THE BATTLEFIELDS OF THE FUTURE
The battlefields of the future will likely continue being the same as the battlefields of today. Structurally, this makes sense. The countries experiencing the worst spates of terrorism tend to be poor and have a long history of political inequality and repression, which makes them ripe for conflict. Combined with a surplus of tools for war, such as small arms and technically capacitated fighters, and radical entrepreneurs with the necessary organizational skills to mobilize populations, there is political space for this type of violence to continue.
So what are the main battlefields of today? Aside from Iraq and Syria, they are Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan. As discussed elsewhere in this book, terrorism affects all parts of the globe, but these countries are unique in that they are both weak and geographically positioned to enable truly transnational revolutionary movements to arise and reshape borders. Moreover, given their proximity to key trading ports, influential countries, and natural resources, their continued instability might have profound global effects both politically and economically. However, much like the decentralized character of the global jihadist movement, violence in each of these places has a regional profile even in spite of the transnational rhetoric deployed by the various organizations involved in the fighting. All that being said, much like Iraq and Syria, the key feature that unites them is the fact that they all have weak governments that are easily targeted by nonstate actors promoting a utopian ideology that provides simple solutions for complex problems. This facilitates efforts to recruit and to receive funding from sources abroad.
In addition, there is no single strategic approach that defines these conflicts. Terrorism is used opportunistically by the various groups to delegitimize the local government and to serve as propaganda and as an effective tactic for defeating the opposition. The group plays to either the regional audience, changing up the levels of violence, prioritizing either the winning of hearts and minds or attacking civilian and military targets, and emphasizing different political programs that allow radical groups to hold territory and claim sovereignty. Combined with the slow-motion collapse of Islamic State since 2015, different jihadist organizations are adapting their propaganda to poach fighters and to draw donations from across the world.
Finally, what is interesting about these countries is that all have multiple nonstate actors, not all of them Islamic in character, competing against one another and against the local government. This means that terrorism is only one dimension of these conflicts and that other structural features are at play. Yet surprisingly, not one of these has managed the revolutionary changes accomplished by Islamic State.
YEMEN: A REGIONAL COLD WAR FOUGHT THROUGH PROXIES
Yemen has been at the forefront of the modern terrorist threat since the early 1990s. Being the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden’s family, it has been the source of terrorists’ plots against the West for the past thirty years. Terrorism, though, is but one of the challenges facing the country, as it is currently engulfed in a civil war that involves Saudi Arabia and Iran. Within this mix are intricate tribal rivalries and politics and a secessionist movement in the southern half of the country. The current conflict owes to the instability plaguing the country in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. In 2011, protestors forced President Ali Abdullah Saleh from power. One of the wiliest politicians in the world, he had been at the forefront of Yemeni politics for over three decades. Although he stepped down peacefully, he began working with the Houthis, a Shiite-inspired movement, which had earlier been his main threat for most of the 2000s, to try to return to power.
It is difficult to grasp the terrorist threat emanating from Yemen without delving into the Houthis and understanding why Saudi Arabia intervened. Since 2015, Yemen has become a veritable humanitarian disaster. Already one of the poorest and most armed societies in the world, Yemen had been the focus of intense fighting for decades. By 2010, shortly before the Arab Spring, the country’s oil supplies were dwindling, and in mid-2015, within months of fighting, much of its already decrepit infrastructure had been destroyed, worsening the conditions in the country.
The Houthis emerged in 1992. They were initially sponsored by President Saleh to counteract Saudi Arabian influence in northern Yemen, but by the early 2000s, the group became his main antagonist. The Houthis, a Shiite-inspired minority movement, found themselves in all-out war against President Saleh by 2004, following disputes between him and their founder, Badreddin al-Houthi. By 2010, they were nearly defeated, but they took advantage of the chaos of the Arab Spring to invade Yemen’s capital of Sana’a and capture most of northern Yemen. They eventually decamped out of the capital, only using the threat of violence to coerce the government to pass laws favorable to them. Not satisfied with these developments, they arrested Yemen’s new president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who soon fled to Aden, the ancient capital of southern Yemen.
The mastermind behind these movements has been former president Saleh. Despite fighting the Houthis for over a decade, he directed his tribal allegiances and members of the military still loyal to him to support their advance on Sana’a. This rapid change worried Saudi Arabia, leading to its intervention. Its primary motivation was the fear that the Houthis would become an organization much like Hezbollah in Lebanon. More important, in the context of the broader Saudi-Iranian rivalry for dominance of the Persian Gulf, fought elsewhere in Iraq and Syria, an Iranian proxy on its southern border was unacceptable. By November 2016, Saudi Arabia had liberated Aden and continues to recognize President Hadi as the rightful and legitimate leader of Yemen as of the middle of 2017.
The costs of this intervention have been high for all parties involved. Eighteen months into the conflict, nearly ten thousand had died and around 80 percent of Yemen’s population was in dire need of humanitarian support. UNICEF released a report in October 2016, stating that fourteen million Yemenis suffered from malnutrition. Furthermore, in December 2017, Saleh was killed in Sana’a, after renouncing his alliance with the Houthis and siding with Saudi Arabia. The full scope of Saudi Arabia’s intervention into Yemen is outside of the scope of this book, but it provides context for al-Qaeda’s activities in Yemen. For the past six years, the country has seen its meager quality of life worsen, with no end in sight for the multipronged conflict. This constant warfare has decimated most traditional power structures in the country and wrecked the country’s infrastructure. With only a token government in the south and a Shiite-led government in the north, Yemen begins 2018 with a political vacuum ripe for exploitation by a group like IS or AQ.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is considered the most important al-Qaeda (AQ) franchise outside the core organization based in Pakistan. In 2013, the leader of AQ, Ayman al-Zawahiri, named the group’s emir, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, his deputy, and since then, the group has been linked with the most serious plots targeting the West, including the foiled 2013 embassy plots. Despite AQ’s central relative decline, AQAP has grown in strength, increasing the overall size of its membership.
The origin of the group harkens back to the returning fighters from the Afghan jihad. Osama bin Laden, of Yemeni origin through his father, sought to push out the Soviet-backed government in southern Yemen and funded the formation of jihadist groups based around returning foreign fighters to attack it. Then President Saleh took advantage of these individuals and used them to help reunify the country. Of importance too, in 1992, an AQ-backed group bombed hotels in Aden where U.S. Marines were staying en route to Somalia. No American service members died, but it did mark the first known attempt by AQ to attack the United States. The veterans of these operations later transformed into al-Qaeda in Yemen (AQY). AQY gained international infamy after executing the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. After 9/11, the United States established ties with President Saleh, who likely stoked the jihadist threat in an effort to keep American aid flowing in the country. In November 2002, AQY was the recipient of the first known drone strike by the CIA. With American support, AQY seemed likely to collapse. This was compounded by the fact that many radicals in the country traveled to Iraq to fight against the United States there, giving the impression of a group nearing defeat.
Unfortunately, as alluded to in the introduction to this section, AQ and its affiliates comprise only one actor in Yemen. After 2002, with the increasing threat of the Houthis, President Saleh slowed down his prosecution of the organization and turned his attention elsewhere. AQ has always been a popular entity in conservative Yemen, and Saleh’s closeness to the United States saw him lose support among critical components of the country’s Sunni community. Indeed, it is worth noting that Yemen is home to Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, a radical cleric who claims to have discovered a cure for AIDS and whom the U.S. Treasury has deemed a foreign terrorist. Al-Zidani also founded Imam University in Sana’a, a place known for peddling extremist ideas, and where Umar Farouk Adbdulmutallab, better known as the “Underwear Bomber,” supposedly attended lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki, the American AQAP ideologue who was killed in a drone strike in 2011. As Gregory Johnsen noted, although the West stopped paying attention to Yemen, it remained an important arena for AQ’s global ambitions.
In 2006, a major prison breakout occurred. Among the twenty-three that escaped were Jamal Ahmad Mohammad al-Badawi and Jaber Elbanah, two high-profile AQY members, which caused the United States to start paying attention to the country again. Although these two were the focus of American counterterrorism efforts, the most consequential individual to emerge was the aforementioned al-Wuhayshi, who set out to rebuild the organization and to begin plotting attacks domestically and internationally. In 2007, AQY killed a group of Spanish tourists with a suicide bomber. In 2008, in another suicide bombing, the group attacked the American embassy in Yemen. In 2009, it merged with the remnants of AQ’s franchise in Saudi Arabia and established AQAP. Later in the year, the group nearly succeeded in assassinating the current deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia. AQAP further increased its notoriety when it started publishing Inspire, the first English-language al-Qaeda magazine, designed to draw recruits to the organization and to provide practical advice on making bombs and committing acts of terrorism. In addition, Anwar al-Awlaki, at this point a senior leader in the organization, began releasing a series of online lectures in English designed to entice Americans to target the United States. Aside from the Underwear Bomber, al-Awlaki maintained contact with Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, and reportedly, through his lectures, inspired Faisal Shahzad, the man behind the failed 2010 Times Square bombing.
This increase in operational tempo, and the number of plots emanating from the group, including the 2010 airline plot and the May 2012 cargo plane attack, led to the United States’s deploying special operations forces (SOF) and drones, while increasing its aid program to Yemen to counteract the threat posed by the group. From an American perspective, after the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011, AQAP was the most dangerous terrorist group in the world. The government in Sana’a did not view it that way, though. The country was largely overwhelmed by the Arab Spring, causing President Saleh to step down. Operating as Ansar al-Sharia, a token effort to rebrand itself away from AQ, AQAP took advantage of the chaos and managed to assert control of Abyan and Zinjibar provinces until 2012, when they were displaced. The period it ruled saw it restoring social services and governing, in a manner similar to IS. However, it overreached and angered the locals with its strict interpretation of sharia that alienated it from the local tribes, as happened to al-Qaeda in Iraq prior to the Anbar Awakening. Given the other disputes going on in the country, this was not fatal. The group sought to build ties with local tribes, establishing alliances and paying off members. In April 2015, a few months after President Hadi was deposed, the group took over the city of Al-Mukalla and supported a governance program that was more moderate in order to not alienate the locals. It was retaken by a Saudi-backed coalition in April 2016, but it is likely that AQAP still covertly controls key parts of what is Yemen’s fifth-largest city.
Nonetheless, the threat posed by the Houthis has allowed AQAP to insert itself into the conflict, concentrating its energies in pushing the Houthis back to curry favor with the country’s tribes. With most of the international attention focused either on IS or on the proxy war fought by Saudi Arabia and Iran in Yemen through their local proxies, this has enabled AQAP to remain hidden and to continue building its capabilities. Moreover, even though its leader, al-Wuhayshi, was killed in 2015, organizationally the group remains intact and still retains its chief bomb maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri. It is likely that AQAP will become the most dangerous terrorist group again after IS collapses, especially if it learns how to govern and assert control over key parts of southern Yemen. Its history of online propaganda set the stage for similar efforts by IS, and its influence will resonate for many years. The 2013 Boston bombers reportedly had copies of Inspire on their laptops and likely learned how to make the pressure-cooker bombs from instructions found in one of its issues. In January 2015, one of the Charlie Hebdo shooters was linked to AQAP. In essence, then, the silence coming from Yemen likely hides the fact that the group continues plotting against Western targets and should not be ignored.
What About the Islamic State?
In late 2014, IS claimed it had expanded into Yemen, and in March 2015, it carried out a suicide-bombing attack against a Zaydi mosque, killing 130 people. Gregory Johnsen has noted that the Yemeni IS branch seems to follow in its parent organization’s footsteps in trying to spark sectarianism in a country not familiar with it. He adds that the strategy adopted by IS seems to be the declaration of state while fomenting civil strife to draw recruits, instead of AQAP’s more moderated approach of trying to enmesh itself into local tribal society to win support.
This is unlikely to be a winning strategy in the long run. While the violence in Yemen seems to have a Shiite and Sunni divide, these differences are largely artificial. Zaydi Islam is theologically close to Sunnism, and intermarriage has been a common feature between the various faiths in Yemen. Trying to spark a sectarian war in the country will prove fruitless. This is already the case. In December 2015, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the United States translated and released a statement by Yemeni IS members explaining that they were defecting to AQAP because of the abuses committed by the organization against fellow Muslims. As Katherine Zimmerman has explained, IS in Yemen is misleading, as the real threat remains AQAP.
Yemen in the Future
At the time of this writing, Yemen is unlikely to reach a political settlement any time soon. Internationally brokered peace agreements have been rejected by President Hadi’s government, while the Houthis demand that Hadi abdicate. There is a gulf of opinion between both parties, worsening the humanitarian situation there. The only organization that benefits from this stalemate is AQAP. The humanitarian crisis in Yemen is giving AQAP and its allies ample opportunity to enmesh themselves within local populations and to begin providing shadow government services. In the future, if a peace deal is negotiated, Yemen will have a difficult time trying to uproot the group.
In this context, then, the question becomes, what does AQAP do afterward? As an al-Qaeda affiliate, it will likely continue prioritizing defeating the government in Sana’a and targeting the West. Although its rhetoric may not be as revolutionary or threatening as IS’s, it still will remain dangerous. The key dynamic here, though, is how Saudi Arabia responds. Given the Salafi jihadist hatred held toward the government in Riyadh, and the kingdom’s own fears about internal instability, it might find itself in a bigger conflict than it initially imagined.
NATO’s intervention into Libya in 2011 led to the downfall of Muammar Qaddafi, ending a brutal dictatorship that had ruled the country for nearly thirty years. Few shed tears at his death, given his history of state-sponsored terrorism like the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, his meddling in the foreign affairs of various countries, including providing support to the IRA against the United Kingdom and the ill-fated invasion of Chad, and his overall erratic behavior. Before his death, the international community was quite optimistic that it could salvage his government and usher in a democratic government, but the resulting history has proven otherwise.
Given Libya’s proximity to Europe and Egypt, instability here has secondary and tertiary effects elsewhere. Libya has already been the target of various counterterrorism operations following the 2012 Benghazi attacks, and the situation in the country has become more worrisome following the emergence of IS in 2014. There is no single neat narrative explaining the terrorist threat from Libya, and given the internal conditions, it has yet to morph into a problem state like Yemen or Afghanistan. What is at play instead is a tangled mixture of alliances and conflicts between nationalists, Islamists, tribes, IS, al-Qaeda, and the international community, with plots centering on the question of legitimacy.
How Did Libya Get Here?: Reconstruction and Deconstruction
The United States and NATO made a conscious effort to avoid a prolonged ground war to remove Qaddafi, relying exclusively on air strikes in support of the ground rebellion. This was desired both by NATO and by the rebels themselves, as it gave ownership of the conflict to ground forces and would limit the presence of outside powers in Libya that could undermine the legitimacy of the forming government in waiting, the National Transition Council (NTC). While this was rational in the sense of wishing to avoid another protracted occupation à la Afghanistan, it also limited the actions the international community could take in the aftermath, lacking ground forces to secure the population and suppress rebel entities attempting to undermine the eventual state-building process. It was this latter factor that ultimately created the current civil war in Libya.
During the fight with Qaddafi, various factions of different ideological and tribal affiliations emerged. There was no unified military body coordinating their activities, making their moves more akin to networked swarms than military campaigns with operational tempos dictated by a leading commanding officer. A report by the RAND Corporation notes that estimates about the actual number of fighting groups vary, with some placing these at several hundred and others at several thousand. The pattern varied by region and city. Revolutionary brigades were key in fighting Qaddafi, while military councils provided security and defectors from the Libyan military eagerly participated in the fight. There were also local gangs that wished to take advantage of the chaos and Islamists in the eastern part of the country that had a postwar governance framework anathema to the revolutionary and democratic aims of many of the other fighters. Exacerbating the situation was the surplus of weaponry received through arms transfers from abroad or from Qaddafi’s own weapons depot.
Following the end of hostilities, the key challenge for the emerging state was the disarmament and integration of these various groups into a national military structure. This was difficult to accomplish when the NTC had no army to speak of and had to find incentives to convince the various groups operating to lay down their arms. This was only one of a multitude of concurrent challenges the NTC had to resolve without having much of a bureaucracy or civil service to help implement policies. Initially, though, there was cause for optimism. The NTC created the Warrior Affairs Commission to help with disarmament and received a large number of registrants—too many for the NTC to handle. Furthermore, nothing was done to assure their loyalty to the state. Moreover, the extent to which the NTC controlled other bodies, such as the Ministry of Interior (MOI) and Ministry of Defense (MOD), was questionable, as they also enacted disarmament bodies.
The MOI created the Supreme Security Committee (SSC), which united numerous rebel factions under one banner but lacked enforcement capabilities, granting them high degree of autonomy. The MOD, in contrast, created the Libya Shield Forces, which was supposed to be the main military force for the country. These three bodies, with varying degrees of success in terms of disarming and controlling the militias, failed at pacifying the country. Instead, given the lack of the rule of law, the various fighting groups began renting themselves out to the highest bidders, immersing themselves in local conflicts between tribes and cities and creating general chaos. Yet another addition to this mix was that the SSC recruited Islamist rebel groups from the city of Derna. These groups had no interest in a democratic Libya and sought to push an agenda more akin to that of al-Qaeda or Islamic State. Within a year of Qaddafi’s death, terrorism was again prominent throughout the country.
Before proceeding, we must discuss Libya’s Islamist movements. Since the 1980s, Libya has been home to a variety of terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda in one form or another, such as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and parts of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Indeed, in the year after Qaddafi’s fall, the latter, having received a large supply of weapons, threatened Mali before the French intervention in January 2013 pushed them back. They are only bit players, though, as many of the conservative Islamists eschew violence and most resemble the Muslim Brotherhood. Even groups who have committed terrorist acts against international targets do not necessarily belong to AQ or IS. This is the case of Ansar al-Sharia, the group behind the September 11, 2012, Benghazi attacks that left U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens dead.
Elections and the Plunge into Civil War
From the outside, there were reasons to believe that Libya could sustain the gains made after Qaddafi’s death. The parliamentary elections in June 2012 were seen as a positive, as they would create the first national government legitimized through elections. Moreover, around 60 percent of the population voted, a rate many established democracies envy. This, however, assumed that a national identity existed within Libya that would allow a government to form. Before the elections, there were already disputes between the more conservative east and the more secular west. The government that emerged was weak, hobbled, and still unable to work with a competent bureaucracy capable of wresting the guns away from the armed groups operating throughout Libya. The divisions within postwar Libya are complex but roughly divide the country between nationalists based in the east and conservatives aligned with rebels out in the west.
These deep divides appeared in the General National Congress (GNC). One of the primary issues for the new government was the Libyan equivalent of de-Baathification. Islamists wishing a clean break with Qaddafi’s government wanted to pass a law that barred any individual who had worked for Qaddafi from government for at least a decade. Unfortunately, such a legislative move would weaken the human capital available for the bureaucracy. Despite grousing from key elites, this law passed, which angered many in the country. In addition, the close personal ties between Islamists and the various rebel groups raised concerns about deeply entrenched graft and corruption. On top of all this, the government was unable to establish the rule of law. Indeed, many nationalists, secular businesspeople, religious minorities, tourists, and figures tied to the incipient Libyan military were targeted in acts of terror by the various militias and rebel groups nominally linked to the GNC.
This uneasy status quo lasted for another eighteen months, until May 2014. Signs of the eventual civil war were evident for some time. In October 2013, there was a failed coup attempt against Prime Minister Ali Zeidan by individuals linked to conservative Islamist elements within the GNC. On February 14, 2014, General Khalifa Haftar—a nationalist who once served under Qaddafi until he defected following Qaddafi’s ill-fated incursion into Chad in the 1980s—attempted a coup against the GNC and failed. He launched another coup in May 2014, beginning in Benghazi and later moving elsewhere in the country, that targeted the evermore conservative and entrenched Islamists in the GNC. This move, known as Operation Dignity, sought to remove groups like Ansar al-Sharia from their positions as security providers and to force the GNC to agree to the creation of a house of representatives. On May 18, rebels under the Dignity aegis stormed Tripoli and dissolved the GNC. Libya held parliamentary elections again on June 25, with the Islamists losing badly. Seeing the writing on the wall and wary of the rise to power of an individual previously linked to Qaddafi, rebel groups from the town of Misrata and militias linked to the GNC responded by launching Operation Dawn. The parties that won the June 25 elections fled to the eastern town of Tobruk and created a new parliamentary body called the Council of Deputies (COD), which was recognized internationally. In contrast, the Islamists created their own body called the General National Council (GNC), which was supposed to be a successor of the original General National Council formed earlier. It is at this point when Libya fell into its second civil war and became a failed state.
It is important to note that religious cleavages do not necessarily divide these two coalitions. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross notes, various Islamist groups joined Operation Dignity, as they felt left out by the dominant Islamic powers in the GNC. In addition, regional and tribal rivalries and more personal feuds animated much of the conflict that followed, although the macro narrative was a convenient tool for unifying the various fighting groups. Moreover, regional actors, including Egypt, various NATO countries, Qatar, Turkey, and others, inserted themselves. Their reasons for joining include stabilization of an important country in North Africa, stymieing the spread of Islamist groups, and fighting terrorist groups. Places like Egypt, which has its own IS branch, and Tunisia are directly threatened by foreign fighters gaining experience in Libya and later returning home to wage jihad. Needless to say, the multitude of factions vying for control led to a spiraling of terrorism within the country with major international implications. Within this context, Islamic State managed to carve out an important islet for itself in eastern Libya.
Islamic State in Libya: One Actor Among Many
The litany of rebel groups in Libya who have engaged in terrorism are far too many to list, showcasing the scale of devastation the country has experienced. Because of its international focus, though, Islamic State has commandeered the most attention. Until now, Libya has been the group’s most successful colonization effort outside of Iraq and Syria, posing a risk to Europe’s southern core. Much like its holdings in the Levant, though, its grip is receding.
Just as in Iraq and Syria, the first signs of IS ambitions in the country appeared in early 2014, when foreign fighters began returning to the country. These fighters had not been officially recognized by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi but began organizing in the city of Derna, a hotbed for Salafist jihadists since before Qaddafi’s death. According to some sources, IS may have emerged from a split between Ansar al-Sharia elements loyal to al-Qaeda and those inspired by IS. Regardless, by June of that year, these individuals had established the Islamic Youth Shura Council before receiving formal recognition as an IS affiliate in November. By the end of that year, IS had made inroads into Sirte, Qaddafi’s hometown, and the capital of its Libya territory until December 2016. By the middle of 2015, there were an estimated four to five thousand IS militants in the country.
As was true in Yemen, IS exported its brutal ideology, tactics, and governing institutions. In all territories it held, it established a sharia court and tried forming a bureaucracy to enforce its rule. These measures helped bring some semblance of law and order, but they were combined with atrocities to terrorize the population further. In February 2015, it videotaped the execution of twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christians, committed various suicide attacks in the country, and carried out various targeted assassinations as it sought to emphasize its control over Derna. These actions did not produce the results they had in the Levant. The difference from its other efforts is that Libya is not divided between Sunnis and Shiites, precluding the same genocidal sectarianism that characterized its expansions elsewhere. Instead, much of this violence seems focused on securing coastal towns that facilitate the movement of people from Europe and the Middle East to keep a steady pipeline of recruits. This approach allows it to secure oil, a major source of income for the group’s activities across the world. In turn, after securing this beachhead, IS can exploit the shipping routes for arms across Africa and expand to other parts with significant Muslim populations, perhaps even joining its affiliates in Nigeria.
This strategy appeared capable of achieving Islamic State’s efforts, but it began to implode by June 2015. Perhaps out of arrogance or out of sheer belief in the ability of its ideology to win over converts, IS failed to secure many alliances that would help protect its position in the long term. Its violence in Derna proved too much for other Islamists in the city after it murdered the leader of a local AQ affiliate. This infighting led to an alliance of convenience between the national army in Tobruk and AQ elements in Derna to uproot IS from the surrounding areas. Reportedly, the fighting against IS included foreign fighters from nearby Tunisia and Egypt, justifying the fears of the leaders of those countries.
Sirte was another example of hubris by IS. The city was quickly taken over, and the group brought its governing apparatus. This quickly translated to public executions for lawbreakers, strict control of the media, degradation of women’s rights, an emphasis on religious activities, and a strict enforcement of sharia. An important factor enabling IS dominion was the acquiescence of Qaddafi’s tribe, which became disempowered following his death. This reservoir of goodwill evaporated quickly, as the group’s capriciousness created a terrible humanitarian crisis within the city. In May 2016, the government in Tobruk, with international backing from France and the United States, launched an offensive against Sirte to liberate it. Brutal fighting followed over the next seven months, before IS lost control in December 2016, depriving it of its last major holding in Libya.
Out of all the efforts by IS to expand, the situation in Libya most closely approximated the conditions in the Levant, given the insecurity and the lack of any capable governing authority. Its expansion was ultimately blunted and reversed within two and a half years, correlating almost neatly with Islamic State’s fortune in Iraq and Syria. Making sense of Libya’s mosaic civil war is difficult, but two overarching factors explain why IS could not expand further. First, IS made little effort to adapt its ideology to local conditions, essentially importing a state governance model created to dominate Iraq and Syria, and did little to moderate and win over other Islamist groups that could have provided it with support. Second, Libya’s marketplace of terrorism was already crowded when IS entered, and the group’s early victories created a bandwagon effect among its rivals to unite and fight IS. Of course, IS still has fighters in Libya, and given a change in circumstances, it could hypothetically create another province. For the time being, this seems unlikely.
What’s Next for Libya’s Islamists?
Losing Sirte is a major blow for IS, but the group is resilient and will likely find new ways to enmesh itself in the ongoing civil war. It will certainly be part of the so-called virtual caliphate that will follow now that IS has lost its grip over Mosul and Raqqa and will draw recruits for fighting in other parts of North Africa and Europe. Failing that, it might strike an alliance with other Salafist jihadist groups and merge with them to help push out the nationalist government in Tobruk. There have already been signs of IS and AQ cooperating in Libya at the tactical level, and as the fortunes of the different groups shift, this might become more of a necessity.
Globally, a bigger problem is al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Although not discussed extensively in this book, AQIM has spent the last few years investing in its state-building functions within Libya. It has made strategic alliances, has started providing social services in areas where it maintains influence, and has sought to moderate its ideology to persuade others to join its cause, much like Jabhat al-Nusra did in Syria. Avoiding sectarianism and ethnic divisions, AQIM is poised to capitalize on the long-term instability in Libya and to become the paramount Islamist group uniting the disparate tribes and coalitions fighting against the nationalists. The group is also wise in seeking not to provoke too much American aggression, as it fears this would be critical in rolling back its advances, as was the case for IS in Sirte.
If AQIM does manage to assert territorial dominion and create a burgeoning state, this would pose a major security challenge for Europe and the United States. Until now, it has not renounced AQ’s ideology or its emphasis on attacking the “far enemy” for propaganda reasons and on dissuading the international community from supporting moderate local governments opposed to its mission.
AFGHANISTAN: A LEGACY OF FAILED STATE RECONSTRUCTION
Afghanistan has been at the forefront of the global terrorist threat since the Soviets invaded the country. The fighting drew thousands of foreign fighters, including Osama bin Laden, and became the birthplace of al-Qaeda. After the Soviets’ defeat by the collection of mujahedeen and Arab foreign fighters, Afghanistan fell into a state of civil war. Out of this chaos emerged the Taliban, who, with the support of Pakistan, quickly quelled the violence and conquered most of the country. Taliban (meaning “students”) emerged from religious schools, or madrassas, in neighboring Pakistan. David Kilcullen attributes much of their success in the 1990s to their ability to impose the rule of law through the courts systems, which helped end the banditry in the country. The Taliban was the original Islamic State in many ways, but had a distinct South Asian flavor because of the importance of Deobandism, a religious movement arising in the nineteenth century similar to Wahhabism, and the importance of Pashtun tribal law (Pashtuns being the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan). Their harsh interpretation of sharia law led to widespread condemnation across the world.
In this environment, terrorism thrived. The Taliban did not participate directly in acts of terrorism, but it provided a safe haven for al-Qaeda and the assortment of groups associated with it. Apart from protection, it allowed all sorts of Salafist jihadist groups to establish training camps to commit plots abroad. It was here that AQ plotted 9/11. The American response to these attacks was catastrophic for the group, with the Taliban nearly defeated by the winter of 2001 and most of AQ’s leadership hiding in Pakistan. The United States quickly deprioritized this conflict as it began preparing for the invasion of Iraq. Maintaining a token presence, and relying on NATO assets to rebuild the Afghan state and its security forces, the United States allowed the Taliban sufficient space to rebuild and to wage an insurgency that greatly stymied state-building efforts there.
Afghanistan from 2002 to 2009: Reconstruction and Resurgence
Providing a history of the Taliban and associated terrorist elements after the American invasion is challenging because of the confusion associated with defining the Taliban. As David Kilcullen explains, local conflict in Afghanistan is mainly driven by tribal politics masquerading as the Taliban. While the movement started by the late Mullah Omar has continued operating, Kilcullen instead argues that it should be regarded as an alliance between Pashtun tribes seeking to dominate the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, although these dynamics have changed a bit with the emergence of IS as of 2015.
In December 2001, the UN implemented the Bonn Agreement, which created an interim government framework for the country and set a timeline for the writing of a new constitution and eventual elections. This resulted in Hamid Karzai’s election as leader of the transition government in 2002 and later president in 2004. In 2002 and 2003, the United States continued focusing on AQ and Taliban targets, but these were secondary efforts relative to the ongoing Iraq War. During this time, the priority for the international community was rebuilding the country. More than two decades of war had devastated its infrastructure and its economy, and the international community recognized it was imperative to rebuild to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban. Another major priority was developing the Afghan National Army (ANA) and its police forces to help consolidate the security and stability of the country and eventually allow for Afghanistan to regain its sovereignty. Joseph Collins notes that given the weakness of the Taliban and other insurgent elements, the international community was able to make progress in repaving roads, improving the country’s health care and educational systems, and capacitating parts of the local government.
Ultimately, these efforts failed in preventing a resurgence of violence. The move toward democratization, while a net positive in many regards, was poorly resourced for the scale of effort necessary. Afghanistan never had a history of centralized government, but it has always had a consensus-building body in the form of jirgas, which acted as a form of local democratic governance that could operate nationally with the government in Kabul. Unfortunately, this system was fragmented after twenty years of war, and most villages, disconnected from the outside world, had reason to distrust the Bonn Agreement. Moreover, the Taliban remained a threat, meaning that locals were wary of committing fully without having sufficient protection. Any effort at creating a national Afghan government palatable to the various ethnic groups would require a simultaneous bottom-up and top-down approach to state-building.
This level of effort demanded greater coordination and unity of effort than what the international community expected. Joseph Collins notes that, wanting to provide tangible and visible support, many international donors circumvented the Afghan government and worked with local nongovernmental organizations, depriving it of much-needed resources. This plagued the training of the country’s security forces as well. The entities tasked with building and arming the military and the police changed over the years, creating inconsistencies in this arena. This state-building effort, done on an ad hoc basis, delayed the ability of the police and the military to act autonomously and undermined their overall quality. Corruption was also a pernicious challenge. With billions of dollars flowing into the country, it was hard to keep track of where it was going, leading to embezzlement, fraud, and waste. All this occurred in a country with immense broken geography littered with pockets of isolated communities. Not surprisingly, the government in Kabul struggled to expand its presence outside of key urban areas, leading to an uneven state-building that ceded primacy to local tribal politics.
This situation gave political space for the Taliban and other insurgent elements to rebuild. After the United States routed it, the Taliban moved its headquarters to Pakistan and spent the years between 2002 and 2005 organizing. It did commit a few incursions, but only in 2005 did it initiate the large-scale insurgency that has plagued Afghanistan for the last decade. Because there was only a token military force and the Karzai government lacked sufficient resources, the Taliban quickly began shadow government operations in most of the country. With drug money and donations from al-Qaeda, the Taliban and its allies—Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s organization and the Haqqani Network—started rolling back the progress made over the preceding years. The Taliban also counted on a major base of support in western Pakistan through the local Taliban branch.
Joseph Collins explains that much of the success of the insurgency came from its increased deadliness owing to learning and borrowing tactics used by al-Qaeda in Iraq. The number of suicide bombings increased, and outright acts of terror became commonplace. Beheadings were recorded, publicized, and disseminated over cell phones, and roads became dangerous as improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were deployed across the country. The insurgency also hacked away at the Afghan security forces piecemeal, attacking and killing many police officers. According to counterinsurgency (COIN) theory, police officers play a critical role in developing community ties to win hearts and minds, establishing the rule of law, and generating intelligence through local connections. Because the police lacked sufficient funding, training, and protection from the international community and the ANA, the Taliban took over large swaths of territory. More important, this violence targeted mainly civilians, with a UN report estimating that civilians were victims of 76 percent of the violence.
The United States was aware of this, but Iraq was the bigger challenge at the time. Nonetheless, by the end of his administration, President Bush laid the groundwork for a civilian surge to help with the state-building process in Afghanistan. He refused to commit ground troops because he recognized that his successor would have to own the war.
The Afghan Surge and Village Reconstruction
President Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq War and dedicating the necessary resources to the Afghan theater. In his first months in office, he asked his administration to provide an assessment of the situation on the ground and a new strategy. In March 2009, he moved an additional twenty-one thousand troops in the country to shore up the troop presence. After a year of debate, President Obama settled on a COIN strategy that required an additional thirty thousand U.S. soldiers and ten thousand troops provided by NATO allies, focused on defeating AQ and the Taliban and strengthening the Afghan government. He also increased the number of civilians working in the country and increased aid directed at Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was only an eighteen-month process, however. He stipulated that by July 2011, he would begin withdrawing troops from the country, with the goal of ending the American war effort there by the close of 2014, allowing Afghanistan to act as a sovereign nation again.
The increased troop count of around 140,000 soldiers from the United States and other NATO countries augmenting the Afghan security forces allowed for a rollback of the Taliban in many places. Unfortunately, given the weakness of the Afghan central government, building upon these gains was difficult. Areas that were cleared would soon revert to Taliban control. This pressure, though, proved valuable in terms of buying the Afghan government time to clean up the corruption plaguing it and also allowing the United States and its allies to train the military and the police forces.
The United States did innovate tactically and operationally to help reconnect remote villages with the national government. Using a platform called village stability operations (VSO), the United States began deploying special operations forces (SOF) to remote villages to provide security. SOF in turn would also engage in other projects to win the trust of the elders and ultimately the community. After securing the area, SOF would begin training local militias drawn from the village, with the idea being that the locals would have more of a buy-in to defend their communities than the Afghan army, which drew people from across the country. Furthermore, locals would have a better understanding of the human terrain, with more intimate knowledge of who supported the Taliban and other insurgents, creating an intelligence network that could be disseminated to the Afghan military. This platform would also create opportunity for civilians from Kabul to begin reconstruction efforts and begin making overtures to connect disparate communities to the central government. Like other efforts in Afghanistan, this was largely under-resourced and produced mixed results. Many of the trainees maintained dual allegiances or would switch sides after the international community handed over control to the Afghan government.
President Obama also began pressuring the Pakistani government to cooperate more in its counterterrorism efforts. It has always been an open secret that Pakistan supports the Taliban and other terrorist elements because of its own geopolitical concerns dealing with India and because of its desire to maintain a friendly government in Kabul. Pakistan is concerned about Indian investments in Afghanistan, worrying that these might create another unfriendly government to its west. It has also used terrorist proxies to provoke India, something best exemplified by the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which were linked back to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Indeed, this latter entity is perhaps the biggest abettor of terrorism in Afghanistan. ISI has been accused of providing training and support to the Taliban and other extremists, and it is also believed that it knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad and most likely gave him protection. Using both carrot and stick, President Obama hoped to induce the Pakistani government to cooperate more and cease supporting its domestic extremists, especially as many began attacking the Pakistani state itself.
These efforts also saw an increased use of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, these attacks resulted in the deaths of many members of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership and key figures in the Taliban. It also resulted in numerous civilian deaths, which inflamed public opinion against the United States. These continued, though, with tacit approval by the Pakistani government, demonstrating the double games Pakistan played.
Mullah Omar’s Death, the Emergence of IS, and Negotiations
The United States and NATO maintained a token force after the December 2014 withdrawal date, as it became obvious Afghanistan remained too weak to provide for its own security. In 2015, the Taliban advanced across the country, seizing large swaths of territory and even taking Kunduz. It also improved its ties with other insurgent groups in Central Asia, like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The Afghan military fought valiantly throughout 2015, but casualties mounted. Much of this, of course, was an effect of Afghanistan’s perennial problem of continued weak and corrupt governance. Because the government was unable to win the loyalty of the tribes and lacked the resources to fund its police and army, the Taliban quickly supplanted Kabul’s government. This was not helped by the disputed elections of 2014, which saw Afghanistan without a functioning government for several months.
While all this fighting was occurring, in the background, internal Taliban politics were affecting the insurgency. In July 2015, it emerged that the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, had died in August 2013 and that the Taliban had covered this up to prevent a fracturing of the movement. Indeed, this was occurring in the early months of 2014. There were reports of IS-linked fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By September of that year, there were a large number of defections from the Taliban, and soon after, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost emerged as the local leader of IS in Afghanistan. This led to even more defections and the arrival of foreign fighters, as well as greater use of terrorism against the civilian population in Afghanistan. IS sought to peel off Taliban support through its propaganda and wished to create the same sectarian strife it had accomplished in Iraq and Syria through attacks directed at Shiites.
These events quickly led to direct confrontations between IS and the Taliban and its allies, including al-Qaeda’s central command in Pakistan. As was true of its efforts in other countries, IS struggled in generating much popular support because its strategy and tactics were seen as antithetical and abhorrent by the local tribes in both countries. As stated before, even though the Taliban holds an Islamist ideology, it really is a Pashtun-led insurgency in which membership is fluid, depending on if locals find it convenient to align themselves with the group. Therefore, in spite of its conservative outlook, the Taliban derives strength from respecting tribal laws and customs. More important, the current generation of Taliban fighters is different from the original cadre that emerged in the 1990s and is not as strict and orthodox as its forebears. This is not to say that they are not brutal, just that they have become more flexible.
IS did not think in these strategic terms and committed the same mistakes the organization made in other countries, assuming its government-in-a-box approach could be transplanted anywhere. By late 2015, its brutal violence managed to displace the Taliban in parts of eastern Afghanistan, but these positions were tenuous at best. The United States, Afghan security forces, and the Taliban began pushing IS from key positions, and by mid-2016, IS only held several villages. Much like its parent organization, this group is unlikely to continue much longer in its current state unless it changes its strategy and tactics.
The Taliban remains the most potent entity in Afghanistan. The government in Kabul remains weak and corrupt, and the international community has largely ignored the country since the rise of IS. Unsurprisingly, there have been efforts to negotiate with the Taliban to end the war, but this is unlikely to produce anything meaningful. Even with the withdrawal of the international community from the country, Afghanistan’s economy is still heavily dependent on international donations to operate. The country lacks a strong tax base to continue arming and supporting its security forces, and at the time of this writing, the Trump administration seems to lack a plan for fighting the Taliban. In other words, given the weakness of its enemies, the Taliban need only to wait out the government in Kabul before it can initiate an offensive to end the war without having to make any more concessions.
This is the worst possible scenario for terrorism and also the most likely unless the United States and its allies change their strategy. The Taliban still retains a close alliance with al-Qaeda, and given the symbolism of Afghanistan and 9/11, the country can easily revert to being a base of operations for international terrorism. Moreover, the Taliban in the past has shown interest in committing attacks abroad. In 2008, Spanish authorities uncovered a plot, which was linked back to the Pakistani Taliban, to bomb the Barcelona subway system. And with the emergence of al-Qaeda’s branch in the Indian subcontinent, there will likely be more terrorism in this region.
The conflicts discussed in this chapter share many similarities to Iraq and Syria. What is important to note, though, is that terrorism in all these places thrives because of the governments in place. This seems self-evident, but recognizing that these are political problems more than military problems helps reframe the nature of the threat and also provides insight into how terrorism might evolve into the future. All the groups discussed have likely internalized the lessons of Islamic State and have seen the dangers of being too brutal and too vociferous in declaring their agendas. They have also likely seen the value of adopting Jabhat Fateh al-Sham’s gradualist approach in both winning popular support and not making them targets off Western governments.
Without adopting a political program for resolving their internal issues, all these countries will continue breeding terrorist organizations, and if reform is not adopted, any of these countries could easily cede large chunks of their territory to sovereign terrorist governments. The world public should not ignore them either. Their advance might not rally the world in the same manner as Islamic State, but as the case of Afghanistan in the 1990s shows, it is those places suffering prolonged upheaval and that people ignore that are most prone toward creating global chaos.
Of the countries discussed, the most fractured is presently Libya, providing ample opportunity for would-be jihadists to plot attacks across North Africa and southern Europe. The opportunity to take over the country is hard, though, because of the multitude of groups involved in the fighting. Afghanistan, unless the United States adopts a new strategy to prop up the government in Kabul, will likely fall to the Taliban. Even though it is not the same organization Mullah Omar created in the 1990s, it could easily revert toward providing a safe haven for groups like AQ. Yemen, though, will probably remain the most dangerous for the world. The humanitarian crisis there does not seem likely to abate, and AQAP is well positioned to stake territorial claim to a large part of the southern half of the country. Already the most dangerous al-Qaeda franchise before IS challenged it, AQAP will probably resume its previous role once it carves up the political space and begin plotting attacks outside of Yemen again.