By Dave Anderson:
In August 2001, Al Quaeda had an interesting operational concept that tied into their long range strategic vision. Al Quaeda's goal was/is to topple the Sunni Arab regimes in the Middle East (esp. the GCC states and Saudi Arabia) and North Africa and replace them with Wahhabi-purism. Previous attempts by Islamist radicals to topple local regimes had failed on a consistent basis because the state has a strong repressive and self-protective capacity. Al Quaeda's strategists argued that local regimes were strong but could be toppled if they were not receiving super power support. However, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and most importantly Saudi Arabia were all receiving significant US support. Launching local attacks against the local enemy would be ineffective and counter-productive as long as the local enemy was being backed by the distant enemy. The key was to sever the symbiotic relationship between the local enemy and the distant enemy.
9/11 was supposed to be the triggering event for this severance. The goal was to cause a mass-casualty attack against the United States (achieved) in order to make the US lose its cool and commit to a multi-decade long war in Afghanistan. Al-Quaeda and its senior leadership saw what the Afghan War did to the Soviet Union's ability to project long distance hard and soft power, and they expected the same thing would occur to the Americans. Vast sums of money, vast number of lives, vast reserves of goodwill would be eaten up by Afghani insurgents, most of whom would be "accidental guerrillas." At some point, the ability or willingness of the United States to protect the House of Saud would diminish to a point where victory over the local enemy was now possible.
And initially this plan failed. The US was able to mobilize local forces, match them up with close air support and Special Forces liason teams and beat the crap out of the Taliban who would have provided the cadre for the initial guerrillas. And then not a whole lot else happened besides Al Quaeda networks getting rolled up and pruned back as Al Quaeda operatives fled from their previously secure base areas. The 9-11 plan failed, or at least was on the pathway to failure by the spring of 2002.
And then we invaded Iraq because our national political discourse wanted to have someone "suck on it" and the default option is to vote for war instead of evidence. Bin Laden's operational goal of tying up American power in a non-winnable guerrilla war had been realized by November 2003. It just happened to be in Iraq instead of Afghanistan. The US dumped a trillion dollars into Iraqi operations and even after the foreign jihadis douchebagged their way out of existance by pissing off the locals, the US has lost international goodwill, credibility, meta-narrative belief, and strategic flexibility. In exchange, we have a government dominated by pensioners of the Iranian government. What a win! But we are slowly backing out of that cluster-fuck with significant but non-fatal damage or impairment.
And now we are looking to jump into a twenty to forty year war in Afghanistan.
What the fuck --- are we trying to accomplish Bin Laden's goals for him?
Great post Dave. There were many of us who said that Bush was doing exactly what bin Laden wanted him to do. Obama seems to be following that infamous tradition.
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