An End to al-Qaeda: Destroying Bin Laden's Jihad and Restoring America's Honor - Hardcover

Nance, Malcolm

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312592493 ISBN 13: 9780312592493

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2010

Synopsis

Osama Bin Laden is unquestionably the leader of the world’s most deadly terrorist cult. He has perverted the teachings of Islam to create a fringe religious ideology, Bin Ladenism, where only al-Qaeda speaks for God.  In his cult, suicide bombing is the highest form of worship and the mass murder of Muslims proves one’s devotion. 

Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the United States was just a small part of Bin Laden’s long-term strategy to win a civil war for control of Islam.  By fighting his terrorists solely with bullets and bombs and ignoring his war on Islam, we have bolstered Bin Laden’s recruiting efforts abroad, undermined civil liberties and economic security at home and tarnished America’s reputation internationally.

Career intelligence officer Malcolm Nance proposes a quantum shift in how to eliminate al-Qaeda in less than twenty-four months, while recreating America’s reputation as a force for good around the world. His plan includes:

·         Exposing al-Qaeda’s mission to create a nuclear armed terror Emirate, incite a Muslim civil war and eventually seize of control of Islam.

·         Challenging and breaking the perceived spiritual link between the mainstream Islam and al-Qaeda’s cultist ideology.

·         Attacking al-Qaeda fighters through precision intelligence and special operations missions, thereby reducing the deaths of innocent civilians.

·         Reframing and restoring America’s shattered image in the developing world in order to support the global counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaign.

An End to al-Qaeda is both a revolutionary blueprint for destroying al-Qaeda and a fierce critique of America’s poorly executed war on Bin Laden’s terrorists.

About this title

About the Author

MALCOLM NANCE is a counterter­rorism intelligence consultant for the U.S. government’s special operations, homeland security, and intelligence agencies. He is a renowned expert of al-Qaeda strategy and tactic and a combat veteran with twenty-eight years’ operational experience in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. An author of several books on counter­terrorism and counterinsurgency and a blog­ger at smallwarsjournal.com, he is director of the International Anti-terrorism Center for Excellence.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1.
From Tragedy to Triumph
We ought not fight them at all, unless we determine to fight them forever.
—john adams1
A Stop for Coffee
all i wanted was a cup of hot coffee. A café latte was being brewed for me at the Cosi coffee shop at the corner of 3rd and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. A few blocks from the United States Capitol, I had arrived early to take my newest employee, Beverly, to the offices of the  House of Representative and Senate intelligence committees. It was a clear, warm morning and Beverly was excited to be working for a small anti- terrorism firm in its secretive offices in a Georgetown neighborhood. We had arrived early and had planned to discuss her duties as chief of staff for the small offi  ce with its ten employees and interns. The Special Readiness Services Interna­tional really had one mission and one contract: to analyze and educate the Special Operations Forces in the tactics, techniques, and procedures of the al- Qaeda or ga ni za tion.
It was 8:30 a.m. when the cashier handed me my change and two cups of coffee. The television on a wall near the counter was on CNN that morning. The café had added it for the congressional staffers to watch the votes in the House and the Senate on C-SPAN. Above the din I heard the quiet murmur­ing of the anchorman, but something was wrong with the words as they reached my ears: “. . . no one knows what kind of aircraft it was that hit the building . . .” These words  were all wrong for TV news. I looked to the right and saw the smoking tower of the World Trade Center complex. The air was clear in NYC—a bright sunny morning with fantastic visibility. How could a small airplane hit that building? Was it a sightseeing helicop ter or a light airplane? From the ground view it was hard to know how bad the fire atop the building was.
I said to Beverly, “You know a B-24 hit the Empire State Building in 1945?” We watched for a few minutes and listened to the news announcers specu­late on the crash. It seemed like a small disaster until I heard the words “the FAA is reporting an aircraft has been hijacked.” That piqued my attention. Just a few months earlier I was a subject matter expert on terrorist hijacking of aircraft. At my last military posting we ran hijacking and terrorism sur­vival courses and simulations as the shadowy terrorist group in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda. It was difficult to hijack an aircraft in the United States, I thought. A moment later I would be proven wrong.
The aircraft came in from the right of the screen and struck the building. That instant I could not speak. I knew who was flying this. My first conscious thought was, You did it . . . you said you would take it down and you’ve done it. I instinctively made one calculated gesture . . . I struck the “5” speed key on my cell phone and called navy Petty Offi  cer Brad Michaels, my former dep­uty at the SERE’s Advanced Terrorism, Abduction and Hostage Survival School in Coronado. Brad was in bed and, after having received excited calls about terrorist attacks from me over the years, he had learned to put the phone on answering machine. The year before it was the USS Cole attack at
3:00 a.m. He never forgave me for waking his wife and son. The answering machine came on as the fireball at the WTC tower billowed outward, rain­ing sparkles of flame, debris, and the remains of humanity. I let the machine beep and then screamed into the phone for him to get up. He snatched the phone up and asked what was wrong. . . . I could not tell him. I was stunned. All I could do was shout, “CNN! CNN! CNN!”
He held on and a second later shouted back into the phone, “What the hell is happening!”
I told him what I knew the instant the airplane appeared: “It’s al-Qaeda . . . it’s a restrike of the WTC!”
He hung up and went to his offi  ce at the North Island Naval Air Station, where we would call each other in coordination. One of the first things to know about a terrorist attack is that one needs a line of communications, a lifeline far from the incident to maintain perspective and collect intelligence.
Dozens of us stood transfixed at the café watching the macabre spectacle. Minutes later cell phones and beepers went off all around us. The Capitol staff s were simultaneously being recalled to the Hill by the sergeant of arms. The staff members quickly started flowing out of the shop and back up Pennsylvania to the congressional office buildings like great swarms of geese. I told Beverly we needed to move. “Where?” she said. I replied, “New York City, of course. This is the greatest act of terrorism in history and we are going to help.”
We drove rapidly down past the Washington Monument. Most of the world had not responded to the attack and tourists were still strolling on the beautiful morning. I put on National Public Radio. They  were reporting on the response to the attack in NYC and the reports of hijacked aircraft. I stopped at the intersection of Inde pen dence Avenue next to the Lincoln Me­morial. As I listened I saw a silver airplane coming from the west near the Sheraton at the Navy Annex. It was descending in a smooth glide path as it passed south of Arlington Cemetery. I casually told Beverly it looked like they were rerouting airplanes away from the Potomac and over northern Virginia. Then the aircraft descended in a smooth line down past the rim of the Pen­tagon and exploded. As it did, I thought of a navy expression I remembered from a battle I once experienced with an Iranian patrol boat: “Cruise Missile Inbound.” The aircraft was a human- guided weapon, and once the fl ames rolled over the top of the building it created a huge black cloud. Beverly saw it but did not recognize what had happened. “What’s that?” she asked calmly.
“We are under attack! A nationwide attack! That’s the Pentagon! It just got hit!”
I shot the car forward and spiraled onto Memorial Bridge; within sixty seconds we rolled to a stop in front of a police car a few hundred yards away from the furiously burning Pentagon crash site. I gave Beverly the keys and told her to go back to Georgetown and call me every thirty minutes. She drove off and I ran into the fray, checking victims as they emerged. I ended up following the orders of a feisty army combat nurse who had survived the attack and accidentally found herself thrust into command of the medical evacuation effort at the crash site. Until the northern Virginia fire depart­ments and disaster teams arrived and organized themselves, the few hundred civilians, servicemen and -women, and first responders in a lone ambulance were the rescue party at what we dubbed the Battle of the Pentagon. I spent hours in and out of the building, moving the provisional field hospital we set up and prepared for more victims. Once the fire had consumed the building to the point where a section collapsed, even they had diffi  culty entering. We then organized the stretcher teams to evacuate the numerous bodies we ex­pected to be found. I received calls from all around the world while working; my former SERE school commanding officer called and wanted a status report for the United States Commander of the Naval Fleet in San Diego, Beverly called to tell me that the WTC complex had collapsed, but I refused to be­lieve it, and Brad called to give me a count of the hijacked aircraft. We were missing one, but a few minutes later we would be informed it had crashed. All the while as I danced with chaos it was clear to me who had perpetrated this attacks. This airplane-turned-suicide-cruise-missile was specifi c revenge for the 1998 cruise missile attack on a terrorist camp in the Afghanistan Pakistan mountains, Zawar Kili—the famous al- Badr camp that had been built during the Afghanistan war against the Soviets for the Arab mujahi­deen. The group running the al- Badr terrorist center was called al-Qaeda and its leader was a radical Saudi Arabian dissident named Osama bin Laden.
Thus the begins the story of the vector of an ideological plague. This plague was violently injected into the bloodstream of America by nineteen men who hijacked four airliners and struck deep into the American psyche. Their mission had consumed the hearts of the men who did it and was calcu­lated to consume all of America and poison the well of the billion innocent Muslims. I ended that day of days feeling the burning pain in my heart. My family had spent nearly a century defending America, and the massive fail­ure made the pain insufferable. My nation had been attacked. Thousands of innocent civilians were dead. Hundreds of rescuers were engulfed in fl ame and steel. Now the reckoning must come. The men who had planned this mission had only one option left for them no matter how long it would take. This battle was a blood fi ght to the death. Bin Laden would die at our hands and quickly. Or so we all thought.
Al- Qaeda’s Ideology of Terror Unleashed
by 2002 aq’s operational terrorist forces in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia were executing a post-9/11 strategy to keep the pressure on the West and to incite a pan- Islamic jihad. A Mania of revenge and fear was permeating America and Europe, and AQ bet that it was as good a time as ever to keep feeding the beast that lashed out wildly at Muslims. Around the world the AQ and its ideological affiliates started to strike regularly in a series of suicide at­tacks at major cities and tourist destinations. First terrorists in Bali, Indonesia, struck Western tourists and left 202 dead; then the Madrid subway system was devastated, with 191 dead; then attacks in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Saudi 1Arabia, London, Russia, Mumbai, and Algeria left almost a thousand more littered in their wake. Numerous attempts at suicide bombings were foiled or unsuccessful, including the attempted bombing of an airliner when the AQ convert Richard Reid attempted to explode explosives in his shoe, attacks on churches in Strasbourg, France, and Paris and a foiled chemical attack in En­gland. OBL’s philosophy of training and inspiring smaller, unaffi  liated groups of “self-starting” jihadis was taking root in Europe.
Most surprisingly, in the midst of these pressure tactics the United States was slacking up in its pursuit of the AQ leadership and the Taliban. By August 2002 the Bush administration was preparing an invasion of Iraq, which at the close of 2003 was proving a disaster. While Iraq burned, other resources  were being expended in areas that seemed of little value other than to bring more AQ recruits out to fight America worldwide. In 2006 the United States engineered the invasion of Somalia with an Ethiopian Chris­tian army. Because a few members of the coalition government had ties to al-Qaeda, America unwisely and quickly toppled the Islamic Courts Union regime that had brought a measure of calm and stability to the country for the first time in thirteen years. This unleashed the Shabaab terror group. There was also much strong language about attacking the Shiite Muslim re­gime in Iran. The administration pressed Israel into a disastrous onslaught in Lebanon that killed over one hundred Israeli soldiers a thousand civilians and destroyed Lebanon’s fledgling economy. The loss gave the terrorists sponsoring Hezbollah increased prestige. All of these actions, supported or encouraged by President George W. Bush, created what OBL thought was an ideological backlash that could only support his goals.
Bin Laden was a happy man. He had reason to be. For more than eight years OBL and his Taliban allies were left virtually alone in their sanctu­ary. The American method of operations was becoming clear on the Afghan- Pakistani border. Where the Americans met Taliban combat forces in the field they pinned them down and then would pommel them with air strikes, but this method inflicted grievous casualties and alienated the very people needed to defeat the guerillas. The Americans  were also adopting the Israeli method of selective assassination of key leadership using Predator and Reaper drones and the occasional air strike inside the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. On occasion, the Pakistanis would swarm in with a new general in charge, get slaughtered, and cut deals in order to have a chance to lick their wounds.
Af ghan i stan suffered from a passionate neglect by the Bush administra­tion. Every effort was going into breaking the four winos of the Iraqi insur­gency. Afghanistan was left to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. These forces were relatively small and did not appear to operate well or share intelligence. They appeared to be marking time until America won in Iraq and then could turn its full attention on Afghanistan. This was strategic folly. It gave AQ over seven years to regroup and return to executing its stra­tegic vision to destabilize the near by enemies of Pakistan and the Middle Eastern nations while striking and punishing the distant enemies of Amer­ica, Europe, and their allies.
OBL has defied all odds. He has created a physical sanctuary in Pakistan that appears impregnable. More important, he has created a viral new ideol­ogy. Some call it al-Qaedaism; I call it bin Ladenism, which, like all good social diseases, spreads fastest by direct contact. The host itself is an invisi­ble carrier and loyal missionary. While the physical war goes on, the war for the hearts of millions of new recruits is being waged on the battlefield of the mind. It is here OBL has held the advantage, and it is here we need to take it away from him.
The safe haven given to al-Qaeda on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border was not what bin Laden expected, but after the rapid disintegration of the Taliban it was just what he needed. OBL had envisaged a rampantly angry American force descending by parachute as they had done in Qandahar early in October 2001. He had spent years preparing his fighting force in the “Is­lamic Emirate of Afghanistan” to fight the Americans in a ground war simi­lar to that of the Soviets. Bin Laden saw his men in Afghanistan standing up and fi ghting in the face of the Americans with his Afghan Taliban brothers. AQ had run Taliban training camps, developed terrorist and land warfare curricula, manned anti-aircraft guns, and supported hijackings of an Indian airliner as practice for their mission against America.
The Americans would come, OBL knew. His attack in NYC would ensure it. He did not calculate that he would be pushed into Pakistan so fast, but it did not matter so long as he had his base of support building in the Pakistan FATA. Since 1980 AQ had been cooperating, enriching, and sharing their ideals and ideology with the poor Pakistani tribesmen of the FATA. His men had blood ties, as their local wives  were from the provinces; they had wed sisters of foreign fighters to the tribesmen in exchange. It was a model in miniature of what AQ believed was a spiritually based Islamic community made up of muhajiroun, emigres, or those who believed that spiritual excel­lence required them to emigrate away from “unclean” lands and live in one where the laws and people of Islam are unspoiled. In this case that was Af­ghanistan, until the “Crusaders” came and displaced them into the FATA re­gion of Pakistan.
The most misunderstood portion of the war against AQ is: What does OBL fight for? The a...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0312592493
• ISBN 13: 9780312592493
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304