FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

News

Do You Remember al Qaeda? They Remember You

The US has been saying for years that it's about to wipe out al Qaeda. But 14 years and a trillion dollars later, the American war on terror hasn't managed to kill its number one target.
Imagen vía EPA/Yahya Arhab

With attention focused on the Islamic State, it's sometimes easy to forget that United States military forces are still deeply engaged with al Qaeda. And despite repeated claims from the US government that the group is teetering on the brink of defeat, it's becoming increasingly clear that al Qaeda's not dead yet — and that the fight against it is far from over.

In October alone, the US military helped disrupt a huge al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and killed, via drone strike, a senior al Qaeda leader living in Syria. The Pentagon announced both counterterrorism victories with little fanfare, and the stories received relatively little media attention.

Advertisement

But both events raise serious questions about the actual progress the US has made against the group responsible for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The US is still hunting al Qaeda across the globe despite years of war costing more than $2 trillion. Even though al Qaeda has taken quite a licking — with its top leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan dead, and spin-off groups in Yemen and Somalia getting pounded flat — it just keeps on ticking.

Today, the ongoing battle is overshadowed by the Islamic State — also known as ISIS or ISIL — which, unlike al Qaeda, strives to be in the spotlight, releasing gruesome execution videos to capture the world's attention.

Related: Even the Taliban Is Disgusted by the Islamic State's Latest Video

This only seems to work to the advantage of al Qaeda's current leader, Ayman al Zawahiri, whose strategy is "to sit back and let ISIS get all the heat and attention, while he very slowly and patiently rebuilds his organization," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University in Washington.

And according to Nicholas Rasmussen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, al Qaeda is by no means a second-tier threat.

"With all the media focus on ISIL, what's sometimes lost is that we still view al Qaeda and the various al Qaeda affiliates and nodes as being a principal counterterrorism priority," he said in an interview published in September's issue of the Sentinel, a publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. "When we are looking at the set of threats that we face as a nation, al Qaeda threats still figure very, very prominently in that analysis."

Advertisement

With training camps reemerging in Afghanistan and senior al Qaeda leaders operating in Syria, it's clear why. What's not clear is whether the current US approach is working.

The US military announced on October 13 that, along with Afghan forces, it had carried out one of the largest joint ground-assault operations ever conducted in Afghanistan.

The target: two al Qaeda training camps in Kandahar province, one of which covered nearly 30 square miles, almost the size of Manhattan. CNN reported that the site had been operating for a year, but the US military didn't learn about it until July.

The operation, which began on October 7, required more than 60 US airstrikes and 200 Afghan and US troops, who seized heavy weapons, including anti-aircraft weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, at the two sites. According to a statement from the US military, US and Afghan forces also found machine guns, ammunition, bomb-making materials, foreign passports, laptops, and mobile phones.

"The enormous success of this operation validates our ongoing campaign," said General John Campbell, commander of US Forces in Afghanistan, in a statement.

But for counterterrorism experts who've long been involved in the fight against al Qaeda, this story was not all good news.

While the joint military operation was a success, the existence of these camps and the fact that they went unnoticed for so long also carries far darker implications, they said.

Advertisement

"When everybody who's involved in counterterrorism or national security saw that report come out, they should have either gagged or had their knees buckle, because it shows you what a $1 trillion can and cannot do," said Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer now working at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York. He was referring to the $1 trillion it's estimated the US has spent on the war in Afghanistan.

"The discovery of these al Qaeda training camps are a gut punch to our entire [counterterrorism] policy in Afghanistan," Skinner said.

Watch the VICE News documentary Syria: Al-Qaeda's New Home

That the camps' existence went undetected for so long also speaks to a growing lack of intelligence in Afghanistan, as US surveillance drones are stretched thin across multiple war zones.

"Since US assets in Afghanistan have drawn down over the past several years, intelligence capabilities have been significantly attenuated," said Colin Clarke, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corporation. "Furthermore, despite the talk of a warming of relations between the US and Pakistan over the past year, the dearth of information sharing between Washington and Islamabad seems tangible, as the militants recently discovered in al Qaeda's Shorabak camps likely ended up there after being pushed across the border by Pakistani security forces."

Meanwhile, in Syria, the US conducted a drone strike on October 15 that killed Sanafi al Nasr, a Saudi national and veteran al Qaeda operative.

Advertisement

The Pentagon said in a statement that "al Nasr was a long-time jihadist experienced in funneling money and fighters for al Qaeda." He was a member of what the US government refers to as the "Khorasan Group," a name given to senior al Qaeda operatives who moved into Syria to take advantage of the chaos and violence there. According to the Pentagon, Nasr is the fifth Khorasan Group leader killed in the last four months. The US military has been targeting al Qaeda in Syria since it began airstrikes there a year ago, even though the stated mission is to go after ISIS.

The very existence of the Khorasan Group — made up of seasoned al Qaeda leaders hiding out in Syria — also contradicts the narrative, touted by the Bush and Obama administrations, that strategic defeat of so-called "core" al Qaeda was near.

"This has been a perennial problem in the war on terrorism," said Hoffman. "We've been going around for a decade and a half, I think too eagerly, saying al Qaeda is finished. Now we're in a position where we're confronted by two reasonably robust adversaries in ISIS and al Qaeda."

Predicting the demise of al Qaeda is tough. In fact, it's hard just to know how much damage is being done to it. One metric the US government has used over the years is the number of its leaders killed, often by US drone strike.

One of the major accomplishments of the George W. Bush administration listed on the White House's website is that "more than three-quarters of al Qaeda's known leaders and associates [were] detained or killed."

Advertisement

Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an editor of The Long War Journal, said this has always been a bad measure of the group's strength. "US intelligence never told us how many top leaders they had to begin with … they're giving us a numerator without a denominator."

Related: Releasing Osama Bin Laden's Porn Stash: The Public's Heroic Battle with the CIA Continues

When the US killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, US counterterrorism officials were once again predicting al Qaeda's imminent collapse.

John Brennan, then the White House's counterterrorism chief, spared no rhetorical fireworks on the subject, using language like "on a steady slide," "on the ropes," and "taking shots to the body and head," according to a 2011 report from the Associated Press. In the interview he touted the killing of Atiyah Abd al Rahman, at the time al Qaeda's second-in-command, as a "huge blow" to the group.

While officials always included the caveat that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — its Yemen-based branch — was still a danger, they remained confident that what they called "core al Qaeda," especially any remnants of the group in Afghanistan, was near defeat.

For several years it was true: al Qaeda was a rarity in Afghanistan, Skinner said. The US successfully dismantled its pre-9/11 training camps and surviving members of the group scattered to Pakistan and elsewhere.

Advertisement

In 2010, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta said he believed there were only 50 to 100 al Qaeda members operating in Afghanistan.

Today, however, the US maintains a robust counterterrorism capability in Afghanistan, compared to operations in other countries, with close to 10,000 troops still on the ground. It also enjoys a close, working partnership with the Afghan security forces.

"Afghanistan is our best-case scenario and it's awful," Skinner said. "Our entire [counterterrorism] strategy has been to partner and liaison and do drone strikes, and that was very effective for about eight years. The problem is it's like trying to fight a forest fire with a fire extinguisher.

"Drone attacks are very effective as a narrow counterterrorism tool. The problem is the situations have now overwhelmed the tactic," he said. "Afghanistan is so much beyond the capability to be controlled with drone strikes. Pakistan has never been that controllable. Yemen is going to get really bad and no one is really talking about it. And Syria is hell on earth."

And according to Skinner the answer to these problems cannot be found in more US drone strikes or more US troops on the ground: "We can help, but we need a lot more firefighters coming from those countries."

Follow Kate Brannen on Twitter: @K8brannen