is that alternate views are running up
against an echo chamber of powerful players all with an interest
in hyping AQI's role.
The first group that profits
from an outsize focus on AQI are former regime elements, and the
tribal chiefs with whom they are often allied. These forces are
able to carry out attacks against Shiites and Americans, but
also to shift the blame if it suits their purposes. While the
U.S. military has recently touted "news" that Sunni insurgents
have turned against the al-Qaeda terrorists in Anbar Province,
there is little evidence of actual clashes between these two
groups. Sunni insurgents in Anbar have largely ceased attacks on
Americans, but some observers suggest that this development has
less to do with vanquishing AQI than with the fact that U.S.
troops now routinely deliver cash-filled duffle bags to tribal
sheiks serving as "lead contractors" on "reconstruction
projects." The excuse of fighting AQI comes in handy. "Remember,
Iraq is an honor society," explains Juan Cole, an Iraq expert
and professor of modern Middle Eastern studies at the University
of Michigan. "But if you say it wasn't us—it was al-Qaeda—then
you don't lose face."
The second benefactor is the
government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, often the first to
blame specific attacks on AQI. Talking about "al-Qaeda" offers
the government a politically correct way of talking about Sunni
violence without seeming to blame the Sunnis themselves, to whom
they are ostensibly trying to reach out in a unity government.
On a deeper level, however, the al-Maliki regime has very
limited popular support, and the government officials and ruling
Islamic Dawa Party feel an imperative to include Iraqi troubles
in the broader "global war in terrorism" in order to keep U.S.
troops in the country. In June, when faced with increasingly
uncomfortable pressure from the Americans for his failure to
resolve key political issues, al-Maliki warned that Iraqi
intelligence had found evidence of a "widespread and dangerous
plan by the terrorist al-Qaeda organization" to mount attacks
outside of Iraq.
Elsewhere within the Shiite bloc
of Iraqi politics, Moqtada al-Sadr has his own reasons for
playing up the idea of AQI. "The Sadrists want to overstate the
role of al-Qaeda in a way to emphasize on the 'foreignness' of
the current problem in Iraq; and this easily fits their
anti-occupation ideology, which seems to gain more popularity
among Shia Iraqis on a daily basis," said Babak Rahimi, a
professor of Islamic Studies and expert in Shiite politics at
the University of California at San Diego.
Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, remain eager to take credit for the violence in
Iraq, despite the bad blood that existed between bin Laden and
AQI's slain founder, al-Zarqawi. They've produced a long series
of taped statements in recent years taunting U.S. leaders and
attempting to conflate their operations with the Sunni
resistance in Iraq. "They want to bring this all together as a
motivating tool to encourage recruitment," said Farhana Ali, a
terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation.
The press has also been
complicit in inflating the threat of AQI. Because of the danger
on the ground, reporters struggle to do the kind of
comprehensive field reporting that's necessary to check facts
and question statements from military spokespersons and Iraqi
politicians. Today, for example, U.S. reporters rarely travel
independently outside central Baghdad. Few, if any, insurgents
have ever given interviews to Western reporters. These
limitations are understandable, if unfortunate. But news
organizations are reluctant to admit their confines in obtaining
information. Ambiguities are glossed over; allegations are
presented as facts. Besides, it's undeniably in the reporter's
own interest to keep "al- Qaeda attacks" in the headline,
because it may move their story from A16 to A1.
Finally, no one has more
incentive to overstate the threat of AQI than President Bush and
those in the administration who argue for keeping a substantial
military presence in Iraq. Insistent talk about AQI aims to
place the Iraq War in the context of the broader war on
terrorism. Pointing to al- Qaeda in Iraq helps the
administration leverage Americans' fears about terrorism and
residual anger over the attacks of September 11. It is perhaps
one of the last rhetorical crutches the president has left to
lean on.
This is not to say that al-Qaeda
in Iraq doesn't pose a real danger, both to stability in Iraq
and to security in the United States. Today multiple Iraqi
insurgent groups target U.S. forces, with the aim of driving out
the occupation. But once our troops withdraw, most Sunni
resistance fighters will have no impetus to launch strikes on
American soil. In that regard, al-Qaeda—and AQI, to the extent
it is affiliated with bin Laden's network—is unique. The group's
leadership consists largely of foreign fighters, and its
ideology and ambitions are global. Al-Qaeda fighters trained in
Baghdad may one day use those skills to plot strikes aimed at
Boston.
Yet it's not clear that the best
way to counter this threat is with military action in Iraq.
AQI's presence is tolerated by the country's Sunni Arabs,
historically among the most secular in the Middle East, because
they have a common enemy in the United States. Absent this
shared cause, it's not clear that native insurgents would still
welcome AQI forces working to impose strict sharia. In
Baghdad, any near-term functioning government will likely be an
alliance of Shiites and Kurds, two groups unlikely to accept
organized radical Sunni Arab militants within their borders. Yet
while precisely predicting future political dynamics in Iraq is
uncertain, one thing is clear now: the continued American
occupation of Iraq is al-Qaeda's best recruitment tool, the lure
to hook new recruits. As RAND's Ali said, "What inspires jihadis
today is Iraq."
Five years ago, the American
public was asked to support the invasion of Iraq based on the
false claim that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to al-Qaeda.
Today, the erroneous belief that al-Qaeda's franchise in Iraq is
a driving force behind the chaos in that country may be setting
us up for a similar mistake.
Andrew Tilghman was an Iraq
correspondent for the Stars and Stripes newspaper in 2005 and
2006. He can be reached at tilghman.andrew@gmail.com.
Click
on "comments" below to
read or post comments
Comment
Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and
relevant to the story.
We
encourage engaging, diverse and
meaningful commentary. Do not
include personal information such
as names, addresses, phone
numbers and emails. Comments
falling outside our guidelines
– those including personal
attacks and profanity – are
not permitted.
See our complete
Comment
Policy and
use
this link to notify us if you
have concerns about a comment.
We’ll promptly review and
remove any inappropriate
postings.
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
