One item stood out for me in the coverage of last week’s killing
spree that left seven dead in France. That was how the late gunman,
Mohamed Merah of Toulouse, was alleged to have traveled to
Afghanistan in 2011.
The motive for the pilgrimage of Mr. Merah has been disputed,
but why else would a French citizen of Algerian descent and
jihadist ambitions visit the “Graveyard of Empires”? The
beaches?
From 1996 — when the Taliban rose to power — to 2001,
Afghanistan was the hub of terrorist training. At Camp bin Laden,
wannabe martyrs were instructed in terrorism techniques, after
which they received their marching orders. The U.S.-led invasion
was supposed to end all that. Training camps run by al Qaeda or
affiliated groups, however, have returned to Afghanistan.
Despite the presence of U.S. troops and drone attacks, training
camps remain commonplace in the Hindu Kush region that bestrides
Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. And it has been that way since
the U.S. shifted its concentration from Afghanistan to Iraq.
In 2007, while the world’s attention was focused on the
sectarian violence in Iraq, a U.S. intelligence report indicated
that al Qaeda had regrouped along the Afghan-Pakistan border and
was in a stronger position than it had been before the 9/11
attacks. At the same time, the London Telegraph was
reporting that “estimates for the total number of extremists who
have received weapons training and religious instruction at al
Qaeda camps, mostly in Afghanistan, ranged from 20,000 to
70,000.”
Now, we figured terrorist camps were going concerns in
Pakistan’s tribal areas (Russian
intelligence from 2010 put the number of camps there at 40),
especially given the Pakistan army’s lackluster attempts to crush
the jihadists. And this was recently confirmed by, among others,
Pakistani journalist Irfan Husain:
From there, it’s easy to travel to similar training camps in
Afghanistan — the border is porous. The training men receive in
Afghanistan is very similar.
But the persistence of terrorist-training camps in U.S.-occupied
Afghanistan raises important questions about the effectiveness of
America’s decade-long mission there. If a major US goal was to
eradicate the camps so that terrorists could never again use
Afghanistan as a base for future attacks, the U.S. seems to have
failed at that mission. And it seems unlikely that another decade
of occupation would produce better results.
AND HERE COMES THE IRONY. While NATO countries send troops to
Afghanistan to fight al Qaeda and the Taliban, these same countries
are exporting a significant number of jihadists — like the
Toulouse gunman — to the Afghan-Pakistan border for terrorist
training. “So many people arrive every month that there are
problems finding places for them to stay,” a suspected al Qaeda
member recently told German investigators.
Some European leaders would like to make it a crime to train in
terrorist camps, or simply to view jihadist websites. That would
certainly keep their intelligence services busy. It is estimated
that more than 400,000 journeys are made each year between Britain
and Pakistan. Some visit for religious education, but then get
sucked into jihadism. It is the same story in Germany. A year ago,
the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that “each
month, an average of five Islamists leave [Germany] for terrorist
training camps in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area.… Never
before have as many volunteers from Germany attended terrorist
training camps as in the last two years.… In the last decade, at
least 220 people from Germany have completed terrorist training,
with about half returning to Germany.”
Many of these training camp directors boast networks of
financial supporters back in the West. European Muslims, however,
make up just a small portion of trainees. Information from the
charge sheet
against David Coleman Headley, the U.S. jihadi indicted for
plotting attacks in Denmark, suggests that as recently as 2009,
north Waziristan was bustling with Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks,
Russians, Bosnians, and Arabs, all there to support the “holy
war.”
America and its allies had two goals going into Afghanistan.
Kill Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, and make sure that
country never again became a haven for terrorists. The U.S. has
accomplished the first goal. The second, sorry to say, was never
going to happen.
