The rise and fall of “Al-Qaeda” in Afghanistan & Pakistan: Where next?

The US forces and the Pakistan Army has been playing ping-pong. After 9/11, some of the leadership escaped to the tribal areas. They were picked up in the cities and sequestered away from the cosmopolitan centers. The US made a horrendous mistake by targeting them with drones in FATA. This gave root to the TTP. Indian agents surreptitiously followed them and infiltrated some of the weaker links. Hence the TTP was directed against Islamabad.

According to US generals only ab out 100 of Al-Qaeda remain in Afghanistan–thus theoratically ending the justification for the “good war”. However the war continues–because OBL and his top leadership have not been captured. The US generals defeated in Afghanistan now need an escape goat fro their incompetency. That scape goat is Pakistan.

The Pakistan Army has successfully cleared the remnants of TTP from Swat, and South Waziristan. The speed and efficacy of the Pakistani operation has surprised the Americans and left the Bharatis (aka Indians) wondering. Saleem Shehzad has tried to capture the situation in his current article. However there are major gaps in his story.

ISLAMABAD – While the surge of 30,000 United States troops in Afghanistan can only lead to an escalation of fighting, a major problem looms across the border, where al-Qaeda plans a new front against the Pakistan army – a move that will further dry up Islamabad’s vital support for the war in Afghanistan.

Simultaneously, al-Qaeda sources have told Asia Times Online, al-Qaeda has re-established itself in Somalia and Yemen. From Somalia, the sources say, al-Qaeda plans to further disrupt trade routes around the Horn of Africa, while from Yemen, al-Qaeda aims to make a comeback in Iraq and in Saudi Arabia and beyond. The overall goal is to take control of all Muslim resistance movements in the region, very much on the lines of al-Qaeda’s South Asian pattern.

Hooking up Lashkar al Zil with the Chicago gang might be a flight of fancy. This enigma shrouded in a mystery will unfold soon. Headly worked for the CIA and the FBI, and even the Bharatis (aka Indians) don’t buy the current story as narrated by the CIA and the FBI. It just doesn’t make sense. If Headley was a CIA agent then there is a distinct possibility that the the CIA knew about Mumbia. The Delhi press is all over this aspect and wonder why the CIA did not inform Delhi about Mumbai.

In South Asia, al-Qaeda’s chief of the Lashkar al-Zil (Shadow Army), Ilyas Kashmiri, sits in Afghanistan orchestrating targets, including in India. (Lashkar al-Zil is an alliance of several Pakistani, Afghan, Uzbek, Iraqi and al-Qaeda groups that carry out operations under the al-Qaeda banner.)

Agents in the United States in early October exposed a plot in which an American national, David Coleman Headley, was allegedly planning terrorist attacks in Denmark and India. One of Headley’s handlers was Ilyas Kashmiri.

The “Chicago Conspiracy” took the Federal Bureau of Investigation all the way to Lahore in Pakistan, where a retired army officer, Major Abdul Rahman, was said to be Ilyas Kashmiri’s main advisor. According to the FBI, massive acts of sabotage were planned in India, including attacks on nuclear facilities, the National Defense College and on parliament in the capital, Delhi.

The objective, very much like the attacks on Mumbai in November 2008, was to spark a war between Pakistan and India that would force Pakistan to disengage from any support of the war in Afghanistan. As al-Qaeda sees it, victory in Afghanistan runs through Pakistan, and in combating the Pakistan army.

In his book Sharpening the Spearheads for Fighting the Pakistani Army, a top al-Qaeda ideologue, Abu Yahya al-Libbi, wrote a lengthy thesis justifying the need to fight against Pakistan’s army and ruling elite, which he referred to as American proxies and as heretic as any Christian establishment, he writes:

Despite this apparent offer of peace talks, another military campaign looms. After some success in South Waziristan, the army has entered Orakzai Agency, the new headquarters of the TTP.

The militant explained, “The operations were done under immense American pressure and they will continue; that’s why we don’t trust any army offer. They always succumb to American pressures. However, even in Orakzai, they realize they are at a dead-end.

“They attacked the mujahideen from three directions – from Khyber Agency, from Hungu and from Kurram Agency. We blocked their advance from all three sides and the weather, which is increasingly cold with snow falls in the mountains, is helping the mujahideen. Before the snow melts, all the mujahideen will be gathered in Tera Valley [opposite the Afghan Tora Bora mountains] in Khyber Agency, including groups like Mangal Bagh, which were previously not ready to fight. From here we will mount an attack against the Pakistan army,” the militant commander said.

The US now needs justification to wage war on Somalia and Yemen. The Shahab were a bunch of Somalis that were against the corrupt and oppressive regimes in Mogadishu. Now they are have been bracketed with Al-Qaeda. An invasion by the US has already started, and the announcement about Al-Qaeda in Yemen only justifies the military actionst that are going on on the Arabian peninsula and the horn of Africa.

New fronts opening

While the US focus is Afghanistan and the fresh 30,000 troops it will have there, al-Qaeda will push on to open up the war theater in Pakistan. At the same time, it has consolidated in Yemen and Somalia.

Al-Qaeda’s presence in Somalia was limited until 2004, after which it applied the tactics it had learned in the Pakistani tribal areas – the transformation of indigenous Islamists into al-Qaeda’s “blood brothers”, and this without having to mobilize significant human or material resources. In Somalia, this has meant nurturing al-Shabaab Islamist insurgents.

The emergence in Somalia in 2006 of the Islamic Court Union – very similar to the Taliban – and its fall within six months and subsequent chaos and war with Ethiopia – provided al-Qaeda with the space to push its agenda; this is where the Lashkar al-Zil was launched. At this point, Ilyas Kashmiri and the recently killed al-Qaeda leader in Waziristan, Saleh Somali, oversaw the emergence of al-Shabaab. Hundreds of youths were funded and organized by al-Qaeda to work exclusively on pirate operations off Somalia to disrupt the important trade route.

Simultaneously, al-Qaeda regrouped in Yemen, spearheaded by the Lashkar al-Zil. Yemen is an exceptionally important country in the broader al-Qaeda strategy of forming a strategic backyard from which to control events in Palestine and Iraq and beyond – notably to revive its broken networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt.

Geographically, Yemen’s location is similar to that of the tribal belt straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan, from where militants run their operations in both countries. In Yemen, the Lashkar a-Zil’s expert teams are training the Ibnul Balad (Sons of the Soil).

Some of al-Qaeda’s key operations before the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US were hatched in Yemen. These include the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, logistical preparations for the “Black Hawk Down” operation and killing of US soldiers in Somalia in 1993, attacks on Jewish properties in Mombassa, Kenya, in 2002 and major attacks against Saudi targets.

Al-Qaeda took about five years to reach a turning point in the Afghanistan and Pakistani tribal areas, but the al-Qaeda leadership is convinced that its Yemen and Somalia operations will take a much shorter time. Al-Qaeda’s sights on Pakistan, and beyond .

If Al-Qaeda is not present in Afghanistan, and its presence has been wiped out in Swat, and South Waziristan, what is the justification for the continued drone strikes in FATA. The fact is that the drones are simply creating problems for Islamabad. The complaint government in Pakistan has lost all credibility and is on the way out. The next government will not be so obsequious to US demands.

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on Dec 28 2009. Filed under Editorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry