The SWISH Report (13.1)

 A report from the South Waziristan Institute of Strategic Hermeneutics to the International Security Unit of the Obama Transition Team, Washington DC, on the condition and future of the war on terror.

Part 1 [The second part of the SWISH report to the ISU of the OTT will be published on 15 December 2008]

Introduction

Thank you for this unexpected yet welcome invitation.  We appreciate that you will have a wealth of advice coming to you from universities, think-tanks, defence-industry lobbyists and pressure-groups, so we particularly appreciate your willingness to go beyond your normal environment and consult an organisation such as ours.   

As you may know, we have produced nine reports for the al-Qaida movement's Strategic Planning Cell, but we are commercial consultants and are more than happy to report to diverse clients. You may also know that our work on political violence and international security has not been confined to al-Qaida but has included other clients including the British government.  You perhaps are not aware that we were also commissioned three years ago to write a report for the Strategic Advisory Group at the US State Department (see "The SWISH Report (4)", 1 September 2005). 

The client then was an internal unit comprising professional state-department personnel rather than political appointees; and while we were willing and able to offer them advice we had eventually to say to them that to accept our advice would be damaging to their careers, given the nature of the Bush administration.

It is perhaps relevant to repeat the last two paragraphs of that report:

"We therefore conclude by making a personal recommendation to you as members of the Strategic Advisory Group of the United States state department - keep your heads down but your intellects active, serve out your time and then join one of the think-tanks or action groups which will, in around five years time, be much more influential than they are now.

The very fact that you have even entertained the idea of commissioning the South Waziristan Institute of Strategic Hermeneutics to do this work shows that you are far ahead of the administration that you serve.  In due course you will be in a position to add greatly to the search for creative policy alternatives that your country so badly needs.  We regret to say that such a time has not yet come."

With the transition to your new administration now well underway, it may be that the time has come rather earlier than we expected three years ago.  Indeed we understand that your unit includes recently retired staff from the state department, including personnel from the unit that commissioned that report.

You have tasked us with proposing the most appropriate policies for the first term of the Barack Obama administration. In order to do so we must first provide an assessment of your country's current security problems and their origins.  Such an assessment will have broad similarity to that given to the state department in 2005, so we will summarise those aspects before moving on to the current situation.  This will take into account the status-of-forces agreement likely to be implemented in Iraq in January 2009, the current surge in violence in that country, and the attacks of November 2008 in Mumbai.    

You require us to give you our assessment without embellishment.  We will therefore be blunt.

The impact of 9/11

The response to the attacks of 11 September 2001 was fully understandable but still deeply mistaken.  The Hamburg group behind the 9/11 attacks was affiliated to the al-Qaida leadership, which had two aims in encouraging and facilitating the attacks: demonstrating the capacity of the movement to strike the "far enemy" of the United States, and inciting a United States military occupation of Afghanistan.    

In relation to the latter, they were much influenced in their thinking by the crippling of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and believed that your forces would ultimately be worn down in a similar manner.  One superpower had been struck down; the other would follow.  True, initially you avoided that fate by using a combination of air power, special forces and the rearming of the Northern Alliance coalition of warlords to terminate the Taliban regime.  But even if you did not immediately occupy Afghanistan, your decision to respond to 9/11 by terminating the Taliban regime and dispersing al-Qaida was still an error.   

The al-Qaida leadership welcomed the fact that you saw the 9/11 attacks as the start of a war rather than an appalling exercise in gross transnational criminality. If you had taken the latter view, and gathered a broad coalition to work intensively to bring those behind the attacks to justice, this would have deeply compromised al-Qaida's exceptionalist status and challenged their religious justifications. The effect would have been to undermine their ability to represent themselves as being under attack from the world's most powerful military force as part of a wider assault on Islam; instead, al-Qaida would have been seen as marginalised extremists.

The impact of Iraq

The United States administration in office at the time responded to 9/11 by commencing a "war on terror" - and thereby fell into a trap.  Seven years later, the war in Afghanistan and western Pakistan is accelerating and the US is now being mired in what may be a decades-long war. Moreover, your predecessor administration compounded this error by terminating the Saddam Hussein regime and occupying Iraq.  That regime had virtually no connection with al-Qaida - indeed the al-Qaida leadership had previously criticised the regime as a secularist entity giving too little respect to Islam.

As such, it mattered little to al-Qaida whether the Saddam Hussein regime survived; but what became an utter gift to them was the occupation of a "heartland" country by their far enemy. Moreover, as the insurgency became more difficult to handle, your forces turned increasingly to Israel for advice, training and assistance. This may be fully understandable and justified from your perspective, given Israel's decades of experience in combating irregular forces.  As a consequence, however, the jihadist propagandists have been able to develop the potent narrative of a "crusader/Zionist" takeover of a country close to the centre of the Islamic world.

This has been of immense propaganda value - and it is reinforced by the fact that close to 100,000 Muslims have been killed in the post-9/11 wars, 120,000 detained without trial, and widespread examples of prisoner abuse, torture and rendition. Even more important has been the evolution of Iraq as a hugely valuable combat-training zone.  It is possible that the war there will continue at a much lower intensity in the coming years; but its value to al-Qaida is already clear for everyone to see.    

To put this in context, by the end of the 1980s a substantial transnational community of jihadist paramilitaries existed that had been trained against Soviet conscripts in a rural guerrilla war in Afghanistan.  A part of this cohort went on to be at the heart of the al-Qaida movement in the 1990s.  Now, there is a similar jihadist community trained in Iraq, but this time against the world's best-equipped army in an urban environment. Their methods and experience are already appearing in other conflicts - not least Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia.  We believe that this will in due course be seen as the most important single outcome of the Iraq war, however long that lasts; it may well have an impact stretching over decades.

The current situation in Iraq is somewhat distorted by the "narrative of victory" propounded by the Republicans during the election campaign.  While the violence has substantially diminished, especially in terms of attacks on US personnel, this cannot be attributed solely to your military surge; it is as much due to a combination of the ceasefire by the Mahdi militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, the activities of the Sunni "awakening movement", and the fracturing of tense mixed communities into separate confessional groups. Note, however, that violence is in any event continuing - there are daily bombings and numerous shootings, with Mosul being the current epicentre.

It would seem on the surface that the status-of-forces agreement will result in a complete withdrawal of US forces from Iraq by 2011. This would fit your campaign aims very well, though we have to say that we believe you will be under very heavy pressure to maintain substantial forces in the country.  As the United States and China join the rest of the industrialised world in an increasing reliance on Gulf energy resources, the security of the region will gain further geo-strategic traction.  62% of world oil reserves and 39% of natural-gas reserves are located immediately around the Persian Gulf; if the former Soviet states and Venezuela are added, the figure rises to over 80% and 69% for this wider group of countries.

Whatever is said in public, your own security advisers will insist on your maintaining a presence in the region, and that must include Iraq.  Since your military forces are not welcome in Saudi Arabia and a benign relationship with Iran cannot be guaranteed, we find it inconceivable that you will straightforwardly exit Iraq. You have not built the world's largest embassy in Baghdad in order to hand it over to the Iraqi ministry of works.  We accept that this analysis differs from that of many other consultants; we would merely say in this context that our institute's past assessments of the evolution of the war on terror have consistently proved more accurate than others.

Afghanistan and south Asia  

In southwest Asia, a complex insurgency has developed in Afghanistan and western Pakistan. Your incoming administration plans to increase the military forces deployed to the region to combat these. We will discuss the advisability of this in the second part of this report, but at this stage we would make three comments.

The first is that the insurgency has grown markedly in 2007-08, and has actually increased in intensity the more that foreign forces have been deployed.  It has been aided by many factors, including the weakness and corruption that is endemic in the Kabul government, though we would also point to the rapid increase in income from opium cultivation. This is a result of larger harvests but, much more significantly, of the very high proportion of raw opium paste now refined into heroin and morphine within the country. This flow of illicit resources has been a great aid to the insurgents.

The second point is that there is abundant evidence that the Taliban militias and related groups on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border no longer see themselves as engaged solely in a struggle within their own countries. They are moving on from this quasi-nationalist outlook to embrace the concept of a global jihad.  As such they are linking ever more closely with the al-Qaida movement, producing a phenomenon which may well turn out to be stronger than the sum of its parts.

The third comment is that the likelihood of Pakistan aiding you in your war on terror is being diminished by the impact of your cross-border raids, and threatened by the risk of an impasse with India after the Mumbai attacks. We should remind you that Pakistan's foreign and security policy has been dominated for decades by a fear of its more powerful neighbour.  There may have been some improvement in relations until Mumbai, but there remains particular anger at the extent to which India is increasingly active and influential in Afghanistan. Pakistan is used to treating that country as its sphere of influence and as a counter to India's regional hegemony. The Islamabad establishment is deeply unsettled by its declining power in Kabul.
 
Conclusion

We are bound to conclude that if current United States policies are continued by your administration, then we see no end to the war in Afghanistan and we anticipate increased problems in Pakistan. We would in that event expect further paramilitary attacks in south Asia and beyond, with Mumbai serving as a model; and we anticipate the development of jihadist movements linked to al-Qaida elsewhere in the world, with Somalia and Algeria being immediate examples.  We do not see the United States withdrawing fully from Iraq.

Above all, we believe that a combination of two factors - the dispersal of the al-Qaida movement into a loose network that is extremely difficult to counter, and the existence of a new cohort of skilled combat-trained paramilitaries - bodes ill for your future in the region.  We have to say that we view the eight years of the George W Bush administration as little short of a disaster for your country. In that light we believe that you will have to engage in a far more radical appraisal of new policies than you currently envisage.

In the second part of our report we will do our very best to propose appropriate policies. We have to say that you will find them hard to implement.  If you do not, however, then your administration may end up just as much damaged as that of your predecessor.

Wana
South Waziristan
07 December 2008

[The second part of the SWISH report to the International Security Unit of the Obama Transition Team will be published on 15 December 2008]