Briefing / Air Strike Videos / Slides
Bin Laden Keeps Lower Profile Than Zarqawi
8 June Associated Press - Bin Laden Keeps Lower Profile Than Zarqawi.
Quote:
Tracking down Osama bin Laden has proven tougher than getting to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi because the top al-Qaida leader does almost nothing to call attention to himself and is protected by a ring of far more faithful followers, intelligence experts said Thursday.
The mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks avoids using satellite phones and the Internet. He is likely holed up along the Pakistani-Afghan border in rugged, remote terrain, protected by loyal tribesmen.
Al-Zarqawi was killed Wednesday just 30 miles from the Iraqi capital. In late April, he was featured in a videotape firing a machine gun in the desert and talking to insurgents...
ZANLA's commander had similar doubts
Quote:
ZANLA, with some 10 000 trained men within Rhodesia, persisted in its effort to secure political control of the Shona tribes. Despite those numbers, by September 1979 ZANLA was in dire straits in the opinion of its commander, Rex Nhongo, because of Fire Force, the external raids, the unease of the host country, and the effect of the deployment of the auxiliaries. Nhongo believed that ZANLA would have found it difficult to get through the next dry seasons of mid-1980. Peace came none too soon for ZANLA.
From the website: http://www.rhodesia.nl/wood2.htm
The insurgents fighting against the Rhodesian Government seem to have had similar misgivings. Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe and Mugabe has strangled gold egg-laying goose for years. Sure, it's a different time and different place, but any AQ self-admitted uncertainty does not necessary translate into a measure of effectiveness we should hang our hat on. If nothing else, the insight gleaned from the documents should be unsettling, warning us that AQ is not flat-footed and considering changing TTPs on an operational scale to achieve their endstate.
Edited to add: The optimism about ground gained due to Zarqawi's death highlights a steady and disturbing trend; focusing on the symptoms and not staying on the attack against the root cause.
Where are they running to?
While we should celebrate our operational and tactical victories against Al Qaeda (AQ), especially important ones like the death of the Zarqawi, we should also remember our President’s words shortly after 9/11, “this will be a different kind of war”. That also means victory won’t be determined solely by battlefield successes (true in most small war scenarios). AQ in Iraq is hurting, just as they were in Afghanistan, but hurting is far, far, from defeat. Some say they are on the run? Where are they running to? How does an ideology run away?
Our security forces, out of necessity, are getting better day by day, and they have created a tougher operational environment for AQ in “certain” areas, but it will be years before we can have that level of security globally. There are large areas of Iraq, and huge areas globally that still allow AQ elements freedom of movement. Even in secure areas in the West we will always be subject to attack (NYC, Madrid, London, etc.).
The old small war adage, “we have to be successful 100% of them time, and they only have to be successful once”, applies. Numerous planned attacks in the West have been preempted, but did that lessen the impact of the successful attacks? The media feeding frenzy will rapidly multiply the effects of any attack a thousand fold, so assuming we cannot create a perfect security environment in NYC with its numerous layers of competent local, state, national, and private security forces, then one can easily come to the conclusion that we won’t create a secure environment in Iraq (the President recently said as much). Hopefully AQ will lose momentum in Iraq, but they will always be able to conduct attacks in Iraq and will as long as we are still there. They won’t run they’ll simply adapt their strategy and tactics. I think we will be severely tested over the coming months, and while we’ll prevail AQ will continue to wage its global war, and one key battlefield for them will continue to be Iraq. [AQ is only one of many security problems in Iraq, but for this discussion I want to keep focused on AQ].
The beast we have been unable to slay is the ideology of AQ. While we think it is bankrupt, it lives on in cyberspace and by word of mouth throughout Mosques and coffee houses around the world. We frequently point out that mainstream Muslims reject it, but what is more important is the number that accept it, even in W. Europe and the U.S. you have fringe elements that hear the call of AQ. Until they slay the idea, this war will continue indefinitely.
This is far from classical UW, and our COIN doctrine does not address adequately address this threat. It may address the certain elements that are waging the insurgency like the FRE or Taliban, but not the AQ. I think 4th GW is new, and we still have not figured out to fight a non-state sponsored global insurgency. While the farmers by day, guerrillas by night scenario may be players in some locations, they are simply one arm of this beast. Key factors such as a global economy, failed states, web enablers, transnational criminal enterprises, WME, WMD, and several others have facilitated a new generation of security threats. Perhaps saying warfare is misnomer, because it implies there is a military solution? Maybe it is simply 4GW security threats?
War as defined in the cold war?
We’re all guilty of trying to rewrite history so it supports our ideas, but let’s look at Fulda realistically. The U.S. rightfully spent a good many years planning the good fight in Fulda, and because we did we were successful in preventing that fight and defeating the USSR. The USSR’s only options available were fighting proxy battles in the 3d world, and while our COIN approach may not have been ideal, let’s not forget we did win the war. The Cold War was a much more serious threat to our nation than AQ, so we need to keep that in perspective when we use our 20/20 hindsight. The mistake was continuing to focus on Fulda after the wall came down. AQ now poses a serious threat to our way of life and the global economy, but not to the survival of our nation. They can hurt us, they can’t destroy us.
What is happening today can be compared to historical insurgencies, but simply saying it is the same is akin to making the same error we did when it continued to focus on Fulda based scenarios after the wall came down. This is a global non-state movement that is able to get its message out globally through numerous channels. Speed is not as important as reach.
Don’t confuse a survival tactic with strength. In traditional insurgencies when insurgents were forced to break into smaller groups that meant they were on the losing end during that period of time. Yes they could survive to emerge again “if” the government allowed social conditions to develop that would support their resurgence.
The current global insurgency is not structured like this, their strategy is different. They want to get us and keep us in multiple fights globally in an attempt to defeat us economically and wear out our will. There is no requirement to win in a military sense. While all analogies of complex situations are imperfect I like comparing their movement to Vivax Malaria, which is the form of malaria that will reattack you periodically throughout the remainder of your life if you get it. The mosquito is the idea, and it is global. The periodic attacks are simply an expression of that idea, some are worse than others, but you know you still have the disease and to date we don’t have cure for it. Using this analogy we have a hostile ideology that is endemic globally and epidemic in some locations. Until we figure out how to eradicate the idea we’ll have to learn how to live with the threat, but it appears that our current response with overt, large military deployments is actually putting that idea into overdrive. Attacking Iraq and Afghanistan may play well with select groups of voters that wanted to see a response after 9/11, but perhaps a more effective response would have been one unseen (IO, clandestine, covert, persuading host nations to take action without our faces present to feed the AQ propaganda). That would be political suicide, but perhaps the only way to win the war.
I don't know where you see an infrastructure developing that we can target. Almost all studies I have read have pointed to the opposite. They had an infrastructure that we seriously crippled; now they are decentralized. AQ is now a decentralized umbrella strategy with several small groups (some large groups) and "individuals" developing their own emerging strategies complete independent of an AQ infrastructure, which makes them more dangerous not less. There aren’t simply two or three bank accounts that we need to attack, or one to three master bomb makers. The idea is on the web and in thousands of minds. Furthermore the knowledge on how to conduct terrorist acts is on the web.
Al-Zarqawi's Cell Phone Reportedly Yields Surprises
4 July AP via CNN - Al-Zarqawi's Cell Phone Reportedly Yields Surprises.
Quote:
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had the phone numbers of senior Iraqi officials stored in his cell phone, according to an Iraqi legislator.
Waiel Abdul-Latif, a member of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's party, said Monday that authorities found the numbers after al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a U.S. air strike on June 7.
Abdul-Latif did not give names of the officials. But he said they included ministry employees and members of parliament.
He called for an investigation, saying Iraqis "cannot have one hand with the government and another with the terrorists."
Meanwhile, al-Zarqawi's wife told an Italian newspaper that al Qaeda leaders sold him out to the United States in exchange for a promise to let up in the search for Osama bin Laden.
The woman, identified by La Repubblica as al-Zarqawi's first wife, said al Qaeda's top leadership reached a deal with U.S. intelligence because al Zarqawi had become too powerful.
She claimed Sunni tribes and Jordanian secret services mediated the deal...