Brian Glyn Williams - Counter Jihad: Americas Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria (Haney Foundation Series)

COUNTER JIHAD

Americas Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria

BRIAN GLYN WILLIAMS

A volume in the Haney Foundation Series,
established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney.

Copyright 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4867-8

For my parents, Gareth and Donna Williams,
who encouraged me to explore the world instead of being afraid of it

If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.

ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani

We kill them [ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq] whenever we find them.

Air Force Lt. General John W. Hesterman III

The average college student today was in grade school on 9/11, and few of them remember what it was like to watch the televised images of Americans plummeting to their deaths out of the burning World Trade Center on that crisp September morning back in 2001. When I ask my own students at my university about the wars that have provided a backdrop to their lives since they were children, many have only a vague understanding of them. Student responses to my inquiries about the reasons for the wars, such as America invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein was shipping nuclear weapons to the Afghan leader bin Laden or the United States invaded Iraq because the Iraqis attacked America first on 9/11, capture the shocking ignorance many from that generation have today about Americas wars that have dominated the news all their lives.

While most college students today have heard about the terrorist group ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), which has seized headlines around the globe since the summer of 2014, few know where this terrorist groupjihadi army came from or what the United States is doing to ostensibly degrade and destroy it. There is no sense of historical awareness or context to the bold beheadings of Americans by ISIS terrorists or to Americas new aerial war on this terrorist group in Syria and Iraq known as Operation Inherent Resolve. For all intents and purposes, ISIS, which is seen as a critical threat to America by 84 percent of Americans, seems to have just appeared out of the blue to conquer one-third of Syria and Iraq. The prequel to the sudden rise of ISIS (i.e., Americas land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) remains an unknown quantity for this generation, few of whom have ever heard of Tora Bora, Donald Rumsfeld, Abu Ghraib, Blackwater, Haditha, General David Petraeus, Fallujah, Mullah Omar, General Stanley McChrystal, or Abu Musab Zarqawi.

As for those older generations who lived through these extraordinary times that saw the United States deploy two and half million of its men and women across the globe to fight in the mountains of Afghanistan or deserts of Iraq, most of us have only a series of disconnected images of the events of that time. These images and memories are often based on fleeting twenty-second CNN or Fox newscasts or half-remembered newspaper articles that hardly jell together to provide an easily digested, macro overview. It is difficult to gain a birds-eye view of jumbled events that are still unfolding and not fully understood at the time.

But that is exactly what I have set out to do here. My aim is to shine a retrospective light on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria in order to historicize the disparate events once collectively known as the War on Terror. The objective is to weave all these disjointed stories together into one accessible narrative that tells us how we got to the point where ISIS conquered an area in the Middle East larger than Britain or Israel with eight million people living under its rule. It is only by re-creating this complex story that we can come to see how the United States got dragged back into a war in the sands of the Middle East with an unprecedentedly violent jihadi terrorist army and how it aims to prevent something similar from happening in Afghanistan by deploying thousands of residual troops.

This book is an effort to stand back from these seminal events that were followed by millions, but not fully understood at the time, and make them comprehensible with the aim of understanding why U.S. forces are today involved in wars in three Muslim countries. This book can be thought of as an after action report of the sort the military issues after engagements (only on a far grander scale), with the aim of explaining the past and uncertain future of our military engagements in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. On one level the aim of this book is to chronicle this constantly unfolding story that takes place on shifting sand and provide specific details or granularity, as the military calls it. On another level it is a broad, sweeping overview spanning events from the 1948 conquest of Palestine by Israeli troops to the beginning of the collapse of the ISIS state in 2016.

I should, however, state that this history of counterterrorism and warfare in distant lands and tragedy in the United States is not intended for experts alone. It is meant to be a guide for all those who want to learn from the mistakes and the successes of the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia and apply them to the present and future. It is a record of the extraordinary events of 200116 that affected the lives of millions in the United States, Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. It is a journey that those who have become disconnected from the wars should take so that they can pass on its lessons to future generations.

This is certainly a journey that those in both American political parties need to take before they politicize this issue and blame Barack Obama or George W. Bush for creating the preconditions for the rise of ISIS. It is only by taking this background journey that the observer of history can understand the political implications stemming from ISISs recent conquests of one-third of Iraq and Syria and the true nature of the resurgent Talibans threat to postOperation Enduring Freedom Afghanistan.

My own journey to understand Americas twenty-first-century wars began in 2003. In the summer of that year I flew to Kabul, Afghanistan, and traveled in a convoy over the mighty Hindu Kush Mountains to the deserts of the north to live with an Afghan warlord named General Abdul Rashid Dostum. Dostums horse-mounted Uzbek Mongol tribesmen had just helped the Americans defeat the Taliban in 2001, and I was eager to meet this larger-than-life field commander. My aim was to delve into the secrets of Afghanistan and find out how Dostum had helped U.S. Special Forces overthrow the Taliban regime in just two months, with less than a dozen U.S. lives lost.

General Dostum was heartened by my quest for knowledge but gave me a gentle warning before agreeing to our interview. As we sat on the porch of his compound with turban-wearing gunmen around us, he wagged a finger at me and said, Hoja [professor], you are an American, and you are hungry for quick answers like many of your countrymen. But you must overcome your typical American impatience and do something that few of your countrymen do. You must learn about our past.