In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

assessments on current and future threats to U.S. national security. Located at the CIA’s wooded headquarters near the Potomac River in northern Virginia, the NIC meets on a regular basis to craft perhaps its most important official assessments: National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). These documents contain the judgments and predictions of the U.S. intelligence community on a wide range of issues. In 2007, representatives from U.S. intelligence agencies met to hone and coordinate the full text of a document on the terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland. The directors of the CIA, National Security Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as the assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, submitted formal assessments that highlighted the strengths, weaknesses, and overall credibility of their sources in developing the document’s key judgments. In other words, it had been thoroughly vetted by the U.S. intelligence community.

The conclusions of the document, titled The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland, were grim: “Al-Qa’ida is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland.” Although many commentators in the United States had looked to Iraq as the center of international terrorism, the report revealed that the core al Qa’ida threat emanated from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border regions. “We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.”¹ The best and brightest minds in the American intelligence community had effectively discovered that since the September 11, 2001, attack, al Qa’ida had barely moved from its base in eastern Afghanistan. Scarcely 100 miles separated al Qa’ida’s Darunta camp complex near Jalalabad—one of bin Laden’s most significant training complexes before September 11—from North Waziristan, a key al Qa’ida haven after September 11. American military action, then, had succeeded in moving senior al Qa’ida leaders only the distance between New York City and Philadelphia.

The significance of the 2007 NIE was clear: al Qa’ida presented an imminent threat to the United States, and it enjoyed a sanctuary in Pakistan. Another U.S. intelligence assessment unambiguously concluded:

Al-Qa’ida has been able to retain a safehaven in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) that provides the organization many of the advantages it once derived from its base across the border in Afghanistan, albeit on a smaller and less secure scale. The FATA serves as a staging area for al-Qa’ida’s attacks in support of the Taliban in Afghanistan as well as a location for training new terrorist operatives, for attacks in Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the United States.²

The FBI came to a similar conclusion, warning in a June 2008 report: “A large number of terrorists have escaped from prisons around the world, raising the threat these terrorist escapees might pose to U.S. interests.” FBI officials were particularly concerned about several operatives in Pakistan, including Abu Yahya al-Libi and Rashid Rauf. “Al-Libi is arguably the most dangerous,” the FBI concluded, “because of his demonstrated ability to spread al-Qa’ida ideology” and to target the United States.³

The Return of al Qa’ida

By 2007, if not before, it was clear that al Qa’ida had enjoyed a resurgence in Pakistan’s tribal belt and that it remained committed to conducting attacks on a global scale, not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al Qa’ida had launched successful attacks and had been foiled in other plots, including the successful attack in London in July 2005 and the thwarted transatlantic plot in the summer of 2006 to detonate liquid explosives aboard several airliners flying from Britain to the United States and Canada. In 2007, officials drew worldwide attention when they broke up an al Qa’ida cell in Denmark and an Islamic Jihad Union cell in Germany led by Fritz Gelowicz. In 2008, police and intelligence forces uncovered several terrorist plots in Europe (including in Spain and France) linked to militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas. People taking part in each of these operations received training and other assistance in Pakistan.

The July 2005 terrorist attack in London serves as a useful example. British authorities initially believed that the attacks were the work of purely “home grown” British Muslims. However, subsequent evidence compiled by British intelligence agencies indicated that key participants, including Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shahzad Tanweer, between November 2004 and February 2005 visited Pakistani terrorist camps, where they were trained by al Qa’ida operatives. In September 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri said that al Qa’ida “was honoured to launch” the London attacks. “In the Wills of the hero brothers, the knights of monotheism,” Zawahiri remarked, “may God have mercy on them, make paradise their final abode and accept their good deeds.”⁴

A year earlier, British and American authorities had foiled a plot by a London-based al Qa’ida cell, led by Dhiren Barot, to carry out suicide attacks on the New York Stock Exchange and the Citi-Group Building in New York City; the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey; and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC. The trail similarly led back to Pakistan.⁵

Al Qa’ida was also involved in the infamous 2006 transatlantic plot.⁶ One of the controllers of the operation, which the British MI5 code-named Operation Overt, was Abu Ubaydah al-Masri, a senior al Qa’ida operative. What surprised U.S. intelligence analysts, however, was how little they knew about some of the individuals involved. “When the British government handed us the names of the individuals they believed were involved in the 2006 translatlantic plot,” remarked Bruce Riedel, a longtime CIA officer who was at NATO, “we had no idea who many of them were. They were complete unknowns.”⁷

Al Qa’ida was involved in more terrorist attacks after September 11, 2001, than during the previous six years. It averaged fewer than two attacks per year between 1995 and 2001, but it averaged more than ten major international attacks per year between 2002 and 2006 (excluding in Afghanistan and Iraq).⁸ Between 1995 and 2001, al Qa’ida launched approximately a dozen terrorist attacks—beginning on November 13, 1995, when they detonated an explosive device outside the office of the program manager of the Saudi Arabian National Guard in Riyadh, killing five Americans and two Indian government officials. The Saudi government arrested four perpetrators, who admitted connections with Osama bin Laden.⁹ Over the next several years, al Qa’ida conducted attacks in Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen, among other places. In 1996, bin Laden issued a declaration of jihad against the United States, in part because he felt that the “presence of the USA Crusader military forces on land, sea and air of the states of the Islamic Gulf is the greatest danger threatening the largest oil reserve in the world.” Consequently, America’s oppression of the Holy Land “cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets.”¹⁰

In 1998, bin Laden called specifically for the murder of any American, anywhere on earth, as the “individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”¹¹ A growing number of extremists all over the world sought training from al Qa’ida in Afghanistan and other countries. A British House of Commons report noted that, as “Al Qaida developed in the 1990s, a number of extremists in the UK, both British and foreign nationals—many of the latter having fled from conflict elsewhere or repressive regimes—began to work in support of its agenda, in particular, radicalising and encouraging young men to support jihad overseas.”¹²

After 2001, as al Qa’ida significantly increased its number of attacks, it continued to operate most actively in Saudi Arabia. But the group also expanded operations into North Africa (Tunisia and Algeria), Asia (Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Pakistan), the Middle East (Jordan and Turkey), and Europe (the United Kingdom). Most of these attacks were located in the area that had been controlled by the Caliphate, notably the Umayyad Caliphate from 661 to 750 AD, the land in which al Qa’ida wanted to establish its own pan-Islamic empire.¹³

An Apostate Regime

Al Qa’ida leaders based in Pakistan had three main objectives in Afghanistan. First, they wanted to overthrow the “apostate” regime of Hamid Karzai. In their mind, Karzai was doubly guilty of failing to establish a “true” Islamic state and of cooperating with the infidel Western governments. Second, al Qa’ida leaders wanted to replace the Afghan regime with one that followed a radical version of sharia law envisioned by Sayyid Qutb and other Islamist thinkers. Al Qa’ida leaders appeared content with the prospect of another Taliban victory in Afghanistan and the establishment of a Taliban-style interpretation of Islam, including sharia law—even though the Taliban had objectives that were largely parochial and limited to Afghanistan. The third objective was to wage a war of attrition against the United States and other Western governments, with the hope of weakening them and ultimately pushing them out of Muslim lands.

All of these goals were interconnected and consistent with the philosophy of bin Laden, Zawahiri, and others—an ideology that had been forged in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union and the struggle against Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other “apostate regimes.” They wanted to unite Muslims to fight the United States and its allies (the far enemy) and to overthrow Western-friendly regimes in the Middle East (the near