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

enemy).¹⁴ Ultimately, they envisioned the establishment of an “Islamic belt” that connected Pakistan to Central Asia, cut through the Caucasus, and then moved into Turkey and the Middle East.¹⁵

In an audio message in 2007, bin Laden rhetorically asked the people of Europe: “So what is the sin of the Afghans due to which you are continuing this unjust war against them? Their only sin is that they are Muslims, and this illustrates the extent of the Crusaders’ hatred of Islam and its people.”¹⁶ Westerners brought with them such concepts as democracy, which Islamists considered nizam al-kufr (a deviant system). They viewed democracy—as evidenced by the free elections in Afghanistan in 2004 and 2005—as supplanting the rule of God with that of a popular majority. Jihadis were obsessed with controlling state bureaucracies and using them to advance their Islamic project.¹⁷

Al Qa’ida leaders were also quick to draw parallels between the United States and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Afghan jihad, Zawahiri argued, was an extension of the struggle against the Soviets. The rhetoric was very much the same. Discussing the necessity of attacking the United States, he wrote that it is “of the utmost importance to prepare the Muslim mujahideen to wage their awaited battle against the superpower that now has sole dominance over the globe, namely, the United States.”¹⁸

Al Qa’ida’s Organizational Structure

After the overthrow of the Taliban, al Qa’ida evolved a fairly decentralized and nonlinear network based out of Pakistan. Terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman divided the group into four categories, or a series of concentric circles: al Qa’ida central, affiliated groups, affiliated cells, and the informal network.¹⁹

Al Qa’ida central included the remnants of the pre-9/11 al Qa’ida organization. Despite the death or capture of key al Qa’ida figures, such as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the core leadership included many old faces, such as bin Laden and Zawahiri.²⁰ Much of the founding core was scattered across Pakistan. After the death of his wife and two children during U.S. attacks in Afghanistan, Zawahiri married a woman from the Mahmund tribe in Bajaur Agency. This enabled him to develop even stronger tribal links to the leadership of militant Deobandi groups, such as Mullah Faqir Muhammad, the leader of Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat- e-Mohammadi (TNSM).²¹

As we have seen, al Qa’ida central was directly or indirectly involved in a number of terrorist efforts outside of Pakistan, such as in London in July 2005 and the foiled transatlantic plot in 2006. In some cases, this included direct command and control, such as commissioning attacks and planning operations. Relative freedom to operate in Pakistan enabled al Qa’ida to maintain operational capabilities, conduct training, and arrange meetings among operational planners and foot soldiers, recruiters, and others in relative safety. It also gave al Qa’ida’s leaders the space to focus on future attacks rather than to waste effort trying to hide from U.S. or Pakistani forces. Hoffman writes that this freedom allowed them the same latitude to operate as when they planned the 1998 East African embassy bombings and the September 11 attacks. Such attacks were entrusted only to al Qa’ida’s professional cadre—the most committed and reliable individuals in the movement—though locals were usually critical to executing the operation.²²

The affiliated groups included formally established insurgent or terrorist groups that cooperated with al Qa’ida. They benefited from bin Laden’s financial assistance and inspiration and received training, arms, money, and other support. In some cases, such as al Qa’ida in Iraq, burgeoning groups also funneled funds back to al Qa’ida central. Al Qa’ida in Iraq sent money to al Qa’ida in Pakistan—funds they had raised from donations as well as kidnappings and other criminal activity.²³ These affiliated groups hailed from countries as disparate as Pakistan, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Morocco, and the Philippines, as well as Kashmir. Among them were al Qa’ida in Iraq, Ansar al-Islam, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Moro Islamic Liberation Front, and the various Kashmiri Islamic groups based in Pakistan, such as Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba. The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) officially merged with al Qa’ida in September 2006, changed its name to al Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and attacked a U.S. contractor bus in December 2006 in greater Algiers, marking its first attack against a U.S. entity.²⁴

The affiliated cells were small, dispersed groups of adherents who enjoyed some direct connection with al Qa’ida, though it was often tenuous and transitory. These units were not large insurgent organizations attempting to overthrow their local government but often self-organized and radicalized small groups, much like the Hamburg cell that helped plan and execute the September 11 attacks in the United States. That cell included Muhammad Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah. In some cases, they comprised individuals who had some prior terrorism experience in previous jihadi campaigns in Algeria, the Balkans, Chechnya, Afghanistan, or perhaps Iraq. Others were individuals who had recently traveled to camps in Pakistan and other locations for training, as with the British Muslims responsible for the July 2005 London bombings.²⁵

Finally, the informal network included individuals who had no direct contact with al Qa’ida central but were outraged by Western attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and the Palestinian territories and thus were inspired to join the jihadi cause. Without direct support, these networks tended to be amateurish and clumsy. The four men charged in June 2007 with plotting to blow up fuel tanks, terminal buildings, and the web of fuel lines running beneath John F. Kennedy International Airport (which was code-named Chicken Farm by the plotters) belong in this category. They had no direct connections with al Qa’ida but were prepared to conduct attacks in solidarity with it.²⁶

Though less reliable, the informal network could occasionally be lethal. The terrorist cells that conducted the Madrid train bombings in March 2004 emerged from a loose association of Islamic extremists. What links there were to al Qa’ida and other groups were tangential at best. According to court documents from the case, the terrorists “were part of a cell that was formed, both locally and internationally, to operate in Spain (Catalonia and Madrid) and outside the country (Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Morocco, Syria, and Iraq).”²⁷ In December 2003, intelligence officials discovered an al Qa’ida Internet strategy document that showed the Madrid attack to have been motivated by Spain’s unpopular involvement in the Iraq War. “In order to force the Spanish government to withdraw from Iraq,” it said, “the resistance should deal painful blows to its forces.”²⁸ Another example of this category included the so-called Hofstad Group in the Netherlands, of which a member (Mohammed Bouyeri) murdered the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in November 2004.²⁹

Musical Chairs

In 2008, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri still ran al Qa’ida’s Pakistan contingent. But security concerns prohibited many of al Qa’ida’s operational commanders from gaining daily access to bin Laden and Zawahiri. For security purposes, al Qa’ida adopted a four-tiered courier system to communicate. There was an administrative courier network designed for communication pertaining to the movement of al Qa’ida members’ families and other administrative activities. Another courier network dealt with operational instructions. Where possible, unwitting couriers were substituted for knowledgeable people in order to minimize detection. A media- support courier network was used for propaganda. Messages were sent in the form of CDs, videos, and leaflets to television networks such as Al Jazeera. Finally, a separate courier network was used only by al Qa’ida’s top leadership, who usually did not pass written messages to each other. Often, their most trusted couriers memorized messages and conveyed them orally.

By 2008, there had been some recent successful apprehensions of senior al Qa’ida operatives by Pakistani and American intelligence forces. One was Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, whose real name was Nashwan Abd al-Razzaq Abd al-Baqi. He was born in Mosul, Iraq, in 1961, served in the Iraqi military, and was one of al Qa’ida’s highest-ranking and most experienced senior operatives. Abd al-Hadi served on al Qa’ida’s ruling Shura Council—a ten-person advisory body to Osama bin Laden—as well as on the group’s military committee, which oversaw terrorist and guerrilla operations and paramilitary training. The U.S. Department of Defense said, “He had been one of the organization’s key paramilitary commanders in Afghanistan from the late 1990s and, during 2002–04, was in charge of cross-border attacks in Afghanistan against Coalition forces.” It continued: “Abd al-Hadi was known and trusted by Bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Abd al-Hadi was in direct communication with both leaders and, at one point, was Zawahiri’s caretaker.”³⁰

Abd al-Hadi also served as a conduit between al Qa’ida in Iraq, the Taliban, and al Qa’ida senior commanders operating inside Pakistan, and he was involved in the foiled 2006 transatlantic-aviation plot. According to a report compiled by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center, based at MI5’s London headquarters, Abd al-Hadi “stressed the need to take care to ensure that the attack was successful and on a large scale.”³¹ He was captured in 2006 in Turkey.

In 2007, al Qa’ida appointed a new leader to run operations in Afghanistan: Mustafa Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid. Abu al-Yazid was born in Egypt’s al-Sharqiyah governorate in the Nile Delta in 1955; in his