Going to do a thread here with some background/history on the 17-year-old US military hunt for al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan, the latest evolution of which I have a new story about (spoiler: US forces are now more focused on IS-K): politico.com/story/2018/08/…
Military says it has killed 65 AQ members in Afg this year. "We've been actively hunting AQ from the lowest rifleman up to their emir and everyone in between," Gen. Nicholson told me. But majority of CT strikes now are against IS-K.
Over the past 17 years, AQ, the group that brought the US to Afg, has always been a high priority for the CT folks, meaning the JSOC task force and the intel community (IC). But, just as it's not the priority today, it's often gotten pushed behind bigger Taliban fight.
AQ is a covert organization whose presence in Afg has grown and shrunk over the years but has always been small and embedded within the larger ranks of local groups like Afghan Taliban and TTP. So there have never been tons of AQ targets for JSOC to hit.
In the early years, the JSOC task force at Bagram, led jointly by SEAL Team 6 and Rangers, spent a lot of time sitting on its hands and training, waiting for occasional missions to grab AQ Arabs who were helping Taliban or the "big mission" to go get bin Laden or Zawahiri in Pak.
Rangers and SEALs who spent time in Afg during those years (into about 2006) describe it as a boring, frustrating time. JSOC was going hard in Iraq, but in Afg, it was limited to an AQ target set that, in Afg, was tiny & very rarely popped its head up to be hit.
The few AQ Arabs who *did* have a persistent presence in Afghanistan took on outsize importance and were treated as top targets more because they were the only ones around than because they were actually really senior in AQ. Abu Ikhlas al-Masri is the prime example of that.
Abu Ikhlas had stayed in Kunar when other Arabs went home in the early '90s. He took up arms against US in 2002 and became a key figure linking local insurgents in the northeast to AQ money/resources from Pakistan, and did a lot of advise/assist stuff with them.
Abu Ikhlas "was basically my counterpart," a Green Beret commander in Kunar who was standing up local Afghan militias in 2004 told me. But because he was the only Arab around, he became a flashing bright light for JSOC/IC, & white SOF & conventional military took cues from that.
"Abu Ikhlas was AQ, and AQ was a phantom back then" inside Afg, an IC member remembers. "He was the only true AQ guy that we knew of. His claim to fame was that he had supposedly met bin Laden once. So he became a big target," drawing JSOC attention to Kunar.
The presence of this one single individual in Kunar was a surprisingly large factor in the conventional military's decision to start building outposts up there in places like Korengal, Waygal, Kamdesh in 2006—a plunge that eventually led to entanglement and heavy US casualties.
"Our purpose as a nation for being in Afg in the first place was AQ...and the only place in all of RC East that had a known AQ operative was Kunar, where Abu Ikhlas was," Nicholson, who orchestrated this plunge as a brigade commander, told me. "CT thru COIN" was the catchphrase.
From 2006 on, JSOC became more active in Afg as its target set expanded from AQ to include the Taliban: first just a few senior leaders, then mid-level ones, and eventually hundreds of junior Taliban figures like tactical commanders and IED-makers who were fighting ISAF and ANA.
In 2009, JSOC made decision to expand from narrow CT mission in Afg to broad mission supporting conventional forces in COIN fight. "I believed the CT mission could not be decisive & we should be using our nat;l assets killing IED makers in support of COIN," a JSOC TF cdr told me.
During the 2009-11 surge period, this became the bulk of what JSOC was doing in Afg, measured by resources & missions: not CT, but fighting a nighttime war against the same local Afghan and Pakistani militants US and NATO infantry were fighting a daytime COIN war against.
The AQ targeting effort continued in the background, sporadically. When AQ figures, either Arab or Pakistani, did venture inside Afg, they either flew way under the radar or they got killed—most often in Kunar, where AQ kept providing tactical support to Taliban & Salafis.
The @LongWarJournal has kept close track of all those guys. Abu Ikhlas was captured by chance in 2010, the same year JSOC killed a trio of Saudi & Kuwaiti AQ guys in the Korengal. In 2011 SEALs killed AQ's emir for Bajaur, a Saudi, when he ventured into Kunar.
A couple of things happened during this 2009-10 period that shaped JSOC's future hunt for AQ in the years that followed, as US & NATO forces drew down. First, US forces started to extract themselves from the more remote areas of Kunar/Nuristan they'd dived into in 2006.
Conventional forces pulled out of their outposts in Kamdesh and Korengal and the CIA began closing some of its Kunar border outposts. Insurgents correctly saw this as the first wave of a larger pullout from northeastern Afghanistan.
Second, the pressure on AQ leadership in Pakistan's tribal areas from CIA drone campaign got really, really intense. In letters to bin Laden (safe in Abbottabad) senior figures in Waziristan described their situation as grim and getting worse.
Bin Laden gave them the ok to start looking for backup sanctuaries, out from under the CIA's tribal-area air campaign. One place they looked at was Baluchistan. Another was Kunar/Nuristan, where AQ saw the US withdrawal from its network of mountain outposts as an opportunity.
There was already an up-and-coming young AQ commander running around Kunar helped the Taliban attack the Americans in the buttoned-up bases and MRAP convoys: a Saudi/Qatari called Farouq al-Qahtani. A senior AQ figure in Pak described Farouq to UBL as "the best of a good crew."
Farouq "has arranged everything to receive us" if the order came to relocate from Pak, the same senior AQ figure wrote to UBL in July 2010. "He said the locations were good, there were supporters and everything." This was as further US withdrawals in Kunar were being planned.
UBL wrote back that he was "leaning toward" ordering AQ figures from Pak into the sanctuary Farouq was setting up in Kunar (& some others elsewhere). UBL had stayed in Kunar after Tora Bora for a while, evading JSOC/IC efforts to find him there, and was impressed by the terrain.
In fallout after Abbottabad raid, CIA drone ops in Pak slowed, so the big exodus to Kunar/Nuristan AQ was mulling never happened. But Farouq was up there, the senior AQ leader in Afg, and Abbottabad DOCEX cast new light on his importance and ties to top AQ leaders in Pak.
JSOC already knew in 2010 that Farouq was up there, but after the DOCEX revealed the mission he'd been given & w/ even more Kunar bases closing in 2011, CIA told JSOC to get busy hunting him and his band of AQ Arabs & Pakistanis.
Heliborne raids by Rangers or SEALs into terrain in places like the Waygal and Helgal are incredibly risky, as JSOC has learned at a cost (two Rangers and SEAL killed in Pech missions in 2010). So to get after the AQ-in-Kunar/Nuristan problem, the task force turned to drones.
Thus, Operation Haymaker was born—a years-long JSOC drone campaign aimed at killing or at least isolating Farouq and his people in remote valleys. Haymaker became centerpiece of widening campaign against AQ in Afg as JSOC got out of the small-time-Taliban-schwacking business.
For 4 years starting in 2012, "spinning up" for a potential raid to go grab Farouq was a feature of Ranger deployments to Afg. But with such restrictive terrain, such a raid never happened. Haymaker came down to drones, spy planes, HIMARS, etc.—remote strikes in a denied area.
In some ways Haymaker was JSOC's scaled-down version of the CIA's Pak drone campaign. It was also an evolution of the smaller-scale drone campaigns JSOC itself was already running in Yemen and Somalia. For docs showing how it worked at its peak, see here: theintercept.com/drone-papers/m…
According to one person involved, during Haymaker's opening summer, it accounted for the majority of about 100 kinetic strikes JSOC conducted throughout Afghanistan. "Haymaker was all our top-line nat'l assets, everything you can imagine from a movie," a second said.
Most Haymaker strikes hit local militants, not actual AQ operatives. The idea was they were Farouq's link to the world. "As we kill off local guys who can walk them from Watapur to Waygal, they lose their guides and they're stuck and exposed," a third Haymaker source told me.
In some places, it worked out just like that. Last year, Waygal residents told me the small number of Arabs in their valley had kept more and more to themselves as the strikes progressed in 2013-15, and eventually left for another valley.
But sometimes, the same Waygalis said, the strikes continued when there weren't any Arabs or even serious AQ-linked local fighters around, resulting in unnecessary deaths of young local fighters that increased anti-American sentiment in the villages where they happened.
A SOF officer who spent time doing Haymaker stuff confirmed that happened sometimes. "If the big fish are away for the winter & the only guy we can find is a machine gunner or RTO, we'll call him OBJ Boxcutter and try to kill him," he said. "The risk/reward can be off."
The Waygalis I talked to said that drone strikes since 2012 had not killed any women or children in their communities (they contrasted that with earlier periods when they could name plenty of civilians who died in US air strikes).
But Haymaker strikes killed and wounded civilians in other parts of Kunar/Nuristan, like the Gambir area of the Watapur valley in 2013, in a botched strike that @mayjeong describes here: theintercept.com/2018/01/27/a-4…
As the Haymaker strike campaign went along, JSOC made similar efforts against another persistent/growing AQ pocket, centered around Bermel district in Paktika. Finally, JSOC killed Farouq in 2016 in the Helgal valley. washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoin…
The military said at the time of Farouq's killing that he had been "directly involved in planning threats against the U.S. in the past year." Some of those plans, I've heard, involved providing training to people who held both Pakistani and British passports.
Since then, military estimates have said that foreign AQ leaders like Farouq have been "focused on their own survival" thanks to Haymaker. Generals have said AQ's ranks in Afghanistan are "decimated." (More on that later.)
It's unclear who, if anyone, replaced Farouq. "From AQ’s perspective, I don’t know why they would replace senior people in Afghanistan anymore when they are killed when Yemen and Syria are much more permissive for" planning external operations, @JJSchroden told me for story.
This brings me back to the story I wrote this week, about the current disposition, intentions, and capabilities of AQ in Afghanistan after all these years and JSOC's recent prioritization of IS-K targets over AQ ones. politico.com/story/2018/08/…
In 2016, as the hunt for Farouq was nearing its close, the Obama admin authorized JSOC in Afg to broaden its target set again from just AQ to IS-K, which was rampaging across Nangarhar. “If US wasn’t careful, what happened in Mosul & Ramadi might happen in Afg,” @SethGJones says.
To what degree IS-K posed (or poses) an external threat to US/Europe like AQ is up for debate. Gen. Votel recently said that he thinks it "probably" does, & new UN report says there have been cases. But Votel couldn't think of any such cases.
Once Ranger-led JSOC task force was allowed to go after IS-K, though, they took to it with a vengeance, shifting drones & other resources from Haymaker. Emphasis from both Obama & Trump was on IS-K, & Nicholson declared 2017 the "year of IS-K" targeting in Afg. AQ to back burner.
Besides the orders from on high, IS-K also poses a more attractive target set for the JSOC task force. “With AQ, it was a lot of long-term development & surveillance—very labor-intensive," a SOF officer told me. W/ IS-K, “you’d put up a drone, see some activity, and strike.”
Another source echoed that IS-K in Nangarhar is so dense, it's easier to go after. “We have the OK to go after a target set with a lot of low-hanging fruit, and that’s a lot more rewarding than developing AQ targets for months and months and then having maybe one shot at them."
In the 22 months since JSOC killed Farouq al-Qahtani, it hasn't (or appears not to have) killed another AQ figure in Afg w/ similar stature & external-ops role. In same period, JSOC has killed the top figure of IS-K twice, as well as a third guy who was expected to take the job.
But as @_rebeccaz noted to me, "just because the SOF guys have shifted their focus to ISIS doesn't mean AQ targets aren't still there." In some cases, strangely, they are living together in the same valleys, like the Watapur in Kunar, hosted by the same local facilitators.
There are AQ folks popping up in a lot of other parts of Afg this year too. When the military kills them, it typically describes them as involved in advising/assisting Taliban, not in external-op planning, & sometimes notes they are part of AQ subgroup AQIS, established in 2014.
Gen. Nicholson & military's quarterly reports paint the two as separate—core/legacy AQ Arabs in the northeast who are just "trying to hide" from JSOC targeting, & AQIS members who are "more active" but focused on battlefield activity and largely Afghans & Pakistanis.
But @thomasjoscelyn warns against viewing AQIS as "not real AQ," for several reasons. For one, "core" AQ figures like Farouq al-Qahtani were involved in battlefield advising too. No "firm line between personnel planning attacks overseas & those training local insurgents," he says
And while last major AQIS figure the military killed was a Pakistani, & US IC judges AQIS mostly recruits w/in S. Asia, some Arabs have also been killed far from northeastern region we associate w/ AQ "core," like an "al-Masri" killed recently in Helmand helping Taliban.
A former senior intelligence official has told me that IC assessments of how many AQ members are in Afg (typical assessment is "about 100") are too close to being assessments of how many AQ Arabs are in Afg, discounting Afghan & Pakistani AQ members.
While there are plenty of local "facilitators" who are only linked w/ AQ in the loosest sense, & counting them could result in overestimate, AQ's top ranks are also seeded w/ Pakistanis—part of a trend of AQ becoming "more Pakistani" while residing there, @ShamilaCh has told me.
The IC says that both AQ "core" in Afg & AQIS "maintain the intent to conduct attacks against the United States and the West," but doesn't specify whether both/either have the capability or have been linked to recent plots. intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/…
Making a firm judgment about that when you're talking about a black box like AQ in Afg is "subjective," sketchy business, @jeff_eggers told me: You "might assess that they have the intent but not the capability right up until the day they execute an attack in the West.”
"As long as their names kept popping up, you had to take them seriously, even if you weren’t sure whether they were actively directing plots," NSC CT hand Josh Geltzer agreed. "You had to treat that view as potentially right even if your confidence in it wavered."
A SOF officer w/ long CT experience in Afg summed it all up this way: “There is the operational threat AQ in Afg poses, but AQ's Afghan presence also has psychological and emotional significance to us," as it does to AQ itself. "I think there is a gulf between the two."
"That’s difficult to talk about," this SOF officer continued on subject of what AQ is doing in Afg vs. other sanctuaries. "Because of what we went through on
9/11, it sounds blasphemous to a lot of people to suggest that we exaggerate the importance of AQ in that region."
9/11, it sounds blasphemous to a lot of people to suggest that we exaggerate the importance of AQ in that region."
I'll conclude this very, very long thread by linking to my story on al-Qaida in Afg again—& by asking anyone w/ information about the 23 OCT 2016 strike that finally killed Farouq al-Qahtani to please get in touch with me at @wesleysmorgan@protonmail.com. politico.com/story/2018/08/…
...and finally, for the "wayyy TL;DR" version, here is a relevant meme: 
(If you've reached this point and the thread seems to end, please pick it back up here—I made a threading mistake. Thanks to @CheekyAmriki for noticing)
