Al-Qaeda: The Next Generation

Remember those crazy left-wingers who said that a war in Iraq would just create a new Afghanistan, leading to a failed state and a brand new generation of terrorists? Those far-left Marxists even wrote silly things like this (warning - PDF):

Osama bin Laden: I WANT YOU - To invade Iraq. Go ahead. Send me a generation of recruits..."

Boy. It's a good thing they were so off, right?

Right?

The current war in Iraq will generate a ferocious blowback of its own, which--as a recent classified CIA assessment predicts--could be longer and more powerful than that from Afghanistan. Foreign volunteers fighting U.S. troops in Iraq today will find new targets around the world after the war ends. Yet the Bush administration, consumed with managing countless crises in Iraq, has devoted little time to preparing for such long-term consequences....

The Afghan experience was important for the foreign "holy warriors" for several reasons. First, they gained battlefield experience. Second, they rubbed shoulders with like-minded militants from around the Muslim world, creating a truly global network. Third, as the Soviet war wound down, they established a myriad of new jihadist organizations, from al Qaeda to the Algerian GIA to the Filipino group Abu Sayyaf.

However, despite their grandiose rhetoric, the few thousand foreigners who fought in Afghanistan had only a negligible impact on the outcome of that war. Bin Laden's Afghan Arabs began fighting the Soviet army only in 1986, six years after the Soviet invasion. It was the Afghans, drawing on the wealth of their American and Saudi sponsors, who defeated the Soviet Union. By contrast, foreign volunteers are key players in Iraq, far more potent than the Afghan Arabs ever were.

Several factors could make blowback from the Iraq war even more dangerous than the fallout from Afghanistan. Foreign fighters started to arrive in Iraq even before Saddam's regime fell. They have conducted most of the suicide bombings--including some that have delivered strategic successes such as the withdrawal of the UN and most international aid organizations--and the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, another alumnus of the Afghan war, is perhaps the most effective insurgent commander in the field. Fighters in Iraq are more battle hardened than the Afghan Arabs, who fought demoralized Soviet army conscripts. They are testing themselves against arguably the best army in history, acquiring skills in their battles against coalition forces that will be far more useful for future terrorist operations than those their counterparts learned during the 1980s. Mastering how to make improvised explosive devices or how to conduct suicide operations is more relevant to urban terrorism than the conventional guerrilla tactics used against the Red Army. U.S. military commanders say that techniques perfected in Iraq have been adopted by militants in Afghanistan.

Link here, via Tapped and the Mother Jones blog.

I'm not sure I agree with everything in this piece. My biggest objection is that it's hard to be sure how important foreigners are to the chaos in Iraq (with the exception of the US Army, of course.) The fact of the matter is, two and a half years later, the US still isn't really sure who they're fighting. Is it Baathists? Sunnis from outside Iraq? Sunnis from inside? Turkmen? Shia from Iran?

The scary answer - and not necessarily the correct one - is that the US could be fighting all of the above. Some authors have compared Iraq to the Muslim equivalent of the Spanish Civil War, where leftists from around the world came to fight against Franco. I haven't read Orwell's accounts from Spain, but the disarray among the left fighting fascism is legendary. It's certainly possible that the same thing is happening in Iraq today - a number of separate groups, all fighting for more or less the same immediate goal (expelling the US) but with no agreement beyond that.

But what seems certain is that a) there are foreign Islamic terrorists in Iraq, b) They wouldn't have been there under Sadaam, and c) This won't be the last we hear from them.

Good work, George. In other news, October was officially the 4th deadliest month for the US in Iraq. More US soldiers (94) were killed in October than in any of the first three months of the war (the "initial phase.") In fact, more US soldiers were killed in October of this year than were killed in any one month of the entire first year of the war - until the insurgency proper began in April of 2004.

This is what continues to be so sad about the US occupation. I continue to believe that Iraq could never have been a "good war", and I don't really believe that the US government could ever have achieved its stated aims of a secular, pro-Israeli Democracy in the heart of Arabia.

But. But it didn't have to be a catastrophe. The US was given a year - a full year! - to try and get things together. The Iraqi people showed an incredible amount of restraint and forbearance in the first year, with most casualties being less than 50 soldiers a month. Not a calm place, certainly, but a far cry from the last year, where almost all of the last 12 months have had more than 60 casualties.

But now the most likely outcome is the Taliban, but this time with the world's second largest oil reserves. So really a second Saudi Arabia. Probably good for the Bush family, but that's about it.