National security editor Patrick Walters
THE past fortnight in Iraq has dramatically underscored al-Qa'ida's new strategic goal: to derail Washington's attempt to stabilise Iraq and create a functioning sovereign state. Al-Qa'ida has made Iraq its priority as it intensifies its global jihad against the US and its allies, according to Western intelligence experts.
Last week's devastating phalanx of suicide bombers in and around Baghdad was co-ordinated by al-Qa'ida's new chief operating officer, Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in concert with local Muslim Sunni insurgents, analysts say.
Iraq has become the physical and ideological heart of the global jihadist struggle. "The focus has shifted from Afghanistan and Pakistan. The main game is now Iraq," one senior Western intelligence expert tells Inquirer in Herzliya, Israel.
There are two immediate concerns for coalition forces fighting in Iraq.
The first is the apparent deepening of collaboration between the estimated 3000 to 5000 foreign Islamist fighters in the country and local Sunni nationalists who feel disfranchised from the country's new Shia-dominated political landscape. The foreigners, many of whom trained in Afghanistan, have taught Sunni fighters to use more sophisticated explosives and tactics in confronting US and Iraqi security forces.
The other key worry is the prospect of a "blowback" or "bleed-out" of foreign fighters trained and blooded in Iraq to new battlefields in the Middle East, Europe and South Asia as Zarqawi's organisation expands its reach well beyond the Middle East.
Listen to the message delivered by European Union counter-terrorism co-ordinator Gijs de Vries at aterrorism conference in Israel last week: "The terrorism threat has become more complex, notably, though not exclusively, as a result of the war in Iraq," he said. "Intelligence agencies have warned that the war in Iraq has stimulated processes of radicalisation and recruitment into terrorism into and beyond Iraq itself."
De Vries says that more than a few of those fighters who will eventually return to Europe will try to fuel violent extremism in Europe's Muslim communities.
On Thursday, Israel's security service chief Yuval Diskin warned that al-Qa'ida was ready to infiltrate Palestinian territories, including the newly vacated Gaza Strip. According to the Shin Bet chief, there is an extensive al-Qa'ida-linked terrorism network in the Egypt's Sinai desert that Hosni Mubarak's Government has failed to tackle.
The troubling turn of events in Iraq comes as Washington gropes with the consequences of its failed strategic vision for the country and its manifest inability to prosecute successful counterinsurgency operations since March 2003.
Bush administration advisers are turning their minds to crafting an exit strategy for the US's 140,000-strong military force by 2008. The buzz word is transition, whereby the planned new Iraqi army gradually assumes the lead security role.
"The consensus is that we can no longer win in Iraq. We have to redefine winning as getting out ofthere without dramatically increasing the jihad-ist threat," observes one counter-terrorism expert who has worked with the Bush administration on the way ahead.
The neo-conservative fantasy of Iraq as a beacon of liberal democracy has been abandoned. The best hope is that a strong stable governing regime can emerge to hold Iraq together against the looming secessionist pressures in the Kurdish north and the Shia-dominated south.
Ehud Yaari, one of Israel's leading Middle East analysts, tells Inquirer that while the jury is still out on the American experiment in Iraq, "the verdict is going to be that the experiment fails".
Yaari notes that the Sunni-led insurgency has "enormous sympathy" in the Arab world, with the US singularly unable to create a distinction between local insurgents and Zarqawi's horde of foreign terrorists. The other ominous development is Iran's slow but steady infiltration of southern Iraq, a process that will simply exacerbate deep-seated animosities between the majority Shia and the traditionally dominant Sunni tribes. Yaari estimates that 500,000 Iranians are resident in the south as Tehran consolidates its powerful patronage networks.
John Howard's Government faces crucial decisions in the coming weeks about the future of our troop deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly the 550-strong Muthanna deployment in southern Iraq.
At home next week the Prime Minister will also attempt to persuade the premiers of the merits of a raft of new domestic counter-terrorism legislation and security upgrades. The security outlook in southern Iraq, particularly around British-controlled Basra, is daily becoming more problematic as rival militia groups, including the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and forces loyal to radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr battle for control.
Defence Minister Robert Hill, sensing the worsening situation, wants Australian troops out of Muthanna by next April. The complication for Canberra is that Washington is putting strong pressure on the Japanese Government to keep its army engineers in Iraq (protected by Australian forces) for another year. If Tokyo, London and Washington make the case for Australia to stay the course, Howard will find it hard to say no. The need to change course in Iraq and rethink counterinsurgency strategy and tactics will make it enormously difficult for Canberra to reduce its troop commitment to Iraq, notwithstanding plans to increase our army presence in Afghanistan. Washington would welcome an increased Australian troop presence. Our soldiers are well-trained in the counterinsurgency warfare techniques so badly lacking in most of the US forces deployed to Iraq.
Last week some of the world's leading counter-terrorism experts gathered at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya in Israel to discuss progress in the global fight against terrorism. They confirmed the emerging consensus in Western intelligence agencies that Iraq has become the prime motivating force and the training ground for a new generation of terrorists. This was a point hammered home by European counter-terrorism officials, including Germany's director of intelligence co-ordination Ernst Urhlau.
According to Urhlau, the Iraq war has allowed the Zarqawi network to evolve into a new kind of transnational terrorist network, looser than al-Qa'ida but active in engaging the Muslim diaspora in Europe.
Three other key messages were advanced by US, European and Israeli experts at the conference:
- The global jihadist war, still in its early stages, will be a long generational struggle requiring a penetrating understanding of the jihadists' decision-making time frame. Observed one of the world's leading terrorism experts, the Rand Corporation's Bruce Hoffman: "You ain't seen nothing yet."
- The need to recognise that defeating Islamist terrorism is as much a war of ideas as a military conflict, a war the US-led coalition is losing. The internet has become the paramount source of inspiration, recruitment and training for the new generation of Islamist militants flocking to Iraq and other theatres. Little effort has been made so far to counter the jihadist appeals appearing on hundreds of websites across the Arab world.
- The urgent requirement for far closer and more comprehensive international co-operation to defeat Islamist terrorism. We still lack a co-ordinated global strategy that will build much closer trust between governments and people from sharply differing political cultures.
In a separate conference in Geneva last weekend organised by the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, one of Britain's leading intelligence experts, David Omand, pointed to the sharp differences in perception by governments of the seriousness of the global terrorist threat.
"Without a greater degree of convergence of understanding over what and who we are fighting, and what strategy we are actually to follow, it is hard to see how the worldwide threat can be contained and eventually eliminated," he said in a deeply thoughtful presentation.
Omand, the British Government's security and intelligence co-ordinator from 2002 to this year, emphasised that the struggle of ideas had to be won as well as the tactical battle on the streets.
"We badly need a counter-narrative that will help groups exposed to the terrorist message make sense of what they are seeing around them. If the US and Europe deploy very different rhetoric and send signals that can be interpreted as contradictory, then we will lose ground," he warned.
"We are still at a relatively unsophisticated stage in our thinking of how to present internationally and domestically what will be a long campaign. We even lack the language in which to describe the essential features of the threat and its ideology without risking giving offence to Muslims around the world."
At the Herzliya conference, London police commissioner James Hart acknowledged that the home-grown July 7 London bombings had come as a surprise. Hart said British society, including the police, had not done nearly enough to engage with Muslim communities and discourage and prevent radical ideas taking hold.
"In the city we are working in partnership directly with the Muslim community in a sustained program of engagement that includes targeted newsletters, meetings, seminars and speakers, all developed with welcome advice from the Muslim community itself," he said. These are lessons Australians should heed.
According to Boaz Ganor, founder of Herzliya's Institute for Counter-Terrorism, the London attacks form part of an indirect strategy being pursued by al-Qa'ida and the global jihad to achieve its dream of a new Muslim caliphate.
Why London? "London is one of the pillars of Western society," Ganor says. "It's a close ally of the US and active in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it has a large Muslim community. All of which fit Australia exactly."
