'US-NATO war served al-Qaeda strategy'
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Al-Qaeda strategists have been assisting the Taliban fight against
United States-North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Afghanistan because
they believe that foreign occupation has been the biggest factor in generating
Muslim support for uprisings against their governments, according to the
just-published book by Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times Online's Pakistan bureau
chief whose body was found in a canal outside Islamabad last week with evidence
of having been tortured.
That al-Qaeda view of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan, which Shahzad reports in
the book based on conversations with several senior al-Qaeda commanders,
represents the most authoritative
picture of the organization's thinking available to the public.
Shahzad's book Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban was published on May 24 -
only three days before he went missing from Islamabad on his way to a
television interview. His body was found on May 31.
Shahzad, who had been the Pakistan bureau chief for the Hong Kong-based Asia
Times Online for 10 years, had unique access to senior al-Qaeda commanders and
cadres, as well as those of Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban organizations.
His account of al-Qaeda strategy is particularly valuable because of the
overall ideological system and strategic thinking that emerged from many
encounters Shahzad had with senior officials over several years.
Shahzad's account reveals that Osama bin Laden was a "figurehead" for public
consumption, and that it was his deputy, Egyptian Dr Ayman Zawahiri, who
formulated the organization's ideological line or devised operational plans.
Shahzad summarizes the al-Qaeda strategy as being to "win the war against the
West in Afghanistan" before shifting the struggle to Central Asia and
Bangladesh. He credits al-Qaeda and its militant allies in the North and South
Waziristan tribal areas in Pakistan with having transformed these areas into
the main strategic base for the Taliban resistance to US-NATO forces.
But Shahzad's account makes it clear that the real objective of al-Qaeda in
strengthening the Taliban struggle against US-NATO forces in Afghanistan was to
continue the US-NATO occupation as an indispensable condition for the success
of al-Qaeda's global strategy of polarizing the Islamic world.
Shahzad writes that al-Qaeda strategists believed its terrorist attacks on
September 11, 2001 would lead to a US invasion of Afghanistan that would in
turn cause a worldwide "Muslim backlash". That "backlash" was particularly
important to what emerges in Shahzad's account as the primary al-Qaeda aim of
stimulating revolts against regimes in Muslim countries.
Shahzad reveals that the strategy behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the
large al-Qaeda ambitions to reshape the Muslim world came from Zawahiri's
"Egyptian camp" within al-Qaeda. That group, under Zawahiri's leadership, had
already settled on a strategic vision by the mid-1990s, according to Shahzad.
The Zawahiri group's strategy, according to Shahzad, was to "speak out against
corrupt and despotic Muslim governments and make them targets to destroy their
image in the eyes of the common people". But they would do so by linking those
regimes to the United States.
In a 2004 interview cited by Shahzad, one of Bin Laden's collaborators, Saudi
opposition leader Saad al-Faqih, said Zawahiri had convinced Bin Laden in the
late 1990s that he had to play on the US "cowboy" mentality that would elevate
him into an "implacable enemy" and "produce the Muslim longing for a leader who
could successfully challenge the West".
Shahzad makes it clear that the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were the
biggest break al-Qaeda had ever gotten. Muslim religious scholars had issued
decrees for the defense of Muslim lands against the non-Muslim occupiers on
many occasions before the US-NATO war in Afghanistan, Shahzad points out.
But once such religious decrees were extended to Afghanistan, Zawahiri could
exploit the issue of the US occupation of Muslim lands to organize a worldwide
"Muslim insurgency". That strategy depended on being able to provoke discord
within societies by discrediting regimes throughout the Muslim world as not
being truly Muslim.
Shahzad writes that the al-Qaeda strategists became aware that Muslim regimes -
particularly Saudi Arabia - had become active in trying to end the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan by 2007, because they feared that as long as they continued
"there was no way of stopping Islamist revolts and rebellions in Muslim
countries".
What al-Qaeda leaders feared most, as Shahzad's account makes clear, was any
move by the Taliban toward a possible negotiated settlement - even based on the
complete withdrawal of US troops. Al-Qaeda strategists portrayed the first
"dialogue" with the Afghan Taliban sponsored by the Saudi king in 2008 as an
extremely dangerous US plot - a view scarcely supported by the evidence from
the US side.
Shahzad's book confirms previous evidence of fundamental strategic differences
between the Taliban leadership and al-Qaeda.
Those differences surfaced in 2005, when Taliban leader Mullah Omar sent a
message to all factions in North and South Waziristan to abandon all other
activities and join forces with the Taliban in Afghanistan. And when al-Qaeda
declared the "khuruj" (popular uprising against a Muslim ruler for
un-Islamic governance) against the Pakistani state in 2007, Omar opposed that
strategy, even though it was ostensibly aimed at deterring US attacks on the
Taliban.
Shahzad reports that the one of al-Qaeda's purposes in creating the Pakistani
Taliban in early 2008 was to "draw the Afghan Taliban away from Mullah Omar's
influence".
The Shahzad account refutes the official US military rationale for the war in
Afghanistan, which is based on the presumption that al-Qaeda is primarily
interested in getting the US and NATO forces out of Afghanistan and that the
Taliban and al-Qaeda are locked in a tight ideological and strategic embrace.
Shahzad's account shows that despite cooperative relations with Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the past, al-Qaeda leaders decided after
9/11 that the Pakistani military would inevitably become a full partner in the
US "war on terror" and would turn against al-Qaeda.
The relationship did not dissolve immediately after the terror attacks,
according to Shahzad. He writes that ISI chief Mehmood Ahmed assured al-Qaeda
when he visited Kandahar in September 2001 that the Pakistani military would
not attack al-Qaeda as long it didn't attack the military.
He also reports that Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf held a series of
meetings with several top jihadi and religious leaders and asked them to lie
low for five years, arguing that the situation could change after that period.
According to Shahzad's account, al-Qaeda did not intend at the beginning to
launch a jihad in Pakistan against the military but was left with no other
option when the Pakistani military sided with the US against the jihadis.
The major turning point was an October 2003 Pakistani military helicopter
attack in North Waziristan that killed many militants. In apparent retaliation
in December 2003, there were two attempts on Musharraf's life, both organized
by a militant whom Shahzad says was collaborating closely with al-Qaeda.
In his last interview with The Real News Network, however, Shahzad appeared to
contradict that account, reporting that the ISI had wrongly told Musharraf that
al-Qaeda was behind the attempts, and even that there was some Pakistani Air
Force involvement in the plot.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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