In recent weeks, media reports from both
Iraq and Afghanistan have suggested the appearance
of a slow evolution of the Islamist insurgents'
tactics in the direction of the battlefield
deployment of larger mujahideen units that attack
"harder" facilities.
These attacks are not
replacing small-unit attacks, ambushes,
kidnappings, assassinations and suicide bombings
in either country, but rather seem to be initial
and tentative forays toward another stage of
fighting.
In the past month, reports
have suggested Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Iraqi
resistance allies are trying to train
semi-conventional units, and this month's
large-unit action by the Taliban at the town
of
Musa Qala in southern Afghanistan may be straws in
the wind
in
this regard.
Al-Qaeda believes that it and
its allies can only defeat the United States in a
"long war", one that allows the Islamists to
capitalize on their extraordinary patience, as
well as on their enemies' lack thereof. Before his
death in a firefight with Saudi security forces,
the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,
Abu Hajar Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin, wrote extensively
about how al-Qaeda believed the military fight
against the US and its allies would unfold. He
envisioned a point at which the mujahideen would
have to develop semi-conventional forces. He
identified this period as the "Decisive Stage"
[1].
Muqrin told his insurgent readers that
the power of the US precluded any expectation of
a quick victory. He wrote that the war would progress
slowly through such phases as initial manpower
mobilization, political work among the populace
to establish trust and support, the accumulation
of weaponry and other supplies, the establishment
of bases around the country and especially
in the mountains, the initiation of attacks
on individuals and then a gradual intensification
of the latter until a countrywide insurgency
was under way.
Each of these
steps was essential and none could be skipped,
Muqrin maintained; the steps would prolong the
war, thereby allowing the mujahideen to grow in
numbers, experience and combat power. "We should
warn against rushing from one stage to the next,"
he wrote. "Rather, we should be patient and take
all factors into consideration. The fraternal
brothers in Algeria, for instance, hastily moved
from one stage to the other ...The outcome was the
movement's retreat ... from 1995-1997."
As
these steps were traversed by the mujahideen,
Muqrin argued that the resources, political will,
morale and manpower of the insurgents' enemies
would be eroded and their forces would assume more
static positions in order to limit the attrition
they suffered. In this stage of the insurgency,
Muqrin predicted that the US and its allies would
conduct far fewer large-scale combat operations in
the countryside and would turn toward conducting
smaller raids on specific targets, while
simultaneously hardening their bases and
protecting their supply routes and lines of
communication.
At this point, Muqrin
wrote, the mujahideen could begin the final stage
of preparation for victory, "which is building a
military force across the country that becomes the
nucleus of a military army".
With the end
of the constant pressure and danger generated by
major enemy sweep operations, Muqrin wrote that
the mujahideen should begin "taking advantage of
the areas where the regime has little or reduced
presence" to train semi-conventional military
units. In these areas, "the mujahideen will set up
administrative centers and bases ... They will
build camps, hospitals, sharia courts and radio
transmission stations at these areas, which will
serve as a staging area for their military and
political operations".
Currently, Anbar
province in Iraq; Nuristan, the Kunar Valley,
Kandahar and Paktika provinces in Afghanistan; and
swathes of Pakistan's border provinces would seem
to meet the requirements laid down by Muqrin.
It should be clearly noted that Muqrin
neither envisioned nor called for mujahideen units
that could evenly square off with the units of
their foes. Although the formation of such
insurgent units would mark "the era of victory and
conquests for the mujahideen", Muqrin wrote, the
development of "semi-regular forces that gradually
become regular forces with modern formations"
would not yield forces equivalent to those of the
enemy.
"By modern," Muqrin wrote, "I mean
the need for these troops to be knowledgeable
about regular warfare, the army formations [and]
their function in urban areas. I do not mean
following the suit of the regimes ..." The purpose
of these forces? "Through these regular forces,"
Muqrin explained, "the mujahideen will begin to
attack small cities and publicize the conquest and
victories in the media to lift the morale of the
mujahideen and the people in general and break the
morale of the enemy."
Muqrin
continued: "The reason the mujahideen should target
the small cities is that when the enemies'
soldiers see these [small] cities falling into the
hands of the mujahideen it will destroy their
morale and they will realize that they are no
match for the mujahideen."
Interestingly,
Muqrin uses for his example the activities of the
Afghan mujahideen from 1988-92. In Afghanistan,
this period encompassed the era after the Soviet
military terminated its large-scale,
hammer-and-anvil sweep operations - leaving most
of the country's non-urban areas to the mujahideen
- and after the Soviet withdrawal when the Afghan
communists were hunkered down in a few urban
bastions.
In these years, Ahmad Shah
Massoud and Jalaluddin Haqqani began to train
small, semi-conventional units to use in attempts
to take small cities of the kind to which Muqrin
refers. Both Afghan commanders successfully used
these units; Massoud took several small cities in
northern Afghanistan - including Takhar - and
Haqqani took Khost, then the capital of Paktia
province.
These relatively small victories
produced a substantial morale boost among the
Afghan mujahideen and their supporters and
produced equal dismay among their enemies. In a
similar but more recent example of this
phenomenon, the Iraqi insurgency's morale received
a boost - and the US-led coalition was embarrassed
- when Zarqawi's forces took and temporarily held
the small city of al-Qaim near the Syrian border
in September 2005 [2].
In closing, it is
again important to note that al-Qaeda's doctrine
as explained by Muqrin does not call for
semi-conventional units to replace guerrilla
forces; the latter will remain a main force of the
insurgency, as well as its safety net. At this
stage, Muqrin wrote, "we should keep the
guerrillas because the mujahideen may need them in
some cases."
Muqrin argued that it was
always possible that the enemy would revert to
large-scale aggressive offensive operations and
force the insurgents back into an earlier stage of
the war. He also noted that the enemy's airpower
would always afford it great mobility. "It should
be noted here that the main bases on the mountains
must maintain a strong garrison and that the
conquests [taking small cities] should not tempt
the mujahideen to abandon their fortified bases,"
Muqrin warned.
"This is [done] so not to
give the enemy an opportunity to conduct a
rear-landing operation, taking advantage of the
absence of the mujahideen in these bases. This is
why we mentioned earlier that the mujahideen must
keep the guerrillas constantly prepared."
The larger insurgent units that
have been sporadically operating in Iraq
and Afghanistan during the past year may signal
the initial, limited success of Muqrin's call for
the building of semi-conventional mujahideen
units. The data to make a definitive judgment,
however, are currently not available.
It will
suffice to say that what is known about al-Qaeda's
doctrine for the "long war" calls for the eventual
creation of such units, and that al-Qaeda deputy
leader Ayman al-Zawahiri's instructions to Zarqawi
- in Zawahiri's letter of July 9, 2005 - clearly
infers that the mujahideen will need
semi-conventional forces to control Iraq after the
withdrawal of the US-led coalition [3].
Michael Scheuer served in the
CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004. He
served as the chief of the bin Laden unit at the
Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is
the once anonymous author of Imperial Hubris:
Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
and Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin
Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America.
Notes 1. Abu-Hajar
Abd-al-Aziz al-Muqrin, "The Second Stage: The
Relative Strategic Balance," Mu'askar al-Battar,
February 2, 2004. 2. Ellen Knickmeyer,
"Zarqawi militants seize key town in western
Iraq," Washington Post, September 6, 2005. 3.
Zawahiri to Zarqawi, July 9, 2005, sirector of
National Intelligence.
