A Solution to the Riddle
Just a solution, not necessarily the solution.
People ask, in tones from genuine wonder to smug certainty, “Why haven’t we been hit again?” How come there have been no major al-Qaeda atrocities on US soil since September 11, 2001? (The brief flurry of anthrax-by-mail attacks shortly after that date may have been al Qaeda, or may not have been.) Answers range from “Because spectacular attacks take years of planning” to “We’ve ’stayed on the offensive’ since then” to “Thanks to all those civil-liberties abridgements like torture and pervasive surveillance” to “Sheer dumb luck.” Here’s another possibility. First, a couple links:
Video of the Bhutto assassination and commentary by Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com.
A roundup of recent reports suggesting Pakistani military/intelligence involvement in the Bhutto assassination and al-Qaeda penetration of the Pakistani military and intelligence services by James Joyner.
So there’s this guy we’ll call “O,” or maybe “U.” He’s a rich Saudi expatriate who went ga-ga over religion years ago. A bit embarrassing to the family: that stuff is for the rubes, not the rulers, but sometimes pushers get too fond of their product. O, or maybe U, puts his money into Jihad in Afghanistan against the Sovs, which is at least useful – the Saudi ruling class is all for bloodying Soviet noses in Afghanistan, and that was always going to mean revving up a bunch of Quran-thumpers in that country and Pakistan. Those people are excitable and, honestly, a bit primitive. In practical terms, O is just amplifying existing Royal policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it keeps him out of the house.
Come the Soviet retreat and it gets a little embarrassing. O won’t shut up about Jihad, and he’s still putting money into local scolds and expatriate dreamers. He’s in the grip of big ideas. Big ideas never closed a production deal.
Thing about O is, he may be crazy, but he’s smart. What he learned in Afghanistan was, it’s good to be rich! “Wisdom along with an inheritance is good,” as that bitter preacher put it in the Jews’ part of The Book. Those phonies back home may look down their noses at him, but there are countries in the world – Muslim countries – so desperately poor that even O’s personal wealth impresses their rulers. Your petro- and construction dollars go pretty far in Sudan and, later, Afghanistan. Western “analysts” blather about “state-supported terrorism” when your thing is the terrorist-supported state. You can basically buy a very poor country, or enough of it anyway.
All the time though, you want one thing: nuclear weapons. Okay, you don’t want nuclear weapons for themselves. You want to drive the Jew-Crusaders from the Middle East and start bringing that old-time religion to your people, and nuclear weapons have got to help. Your folks have played with chemicals and germs, but chemicals and germs just aren’t that impressive. You’ve been able to figure out – by trying – that you never will be able to make a nuclear weapon on your own. You’ve also discovered – again by trying – that everything one reads in the papers about the poor security around the old Soviet nuclear stockpile is a crock, maybe deliberate disinformation. If it were that poor, you’d have an arsenal by now.
But the brothers in Pakistan have had nuclear weapons since 1983, and you know some of the brothers in Pakistan pretty well. The Inter-Services Intelligence agency has carried you on their books ever since that time. Some of them spent years thinking of you variously as an agent or an asset or a client, forgetting that you are rich! Who is whose client here? That’s actually a tricky question. Pakistan isn’t as poor as Sudan or Afghanistan. The military owns a ridiculous amount of the country. Some of the senior leadership is rich enough to tell you to go fly. The junior people, though, can be wowed, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm for religion from low up to quite high levels of the hierarchy. The intelligence service is especially fertile ground. Unfortunately, the uniformed military has the nukes. Also, the uniformed military has played footsie with the Americans and the Chinese for years, and neither country wants someone like O getting their hands on a nuclear arsenal. The Chinese figure it would be bad for business, and the Americans, obviously, don’t want to get blown up.
So you spend years and years in that agent-handler dance John LeCarré used to write about all the time, that mutual seduction, working on pirhouettes – turning the handlers into the handled. You get your guys seduced and promoted. The guy who debriefed you last year is a manager this year, and has an important political job next year. And he’ll tell two friends, and so on, and so on. You can fill their heads with true religion and their pockets with cash, but you also need to impress them as a man who can get things done. This you do with a series of spectacular attacks on Americans, from the Embassy bombings in Africa to the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, finally climaxing in major strikes on American soil just after the turn of the millenium.
After the last attack you know the shit’s going to hit the fan. Actually, that’s important. Because if you can get to the point that you’re effectively running Pakistan, the Americans are going to want to stop that. So the trick is to tie them down like we did with the Soviets years ago, get as much of their military bogged down as possible and unable to bring their full force to bear on Islamabad. You figure Afghanistan will be that place. So right before the big attack on New York and Washington, your people take out Ahmed Shah Massoud. He’s the most charismatic opposition figure in Afghanistan and probably the guy the Americans will try to stick in place of the Taliban. With Massoud out of the way, who can they turn to, some nonentity like Karzai? Let them try.
Things get a little dicey, it’s true. The Americans almost catch O at Tora Bora, but blow it. After that, luck turns O’s way. They go after Saddam, whose country is even farther from Pakistan than Afghanistan is. Zarqawi, the total nutter America just imagines O to be, makes himself useful for a few years helping Iraq fall apart – the Americans actually throw an extra 30,000 troops into the place in 2007.
Meanwhile, since we’re all the heroes of our own stories, what O considers to the the real war continues wherever he is, and where he is is Pakistan, where he always wanted to be. It’s hard work playing Pakistan’s factions against each other. It takes years of noiseless, patient effort. But it’s the most important thing in the world. At some point, the status quo is going to crumble. The trick is to have your loyalists ready to take advantage when it does. That takes up all your time. A lot of your personal attention devoted to symbolic attacks on America would be a distraction, and if there’s one thing a grand strategist can’t afford, it’s getting bogged down in a distracton.
Comment by Steve —
January 1, 2008 @ 11:51 am
And a happy new year to you too, Jim.
Oddly, I think the very cleverness of the plan is an argument against it being the plan from the very start. Things like that work out for Ra’s al-Ghul, not actual evil billionaire Middle Eastern terrorists. As a summary of where things stand now, though? Way too plausible.
Comment by Dustin —
January 1, 2008 @ 12:30 pm
The thing that most disturbs me about this scenario, aside from its plausibility, is that it strikes at a conception of the world that still infects even me, though at least I’m aware of it and seek out various cures. It’s precisely the reason why such theories wouldn’t fly in polite, “serious” discourse: it raises the possibility that none of this is actually about us. And judging on the discussions since the assassination, that mindset seems too deeply embedded to ever be disengaged.
Comment by Dustin —
January 1, 2008 @ 12:31 pm
And a Happy New Year to Jim, Thoreau and Mona.
Comment by Dave Woycechowsky —
January 1, 2008 @ 12:34 pm
wait, what: you think Queda might not have done the anthrax? But if not them then who? The deadly kind of anthrax is pretty hard to make.
Comment by Victor Von Doom —
January 1, 2008 @ 1:03 pm
Scary in how much sense this makes.
It really isn’t about us. “They” don’t hate us for our freedoms – they wanted our military out of Saudi Arabia. That’s what they said. They attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, and we pulled our military out of Saudi Arabia.
The fact that O didn’t prance around in front of a huge “Mission Accomplished” banner reinforces the notion that he is smart.
We may be stuck in a Kobiyashi-Maru scenario with someone as captain who doesn’t have the sense to reprogram the simulator.
Comment by Thoreau —
January 1, 2008 @ 1:08 pm
Jim-
It’s a plausible theory, that he’s more interested in taking control of Pakistan.
Another, simpler possibility (but not entirely inconsistent with your theory) is that while Bin Laden handles people he is also handled by people. It’s a mutual game.
After seeing the way that America went apeshit in response to 9/11, some of them became less willing to play ball on attacking the West. Relatives became less willing to help him with cash. Certain Pakistanis became less willing to turn blind eyes at jihadis with Western passports crossing their borders. So he focused on his local goals because his friends were more reluctant to turn blind eyes to attacks on the West.
This is not to say that I think our apeshit behavior over the past several years has been wise. Making some bad guys fear retaliation has not been the only effect. A lunatic on a rampage can simultaneously intimidate some bad guys AND piss off a lot of people AND hurt a lot of innocents.
But I wouldn’t attribute the lack of attacks entirely to Bin Laden’s Great Grand Plan. I’m skeptical of Great Grand Plans no matter who is laying them. I suspect that some of it may also be a response to constraints.
Comment by abb1 —
January 1, 2008 @ 2:10 pm
I don’t think there is a chess-like long-term plan; rather, probably, a combination of general strategy with mostly opportunistic individual actions. That would make more sense.
One thing is clear, though: as others said (and as Mr. O stated many times himself) this is not at all about the US. If they haven’t hit the US so far, then they don’t think it’s something worth doing. And really, what would it achieve that the 9/11 hasn’t?
Comment by Dillon —
January 1, 2008 @ 2:55 pm
That’s interesting.
I attribute the absence of a follow up attack to the fact that Osama has no reason to upset the status quo in the US – the Bush Administration is already playing into Osama’s hand by invading Iraq and threatening Iran. This is supported by Osama’s October 2004 videotape released just before the presidential elections, which essentially dared American voters to re-elect Bush.
Also, as Thoreau mentions in comment 6, the lack of an attack is partially due to constraints.
Comment by TGGP —
January 1, 2008 @ 3:25 pm
Do we have reason to believe bin Laden had any connection to ISI? He had his own money and his own fighters, and ISI was relying on dirt-poor Afghans with lots of guts and little else who themselves found “Afghan-Arabs” like bin Laden’s gang an annoyance. In his book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner Zawahiri denies any connection to such intelligence agencies and through them America, saying instead they relied on donations from the faithful in Gulf States (Saudi Arabia pledged to match American contributions, so that could still have been a factor although I don’t know if his support was from the Saudi state or just the “charitable” organizations that love to fund jihad).
I also tend not to believe in Grand Plans.
Comment by Walter —
January 1, 2008 @ 4:52 pm
It was what, eight and a half years between the first and second WTC attacks? AQ have a while to go before we can say their operations in the US are diminishing. They weren’t very frequent before 9-11.
Comment by the talking dog —
January 1, 2008 @ 6:17 pm
Happy new year!
Of course, if OBL gets his hands on those nukes he need not pull off an actual attack, anywhere. He will have the necessary leverage for just about everything else he wants. There are other parts of A.Q.’s master 20-year plan, some of which are summarized here.
The key point, of course, is that we have no long term plan, and other than “win elections HERE by playing to the rubes’ paranoia and xenophobia”, seem to have no plan at all.
Jim’s scenario laid out the plans of a very, very patient planner, and, I suspect, there is a huge degree of accuracy there. I will say that our overall ape-s*** reaction to 9-11– including the creation of another Middle East failed state in Iraq– are certainly as good or better than anything that the A.Q. playbook could ever have hoped to achieve.
Comment by Barry —
January 1, 2008 @ 10:04 pm
Comment by Dave Woycechowsky —
“wait, what: you think Queda might not have done the anthrax? But if not them then who? The deadly kind of anthrax is pretty hard to make.”
As has been pointed out here and elsewhere,
1) Al Qaida has never demonstrated competancy in biological or chemical weaponry.
2) This sort of stuff is hard to make.
3) The skills exist in the US military – the darker corners, labeled ‘defensive biowarfare research’.
Comment by Dave Woycechowsky —
January 2, 2008 @ 6:36 am
As has been pointed out here and elsewhere
Yeah, I was concern trolling on Mr. Henley a bit there. Normally I would never troll, but I thought that thing about the anthrax maybe being AQ was a bit precious of him. If it turns out that Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper did send then bugs then he becomes “one of us, one of us.”
Comment by Dave W. errata —
January 2, 2008 @ 6:38 am
–If it turns out that Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper did send them bugs then Chief Executive Offering becomes “one of us, one of us.‖
Comment by Barry —
January 2, 2008 @ 9:19 am
The way that I see it, if AQ sent the anthrax, then they had only a very limited supply, and the source was ‘neutralized’, *and* the administration didn’t boast about the ‘neutralization’ (whether they did it or somebody else did it).
Comment by Dave W. —
January 2, 2008 @ 10:30 am
The letters said “death to Israel.”
I still don’t think we know how many died, or what cleanup costed. They have announced the names of many victims, but they have not said that the victim list is inclusive.
Cheney’s staff got CIPRO on 9/11, before the first letter was received. That tells me what I need to know about the anthrax. Well, that and lack of a serious investigation.
I think Mr. Henley will come around. Drip, drip, drip.
Comment by frankdawg81 —
January 2, 2008 @ 11:55 am
I think the answer is much more simple – UBL attacked us to provoke a reaction. He got more and better than he could ever have hoped for. He thought we would be stuck in the stan like the Russians but we picked a bigger, dumber, fight & are bleeding treasure and blood in Iraq.
That suits his purpose. If and when we ever abandon that fools mission he will probably try again.
He wants to bleed us to death & Boy Blunder has done an excellent job of helping him do that. Why does he need to risk his next big idea? He’ll save it for later.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
January 2, 2008 @ 12:21 pm
Happy New Year.
I still have this horrible suspicion that O has been dead for years. Our only “proof” that he’s alive are audiotapes that have been thumbs-upped by the CIA during an administration that has grossly manipulated intelligence and its operations.
Comment by jlw —
January 2, 2008 @ 2:15 pm
Sure, it isn’t all about us. But if it is all about them (to them), then they can’t have us doing our own thing or, heavens forfend, ignoring them. Al Qaeda needs us as the designated bogeyman, much the same way the Villagers in Washington need al Qaeda.
That’s why I think the most obvious window of opportunity for a mass-casualty attack here is in the 12 months from September 2008 to August 2009. Either force terror to the center of the next election or on to the dominant position of the next president’s agenda. That will ensure a prolonged bleeding in Iraq and amped-up measures against Muslims in general–both good for al Qaeda–as well as a deferral of any other long-term domestic or international initiatives. Dr. Banner might be able to cure cancer and concoct a carbon emissions-free energy source, but HULK SMASH.
For now, though, I don’t see what the point of another attack would be. No need to prod the cow that’s already stepping lively toward the abatoir.
Comment by Jon H —
January 2, 2008 @ 8:24 pm
I figure we haven’t been hit again because there’s no point – there has been no need.
a) Our response has been all Osama could have hoped for and then some.
b) 9/11 would be a very tough act to follow, deflating Al Qaeda’s reputation if they don’t do something even more spectacular, and so
c) since there’s no chance of running a grinding ongoing program of frequent terrorist attacks, no way to run a meaningful war of attrition against the US through stateside terrorism, why bother at all? What’d be the point?
It only makes sense if Osama is a comic book villain like Doctor Doom (or maybe Turner D. Century), who just keeps attacking and attacking and attacking despite there being no particular logic or point to it.
Sure, they could attack us on the mainland. And kill some people. But that clearly isn’t sufficient to motivate them.
Comment by the talking dog —
January 2, 2008 @ 10:16 pm
Actually the correct answer was #5 above (from Victor Von Doom)… OBL achieved his own “mission accomplished” in April 2003, just days before Junior went on the Lincoln in his borrowed flight suit and “mission accomplished” banner; in late April 2003, American forces more or less began the bug-out of Saudi’s Prince Sultan Air Base.
Given that we subsequently shut down the Saudi visa express line in 2002, and OBL already got what he wanted from us in 2003… why should he keep bothering us? Unlike our leadership, OBL’s actions have been consistent and rational albeit… “evil”.
Comment by turkey turkey turkey —
January 2, 2008 @ 10:51 pm
Grand plans are for movie villains. They don’t work in reality. You’ve basically put down where AQ sits at the moment, but I doubt they could have planned things to turn out this way.
The simplest explanation for why the US hasn’t been hit again is that the neocons have done far more damage to the US than AQ could do themselves. There’s no need for AQ to expend their resources inflicting pinpricks on the US when the neocons and are quite happy to asset strip the US treasury in bulk and pour trillions of dollars and thousands of lives into Iraq. There’s no need to stab an enemy when he’s already firing an autocannon at his own head.
As for the anthrax, it’s pretty damn clear it was right-wing domestic in origin. AQ has never demonstrated any ability to acquire or use bioweapons and the target choices were completely in line with what would be expected from a GOP nutjob or an official effort to neutralize political opposition. If the anthrax attacks had been AQ, they would have hit both halves of the oligarchy rather than concentrating on the (D) side of the state.
Comment by GILMORE —
January 3, 2008 @ 3:01 pm
as someone who read up a lot about the inner workings of the formation of Al Q in afghanistan and after, this doesnt hold a lot of water.
Yes, it makes sense from current perspective, but only from the POV of the ‘law of unintended consequences’.
There was always an element of Al Q whose mandate was not ‘destroying the crusader world’ so much as destroying the Western-backed apostates/dictators who run things in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq etc. and turning the middle east into a single unified theocratic bloc aligned against the west.
While Pakistan has some appeal as making the new central character, I think it’s important to remember that ethnicity matters greatly to these jihadists, and as a mainly Arab movement, they arent exactly 100% aligned with the Waziristani separatist types…they use them for protection and as a tool to maintain destabilized conditions in Pakistan, enabling their continued tolerance/isolation.
Yes the current state of affairs is pretty fucked. But I think it has more to do with US policies working against our own interests, unintentionally. We do more to fuck ourselves than Al Q et al does as far as manipulating world affairs.
Its a common habit to try and apply some idea of “narrative master plan”, revisionist history to events that are so fucked up and out of control that we are at a loss to explain how we got here without envisioning some grand puppetmaster behind the scenes. See = 9/11 truther wingnuts. Or how many arabs blame teh joos for any and everything wrong in their lives.
Comment by Rimfax —
January 3, 2008 @ 4:52 pm
If that was his grand plan, he’s an idiot. The idea that the US military needed to be bogged down (in a neighboring country) so that they couldn’t save the day for the Pakistani military is a painfully tortured hypothesis. OBL has no chance of inciting a successful intelligence service/jihadist coup over the Pakistani military, regardless of whether the American Army is in Germany or Iraq or Afghanistan.
He’d have an easier time taking control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal using a political puppet than by taking on the military in a power struggle. To do that, he would keep his jihadis busy with petty terrorism, mostly against Israelis and apostate and secularist Arabs while he worked to convince Musharaf that things were safe to hold elections. If he was good, he’d have a secularist mole with standing and charisma for Musharaf to back against the old kleptocratic families that used to control Pakistani elections.
The trouble with the nukes is that he can only get them from someone who doesn’t give a crap if they get traced back to that country. That means someone who doesn’t give a shit if that country’s capital city gets nuked in response. If he couldn’t find a Russian or Chechen or Kazak who fit that bill, what makes him (or anyone else) think that he’ll find a Pakistani who does?
In other words, the grand plan described is one of the dumbest ways to achieve the presumed goals described. It seems like a creative, yet desperate, way to make us feel better about being hurt so badly by such a shitbag. After all, if he’s an evil genuis, we’re just pawns in his little game. The FBI’s ineptitude in Minneapolis wasn’t what allowed it to happen, it was this supergenius’s incredible intelligence and personal force of will.
Comment by Baron Von Ottomatic —
January 3, 2008 @ 7:17 pm
Interesting, although from a practical standpoint OBL would have probably had an easier mark in Pakistan before the US began strong-arming the world post 9/11. And if the Bhutto plot is indeed traced back to the military I’d wager there will be an enormous popular backlash against the jihadis.
Comment by Jon H —
January 3, 2008 @ 8:07 pm
“what makes him (or anyone else) think that he’ll find a Pakistani who does?”
Um, A.Q. Khan?
Comment by Jon H —
January 3, 2008 @ 8:07 pm
“what makes him (or anyone else) think that he’ll find a Pakistani who does?”
Um, A.Q. Khan?