NYT Reporter David Rhodes on his time in captivity

The following is a link to the series of articles by David Rhodes, the NYT reporter who was kidnapped by the Haqqani network in Afghanistan last year:

http://projects.nytimes.com/held-by-the-taliban/?hp#part-1

This is a good series of articles providing an inside look at human nature and extremism, as well as the links between al Qaeda, the Taliban, and elements of the Pakistani ISI and military establishment.

Bill Roggio picks up the theme here: http://www.longwarjournal.org/threat-matrix/archives/2009/10/david_rohde_taliban_no_longer.php

Gitmo detainee Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed

In a story for the New York Times on October 3, 2009, Times reporter Scott Shane discusses the case of Gitmo detainee Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed to illustrate some of the difficulties of closing down the detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay. According to Mr. Shane:

It was seven years ago that Mr. Ahmed, then 18, was swept up by Pakistani security forces in a raid on a Faisalabad guesthouse and taken to the prison. It was five months ago that a federal judge, after reviewing all the government’s classified evidence, ruled that his incarceration had never been justified and ordered the government to get to work “forthwith” on his release.[1]

But Ahmed remained in detention, according to Mr. Shane, because of concerns that he may have been “radicalized” during his time in Guantanamo, making him susceptible to jihadist influence in his native Yemen. The U.S. attempted to enroll him in the rehabilitation program run by the Saudi government, but Ahmed refused to go and the Saudis would not accept a reluctant enrollee. Nevertheless, the U.S. recently released him in Sana, Yemen. After debriefing by the Yemeni government, Ahmed is expected to return to his family and, according to Mr. Shane, “decide whether to look for work or try to resume his education.”[2]

By Mr. Shane’s account, Ahmed was detained on the basis of evidence now discredited by a federal judge’s ruling, and concerns about any threat he poses are based primarily, if not exclusively, on the assessment that Gitmo may have radicalized him. Mr. Shane quotes Ahmed’s brother:

“Seven years are gone from his life and can never be gotten back,” said the brother, Wagdi Ahmed, a surgeon’s assistant in the port city of Aden, speaking through a translator. “The feeling of the family is his detention at Guantánamo was not rightful. But nonetheless, we just say, praise God.”[3]

Indeed, Mr. Shane subsequently writes that the “public file on Mr. Ahmed suggests a highly ambiguous case that typifies many at Guantanamo.”[4] According to Mr. Shane, Ahmed “told a review board that he had traveled to Pakistan to study ‘religion and science’ – but he said one reason he wanted to attend an Islamic university was that religious schools accepted students with lower grade point averages.”[5]

According to Mr. Shane, the “guesthouse where he was captured was used by both students and terrorist operatives,” and that “[f]our fellow prisoners later reported having seen him fighting or undergoing training in Afghanistan, but Judge Kessler [who ordered his release] found their accounts unpersuasive, flawed by inconsistencies, contradictions and mental illness.”[6]

Mr. Shane notes that Judge Kessler “rejected the government’s so-called mosaic theory, which asserted that the pattern of indications of terrorist ties added up to a strong case.”[7] The judge wrote that the mosaic theory collapses if “the individual pieces of a mosaic are inherently flawed.”[8] Mr. Shane quotes Ahmed’s lawyer as saying “his client never supported terrorism and was known as ‘the sweet kid’ to other prisoners.”[9] Finally, Mr. Shane observes that instability in Yemen, coupled with Al Qaeda’s infiltration in the country, does not improve the prospects for easy integration of released detainees into Yemeni society after years in detention at Gitmo.

Unfortunately, Mr. Shane cites selectively, and rather myopically, from the “public file” on the New York Times’ own website. It is true Ahmed “told a review board that he had traveled to Pakistan to study ‘religion and science’,” and the public file reveals that his travels to Pakistan took place in October 2001.[10] But this was a very interesting time to travel to Pakistan, and the Faisalabad guesthouse at which he was captured was a very interesting place to study.

Ahmed was captured in the March 2002 raid on the Issa guesthouse in Faisalabad that yielded top Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, whose role in the terrorist network has been described by Thomas Joscelyn here and here. According to Mr. Joscelyn, the guesthouse that was “used by both students and terrorist operatives” was run by Lashkar-e-Taiba – the group that allegedly had a central role in the planning of the Mumbai attacks last year – and certainly did not bear the markings of your typical school:

During the early hours of March 28, 2002, elite teams from the Pakistani and American counterterrorism forces stormed more than a dozen locations throughout Pakistan. Their target was one of the most wanted men on the planet--the al Qaeda commander Abu Zubaydah. For weeks, America's intelligence agencies had been compiling and analyzing intercepts hoping to pinpoint Zubaydah's location. The spooks were not exactly sure where he was, but they had narrowed the possibilities to nine spots in Faisalabad and a handful of other sites around Pakistan. Before dawn, the joint Pakistani-American task forces raided them all.

One of the targets in Faisalabad was a safe house run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, an al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organization based in Pakistan. As reported by Ronald Kessler in his book The Terrorist Watch (2007), the place was more of a small fortress than a residence. The perimeter fence was electrified. The door was reinforced with steel. Surveillance suggested all was quiet, but the first attempt to break through the compound's defenses failed and awoke the residents. Chaos ensued. After finally breaking through the door, the agents found themselves face-to-face with junior-level terrorists wielding knives and whatever other weapons they could improvise. One even tried to strangle a Pakistani officer with piano wire. A few scampered to the roof, but there was no escape. All of the terrorists living in the house were quickly killed or captured, among them Abu Zubaydah.

The raid also yielded Ghassan Abdullah al Sharbi, Sufyian Barhoumi, and Jarban Said Bin al Qahtani.[11] This information alone reveals that Ahmed was, at the very least, exposed to some of the most hardened jihadists in the terrorist network of the pre-9-11 world and the immediate aftermath. As noted by Gordon Cucullu in his book Inside Gitmo, as well as Thomas Joscelyn here, Ghassan al Sharbi studied electrical engineering at Emory Riddle University in Prescott, Arizona, and became friends with Hani Hanjour, the 9-11 hijacker who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.[12]

Cucullu notes that al Sharbi subsequently teamed up with Sufyian Barhoumi “to establish a new, independent section of [al Qaeda’s] military committee” that would focus on the development of IED [improvised explosives devices] capability.[13] Barhoumi, according to Cuccullu, had become “exceptionally proficient at constructing and dismantling explosive devices” and in 1998 “allegedly attended an electronics and explosives course at al Qaeda’s Khalden Camp, a facility that specialized in advanced demolitions study.”[14] The new military committee was formed at the request of Muhammed Atef, the head of al Qaeda’s military committee who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in November 2001.
According to Cucullu, “[Atef] reportedly tasked the emir of the al Farouk camp, Abu Muhammad, with identifying two ‘brothers’ to receive special electronics-based explosive training in Pakistan at the Faisalabad facility.”[15] These two “brothers” were al Sharbi and Barhoumi. After 9-11, with the U.S. and the international community hot on their trails, the al Qaeda leadership tasked Zubaydah with completing the formation of the IED unit. According to Cucullu:

By December 2001, in reaction to the intensity of the conflict growing daily in Afghanistan, Abu Zubaydah, a high-level al Qaeda recruiter and operational planner, was reportedly pressured to expedite formation of the special bomb unit. Authorities believe he made certain that the designated fighters – Sharbi, Qahtani, and Binyam Muhammad – were moved from Bimel, Afghanistan, down to Faisalabad, Pakistan, a location the leadership considered safer. Apparently Sufyian Barhoumi was already there.

By March 2002, it is believed, all players had closed into the safe house in Faisalabad. Barhoumi, being the most experienced and most proficient, was going to train Sharbi, Qahtani, and Binyam Muhammad in “building small, hand-held remote-detonation devices for explosives that would later be used in Afghanistan against United States forces.” Barhoumi was given approximately $1,000 to purchase necessary components to conduct the training…

March 2002, it is thought, was a frantic time for the group. Abu Zubaydah urged them to construct as many remote-controlled explosive devices as possible. At the end of the month they were to take the products they had built back to Afghanistan for use against the Americans. Once back in the fight they would use their newly acquired skills to train other al Qaeda fighters.[16]

But on March 28, 2002, according to Cucullu, “in what could only have been a day or two before the group took off to return to Afghanistan and the fighting there, Pakistani forces busted into the safe house in Faisalabad and made a stunning high-value catch: Abu Zubaydah, Barhoumi, Sharbi, Qahtani, and several others were captured with all of their bombs and equipment.”[17]

Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed was among those captured in the raid. According to the public file, the government has since learned other incriminating details about Ahmed’s alleged involvement in the terrorist network. According to the files, a “known jihadist who received combat training in Afghanistan identified [Ahmed] as part of his group fleeing Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul in December 2001.”[18] Along the way, this group “stayed for approximately two days at a madrassa run by the Jamiat Ulema-E-Islami (JUI).” The madrassa was located in Barmal, Afghanistan and “was used by many different groups of foreigners on their way to Pakistan.”[19] According to the government files:

The Jamiat Ulema E Islami, or “Assembly of the Scholars of Islam,” is a radical Pakistani Islamist political party best known for its anti-U.S. threats, vocal support of Usama Bin Ladin, and sponsorship of some 3,000 religious schools (madrassahs). Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the cell leader of the 26 February 1993 New York World Trade Center bombing, is associated with the Jamiat Ulema-E-Islami (JUI).[20]

As stated above, Mr. Shane notes that “[f]our fellow prisoners later reported having seen [Ahmed] fighting or undergoing training in Afghanistan, but Judge Kessler [who ordered his release] found their accounts unpersuasive, flawed by inconsistencies, contradictions and mental illness.”[21] But is Ahmed simply guilty by association?

Possibly, but the government has also learned that Ahmed’s “alias was on a list of captured mujahidin found on a hard drive associated with Khalid Shayk Muhammad, acquired in March 2003.”[22] As noted by Thomas Joscelyn in his recent article on former Gitmo detainee Fahd Saleh Suleiman al Jutayli, who was recently “killed in a shootout between the Yemeni Army and Houthi rebels in northern Yemen,” the discovery of an Ahmed alias on the KSM-associated hard drive would suggest Ahmed’s compliance with al Qaeda’s standard operating procedure:

Al Qaeda typically takes new recruits’ passports and other identifying information and gives them a new jihadist identity. This marks a break with their pre-al Qaeda past and also makes it difficult for them to be identified should they be detained.

Because al Qaeda’s leaders take their recruits’ passports and other paperwork, the safety deposit boxes and safe houses where they are stored have become valuable intelligence collection points for authorities. In fact, al Qaeda’s substantial bureaucracy leaves an evidentiary trail that makes it possible for investigators to piece together at least some of the details of a Gitmo detainee’s past.

This was the case with Jutayli. US intelligence authorities found Jutayli’s name “on a computer used by suspected al Qaeda members,” which listed “associates incarcerated in Pakistan.” Another list including Jutayli’s name was “recovered from safehouse raids associated with suspected al Qaeda [members] in Karachi, Pakistan.”

And perhaps most importantly, Jutayli’s name “was found on a hard drive associated with a senior al Qaeda operative seized during raids on 1 March 2003 in Pakistan.” Although the government’s documents do not explicitly say so, this “senior al Qaeda operative” may very well be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was captured on that same day in Rawalpindi.

As noted above, Ahmed’s “alias was on a list of captured mujahidin found on a hard drive associated with Khalid Shayk Muhammad, acquired in March 2003.”[23] Was Ahmed’s name on the same KSM-associated database of captured mujahideen as Jutayli, another former detainee who has since been killed in a shootout between the Yemeni army and Shi’ite Houthi rebels in northern Yemen? It is a question worth considering now that Ahmed has been released to the Yemeni government.


[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/world/middleeast/04gitmo.html?hp
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/world/middleeast/04gitmo.html?hp
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/world/middleeast/04gitmo.html?hp
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/world/middleeast/04gitmo.html?hp
[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/world/middleeast/04gitmo.html?hp
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/world/middleeast/04gitmo.html?hp
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/world/middleeast/04gitmo.html?hp
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/world/middleeast/04gitmo.html?hp
[9] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/world/middleeast/04gitmo.html?hp
[10] CSRT (000556)
[11] Gordon Cucullu, Inside Gitmo, HarperCollins, 2009, pp. 84-86.
[12] Gordon Cucullu, Inside Gitmo, HarperCollins, 2009, pp. 84-86.
[13] Gordon Cucullu, Inside Gitmo, HarperCollins, 2009, pp. 84-86.
[14] Gordon Cucullu, Inside Gitmo, HarperCollins, 2009, pp. 84-86.
[15] Gordon Cucullu, Inside Gitmo, HarperCollins, 2009, pp. 84-86.
[16] Gordon Cucullu, Inside Gitmo, HarperCollins, 2009, pp. 84-86.
[17] Gordon Cucullu, Inside Gitmo, HarperCollins, 2009, pp. 84-86.
[18] ARB 1 (602), ARB 2 (749), ARB 3 (434)
[19] ARB 1 (603), ARB 2 (749), ARB 3 (434)
[20] ARB 1 (603), ARB 2 (749), ARB 3 (434)
[21] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/world/middleeast/04gitmo.html?hp
[22] ARB 1 (603), ARB 2 (749), ARB 3 (434)
[23] ARB 1 (603), ARB 2 (749), ARB 3 (434)

Obama on Afghanistan

According to this article in today's NYT, President Obama reassured lawmakers yesterday that "he would not substantially reduce American forces in Afghanistan or shift the mission to just hunting terrorists there, but he indicated that he remained undecided about the major troop buildup proposed by his commanding general."

This is reassuring in light of my post yesterday about the Biden approach that would focus on hunting down Al Qaeda leaders with drones and Special Forces. This, of course, is certainly a good idea, except for any signal it might send about an eventual drawdown or withdrawal of US forces. By no means am I in a position to provide counsel on the appropriate level of troops, but I was moved to point out that signalling a drawdown or withdrawal generates an incentive for Pakistan to prop up the Taliban. However, the NYT article makes clear that Biden's approach "would increase the use of such surgical strikes while leaving the overall size of the American force in Afghanistan roughly at the 68,000 troops currently authorized."

Pakistan-Taliban alliance

A story on the Threat Matrix Blog at the Long War Journal makes one wonder whether outspoken resistance to a troop buildup in Afghanistan is ill-advised. Bill Roggio cites to a story by Farhat Taj indicating that “Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence agency and the Army are backing the Taliban against the Salarzai tribe in the Bajaur tribal agency.” Further along in the article, Roggio writes:

Couple this report with yesterday's report that more jihadi terror camps focusing on the fight against India have opened, and it is clear that Pakistan's military and intelligence services remain compromised and that they have refused to abandon the notion of keeping the Taliban and other terror groups in reserve against India as well as a hedge against a US withdrawal from Afghanistan. And not only that, elements in Pakistan's military and the ISI are also actively aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan: “Who will fight the NATO forces from across the Afghan border if you eliminate the Taliban?” the colonel and the political agent in Bajaur asked.

Given Pakistani concerns about a drawdown or withdrawal of US forces, one might ask whether the skepticism expressed by notables such as Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Carl Levin signals, even if unintentionally, the beginnings of a retreat from commitment to Afghanistan, and thus not only emboldens jihadists, but also plays into the expectations of elements in the Pakistani military and ISI who continue covert support for the Taliban as a hedge in Afghanistan should the US eventually draw down forces or leave outright.

The skepticism of Biden and others is apparently based partly in a belief that the real threat to the international community is from Al Qaeda and seems to assume that links between Al Qaeda and the Taliban are weak at best. This latter assumption is quite tenuous, but another matter altogether. The point is only to raise the question of whether public skepticism about the efficacy of a troop buildup in Afghanistan feeds the incentive for powerful elements in the Pakistani military and ISI to support rather than fight the Taliban. To finish the thought, here is an excerpt from a great post by Steve Coll at Think Tank about the competing factors at work:

The Pakistan military’s tolerance of the Taliban and similar groups is rooted in a belief that Pakistan requires unconventional forces, in addition to a nuclear deterrent, to offset India’s conventional military and industrial might. This self-defeating logic of existential insecurity has informed Pakistan’s policies in Afghanistan because Pakistani generals have seen an Indian hand in Kabul since the days of the Soviet invasion. They interpret India’s goals in Afghanistan as a strategy of encirclement of Pakistan, punctuated by the tactic of promoting instability among Pakistan’s restive Pashtun, Baluch, and Sindhi populations.

Pakistan has countered this perceived Indian strategy by developing Islamist militias such as the predominantly Pashtun Taliban and the Punjab-based Lashkar-e-Taiba as proxies for Pakistan in regional conflicts and as a means to destabilize India. As for the U.S. role, Pakistani generals see it as inconstant and unreliable, based on the pattern of here-and-gone U.S. engagement in the past, and they also tend to believe that the U.S. is today lashing itself, deliberately or naïvely, to Indian strategy in the region.

What does this imply for U.S. policy in Afghanistan today?

If the United States signals to Pakistan’s military command that it intends to abandon efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, or that it has set a short clock running on the project of Afghan stability, or that it intends to undertake its regional policy primarily through a strategic partnership with India, then it will only reinforce the beliefs of those in the Pakistani security establishment who argue that nursing the Taliban is in the country’s national interests. This in turn will exacerbate instability in Pakistan itself.

At the same time, if the United States undertakes a heavily militarized, increasingly unilateral policy in Afghanistan, without also adopting an aggressive political, reconciliation and regional diplomatic strategy that more effectively incorporates Pakistan into efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, then it will also reinforce the beliefs of those in the Pakistani security establishment that they need the Taliban as a hedge against the U.S. and India.

Between withdrawal signals and blind militarization there is a more sustainable strategy, one that I hope the Obama Administration is the in the process of defining. It would make clear that the Taliban will never be permitted to take power in Kabul or major cities. It would seek and enforce stability in Afghan population centers but emphasize politics over combat, urban stability over rural patrolling, Afghan solutions over Western ones, and it would incorporate Pakistan more directly into creative and persistent diplomatic efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and the region.