Page 2 of
2 BOOK REVIEW The real AfPak
deal Inside al-Qaeda and
the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11 by
Syed Saleem Shahzad Reviewed by Pepe
Escobar
What al-Qaeda certainly did not
count on was that Washington might cunningly
seduce the Taliban with some sort of power-sharing
agreement (that's more or less where we are now).
One doubts whether Mullah Omar will go for jihad
when he can have his say in Kabul, not to mention
getting a cut of the transit fees in case the
US$10 billion saga of the TAP
(Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan) pipeline ever
reaches its conclusion.
Even if al-Qaeda
did not anticipate the massive US drone war over
the tribal areas, it could not but rejoice over
the humanitarian crisis the all-out droning
provoked - as over 1 million people have
been displaced in five of the
seven tribal agencies, and for that these 1
million and their extended families will fight
Americans forever.
Saleem argues that the
drone war has forced al-Qaeda to entrench itself
even deeper in the Hindu Kush and its connected
mountains; so while it cannot prevail in the
deserts of Yemen or Iraq, or in the jungles of
Somalia, it does in the tribal areas, alongside a
Pakistani Taliban "which roams as free as the
mountain eagle can survive and fight".
The
American eagle might entertain different ideas -
taking this as the definitive proof that the only
way to "win" the war in the tribal areas is to
literally drone them to death.
Where's
Osama? It's interesting to note what
Saleem does not say about Osama bin Laden. It's
implied that Osama and current al-Qaeda Ayman
al-Zawahiri, along with a few hundred jihadis, at
least after they escaped Tora Bora in late 2001,
were holed up in Shawal, literally a no-man's land
at the crossroads of eastern Afghanistan, South
Waziristan and North Waziristan.
Then
Osama disappears from the narrative - after all he
was indeed "invisible" for years. He reappears
after the 2007 Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) debacle in
Islamabad - al-Qaeda's push to open a front in the
capital itself - when, according to Saleem, he
appointed Abu Obaida al-Misri to organize a revolt
in Pakistan and make the country ungovernable.
If Washington's Abbottabad narrative is to
be believed - and that's a major if - Osama at the
time was already living in Abbottabad and
perfectly up to date with everything going on in
Pakistan.
Saleem subscribes to the
al-Qaeda thesis that the 9/11 attack was organized
to lure the US into an Afghan trap; the Pentagon
for its part used 9/11 as the perfect excuse to
implant itself in the crucial crossroads of
Central and South Asia; and there's always the
possibility that 9/11 was allowed to happen, so
the Pentagon could expand on what later was
codified as the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine.
As much as Osama is relatively absent from
the narrative - reflecting his role over these
past years as a symbol - the real star is indeed
Ilyas Kashmiri, whom Saleem, and no one else,
interviewed. (See Al-Qaeda's
guerrilla chief lays out strategy Asia Times
Online, October 15, 2009.) Rising among a series
of changeable operational jihadis, each with his
modus operandi, Kashmiri impressed the al-Qaeda
ideologues so much that he was promoted to head of
the military committee and charged to expand the
jihad to Central Asia.
He sees the central
theater of war always as Afghanistan and the
Pakistani tribal areas, until the jihad in Central
Asia - and in India - picks up momentum. What's
extraordinary is that this was the ISI's plan of
30 years ago; building a theater of war to defeat
the Soviets in Afghanistan and have Kashmiris be
self-determined in India. It's no less than
another major historical irony that a Kashmiri now
is in charge of the same plan - but for al-Qaeda's
global jihad purposes.
A case can be made
that Saleem attributes larger than life powers to
al-Qaeda. As the book ends, he writes that
al-Qaeda's aim its to exhaust the West and then
announce victory in Afghanistan. As much as the
Afghan Taliban - and not al-Qaeda - are running
rings around NATO full time, the West will not
leave Afghanistan; because of Pipelineistan;
because of those juicy military bases so close to
Russia and China; because of NATO's expansion
aims; because of so much mineral wealth to be
exploited.
And when Saleem relays
al-Qaeda's objectives, that's even more
far-fetched; "al-Qaeda next aims to occupy the
promised land of ancient Khurasan, with its
boundaries stretching from all the way from
Central Asia to Khyber Paktoonkhwa through
Afghanistan, and then expand the theater of war to
India."
It won't happen. But what's
certain is that this "vision" simply won't vanish.
Especially with Americans/Europeans occupying
Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas being
droned to death.
And what about Iran?
There are minor problems in the book -
such as Saleem's assertion that in the mid-1990s
then Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani and his
minister of defense, the "Lion of the Panjshir"
Ahmad Shah Massoud, "allowed Osama bin Laden to
move from Sudan to Afghanistan"; actually Osama
arrived when the Taliban were already in power and
Massoud's Tajiks were their only armed opposition.
And a major problem is what Saleem bills
as the normalization of al-Qaeda relations with
Iran (we had some very lively discussions about
that via e-mail). Saleem argues that when an
Iranian diplomat was kidnapped in Peshawar in 2008
the complex tribal web led to Sirajuddin Haqqani.
After several months, and through Sirajuddin,
Tehran swapped their diplomat with high-value
al-Qaeda operatives held in Iran - including Abu
Hafs al-Mauritani, Suleiman Abu Gaith, Iman bin
Laden - one of Osama's daughters - and the
Egyptian Saif al-Adil.
It's been
impossible since then to get any kind of
confirmation from Tehran; but it's doubtful that
even with Tehran allowing al-Qaeda jihadis safe
passage towards Iraq, Central Asia or Turkey,
Tehran and al-Qaeda got somehow "intimate".
Especially because al-Qaeda had and still has a
real close relationship with the hardcore Sunni
outfit Jundallah - which specializes in targeted
assassinations in the Iranian province of
Sistan-Balochistan.
This gripping,
sometimes puzzling, sometimes infuriating but
always terrific reporter's notebook from what many
will see as a heart of darkness - but it's in fact
one of the most fascinating terrains, in social,
anthropological and even geological terms in the
whole planet - certainly could have profited from
sharp editing to eliminate redundancies and to
provide essential context.
After all,
Saleem used to think in Urdu - and then translate
it into English. In contrast, the English-language
Saleem that became known to readers of Asia Times
Online and other media is the merit of hours and
hours of painstaking work over the years by Editor
Tony Allison.
But in the end what really
matters is that he was our vanishing point out
there. This is not a book about "terror"; it's the
cracking narrative of a man alone in an immense
tribal land, armed only with a strong moral
compass, in search of the truth. And for that he
was killed. By the state within the state in
Pakistan - not by tribal Pashtuns.
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