[Peace-discuss] A Special Relationship The United States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again - Andrew Cockburn

Wed Jan 6 09:58:23 EST 2016

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December 30, 2015 

Letter from Washington
<http://harpers.org/departments/letter-from-washington/>   From the January
2016 issue

A Special Relationship

The United States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again

By Andrew Cockburn <http://harpers.org/author/andrewcockburn/> 

One morning early in 1988, Ed McWilliams, a foreign-service officer posted
to the American Embassy in Kabul, heard the thump of a massive explosion
from somewhere on the other side of the city. It was more than eight years
after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the embassy was a tiny
enclave with only a handful of diplomats. McWilliams, a former Army
intelligence operative, had made it his business to venture as much as
possible into the Soviet-occupied capital. Now he set out to see what had
happened.

It was obviously something big: although the explosion had taken place on
the other side of Sher Darwaza, a mountain in the center of Kabul,
McWilliams had heard it clearly. After negotiating a maze of narrow streets
on the south side of the city, he found the site. A massive car bomb,
designed to kill as many civilians as possible, had been detonated in a
neighborhood full of Hazaras, a much-persecuted minority.

<http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/00033__RobertNickelsberg-Harp
ers-1601-630-1.png> Description: Afghan mujahedeen move toward the front
line during the battle for Jalalabad, Afghanistan, March 1989 © Robert
Nickelsberg

Afghan mujahedeen move toward the front line during the battle for
Jalalabad, Afghanistan, March 1989 © Robert Nickelsberg

McWilliams took pictures of the devastation, headed back to the embassy, and
sent a report to Washington. It was very badly received  not because
someone had launched a terrorist attack against Afghan civilians, but
because McWilliams had reported it. The bomb, it turned out, had been the
work of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedeen commander who received more CIA
money and support than any other leader of the Afghan rebellion. The attack,
the first of many, was part of a CIA-blessed scheme to put pressure on the
Soviet presence in Kabul. Informing the Washington bureaucracy that
Hekmatyars explosives were being deployed to kill civilians was therefore
entirely unwelcome.

Those were Gulbuddins bombs, McWilliams, a Rhode Islander with a gift for
laconic understatement, told me recently. He was supposed to get the credit
for this. In the meantime, the former diplomat recalled, the CIA pressured
him to report a little less specifically about the humanitarian
consequences of those vehicle bombs.

I tracked down McWilliams, now retired to the remote mountains of southern
New Mexico, because the extremist Islamist groups currently operating in
Syria and Iraq called to mind the extremist Islamist groups whom we lavishly
supported in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Hekmatyar, with his documented
fondness for throwing acid in womens faces, would have had nothing to learn
from Al Qaeda. When a courageous ABC News team led by my wife, Leslie
Cockburn, interviewed him in 1993, he had beheaded half a dozen people
earlier that day. Later, he killed their translator.

In the wake of 9/11, the story of U.S. support for militant Islamists
against the Soviets became something of a touchy subject. Former CIA and
intelligence officials like to suggest that the agency simply played the
roles of financier and quartermaster. In this version of events, the dirty
work  the actual management of the campaign and the dealings with rebel
groups  was left to Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). It was
Pakistans fault that at least 70 percent of total U.S. aid went to the
fundamentalists, even if the CIA demanded audited accounts on a regular
basis.

The beneficiaries, however, have not always been content to play along with
the official story. Asked by the ABC News team whether he remembered Charlie
Wilson, the Texas congressman later immortalized in print and onscreen as
the patron saint of the mujahedeen, Hekmatyar fondly recalled that he was a
good friend. He was all the time supporting our jihad. Others expressed the
same point in a different way. Abdul Haq, a mujahedeen commander who might
today be described as a moderate rebel, complained loudly during and after
the Soviet war in Afghanistan about American policy. The CIA would come
with a big load of ammunition and money and supplies to these
[fundamentalist] groups. We would tell them, What the hell is going on? You
are creating a monster in this country. 

<http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/00034__MolhemBarakat-Harpers-
1601-630-1.png> Description: Fighters with Jabhat al-Nusra search residents
at a checkpoint in Aleppo, Syria, October 2013 © Molhem Barakat/Reuters

Fighters with Jabhat al-Nusra search residents at a checkpoint in Aleppo,
Syria, October 2013 © Molhem Barakat/Reuters

American veterans of the operation, at the time the largest in CIA history,
have mostly stuck to the mantra that it was a Pakistani show. Only
occasionally have officials let slip that the support for fundamentalists
was a matter of cold-blooded calculation. Robert Oakley, a leading player in
the Afghan effort as ambassador to Pakistan from 1988 to 1991, later
remarked, If you mix Islam with politics, you have a much more potent
explosive brew, and that was quite successful in getting the Soviets out of
Afghanistan.

In fact, the CIA had been backing Afghan Islamists well before the Russians
invaded the country in December 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carters
national-security adviser, later boasted to Le Nouvel Observateur that the
president had signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of
the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul six months prior to the invasion. And that
very day, Brzezinski recalled, I wrote a note to the president in which I
explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet
military intervention. The war that inevitably followed killed a million
Afghans.

Other presumptions proved to be less accurate, including a misplaced faith
in the martial prowess of our fundamentalist clients. As it turned out, the
Islamists were really not the ferocious anti-Soviet warriors their backers
claimed them to be. McWilliams, who left Kabul in 1988 to become special
envoy to the Afghan rebels, recalled that Hekmatyar was more interested in
using his U.S.-supplied arsenal on rival warlords. (On occasion, he tortured
them as well  another fact the envoy was discouraged from reporting.)
Hekmatyar was a great fighter, McWilliams remembered, but not necessarily
with the Soviets.

Even after the Russians left, in February 1989, the agencys favorite Afghan
showed himself incapable of toppling the Soviet-supported regime of Mohammad
Najibullah. Hekmatyars attack on the key city of Jalalabad, for example,
was an embarrassing failure. Oakley bragged in the weeks leading up to this
offensive [that] it was going to be a great success, said McWilliams, who
had passed on warnings from Abdul Haq and others that the plan was
foolhardy, only to be told, We got this locked up. To his disgust, the
Pakistani and American intelligence officials overseeing the operation
swelled its ranks with youthful cannon fodder. What they wound up doing was
emptying the refugee camps, McWilliams told me. It was a last-ditch effort
to throw these sixteen-year-old boys into the fight in order to keep this
thing going. It did not work. Thousands died.

Anxious as they might have been to obscure the true nature of their
relationship with unappealing Afghans like Hekmatyar, U.S. officials were
even more careful when it came to the Arab fundamentalists who flocked to
the war in Afghanistan and later embarked on global jihad as Al Qaeda. No
one could deny that they had been there, but their possible connection to
the CIA became an increasingly delicate subject as Al Qaeda made its
presence felt in the 1990s. The official line  that the United States had
kept its distance from the Arab mujahedeen  was best expressed by Robert
Gates, who became director of the CIA in 1991. When the agency first learned
of the jihadi recruits pouring into Afghanistan from across the Arab world,
he later wrote, We examined ways to increase their participation, perhaps
in the form of some sort of international brigade, but nothing came of
it.

The reality was otherwise. The United States was intimately involved in the
enlistment of these volunteers  indeed, many of them were signed up through
a network of recruiting offices in this country. The guiding light in this
effort was a charismatic Palestinian cleric, Abdullah Azzam, who founded
Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), also known as the Afghan Services Bureau, in 1984,
to raise money and recruits for jihad. He was assisted by a wealthy young
Saudi, Osama bin Laden. The headquarters for the U.S. arm of the operation
was in Brooklyn, at the Al-Kifah Refugee Center on Atlantic Avenue, which
Azzam invariably visited when touring mosques and universities across the
country.

You have to put it in context, argued Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent and
counterterrorism expert who has done much to expose the CIAs post-9/11
torture program. Throughout most of the 1980s, the jihad in Afghanistan was
something supported by this country. The recruitment among Muslims here in
America was in the open. Azzam officially visited the United States, and he
went from mosque to mosque  they recruited many people to fight in
Afghanistan under that banner.

<http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/00037__KhalilAshawi-Harpers-1
601-630-1.png> Description: The view through the scope of a weapon that
belongs to a member of Ahrar al-Sham, Idlib, Syria, March 2015 © Khalil
Ashawi/Reuters

The view through the scope of a weapon that belongs to a member of Ahrar
al-Sham, Idlib, Syria, March 2015 © Khalil Ashawi/Reuters

American involvement with Azzams organization went well beyond
laissez-faire indulgence. We encouraged the recruitment of not only Saudis
but Palestinians and Lebanese and a great variety of combatants, who would
basically go to Afghanistan to perform jihad, McWilliams insisted. This
was part of the CIA plan. This was part of the game.

The Saudis, of course, had been an integral part of the anti-Soviet campaign
from the beginning. According to one former CIA official closely involved in
the Afghanistan operation, Saudi Arabia supplied 40 percent of the budget
for the rebels. The official said that William Casey, who ran the CIA under
Ronald Reagan, would fly to Riyadh every year for what he called his
annual hajj to ask for the money. Eventually, after a lot of talk, the
king would say okay, but then we would have to sit and listen politely to
all their incredibly stupid ideas about how to fight the war.

Despite such comments, it would seem that the U.S. and Saudi strategies did
not differ all that much, especially when it came to routing money to the
most extreme fundamentalist factions. Fighting the Soviets was only part of
the ultimate goal. The Egyptian preacher Abu Hamza, now serving a life
sentence on terrorism charges, visited Saudi Arabia in 1986, and later
recalled the constant public injunctions to join the jihad: You have to go,
you have to join, leave your schools, leave your family. The whole
Afghanistan enterprise, he explained, was meant to actually divert people
from the problems in their own country. It was like a pressure-cooker
vent. If you keep [the cooker] all sealed up, it will blow up in your face,
so you have to design a vent, and this Afghan jihad was the vent.

Soufan agreed with this analysis. I think its not fair to only blame the
CIA, he told me. Egypt was happy to get rid of a lot of these guys and
have them go to Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia was very happy to do that, too.
As he pointed out, Islamic fundamentalists were already striking these
regimes at home: in November 1979, for example, Wahhabi extremists had
stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The subsequent siege left hundreds dead.

Within a few short years, however, the sponsoring governments began to
recognize a flaw in the scheme: the vent was two-way. I heard this point
most vividly expressed in 1994, at a dinner party on a yacht cruising down
the Nile. The wealthy host had deemed it safer to be waterborne owing to a
vigorous terror campaign by Egyptian jihadists. At the party, this defensive
tactic elicited a vehement comment from Osama El-Baz, a senior security
adviser to Hosni Mubarak. Its all the fault of those stupid bastards at
the CIA, he said, as the lights of Cairo drifted by. They trained these
people, kept them in being after the Russians left, and now we get this.

According to El-Baz, MAK had been maintained after the Afghan conflict for
future deployment against Iran. Its funding, he insisted, came from the
Saudis and the CIA. A portion of that money had been parked at the Al-Kifah
office in Brooklyn, under the supervision of one of Azzams acolytes  until
the custodian was himself murdered, possibly by adherents of a rival jihadi.
(Soufan confirmed the murder story, stating that the sum in question was
about $100,000.)*

* Azzam was assassinated in 1989 in Peshawar, 

Pakistan, by a sophisticated car bomb. Though there was a wide range of 

credible suspects, his widow was convinced that the CIA had commissioned

the killing.

A year before my conversation with El-Baz, in fact, the United States had
already been confronted with the two-way vent. In 1993, a bomb in the
basement of one of the World Trade Center towers killed six people. (The
bombers had hoped to bring down both structures and kill many thousands.) A
leading member of the plot was Mahmud Abouhalima, an Afghanistan veteran who
had worked for years at the recruiting center in Brooklyn. Another of
Azzams disciples, however, proved to be a much bigger problem: Osama bin
Laden, who now commanded the loyalty of the Arab mujahedeen recruited by his
mentor.

In 1996, the CIA set up a special unit to track down bin Laden, led by the
counterterrorism expert Michael Scheuer. Now settled in Afghanistan, the Al
Qaeda chief had at least theoretically fallen out with the Saudi regime that
once supported him and other anti-Soviet jihadis. Nevertheless, bin Laden
seemed to have maintained links with his homeland  and some in the CIA were
sensitive to that fact. When I interviewed Scheuer in 2014 for my book Kill
Chain, he told me that one of his first requests to the Saudis was for
routine information about his quarry: birth certificate, financial records,
and so forth. There was no response. Repeated requests produced nothing.
Ultimately, a message arrived from the CIA station chief in Riyadh, John
Brennan, who ordered the requests to stop  they were upsetting the
Saudis.

Five years later, Al Qaeda, employing a largely Saudi suicide squad,
destroyed the World Trade Center. In a sane world, this disaster might have
permanently ended Washingtons long-standing taste for mixing Islam with
politics. But old habits die hard.

In the spring and summer of last year, a coalition of Syrian rebel groups
calling itself Jaish al-Fatah  the Army of Conquest  swept through the
northwestern province of Idlib, posing a serious threat to the Assad regime.
Leading the charge was Al Qaedas Syrian branch, known locally as Jabhat
al-Nusra (the Nusra Front). The other major component of the coalition was
Ahrar al-Sham, a group that had formed early in the anti-Assad uprising and
looked for inspiration to none other than Abdullah Azzam. Following the
victory, Nusra massacred twenty members of the Druze faith, considered
heretical by fundamentalists, and forced the remaining Druze to convert to
Sunni Islam. (The Christian population of the area had wisely fled.) Ahrar
al-Sham meanwhile posted videos of the public floggings it administered to
those caught skipping Friday prayers.

This potent alliance of jihadi militias had been formed under the auspices
of the rebellions major backers: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar. But it
also enjoyed the endorsement of two other major players. At the beginning of
the year, Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had ordered his followers to
cooperate with other groups. In March, according to several sources, a
U.S.-Turkish-Saudi coordination room in southern Turkey had also ordered
the rebel groups it was supplying to cooperate with Jaish al-Fatah. The
groups, in other words, would be embedded within the Al Qaeda coalition.

A few months before the Idlib offensive, a member of one CIA-backed group
had explained the true nature of its relationship to the Al Qaeda franchise.
Nusra, he told the New York Times, allowed militias vetted by the United
States to appear independent, so that they would continue to receive
American supplies. When I asked a former White House official involved in
Syria policy if this was not a de facto alliance, he put it this way: I
would not say that Al Qaeda is our ally, but a turnover of weapons is
probably unavoidable. Im fatalistic about that. Its going to happen.

Earlier in the Syrian war, U.S. officials had at least maintained the
pretense that weapons were being funneled only to so-called moderate
opposition groups. But in 2014, in a speech at Harvard, Vice President Joe
Biden confirmed that we were arming extremists once again, although he was
careful to pin the blame on Americas allies in the region, whom he
denounced as our largest problem in Syria. In response to a students
question, he volunteered that our allies

were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy
Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of
dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight
against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra
and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts
of the world.

Bidens explanation was entirely reminiscent of official excuses for the
arming of fundamentalists in Afghanistan during the 1980s, which maintained
that the Pakistanis had total control of the distribution of U.S.-supplied
weapons and that the CIA was incapable of intervening when most of those
weapons ended up with the likes of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Asked why the United
States of America was supposedly powerless to stop nations like Qatar,
population 2.19 million, from pouring arms into the arsenals of Nusra and
similar groups, a former adviser to one of the Gulf States replied softly:
They didnt want to.

The Syrian war, which has to date killed upwards of 200,000 people, grew out
of peaceful protests in March 2011, a time when similar movements were
sweeping other Arab countries. For the Obama Administration, the tumultuous
upsurge was welcome. It appeared to represent the final defeat of Al Qaeda
and radical jihadism, a view duly reflected in a New York Times headline
from that February: as regimes fall in arab world, al qaeda sees history fly
by. The president viewed the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 as his
crowning victory. Peter Bergen, CNNs terrorism pundit, concurred,
certifying the Arab Spring and the death of bin Laden as the final
bookends of the global war on terror.

Al Qaeda, on the other hand, had a different interpretation of the Arab
Spring, hailing it as entirely positive for the jihadist cause. Far from
obsessing about his own safety, as Obama had suggested, Zawahiri was brimful
of optimism. The tyrants supported by the United States, he crowed from
his unknown headquarters, were seeing their thrones crumble at the same time
as their master was being defeated. The Islamic project, declared Hamid
bin Abdullah al-Ali, a Kuwait-based Al Qaeda fund-raiser, would be the
greatest beneficiary from the environment of freedom.

While the revolutions were ongoing, the Obama Administration settled on
moderate Islam as the most suitable political option for the emerging Arab
democracies  and concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood fitted the bill.
This venerable Islamist organization had originally been fostered by the
British as a means of countering leftist and nationalist movements in the
empire. As British power waned, others, including the CIA and the Saudis,
were happy to sponsor the group for the same purpose, unmindful of its
long-term agenda. (The Saudis, however, always took care to prevent it from
operating within their kingdom.)

The Brotherhood was in fact the ideological ancestor of the most violent
Islamist movements of the modern era. Sayyid Qutb, the organizations moving
spirit until he was hanged in Egypt in 1966, served as an inspiration to the
young Zawahiri as he embarked on his career in terrorism. Extremists have
followed Qutbs lead in calling for a resurrected caliphate across the
Muslim world, along with a return to the premodern customs prescribed by the
Prophet.

None of which stopped the Obama Administration from viewing the Brotherhood
as a relatively benign purveyor of moderate Islam, not so different from the
type on display in Turkey, where the Brotherhood-linked AKP party had
presided over what seemed to be a flourishing democracy and a buoyant
economy, even if the countrys secular tradition was being rolled back. As
Mubaraks autocracy crumbled in Egypt, American officials actively promoted
the local Brotherhood; the U.S. ambassador, Anne Patterson, reportedly held
regular meetings with the groups leadership. The administration was
motivated to show that the U.S. would deal with Islamists, the former White
House official told me, even though the downside of the Brotherhood was
pretty well understood.

At the same time that it was being cautiously courted by the United States,
the Brotherhood enjoyed a firm bond with the stupendously rich ruling clique
in Qatar. The tiny country was ever eager to assert its independence in a
neighborhood dominated by Saudi Arabia and Iran. While hosting the American
military at the vast Al Udeid Air Base outside Doha, the Qataris put
decisive financial weight behind what they viewed as the coming force in
Arab politics. They were certain, the former White House official told me,
that the future really lay in the hands of the Islamists, and saw
themselves on the right side of history.

The Syrian opposition seemed like an ideal candidate for such assistance,
especially since Assad had been in the U.S. crosshairs for some time. (The
countrys first and only democratically elected government was overthrown by
a CIA-instigated coup in 1949 at the behest of American oil interests irked
at Syrias request for better terms on a pipeline deal.) In December 2006,
William Roebuck, the political counselor at the American Embassy in
Damascus, sent a classified cable to Washington, later released by
WikiLeaks, proposing actions, statements, and signals that could help
destabilize Assads regime. Among other recommended initiatives was a
campaign, coordinated with the Egyptian and Saudi governments, to pump up
existing alarm among Syrian Sunnis about Iranian influence in the country.

Roebuck could count on a receptive audience. A month earlier, Condoleezza
Rice, the secretary of state, testified on Capitol Hill that there was a
new strategic alignment in the Middle East, separating extremists (Iran
and Syria) and reformers (Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states).
Undergirding these diplomatic euphemisms was something more fundamental.
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who returned to Riyadh in 2005 after many years as
Saudi ambassador in Washington, had put it bluntly in an earlier
conversation with Richard Dearlove, the longtime head of Britains MI6. The
time is not far off in the Middle East, Bandar said, when it will be
literally God help the Shia. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had
enough. The implications were clear. Bandar was talking about destroying
the Shiite states of Iran and Iraq, as well as the Alawite (which is to say,
Shia-derived) leadership in Syria.

Yet the Saudi rulers were acutely aware of their exposure to reverse-vent
syndrome. Their corruption and other irreligious practices repelled the
jihadis, who had more than once declared their eagerness to clean house back
home. Such fears were obvious to Dearlove when he visited Riyadh with Tony
Blair soon after 9/11. As he later recalled, the head of Saudi intelligence
shouted at him that the recent attacks in Manhattan and Washington were a
mere pinprick compared with the havoc the extremists planned to unleash in
their own region: What these terrorists want is to destroy the House of
Saud and to remake the Middle East!

>From these statements, Dearlove discerned two powerful (and complementary)
impulses in the thinking of the Saudi leadership. First, there could be no
legitimate or admissible challenge to the Islamic purity of their Wahhabi
credentials as guardians of Islams holiest shrines. (Their record on
head-chopping and the oppression of women was, after all, second to none.)
In addition, they were deeply attracted toward any militancy which can
effectively challenge Shia-dom. Responding to both impulses, Saudi Arabia
would reopen the vent. This time, however, the jihad would no longer be
against godless Communists but against fellow Muslims, in Syria.

By the beginning of 2012, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and the United States
were all heavily involved in supporting the armed rebellion against Assad.
In theory, American support for the Free Syrian Army was limited to
nonlethal supplies from both the State Department and the CIA. Qatar,
which had successfully packed the opposition Syrian National Council with
members of the Muslim Brotherhood, operated under no such restrictions. A
stream of loaded Qatari transport planes took off from Al Udeid and headed
to Turkey, whence their lethal cargo was moved into Syria.

The Qataris were not at all discriminating in who they gave arms to, the
former White House official told me. They were just dumping stuff to lucky
recipients. Chief among the lucky ones were Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, both
of which had benefited from a rebranding strategy instituted by Osama bin
Laden. The year before he was killed, bin Laden had complained about the
damage that offshoots such as Al Qaeda in Iraq, with its taste for
beheadings and similar atrocities, had done to his organizations image. He
directed his media staff to prepare a new strategy that would avoid
everything that would have a negative impact on the perception of Al
Qaeda. Among the rebranding proposals discussed at his Abbottabad compound
was the simple expedient of changing the organizations name. This strategy
was gradually implemented for the groups newer offshoots, allowing Nusra
and Ahrar al-Sham to present themselves to the credulous as kinder, gentler
Islamists.

The rebranding program was paradoxically assisted by the rise of the Islamic
State, a group that had split off from the Al Qaeda organization partly in
disagreement over the image-softening exercise enjoined by Zawahiri.
Although the Islamic State attracted many defectors and gained territory at
the expense of its former Nusra partners, its assiduously cultivated
reputation for extreme cruelty made the other groups look humane by
comparison. (According to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow with the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies, many Nusra members suspect that the
Islamic State was created by the Americans to discredit jihad.)

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, driven principally by its virulent enmity toward
Iran, Assads main supporter, was eager to throw its weight behind the
anti-Assad crusade. By December 2012, the CIA was arranging for large
quantities of weapons, paid for by the Saudis, to move from Croatia to
Jordan to Syria.

The Saudis preferred to work through us, explained the former White House
official. They didnt have an autonomous capability to find weapons. We
were the intermediaries, with some control over the distribution. There was
an implicit illusion on the part of the U.S. that Saudi weapons were going
to groups with some potential for a pro-Western attitude. This was a
curious illusion to entertain, given Saudi Arabias grim culture of Wahhabi
austerity as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clintons flat declaration,
in a classified cable from 2009, that donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the
most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.

Some in intelligence circles suspect that such funding is ongoing. How much
Saudi and Qatari money  and Im not suggesting direct government funding,
but I am suggesting maybe a blind eye being turned  is being channeled
towards ISIS and reaching it? Dearlove asked in July 2014. For ISIS to be
able to surge into the Sunni areas of Iraq in the way that its done
recently has to be the consequence of substantial and sustained funding.
Such things simply do not happen spontaneously. Those on the receiving end
of Islamic State attacks tend to agree. Asked what could be done to help
Iraq following the groups lightning assaults in the summer of 2014, an
Iraqi diplomat replied: Bomb Saudi Arabia.

However the money was flowing, the Saudis certainly ended up crafting their
own Islamist coalition. The Saudis never armed al-Nusra, recalled the Gulf
State adviser. They made the calculation that theres going to be an
appetite for Islamist-leaning militias. So they formed a rival umbrella army
called Jaish al-Islam. That was the Saudi alternative  still Islamist, but
not Muslim Brotherhood.

Given that Jaish al-Islam ultimately answered to Prince Bandar, who became
the head of Saudi intelligence in 2012, there did not appear to be a lot of
room for Western values in the groups agenda. Its leader, Zahran Alloush,
was the son of a Syrian religious scholar. He talked dutifully about the
merits of tolerance to Western reporters, but would revert to such
politically incorrect themes as the mass expulsion of Alawites from Damascus
when addressing his fellow jihadis. At the same time, Saudi youths have
poured into Syria, ready to fight for any extremist group that would have
them, even when those groups started fighting among themselves. Noting the
huge numbers of young Saudis on the battle lines in Syria, a Saudi talk-show
host lamented that our children are fighting on both sides  meaning Nusra
and the Islamic State. The Saudis, he exclaimed, are killing one
another!

The determination of Turkey (a NATO ally) and Qatar (the host of the biggest
American base in the Middle East) to support extreme jihadi groups became
starkly evident in late 2013. On December 6, armed fighters from Ahrar
al-Sham and other militias raided warehouses at Bab al-Hawa, on the Turkish
border, and seized supplies belonging to the Free Syrian Army. As it
happened, a meeting of an international coordination group on Syria, the
so-called London Eleven, was scheduled for the following week. Delegates
from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East were bent on issuing a
stern condemnation of the offending jihadi group.

The Turks and Qataris, however, adamantly refused to sign on. As one of the
participants told me later, All the countries in the room [understood] that
Turkeys opposition to listing Ahrar al-Sham was because they were providing
support to them. The Qatari representative insisted that it was
counterproductive to condemn such groups as terrorist. If the other
countries did so, he made clear, Qatar would stop cooperating on Syria.
Basically, they were saying that if you name terrorists, were going to
pick up our ball and go home, the source told me. The U.S. delegate said
that the Islamic Front, an umbrella organization, would be welcome at the
negotiating table  but Ahrar al-Sham, which happened to be its leading
member, would not. The diplomats mulled over their communiqué, traded
concessions, adjusted language. The final version contained no condemnation,
or even mention, of Ahrar al-Sham.

Two years later, Washingtons capacity for denial in the face of
inconvenient facts remains undiminished. Addressing the dominance of
extremists in the Syrian opposition, Leon Panetta, a former CIA director,
has blamed our earlier failure to arm those elusive moderates. The
catastrophic consequences of this very approach in Libya are seldom
mentioned. If we had intervened more swiftly in Syria, Gartenstein-Ross
says, the best-case scenario probably would have been another Libya.
Meaning that we would still be dealing with a collapsed state and spillover
into other Middle Eastern states and Europe.

Even as we have continued our desultory bombing campaign against the Islamic
State, Ahrar al-Sham and Nusra are creeping closer and closer to
international respectability. A month after the London Eleven meeting, a
group of scholars from the Brookings Institution published an op-ed making
the case for Ahrar al-Sham: Designating [the] group as a terrorist
organization might backfire by pushing it completely into Al Qaedas camp.
(The think tanks recent receipt of a multiyear, $15 million grant from
Qatar was doubtless coincidental.)

Over the past year, other distinguished figures have voiced support for a
closer relationship with Al Qaedas rebranded extensions. David Petraeus,
another former head of the CIA, has argued for arming at least the more
moderate parts of Nusra. Robert Ford, a former ambassador to Syria and a
vociferous supporter of the rebel cause, called on America to open channels
for dialogue with Ahrar al-Sham, even if its members had on occasion
slaughtered some Alawites and desecrated Christian sites. Even Foreign
Affairs, an Establishment sounding board, has echoed these notions,
suggesting that it was time for the United States to rethink its policy
toward al-Qaeda, particularly its targeting of Zawahiri.

Lets be fair to the CIA, said Benazir Bhutto, the once and future prime
minister of Pakistan, back in 1993, when the consequences of fostering jihad
were already becoming painfully clear to its sponsors. They never knew that
these people that they were training to fight Soviets in Afghanistan were
one day going to bite the hand that fed them.

Things are clearer on the ground. Not long ago, far away from the think
tanks and briefing rooms where policies are formulated and spun, a small boy
in the heart of Nusra territory was telling a filmmaker for Vice News about
Osama bin Laden. He terrified and fought the Americans, he said
reverently. Beside him, his brother, an even smaller child, described his
future: To become a suicide fighter for the sake of God. A busload of
older boys was asked which group they belonged to. Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda,
they responded cheerfully.

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