The Other Flypaper Theory

On the 12^th of October 2000, al Qaeda conducted a suicide bomb attack on the American destroyer, the USS Cole. Seventeen members of the crew were killed in the attack.

Those who define terrorism as the deliberate killing of innocent civilians might find it difficult to argue that this al Qaeda suicide bomb attack was terrorism but let’s not get into the difficulty of defining terrorism here. What is now beyond dispute is that this attack was organised and carried out under the umbrella of the al Qaeda organisation. Bin Laden himself is thought to have selected the target and provided the money necessary to carry out the attack.

It is self-evident that in order to successfully tackle someone like bin Laden, it is vital that we understand his goals, methods and strategies. In the 6^th Century BC, Sun Tzu wrote that “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles”. For all the talk of the new nature of today’s threats, this is as relevant today as it was two and a half thousand years ago.

So what was bin Laden hoping to achieve when he organised the attack on the USS Cole? The answer can be found in the section on the USS Cole in the 9/11 Commission Report (on page 191 of this extremely large pdf).

Back in Afghanistan, bin Laden anticipated U.S. military retaliation… He ordered the evacuation of al Qaeda’s Kandahar airport compound and fled…

There was no American strike. In February 2001, a source reported that an individual who he identified as the big instructor (probably a reference to bin Laden) complained frequently that the U.S. had not yet attacked. According to the source, bin Laden wanted the United States to attack and if it did not he would launch something bigger.

Note the date. Sadly, while the new Bush administration were not paying enough attention to the many warnings they’d been given, that is exactly what happened next. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this passage is a damning indictment of the failures of that administration (as Keith Olbermann points out in this report which I also include as the via for the quotation).

But the key point here is what this reveals about bin Laden’s intentions. Can it be true that bin Laden wanted the United States to attack Afghanistan? It’s clear that this does not match bin Laden’s public pronouncements on the subject. In those, he expresses his profound opposition to any Western military presence in Muslim countries and rages against the killing of fellow Muslims by the United States military. Why then would he want the U.S. to attack?

It’s not so very difficult to unravel; it’s the difference between propaganda and truth. While trying to keep this post non-confrontational, I have to say that I am constantly taken aback by the way some supporters of the “war” on terror take bin Laden’s public statements at face value. He’s evil incarnate but he’s also telling the unblemished truth in his public messages?
Ultimately bin Laden is opposed to Western occupation of Muslim lands so he is telling the truth in one sense. But he’s very much a long game player; he knows that he is not in a position to wield real power in any Muslim country in the short term. As such, he is deliberately attempting to provoke and exploit U.S. military action against Muslim countries in order generate support for his cause. Bin Laden, unlike our own leaders, understands the motivating power of the concept of resistance to foreign occupation among many Muslims.

Zawahiri, in a letter to Zarqawi in Iraq in July 2005, put it like this:

The Muslim masses-for many reasons… do not rally except against an outside occupying enemy, especially if the enemy is firstly Jewish, and secondly American. This, in my limited opinion, is the reason for the popular support that the mujahedeen enjoy in Iraq, by the grace of God.

In that letter, Zawahiri was essentially warning Zarqawi that support for the “resistance” in Iraq was dependent on the motivating factor of the U.S. military presence; without it, he warned, “it doesn’t appear that the Mujahedeen, much less the al-Qaida in the Land of Two Rivers, will lay claim to governance [of Iraq]”.

In the same, way, bin Laden knew that U.S. military action against Afghanistan would rally some among the “Muslim masses” to his cause. That was the main purpose of the attack on the USS Cole and the attacks which were to follow on September 11^th 2001.

This is the very foundation of al Qaeda’s strategy and it is a classic asymmetric warfare technique. For all the hype and hysteria, a group like al Qaeda has only limited power; they did not and do have the tremendous power of a strong nation state at their disposal and their only real ally was the dysfunctional Taliban regime in Afghanistan. In such a position of weakness, the most effective tactic is to seek to turn the power of your enemies against them. By provoking the United States into attacking and occupying Muslim countries, bin Laden has used their own military power as a hugely effective recruiting tool for himself and his associates. That was always the underlying plan.
In that respect, the “war” on terror, and associated rising hostility towards Muslims in many Western countries, has delivered more than bin Laden could ever have hoped for.

Of course, bin Laden’s actual strategies should be no more a straightjacket to our actions than his spurious public pronouncements. As I said at the start, what is important when creating strategies to deal with al Qaeda is that these strategies are built on an understanding of what they are trying to achieve and how they are trying to achieve it. The very nature of the “war” on terror indicates that this vital understanding has eluded our leaders.

It is worth taking a moment to consider the implications of the above. Bin Laden deliberately sought to provoke the United States government into attacking and killing Muslims for the purpose of spreading his own propaganda. He’s not on the side of justice for Muslims around the world; he’s not on anyone’s side but his own (and that of his warped totalitarian ideology) and he doesn’t care how many Muslims get killed as a result of his actions. In fact, certainly in the short to medium term, the more Muslims the American’s kill, the happier he’ll be.

That central truth, which should be at the forefront of all efforts to stop the spread of his insidious propaganda, has been largely obscured by the “war” on terror, the dangerously unsophisticated, deadly and counter-productive approach adopted by the American and British governments.