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How al Qaeda Views a Long Iraq War    [

    Taliban Revived in Southern Afghanistan
    By Jim Krane
    The Associated Press

    Saturday 07 October 2006

    Kabul, Afghanistan - A sweating man wanders into a crowd and blows himself up, leaving a dozen bodies lifeless on the street. A few blocks away, a car bomb pulverizes an armored Humvee, killing two U.S. soldiers and 14 civilians. The kind of anonymous insurgent violence that is convulsing Iraq has migrated 1,500 miles east to plague Afghanistan five years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the Taliban regime.

    The prospect of a second downward spiral - though so far Afghanistan isn't nearly as violent as Iraq - has experts worried that Western militaries don't have an effective strategy for these irregular wars.

    "One Iraq is bad enough," said Bruce Hoffman, a counterinsurgency expert at Georgetown University. "Given that our two main theaters of operations aren't going well, one has to question how well the U.S. understands counterinsurgency."

    The reborn Taliban acknowledges that it has adopted the suicide bombings, beheadings and remote-controlled bombs of the Iraqi insurgent movement. Nearly 200 civilians have been killed in suicide attacks this year that look all too much like the wave of bombings sweeping Iraq.

    "We're getting stronger in every province and in every district and every village," said Qari Mohammed Yusuf Ahmadi, who calls himself the Taliban's spokesman for southern Afghanistan. "We don't have helicopters and jet fighters. But we're giving America and its allies a tough time with roadside bombs, suicide attacks and ambushes. Our Muslim brothers in Iraq are using the same tactics."

    Resemblances to Iraq don't stop there. Taliban public relations teams videotape attacks and post them online, an uncharacteristic venture into modern technology for a Muslim fundamentalist group that once banned cameras and computers.

    The West's military strategy in Afghanistan also resembles that in Iraq.

    Just as critics say Washington did not send enough troops to Iraq before the insurgency took root, analysts fault the U.S. for failing to press its advantage in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003 when the Taliban were all but vanquished.

    Meanwhile, Afghan observers say the same harsh U.S. tactics, decried in Iraq for causing civilian casualties, have helped the Taliban recruit new fighters.

    But unlike Iraq's insurgents, the Taliban has ready sanctuary and support just outside their battle zone, in the border areas of Pakistan.

    "There will be no end to this insurgency until its sanctuaries and external support are addressed," said Christopher Alexander, the deputy head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

    The U.S. military estimates about 6,000 Taliban and other insurgent fighters operate in Afghanistan, many from bases in Pakistan. Yusuf Ahmadi - who spoke by satellite phone from an undisclosed location and whose exact ties to the militia's leadership are unclear - put the figure in the tens of thousands.

    The Taliban comeback, while focused on the volatile south and east, has begun to hit Kabul. The mountain capital's tree-lined boulevards are now scarred, like the streets of Baghdad, by garlands of razor wire, towering blast walls and impromptu police checkpoints.

    There's little indication that Iraqi insurgents are joining the fight in Afghanistan or giving the Taliban direct aid, although a few Arab and Chechen fighters mingle in Taliban ranks.

    But even without much personal contact, the Taliban has learned from Iraq's insurgency. Web sites explain the insurgent's art: everything from concealed rocket launchers to roadside bomb-making.

    "We're not saying they're getting direct support from Iraq," a U.S. military official in Afghanistan said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity the information. "They've evolved by adapting their tactics. They've seen the value of the suicide bomber in Iraq. For them, it's a very cheap and effective weapons system."

    The U.S. and NATO military response in Afghanistan also has nuanced differences from Iraq. U.S. warplanes drop 10 times more bombs in Afghanistan than they do in Iraq, and a few U.S. and NATO troops live off base in village houses, a strategy rarely attempted in Iraq.

    But most of the allied war efforts looks similar. In both places, troops cordon off villages and search homes. They employ billions of dollars in technology - things like signal jammers and mine-clearing vehicles - to find and disarm roadside bombs. They operate from bases nearly identical in appearance, with troops living in tin trailers barricaded by dirt-filled metal baskets.

    The Afghan war is still far smaller, occupying just 40,000 allied troops - a quarter of those in Iraq - and suffering a fraction of the casualties. But for individual soldiers serving in mountainous Taliban lands like Zabul province, the dangers feel the same.

    "I know Iraq grabs a lot of headlines. But there's still a war going on over here," said Lt. Col. Steve Jarrard, 46, of Johnson City, Tenn., based in the hard-bitten southern town of Qalat. "I really hope we're doing the right thing over here."

    Right now, it's too early to tell the result of major U.S. and NATO offensives aimed at crushing the Taliban.

    "In three to six months you'll see a noticeable effect," said NATO spokesman Maj. Luke Knittig. "But you're talking two to five years before seeing a defeat of the insurgency" in southern Afghanistan.

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    AP correspondents Noor Khan in Kandahar and Fisnik Abrashi in Kabul contributed to this report.

 

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    Go to Original

    How al Qaeda Views a Long Iraq War
    By Dan Murphy
    The Christian Science Monitor

    Friday 06 October 2006

A letter from al Qaeda leaders found in Iraq shows that the group sees the war as a boon for its cause.

    Cairo-In appearances across the US, President Bush has been campaigning against withdrawing troops from Iraq, arguing that to leave now would hand a historic victory to Al Qaeda and inspire new generations of jihadists to attack the US.

    But a letter that has been translated and released by the US military indicates that Al Qaeda itself sees the continued American presence in Iraq as a boon for the terror network, which has recently shown signs of expanding into the Palestinian territories and North Africa.

    "The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness ... indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest," says the writer, who goes by the name Atiyah. The letter, released last week, was recovered in the rubble of the Iraqi house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed by a US bomb in June.

    If the letter is accurate, it provides a window into the group's strategic thinking on Iraq that differs starkly from the one the Bush administration has been expressing publicly - a view the president reiterated Wednesday when he said that Al Qaeda believes that "America is weak, and if they can kill enough innocent people we'll retreat. That's precisely what they want."

    While the letter was released only recently, Atiyah, thought to be a senior Al Qaeda leader whose full name Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, apparently wrote it last December from the Pakistani region of Waziristan. It has surfaced among a flurry of other communiqués from Al Qaeda.

    Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released a videotape this week in which he lashed out at Mr. Bush and Pope Benedict XVI. On Sept. 28, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, believed to have replaced Mr. Zarqawi as the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, published an Internet statement in which he reached out to Sunni tribal leaders who have been in conflict with Al Qaeda. And a new group claiming to be Al Qaeda in Palestine issued a video attacking Palestinian political leaders.

    But the Atiyah letter, reflecting as it does the candid opinions of Al Qaeda, rather than the group's propaganda statement crafted for public consumption, appears to offer the most insight. It is largely focused on the fact that Zarqawi's tactics were alienating Iraqi Sunni leaders, and urges him to move with more caution.

    He strongly warned Zarqawi against assassinating Sunni leaders. Al Qaeda is a Sunni organization that has been trying to use minority Sunni anxiety in Iraq to build support. The letter also called the Zarqawi-organized bombing of three hotels in Jordan in 2005 a "mistake," arguing that expanding Iraq's jihad beyond its borders too soon will cost them public support.

    At one point, Atiyah muses that perhaps Zarqawi should step down from his leadership role, "if you find at some point someone who is better and more suitable than you." Since Zarqawi's death, a "more suitable" figure from Al Qaeda's standpoint has indeed emerged.

    "In order to understand this letter one has to see the circumstances of when this letter was released," says Rita Katz, the director of the SITE Institute, which is devoted to tracking Islamist militant groups. "This followed after Zarqawi had an audio message ... in which he threatened the tribes of the Sunnis who wouldn't cooperate with him. That was a real turning point.

    "The letter from Atiyah is basically his response to this. He's telling him that instead of fighting Sunni opponents, you should reach out with more peaceful solutions."

    Ms. Katz says Mr. Muhajir's Sept. 28 statement shows he has taken that advice to heart. She points out that a number of Sunni tribes in Iraq's turbulent Anbar Province have turned against Al Qaeda's main umbrella group in Iraq, the Mujahideen Shura Council (MSC), in recent months.

    "Al-Muhajir's latest speech was quite interesting, because he basically said sorry to the heads of the Sunni tribes. 'We need you. We'll work together to defeat the enemy.' "

    The day before his speech, Al Jazeera reported a statement it said was delivered by Ahmad Naji al-Juburi, head of the tribal council in Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad, in which he lashed out at Al Qaeda for killing "civilians, defenseless people, police and security men ... Al Qaeda said it came to Iraq for jihad and to liberate it from occupation [but] what Al Qaeda is doing is utterly at odds with what it announced."

    Katz and others say Muhajir is eager to mend fences with Sunni leaders, because he knows that if Al Qaeda loses the support of Sunni tribes, it will be in a very tenuous position.

    "Al-Muhajir took another step toward undoing some of the alienation Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had created in Iraq's Sunni community," Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999 and is now a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington wrote in a commentary on Muhajir's and other recent Al Qaeda communications.

    How long Muhajir will be in charge of Al Qaeda in Iraq is unclear. Earlier this week, Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie said security forces are close to catching him. On Sept. 28, the US military caught a man it described as his driver. But given the ease with which Al Qaeda in Iraq weathered the killing of Zarqawi, analysts are skeptical that killing Muhajir will have much impact on Iraq's war.

    "When Zarqawi was killed, people said that was the end of the insurgency and the end of the mass killings. But in fact we've seen mass killings increase dramatically since," says Katz. "Al Qaeda in Iraq played an important role at the beginning of the war. Zarqawi set up something that hadn't existed before, but at this stage the infrastructure is set up very nicely."