Ayman al-Zawahiri was from a prominent, elite Egyptian family. His relatives were Arab nationalists in that most nationalist of eras, the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ruled Egypt 1954-1970 after a young officers coup in 1952. Some teenagers act out by becoming delinquents. Al-Zawahiri defied the rest of his relatively secular family by becoming a devotee of Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brotherhood theorist of Islamic revolution. Qutb and the Brotherhood had been involved in a failed attempt to assassinate Col. Abdel Nasser in Alexandria in 1954. A thousand or so members were rounded up and tried, some of them tortured. Qutb was jailed as a conspirator. Qutb argued that the secular, nationalist Egyptian government was full of people who only looked and spoke like Muslims but that they had actually gone over to the evil Pharaoh. They were no longer really Muslims, but godless tyrants, apostates. And, he implied, apostates deserve to be killed. Qutb was accused of conspiring again to assassinate Abdul Nasser from prison in 1965 and was executed in 1966. Al-Zawahiri, age 15, was crushed.

In 1967 when Abdel Nasser lost the 6-Day War with Israel, al-Zawahiri rejoiced. He was maybe the only Egyptian not in mourning. He was glad to see Pharaoh taken down a notch.

Al-Zawahiri yielded to his family demands that he go to medical school. By the late 1970s he had a fancy practice in the shishy Ma’adi district of Cairo. I was at the American University in Cairo then, and some of my professors lived in Ma’adi, and invited us over for pot luck. We were around the corner from al-Zawahiri’s clinic. Who knows, maybe I saw him on the street. He had taken the Hippocratic Oath to protect human life, but would become one of history’s most notorious mass murderers.

Behind the scenes, al-Zawahiri formed one of the two branches of the youth terrorist organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). They had no use for the Muslim Brotherhood, the leadership of which made a pact with President Anwar El Sadat to give up political violence if he would let them organize. Sadat was a rightwinger who took over Abdel Nasser’s leftwing government, and he thought he needed a counterweight to the leftists, so he did a deal with the right wing Muslim Brotherhood. They disapproved of land reform and nationalization of industries, so they were perfect for Sadat’s purposes even if they were a little nutty about religion. Sadat encouraged the young Muslim Brotherhood types on college campuses to organize into “Islamic Groupings” to offset the Nasserists and Communists. The Islamic Grouping formed a national organization, advised by Sheikh Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh.

I remember in 1978 when a gaggle of Egyptian Islamic Jihad members were arrested by the Egyptian police, having been caught with bomb-making materials and bombs. It was the headline of the government-owned newspaper, al-Ahram [The Pyramids] . Al-Zawahiri still had the cover of practicing medicine in Ma’adi, but the Egyptian secret police were beginning to realize that he was dangerous.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran gave hope to religious radicals in Egypt that they could overthrow Sadat and make a Sunni version of that revolution in Egypt.

The EIJ found ways of getting in touch with cadets at the most prominent Egyptian military academy, and some secretly joined them, including one Lt. Khalid al-Islambouli. In 1981, both branches of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad made a 12-man council with the Islamic Grouping, and the ensemble decided to take out Sadat. It was decided that al-Islambouli and other recruits in the military would jump out of their troop transport vehicle during a military parade while Sadat was in the reviewing stand.

They pulled it off, and in 1981 Sadat was assassinated. However, the Egyptian masses weren’t interested in being ruled by religious zealots, and Sadat’s vice president, Hosni Mubarak, an air force officer who planned out Egypt’s campaign in the 1973 war, became president-for-life.

Egyptian religious radicals were at that point rounded up, including al-Zawahiri. In the meantime, Ronald Reagan had come to power in the US, and he and some congressional Cold Warriors wanted to respond to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by backing Afghan jihadis. Some of the seven main such groups were tribal and relatively secular. Several were religious extremists, such as the Hizb-i Islami of Gulbaddin Hikmatyar. Hikmatyar became the CIA favorite and got the lion’s share of the billions the US sent in via the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The Egyptian government wanted to get the radicals off its hands. Instead of executing those implicated in Sadat’s killing or keeping them in prison, both steps sure to make further trouble, they offered them a deal. Leave Egypt and go do your jihad against the Soviets, or else. Most of them took the deal, including al-Zawahiri. It may be that the Reagan administration pressured Mubarak to send them off. We may never know. Al-Zawahiri set up a clinic on the Pakistan side, in Peshawar, to treat the jihadis wounded in firefights with the Red Army.

Meantime, I went off to Pakistan for my Ph.D. research and studied Urdu in Lahore. It was in late 1981 that I went up with a friend to Peshawar. Al-Zawahiri wasn’t there yet– he didn’t get out of prison until 1984– but the place was like Berlin in the Cold War, a hotbed of plotting, with many Afghan refugees around. I spoke Dari Persian with them and heard about their ordeals. My time in South Asia in the 80s and early 90s gave me insights into religious politics in Pakistan and Afghanistan that would later help me interpret al-Qaeda.

In 1989, the Soviets completely withdrew from Afghanistan. Usama Bin Laden, who had been a fundraiser for the Mojahedin, based in Peshawar and Saudi Arabia, went back to Jedda. He immediately gave a sermon in Jedda about the need to take down the other superpower, the US, (with which he had been implicitly allied only a few months before). He complained bitterly about US backing for Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians during the first Intifada.

By 1996, Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had gathered again in Afghanistan, as the Taliban were taking over the country. They merged their two organizations, EIJ and al-Qaeda, and became Qaedat al-Jihad. They declared holy war on the US and al-Zawahiri developed a new approach. He came to believe that he hadn’t been successful in overthrowing Arab governments because the US propped them up. So, first, he’d have to find a way to get them out of the Middle East and make it clear that dominating it came with a high price. After the US withdrew, then its puppets in the region (as he thought of them) would be easily overthrown.

Hence the attacks on the East Africa US embassies, the attack on the USS Cole, and the 9/11 attacks.

Those attacks failed, despite their gut-wrenching death toll and all the noise they made. They did encourage copy-cat attacks on a much smaller scale– Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2003-2006. Because I knew that terrain, I got called to Washington by think tanks a lot in the first decade of the last century, giving talks and presentations to the US government personnel who got time off to come to the panels, on what al-Qaeda was and how it operated and how I thought it could be defeated. I hope I helped.

The Bush administration took cynical advantage of 9/11 to launch a war of conquest in Iraq and to begin a 20-year military occupation of Afghanistan. Neither of the latter were useful for counter-terrorism, and indeed, were always likely to proliferate terrorism. The US was not dissuaded from playing its superpower role in the region and propping up governments it found useful. Indeed, Washington doubled down on that role, most unwisely. The Bush administration made an opening for al-Qaeda and its offshoot, ISIL in Iraq, and the US government over two decades failed to convince rural Afghans, whom they bombed assiduously all that time, to choose it over the Taliban.

The US squandered 20 years of sole superpower status and some $7 trillion on its fruitless “war on terror,” which had no benefit at all for the United States. If counter-terrorism were desirable, it could have been done with a light, rapid-response force, not with massive land campaigns in Central and West Asia.

Al-Zawahiri gradually lost any relevance. He was viewed as a joke in Egypt, and he opposed the 2011 youth revolts because they were primarily secular in character. He was backed for a while by some of the Syrian Jihadis who from 2011 tried to overthrow the Syrian government with a guerrilla war. But they faced pressure from Gulf patrons to dissociate themselves from al-Zawahiri. A section of them split off into ISIL, who thought that al-Zawahiri was old hat.

Ironically, during the Syrian civil war, until Russian and Iranian intervention ended it, the US CIA was supporting religious radical groups trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad who at least were battlefield allies of al-Qaeda. We were back to the 1980s in some ways.

As al-Zawahiri died, the Egyptian military was still ruling Egypt and the Saudi, Jordanian and other royal families al-Qaeda saw as Quislings were all still in power and benefiting from high oil prices. The US was still the predominant superpower, and a rising China likes Muslim radicalism even less than Washington does.

Al-Zawahiri goes down in the forgotten annals of failed, minor revolutionaries, distinctive only for the number of innocent civilians he murdered. His was a dead end for the Muslim world, and the vast majority of Muslims saw al-Qaeda for what it was.

An unprecedented 18% of Arab youth now are “not religious,” and many youth and others in the Arab world give as a reason for their cooling to religion the long decades of religious radicalism that have roiled the region. Al-Zawahiri dreamed of an Islamic state — though the rigidity and harshness of his vision was more a nightmare — but his crude, Nazi-like methods undermined the very basis for any such thing.

As for the US, almost no one will care that al-Zawahiri was finally brought to justice. People younger than 33 probably mostly don’t know who he was. Americans had moved on, turning inward. This generation faces the climate emergency, economic challenges, a rising American far right that threatens the foundations of democracy in a way al-Zawahiri never did, and renewed Washington-Moscow tensions. Most Americans regret that they allowed Washington to spend trillions on its murky and self-contradictory “war on terror.” Al-Qaeda can now be seen for what it was — a small, opportunistic and destructive terrorist organization that leaves virtually no legacy, and certainly no positive one.

Published in Foreign Policy No. 156 (Sep. – Oct., 2006), pp. 26-28, 30, 32. Copyright Foreign Policy, all rights reserved. Not for further reprint.

These responses were my assessment of 9/11 and the Bush Forever Wars five years after the attacks. It is perhaps worth revisiting them now, 20 years after the attacks. I think I mostly got it right. I pointed out the US had not refashioned Iraq and Afghanistan but just continued the civil war in both countries by backing the previously weaker side. I pointed out that in many ways 9/11 had also been a disaster for al-Qaeda. I pointed to the future threat of cyber-terrorism. One thing that I would like to underline to today’s readers is that the things I said here in fall, 2006, were extremely controversial and would have been angrily denounced by everyone in official Washington. After you read it, you can see what Bush was telling people around the same time here. Because I said these things I was widely and viciously attacked by the right wing in the U.S., who deluged my university administration for years with demands that I be fired; I was subject to an illegal and outrageous investigation of my private life by the CIA; and I was turned down for a job at Yale (which they had asked me to apply for!). As all Wolverines know, the University of Michigan is in any case the best university in the world, and I was always unlikely to leave Ann Arbor. I say all this not in any search for sympathy; I am aware of my privilege. I say it because much of what I said here later on became common wisdom, and I just want to underline how unusual these views were at that time. In fact, it was brave of Foreign Policy to print them; the Bushies and Neoconservatives were vindictive.

9/11 Was a Victory for Al Qaeda

Only somewhat. The operation was certainly a tour de force of large-scale, theatrical terrorism. But did it really advance the goals of the organization? As a result of the attacks, al Qaeda lost its bases and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. Some al Qaeda strategists had wanted to expand the Taliban’s rule from Afghanistan to neighboring countries, including Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and eventually Pakistan. Instead, the movement’s leaders were forced to either flee overseas or take refuge in a remote network of caves. Military strikes and intelligence operations have disrupted the organization, and hundreds of key operatives have been arrested in Pakistan. Intercepted correspondence and Internet postings reveal that some al Qaeda operatives are bitter toward Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for incurring the full wrath of the United States. Although al Qaeda as a movement or franchise may have benefited from the successes of the Iraqi insurgency, al Qaeda’s leadership did not anticipate the Iraq war. The organization has capitalized on the fighting to further its message and recruiting, but the war was not part of its overarching strategy.

Small Attacks by Local Cells Have Replaced 9/11 -Style Operations

Probably. Post-9/11 terrorism — from Bali to Madrid to London — has become the province of small, local groups who are emulating al Qaeda but not in direct contact with it. These cells can learn a few tricks on the Internet, and they can certainly inflict pain, but they cannot hope to accomplish much. At most, they can carry bombs onto trains. The economic and social disruption of these operations is limited, which is why al Qaeda itself would not bother with them. The core al Qaeda leadership prefers terrorism that has a powerful psychological and political impact. Attaining that level of impact has now become very difficult. The 9/11 hijackers exploited conceptual gaps in U.S. security procedures: American experts did not expect hijackers to be capable of piloting jetliners, and they did not expect them to commit suicide. It would be very difficult to accomplish such an advanced operation again. The organization’s command and control has been severely disrupted, and security agencies around the world are watchful. But al Qaeda is not out of the game entirely. In February 2006, its operatives almost succeeded in bombing the Abqaiq oil refining facility in Saudi Arabia, which would have caused an enormous short term spike in the price of petroleum and widespread fuel shortages. But the fact that a once porous Saudi security apparatus foiled the attack highlights al Qaeda’s limited capabilities.

9/11 Was a Clash of Civilizations

False. The notion that Muslims hate the West for its way of life is simply wrong, and 9/11 hasn’t changed that. The exhaustive World Values Survey found that more than 90 percent of respondents in much of the Muslim world endorsed democracy as the best form of government. Polling by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has found that about half of respondents in countries such as Turkey and Morocco believe that if a Muslim immigrated to the United States, his or her life would be better. The one area where Muslim publics admit to a value difference with the United States and Europe is standards of sexual conduct and, in particular, acceptance of homosexuality. In other words, Muslims reject what might be called Hollywood morality, just as do American conservatives and evangelicals. Those differences alone do not drive people to violence.

If it is not a clash of civilizations, what is it?

It is a clash over policy. Bin Laden has expressed outrage at the occupation of the three holy cities — Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem- – by the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia (now ended) and the Israeli possession of Jerusalem. Before the Iraq war, polling consistently showed that Muslims were most concerned about the United States’ wholehearted support of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. The bloody U.S. occupation of Iraq has now created another point of tension: The Muslim world does not believe that Iraq will be better off because of the U.S. intervention. Autonomy and national independence appear to be part of what Muslims mean by democracy, and they consider Western interventions in Muslim affairs a betrayal of democratic ideals. September 11 and the American response to it have deepened the rift over policy, but they haven’t created a clash of civilizations.

The War on Terror Has no End

That’s the plan. The Bush administration has defined the struggle vaguely precisely so that it can’t end; George W. Bush clearly enjoys the prerogatives of being a war president. So, the administration has expanded the goals and targets of this war from one group or geographical area to another. There is an ongoing counterterrorism effort against al Qaeda and, more broadly, the Salafist jihadi strain of Sunni radicalism. Then there is the struggle to empower the Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and to crush permanently the Pashtun-centered Taliban. In Iraq, the goal is to ensure the primacy of the Kurds and the Shiites over the Sunni Arabs. And then there is the effort to contain or overthrow the secular Baathist regime in Syria and the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran. Even North Korea sometimes gets included in this sprawling campaign. It is less a coherent war than a hawk’s wish list.If the war on terror is indeed all these things, then it could drag on for decades. More likely, the American public will not tolerate such a costly grab bag of initiatives for much longer. If there is no major attack in the United States, pressure will build on Washington to stop fiddling with the politics of Kandahar and Ramadi, much less those of Damascus and Tehran. At some point, the American public will have to choose between paying for Bush’s ongoing wars and Medicare.And that will be the true end of the war on terror.

9/11 Radically Changed U.S. Foreign Policy

No. American policy has changed only at the margins. The attacks temporarily removed constraints on U.S. political elites, allowing them to pursue their policies more aggressively. As we now know, President Bush and his advisors wanted to undermine Saddam’s regime well before September 11. Absent the attacks, the administration might have employed a limited bombing campaign, a covert operation, or a coup attempt. The attacks suddenly made a years long land war in the Middle East politically palatable. But that energy has now dissipated, and it has left behind little fundamental change in U.S. policy.Despite talk of a war on terror, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, the Persian Gulf monarchies, Morocco,and Pakistan remain close U.S. allies. Relations with Libya were warming in the Clinton era, and the Iraq war didn’t alter its trajectory. American support for Israel remains steadfast. And Iran and Syria were in Washington’s sights well before 9/11.It is possible to imagine a response to 9/11 that would have been dramatically different. The United States might have allied with the Baathist secularists in Syria and Iraq, and with the Shiites in Iran, to counter the extremist Sunni threat. Instead, all Washington’s old friends in the area (including the three regimes that had recognized the Taliban — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) are still friends, and the old enemies are still enemies. The most dramatic changes, of course, are in Afghanistan and Iraq. But both countries have effectively been fighting civil wars for 25 years, with the United States backing the losing side (the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and the Kurds and Shiites in Iraq). After 9/11, the Bush administration transformed the losers in those conflicts into winners. But the civil wars continue, with the unseated groups now playing the role of insurgents. The change is significant, but the transformation is far less complete than what was imagined in the spring of 2003. The administration’s plan for liberalization and democratization in the Middle East has yielded little beyond a failed state in Iraq, an unstable Lebanon torn between Hezbollah and Israel, and polite but noncommittal noises from allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The Next 9/11 Will Be Even Worse

It’s anyone’s guess. Al Qaeda’s efforts to acquire nuclear material have been amateurish. In 2002, U.S. agents in Afghanistan seized canisters from Taliban and al Qaeda compounds, only to discover that al Qaeda operatives had likely been duped into purchasing phony nuclear materials. The organization has pursued other tools of mass destruction, but without much success. Al Qaeda agents were reportedly planning to use poison gas in New York’s subway system, though it appears that Zawahiri mysteriously called off the operation. Perhaps the experience of the Aum Shinrikyo terrorist group in Tokyo deterred him; its 1995 attack killed 12 people rather than the thousands the terrorists had hoped to claim. Still, it would be irresponsible to minimize the threat. Technological advances are allowing small groups to wreak major damage, and al Qaeda has often attracted skilled engineers and scientists. Breakthroughs in DNA research, for example, could lead to designer viruses that would be a terrorist’s dream. The Internet has created new vulnerabilities as major engineering infrastructure, from dams to nuclear plants, has come to rely on it. The world’s financial systems are increasingly vulnerable as well. Governments, universities, and corporations must ensure that emerging technologies don’t go astray. Al Qaeda may not have fundamentally changed the world on 9/11, but that is no reason to give it a second chance.

Want to Know More?

1 For a discussion of the roots of 9/11 and insight into what makes militants tick, see Fawaz Gerges’s The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006). Noted Islam scholar Gilles Kepel examines the politics behind radical Islam in Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon speculate on what the next 9/11 might look like in The Next Attack:The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right (New York: Times Books, 2005). FOREIGN POLICY and the Center for American Progress surveyed more than 100 leading foreign-policy experts about the prospects for America’s war against terror in The Terrorism Index (FOREIGN POLICY,July/August 2006). Richard Clarke offers an insider’s look at the U.S. government’s struggle to adapt to the world of global terrorism in Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004). The 911 Commission Report (New York: Norton, 2004) examines the attack in minute detail, assesses the policy failures that made it possible, and suggests reforms to prevent it from happening again.

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Bonus Video:

9/11: One Day In America | Documentary Series Trailer | National Geographic UK

While there are parts of the report I agree with, some of the argument seems to me flawed. Let me explain why that is, below.

First of all, lead author David Vine and his colleagues are speaking of US “Post-9/11 Wars,” which is not exactly the same as the “War on Terror.”

The War on Terror is a stupid phrase that I have much criticized. I’m not alone– a Marine general once made fun of it to me when we were taking a walk in the woods together. But surely if it has any meaning at all, it means the fight against al-Qaeda and allied movements. The Congressional Authorization for the Use of military Force of 2002 specifically speaks of movements that planned out the September 11 attacks.

So even if the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations have invoked the AUMF in their various police actions, analytically speaking it does not apply to anti-al-Qaeda movements such as the Houthis in Yemen or the Baathist government in Syria (which in 2002-2003 tortured al-Qaeda operatives for the United States).

So the “War on Terror” would comprise US military actions mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I am all on board with Vine and his colleagues in criticizing the Bush administration war on Iraq. Iraq was not involved in 9/11, and there was no al-Qaeda to speak of in Iraq in 2002. What little there was was being hunted by the Baath secret police. Iraq was not making weapons of mass destruction and delivered to the UN documentation of its destruction of such programs in the late 1990s.

There was no reason for the United States to launch an aggressive war on Iraq, occupy it for 8.5 years, and destroy its main institutions, including the army. These actions led to the rise of ISIL and yet another US intervention.

The study estimates 9.2 million displaced in Iraq by these wars. OK, I can live with that estimate. And I agree that the proximate cause was the US war of aggression on Iraq. That is, many of those displaced were not displaced by the US military, but by Sunni or Shiite militias or the reconstituted Iraqi Army. But, if Bush hadn’t invaded in the first place, none of that would have happened.

So blaming the US for the 9.2 million Iraqi displaced is fair.

Likewise, the US involvement in the Saudi-led war on Yemen is shameful, and the US bears a large share of blame for the 4.4 million displaced there. Although the US is not fighting there, it has refueled Saudi and other bombers, it sold sophisticated military equipment to the belligerents, it has provided strategic advice, and anything anyone says bad about Washington in this regard is richly deserved. Even the Congress has denounced US support for this war, which is like bank robbers denouncing greed, and tells you how awful and fruitless this war is.

Afghanistan is more complicated. The Soviet occupation from very late 1978 to 1988 killed about one million, wounded 3 million, displaced 2 million internally, displaced 2 million to Iran, and displaced 3 million to Pakistan. This is out of a population of some 16 million at the time!

As for the US and NATO after 2001, they in my view made an error in trying to stay in Afghanistan after they helped the Northern Alliance overthrow the Taliban in 2001-2002. But that initial campaign does not appear to have resulted in high levels of casualties or displacement. The attempt of Donald Rumsfeld and his successors to stay in Afghanistan helped alienate some of the population and led to a resurgence of the Taliban, which now hold 5-10% of the country and have a presence in half of provinces. This renewed war between the Kabul government and the Taliban has produced thousands of casualties a year, and has displaced millions.

The Brown report estimates “2.1 million Afghans fled the country with another 3.2 million” displaced internally.

I have no reason to doubt these figures. But it is also true that after the fall of the Taliban and the return of relative peace in some provinces, about half of the 3 million Afghans in Pakistan have been repatriated. So you’d have to say that the US and NATO partially reversed that emigration flow that had been caused by the Soviets. That is, the US permitted 1.5 million Afghans to return home, so if 2.1 million left during the past 19 years, the net outflow is more like 600,000.

Very little US war-fighting in Afghanistan was in Persian-speaking provinces, which were relatively calm. It was mostly in the Pushtun regions where the Taliban were strong. So I just am not convinced that enormous numbers of Tajiks and Hazaras went to Iran because of the ongoing fighting with the Taliban. In fact, many Shiite Hazaras were able to come back home because the Taliban were overthrown (the Taliban had massacred them).

We must remember that Iran is an oil state, which means it has a need for foreign guest workers, and there are now 3 million Afghans in Iran. They are largely Persian-speaking and from provinces that were relatively secure after the Tajik-Hazara-Uzbek alliance came to dominate the country. Many are therefore economic migrants like the Pakistanis who go to the Gulf. There may be advantages to claiming to be refugees as opposed to economic migrants. There is also a tendency toward refugee inflation on the part of governments seeking UN help.

So I’m not sure you could nail down a net foreign displacement at all.

Internally displaced persons of 3.2 million is plausible. But remember that the Taliban and more recently ISIL are responsible for some proportion of them. Unlike in Iraq, where there was nothing much going on before Bush invaded it, the Taliban controlled Afghanistan and were already widely displacing people, so you can’t blame the US for their continuing to do so. Taliban ideology is hard line Deobandi and they hate Shiites, Sufis, Sunni mainstream traditionalists, and Uzbek secularists, and have not scrupled to shoot them or blow them up at will.

I just think that the picture in Afghanistan is much more mixed, both with regard to responsibility and with regard to movements on the ground, than is true of Iraq.

I can’t understand the report’s allegations about Libya. They are reporting 1.2 million displacements. Are they counting everyone who was displaced since the Libyan Revolution of 2011, including those who then went home?

So the United Nations High Commission on Refugees says as of 2020 of Libya: “217,002 people displaced inside the country (IDPs) and 278,559 people who have returned home (returnees).”

There are also some 40,000 refugees in Libya from other countries, many of them trying to make their way by sea to Europe.

Anyway, I just think this part of the report is deeply flawed. The no-fly zone in Libya was not part of any war on terror, it was ordered by the United Nations Security Council. The International Criminal Court found the Gaddafis guilty of massive crimes against humanity. If there had been no no-fly zone, Gaddafi’s armor would have crush Misrata, Benghazi, Bayda and other cities, and would have also produced hundreds of thousands of displaced. We saw in Syria what an entrenched one-party state did to a rebelling population. The same thing would have happened in Libya.

The US role in 2011 was mainly to take out Gaddafi’s anti-aircraft batteries. The sorties flown to stop Gaddafi’s armor from advancing on revolutionaries were by various NATO states. I was in Libya in 2012 and it was fragile but not anything like Syria. Bad things happened from 2014, when militias started controlling politics, but I can’t for the life of me see what the US had to do with that.

As for Syria, that is a really complex situation that I can’t go into here at the length it deserves. But, again, if the US had not intervened against ISIL, then a lot more people would have been displaced by ISIL, and, indeed, ISIL did chase 600,000 Syrian Kurds into Turkey.

Millions were displaced in western Syria by the civil war. It isn’t clear to me that the US was a major player in all that. In fact, people complained about Obama’s reluctance to get involved.

Surely with regard to Syria, the millions displaced must be blamed on the al-Assad regime, on extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, on Hizbullah and Iraqi militias, and most of all on Russia, the fighter jets of which have bombed the bejesus out of Syria. Nobody has done a report on all the people displaced by Russia.

In the end, I think the numbers arrived at and attributed to the US in this report are exaggerated. But even if the actual number of displaced caused by the US is probably closer to 13 million, that is more than the population of my state, Michigan, and is pretty damning in itself.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs: “Costs and Consequences of US Post-9/11 Wars: Focus on Climate Change”

The US government has never understood insurgency for the most part. Smart USG officials with whom I’ve interacted have had a firm belief that leadership is a rare quality and that you can attrite an organization by killing its leaders. This theory is patently false. It moreover gives false hope to counter-insurgency officials and fools them into thinking simple tactical steps will be effective.

When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on whom the Pentagon rather ridiculously blamed 80% of the violence in Iraq in 2005, was killed from the air in spring of 2006, many observers thought that al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, his guerrilla group, was doomed. But his successor, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, renamed it the Islamic State of Iraq and decided to experiment with holding territory in Diyala and other provinces under the noses of the US military.

Then in 2011 President Obama appears to have had Usama Bin Laden assassinated (there is nothing in the public record to suggest that at any point there was any order to capture him alive). Al-Qaeda was fading at that point. But Ayman al-Zawahiri, the no. 2 man, just took over the operation. Al-Qaeda and its local ally, the Haqqani group, continued to hit the US in Afghanistan, sometimes quite hard, and sought to destabilize Pakistan. The Yemeni affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, remained vigorous.

The Iraqi affiliate had run into some roadblocks. When Abu Omar was killed in Iraq 2010, again some thought that the group was over with.

But Ibrahim Samarrai took over, called himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and took the fight so Syria, renaming the group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or in Arabic Daesh). It went on to conquer most of al-Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces in Eastern Syria. In 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi came into an internal conflict with ally Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, and this al-Qaeda branch in Syria split into the Nusra Front (al-Qaeda proper, reporting to Ayman al-Zawahiri), and Daesh.

The Nusra Front or al-Qaeda in Syria became the best rebel fighting group against the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad. Since the US backs remnants of the Free Syrian Army (mostly de fact Muslim Brotherhood factions) who have tactical alliances with al-Qaeda on the battlefield, the US became allied with the allies of al-Qaeda, repeating all the mistakes of the Reagan administration in Afghanistan in the 1980s. US weapons given to the rebels often end up in al-Qaeda’s hands, and the few victories the rebels have had, as in Idlib, were spearheaded by al-Qaeda, so that the US-backed rebels can’t be convinced to abandon the alliance of convenience.

As for Daesh, in 2014, al-Baghdadi’s group took over 40% of the land area of Iraq. It could not have done that if the Sunni Arab population of Iraq were not outraged at the sectarian, Shiite fundamentalist government that the Bush administration installed in Baghdad, and which Washington continues to back to the hilt. (There’s nothing wrong with the Shiite majority coming to power at the ballot box; but democracy involves avoiding a tyranny of the majority, which Iraq’s Shiite parties have not avoided).

In 2015 Saudi Arabia launched a war on Yemen to beat back the victorious Houthi Zaidi militia. It ignored al-Qaeda in the south, which promptly took the major port of Mukala and also several other cities. Only in the past month have Saudi Arabia and its allies bothered to try to deal with AQAP, the most deadly of the al-Qaeda affiliates aside from Daesh). Al-Qaeda has withdrawan from Mukala, but there are rumors that it was allowed simply to walk away (the Saudis claim to have killed 800 in fierce fighting but this allegation cannot be substantiated). Saudi Arabia has virtually ignored Daesh in Iraq and some think it is happy enough to see a champion arise for Iraqi Sunnis that ties down the Shiite government in Baghdad, which the current government in Riyadh despises.

So I think we may conclude that the decapitation strategy of dealing with al-Qaeda does not work and has never worked.

Moreover, al-Qaeda has meant different things to different people, and its appeal has changed over time. Zawahiri was hoping it would become the reining ideology in Egypt and Saudi Arabi, the heartlands of Islam. Instead, Egyptians have gone in for a nationalism that despises Muslim fundamentalism. And Saudis have largely remained loyal to the royal family, and opinion polling suggests that if they could have a change, it wouldn’t be in the direction of even greater puritanism.

Instead, al-Qaeda and its affiliates and offshoots have become what Maoism was to peasant revolutionaries of the 1950s and 1960s– an ideological franchise you could pick up and beat the Establishment with where the Establishment was intolerably overbearing. Al-Qaeda is modular, in the sense of offering a model and tool kit. Thus, the al-Qaeda-allied Taliban Movement of Pakistan represented the poorer villagers in places like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Swat Valley, places either neglected or bossed around by the authorities in Islamabad. The Sunnis of Iraqi experimented with the Daesh version of al-Qaeda when they felt oppressed by the Shiite fundamentalist government in Baghdad. Syrian rural and small-town Sunnis experimented with Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria) and Daesh when they felt oppressed by the one-party Baath socialist state and its high officials (many of them Alawi Shiites). Some of the appeal of AQAP seems to map onto Sunni discontents in south Yemen; there is no al-Qaeda in the north of the country. In Sinai, neglected and discriminated-against rural clans are fighting the Egyptian army.

But these disparate, largely rural insurgencies also face extreme challenges. They depend on government being weak. Even a slight assertion of Saudi power against AQAP in Mukalla caused it to be rolled up there almost immediately. Daesh has lost enormous territory to Shiite militias and Kurdish guerrillas where those two stood and fought. The Russian intervention in Syria has pushed back al-Qaeda in Syra/ Nusra on several fronts, virtually wiping it out in Idlib and along the Lebanese border.

AQAP and Daesh have attempted to recruit Europeans by pulling off the attacks last year in Paris. But their terrorism focuses on soft targets and has little obvious benefit to them, and has made NATO and Russia de facto allies again, in Syria. The strategy of holding territory and yet engaging in long-distance terrorism against a powerful foe is epically stupid. The only advantage of a terrorist group is that it doesn’t have an obvious return address. The current al-Qaeda affiliates all defied Bin Laden’s advice not to give the enemy a clear target. So they are all in the process of being rolled up.

Al-Qaeda in its various permutations can’t be defeated on the battleground. It can’t be defeated by decapitating leaders (leadership, contrary to what the Pentagon thinks, isn’t that unusual or special).

That is, insurgencies are not mindless nihilism that can be wiped out with some drone strikes or aerial bombardment, some assassinations or “regime change.” They are manifestations of forms of class struggle (though the class may be inflected by sectarian or ethnic identity). Where there is great inequality and injustice, and where the state is weak, there will be spaces for insurgency, and often such uprisings see a benefit in franchising, signing on to the discourse, techniques and prestige of an umbrella rebellion.

Obama’s killing of Usama wasn’t the end of anything precisely because the US has not known how to, or has not always even wanted to, promote social justice in the Middle East. The bizarre and embarrassing commitment of the US government to helping the Israelis keep 4.5 million Palestinians stateless and without rights is an example of this blindness. But so too was Ronald Reagan’s alliance with Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party against the Shiites of Iraq and Iran (the latter having rebelled against decades of heavy-handed US hegemony and a coup that put a megalomaniacal monarch back in power in Tehran). George W. Bush reversed Reagan’s policy, siding with Iraqi Shiites against Saddam and the Baath, which only created new inequities and led to the rise of Daesh. The Obama administration’s acquiescence in the praetorian brutality of the current Egyptian government (in the Sinai and elsewhere) has also not been helpful.

Rather, just as Maoist peasant insurgencies were often best forestalled or foiled by land reform, which turned the peasants into rural middle classes and gave them a stake in the status quo, so rural al-Qaeda insurgencies would be best addressed by fostering social justice policies. Pakistan and Afghanistan never had land reform (pre-modern landholding patterns are typically extremely unequal). FATA in Pakistan needs to receive more investment from the center and should be made a province, with a provincial legislature and prerogatives.

In Iraq and Syria the land is not perhaps as important as government services and government investment in communities, which has often been done on a sectarian basis and very unequally. Egyptian policies in the Sinai are so opaque it is even difficult to know exactly what drove so many there into insurgency, but that someone is making a lot of money with Sinai resources and locals are being kept down and excluded is almost certainly part of it.

The US does not always have good levers to push reform (though it did militarily occupy Iraq for 8.5 years, so you’d think they could have accomplished something). It also has leverage with Pakistan and Egypt. Where it does not, Washington shouldn’t fool itself that “taking X out” is an equally good option, or that targeted assassinations will do more than call forth more resistance to an unbearable and unjust status quo.

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PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov 26 2015 (IPS) – “My two sons were killed by Taliban militants mercilessly three years ago. My husband died a natural death two year back. Now, I am begging to raise my two grandsons,” Gul Pari, 50, told IPS.

Pari, who is waiting for her turn at a psychiatrist’s clinic in Peshawar, the capital of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, says she dreamed every night that her sons were alive and would return one day.

Women being examined by female doctors in free medical camp held in North Waziristan, one of the seven districts of FATA. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

“I am waiting for them. They are martyrs and will come and take revenge from their killers,” she said.

While psychiatrist Dr Mian Iftikhar Hussain said that a majority of the women from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) suffer from psychological problems due to endless violence by Taliban militants.

“We have been receiving at least 200 people, mainly women, with post-traumatic stress disorders due to the human and financial losses.

FATA comprises seven districts, is home to 6 million people and has suffered immensely due to endless conflict,” he said.

Federally Administered Tribal Areas located on the border with Afghanistan is thick with militants since 2001 when the U.S.-led coalition forces toppled their government in Kabul in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington.

They took refuge in FATA from where they began targeting Pakistani forces, damaging schools and other government-owned buildings.

Towards the end of 2005, Pakistan, a U.S. ally in the war against terrorism, began military operation which displaced at least 3million people.

“Most of the displaced people have developed psychological problems because they have lost their near and dear ones in war between Taliban and the army, besides losing their trades, shops and agricultural productivity,” Mian Iftikhar Hussain said.

FATA near Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of Pakistan’s four provinces, has suffered immensely.

Muhammad Rafiq, a shopkeeper in North Waziristan, one of FATA’s districts told IPS that his daughter developed mental problems due to displacement. “We now live in a mud-built house which is without clean drinking water and sanitation facilities. There is no electricity, which makes my children face health problems,” he said.

Rafiq said he had better house back home and had earned an appropriate amount to lead prosperous lives but now they have become extremely poor and couldn’t get proper food.

Prof Syed Muhammad Sultan head of the psychiatry department at the Khyber Teaching Hospital Peshawar warns that residents of FATA would face more mental and psychological problems in the days ahead.

Most of the displaced population has taken temporary shelter in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in tiny houses or schools where they lacked basic amenities.

Women and children are vulnerable to psychological conditions, he said.

“They are destined to develop short as well as long term psychological disorders in addition to physical problems,” he said.

Most of the displaced persons have developed the problems of de-personalisation, a condition in which people feel change in their personalities, as well as de-realisation, a condition in which people feel a complete change in the other people’s personalities, he explained.

Professor Sultan said the burden of psychological disorders is unseen but it could go out of proportion if attention is not paid to control it early.

“Women are the worst victims of this mass displacement, which is likely to cause them anxiety disorders, panic disorders, mixed anxiety depression disorder and depression,” he said.

Psychologist Zeenat Shah said many displaced persons suffered from poor self-esteem as well as insecurity about future, while grief and bereavement were other issues faced by them.

“The people who have to flee homes, struggle to adjust to new environments and have a sense of insecurity. This is the result of loss of social structure as well as deaths of close relatives in the conflict and will cause permanent phobias, chronic depression and adjustment problems among displaced people,” she said.

Another psychologist has voiced concern about the mental health of displaced women and children.

“From childhood to adolescence, a child passes through a lot of dramatic changes in physical as well as mental health. During the transition, they gain their identity, grow physically and establish social interaction and relationship in home, in community and in society as whole,” she said.

The psychologist said children going through through the psychological ordeals as in FATA couldn’t progress academically.

She said the situation with regard to women would deteriorate if they (women) continued to stay in the conditions which they were currently in.

“Such women have to live in host communities with relatives or in small rented houses most of which don’t have proper water, electricity and sanitation system. It is very difficult for them to work and cook in the current fasting month in this hot weather, especially when they don’t have access to basic amenities,” she said.

Zainab Bibi, another psychologist from the hospital, has seen the situation as critical for the Waziristan people.

“They (the displaced) have left their homes in a hurry to save their lives. They are victims of decade-long war in their native areas.,” she said.

“It will be very difficult for them to face challenges. However, they could overcome some of them with the help of the government and welfare societies as well as relatives,” she said.

The incidence of psychiatric disorders among displaced persons would soar due to the protracted life difficulties.

Interventions like educational and recreational facilities for the displaced to help them fight mental health problems could help alleviate the problem, she suggested.

Licensed from Inter Press Service

“Dozens of people are thought to have died after an attack by gunmen on a bus in Karachi. They surrounded the bus, which was carrying Ismaili Shia Muslims, and opened fire. It is believed that there were up to 60 people on board the bus, including women and children.”

Dozens killed in Pakistan bus attack – BBC News

An anti-terror court in Pakistan has sentenced 10 men for their roles in the 2012 attack on Malala Yousafzai.

France24 English: “PAKISTAN – Court jails 10 for life over Malala attack”

The tragic deaths last January, just now being revealed, of two Western hostages in drone strikes on a relatively empty housing complex in northern Pakistan near the Afghanistan border underlines that the Obama administration is killing people from the air without knowing who they are and is killing significant numbers of innocent civilians. Just as hostages don’t move around outside so that spy cameras can observe them, so too in gender-segregated Pushtun society, women are often immured at home and so the CIA or US military who are running the drones do not know if they are in the sights.

Contrary to assurances given by President Obama a couple of years ago, the US government admits that it had no idea who it was targeting when it hit that building. Indiscriminate fire is a recognized war crime, and it seems to characterize the US drone program.

These are the figures for the US drone assassination program in Pakistan, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

Total strikes: 415
Obama strikes: 364
Total killed: 2,449-3,949
Civilians killed: 423-962
Children killed: 172-207
Injured: 1,144-1,722

That is, as many as a fourth of those killed by US drone assassinations are non-combatants.

Death by drone is inherently lawless. There is no constitutional or legal framework within which the US government can blow people away at will. For a while in the 1970s through 1990s, assassination was outlawed.
Now it is back, but has taken this freakish form where bureaucrats thousands of miles away fire missiles from large toy airplanes. The US is not at war with Pakistan, so this action is not part of a war effort. You can’t be at war with an organization– a state of war has a technical legal definition.

The US government maintains that it is only shooting when it sees a high value target. This is a lie. They had no idea who was in the building. The US government maintains that it kills hardly any local civilians with its drone assassinations, whereas journalists on the ground find evidence of substantial non-combatant deaths. The killing of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto is not just a tragedy; it reveals the US assassination technique for the world to see.

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TomoNews: “CIA drone strike accidentally kills Al Qaeda hostages Warren Weinstein, Giovanni Lo Porto”

By now the Iraqi government has a long history of claiming areas are “liberated” when the local picture remained mixed. This is the sort of thing that occurred recently in
where Tikrit, where PM Haydar al-Abadi went on television and declared Tikrit no longer in the hands of Daesh (ISIL or ISIS).

In fact, whole neighborhoods appear still to be Daesh territory and some 400 fighters from that group remained in the city Friday evening. In any case, the difficulty the government had in taking Tikrit had to do not so much with the number of fighters but with the booby traps Daesh had set everywhere.

Still, the Iraq press thinks it is only a matter of time before Tikrit does fall entirely.

A notable development in Tuesday’s advances, which saw the Tikrit-Samarra highway reopened, was that the Shiite militias–the Badr Corps, the League of the Righteous, and an organization termed “Iraqi Hizbullah” fought Daesh with US Air Force close air support. Some of the militia had announced that they would not fight alongside the USA. But all seem gradually have moved into the city with the help of US precision targeting of enemy positions.

This battle is a milestone in the sense that Iraq’s Shiite militias are also being supported on the ground by Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps advisers. Thus, de facto the US Air Force is giving close air support to Iranian forces

The Tikrit campaign is thus unprecedented in modern times in combining US, Iranian and Iraqi forces. You’d have to go back to the Baghdad Pact of 1955 to find such an alliance, and it was short-lived, ended by the 1958 Iraqi nationalist revolution of Abdel Karim Qasim.

Although French fighter jets have also flown against Daesh in Tikrit, apparently Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries have not joined in. For them, the spectacle of Shiites taking Sunni Tikrit is too painful, and it is not clear that they think Daesh is greater threat than Iran. Obama certainly does think that. Thus we see the great divergence between US and Saudi policy in Iraq and to some extent Syria.

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