Читать книгу Iran's Deadly Ambition - Ilan Berman - Страница 13

CHAPTER III

Iran’s Own “War on Terror”

In the spring of 2014, the world woke up to a new and virulent global threat. Over the course of that season, the terrorist group now known as the Islamic State cut a bloody swathe across northern Iraq, routing the Iraqi armed forces in city after city in its merciless drive toward the country’s capital, Baghdad.

For the Obama administration, the development was politically unwelcome. In previous years, and particularly since the death of Osama Bin Laden at the hands of U.S. special operators in May 2011, the White House had actively promoted the notion that the struggle known as the war on terror had decisively turned a corner. The rise of the Islamic State put the lie to the assertion by administration officials—chief among them President Obama himself—that al-Qaeda and its ilk were “decimated” and on a “path of defeat.”¹

Nevertheless, it should not have come as a surprise. Warning signs of the group’s resurgence—then known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI—were visible as far back as 2012, when it launched a highly successful campaign of bombing attacks and prison breaks.² Even so, the speed at which it expanded in Syria and Iraq has been nothing short of meteoric, and its success in capturing both treasure and territory has been startling.

Beginning in early 2012, AQI—also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS)—intervened in the Syrian civil war, mobilizing against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. It did so initially in close conjunction with al-Qaeda’s local Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra. However, infighting over leadership prompted al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri to intervene and demand a tactical divorce between the two organizations.³ Thereafter, an ideological schism formed between them, with al-Zawahiri formally disavowing ISIS in February 2014.⁴

In response, the Islamic State is trying to seize the mantle of global jihadism from al-Qaeda and supplant the Bin Laden network as the ideological center of gravity for Islamic extremists worldwide. To that end, in June 2014, the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, formally declared the creation of a new “Islamic caliphate” in Iraq and parts of Syria during a high-profile speech in Mosul, Iraq. In the same address, al-Baghdadi anointed himself as the new “caliph” and the “leader for Muslims everywhere.”⁵ As a result, there is now pitched ideological competition between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State for primacy in the jihadist intellectual narrative, with the two groups trading barbs and proffering competing worldviews in their battle for Islamic “hearts and minds.”⁶

The Islamic State is “beyond anything that we’ve seen,” in terms of both its ambitions and its capabilities, the then defense secretary Chuck Hagel warned in August 2014.⁷ The statistics bear out his assessment. The U.S. intelligence community estimated that, as of fall 2014, the group could field as many as 31,000 men under arms, making it among the largest terrorist groups on record.⁸ (By way of comparison, the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau gauged that al-Qaeda’s core and its two most potent affiliates, AQAP and AQIM [al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb], number in the low thousands—although, when indirect affiliates such as Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah are factored in, that figure is considerably higher.⁹) The Islamic State is also believed to be one of the world’s richest groups, with assets valued at around $2 billion.¹⁰ Its rapid advance in both Iraq and Syria, more-over, left the group in control of vast territory. In mid-2014, experts estimated that it held and administered segments of northern Iraq and eastern Syria equivalent to the size of the United Kingdom.¹¹

The Islamic State is not just a threat to the West. For Shiite Iran, the rise of the Sunni group poses a grave danger as well—as both a national security threat and a challenge to its ideological legitimacy. This is why the Islamic Republic began a major mobilization against the group. Iran provided both arms and advisors to the Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas battling the Islamic State in northern Iraq.¹² It also sent detachments of its Revolutionary Guards to fight against the Islamic State on Iraqi soil.¹³ And in a marked departure from normal policy, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reportedly even gave Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the elite Quds Force, the green light to coordinate military operations with the United States against the Islamic State.¹⁴

All this has nudged the United States and Iran into tactical alignment and has fostered the idea that cooperation in countering the Islamic State is, in fact, possible. Secretary of State John Kerry, for example, said publicly that he envisions a role for Iran in the broad coalition that Washington is erecting against the group.¹⁵ Others in the Obama administration have gone even further. In mid-October 2014, President Obama reportedly sent a secret letter to Iran’s supreme leader proffering joint coordination in the fight against the Islamic State, provided Iran could come to terms with the West over its nuclear program.¹⁶

The idea generated a firestorm of criticism in Washington. “It’s sometimes true that very different countries can cooperate against a common enemy, as the United States and Soviet Union did during World War II,” noted Michael Doran of the Brookings Institution and Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations in the Washington Post in the summer of 2014. “But the suggestion of a united U.S.-Iran front is more reminiscent of the wishful thinking among conservatives who argued in the 1930s that Britain and the United States shared a common interest with Nazi Germany in countering communism.”¹⁷

This skepticism is undoubtedly warranted, for Iran’s long and sordid history as a sponsor and instigator of international terrorism puts it squarely on the wrong side of today’s struggle against radical Islam.

BLOODY ROOTS

Chalk it up to the Islamic Republic’s roots in the radical, religious-based protests that coalesced against the secular rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi during the 1970s—or to Ayatollah Khomeini’s deep-seated belief that, once established, the ideology of his extremist state could become an export commodity and a way to reorder the prevailing geopolitics of the Muslim (and eventually the entire) world. Whatever the reason, since its inception in 1979, Iran’s current regime has harnessed terrorism as a key tool of strategic influence and foreign policy.

The formative years of Khomeini’s regime saw his government erect an elaborate domestic infrastructure to support and propagate terrorism, spanning multiple ministries and agencies, as well as invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the cause of global Islamic “resistance.”¹⁸ In the process, the Iranian regime created a massive terror machine dedicated to the exportation of its radical ideas.

The United States felt the results of this architecture first-hand in April 1983, when a truck bomb destroyed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people, and then again that October, when a similar explosive device targeted the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241. Both attacks were definitively traced back to the Islamic Republic, which—working through proxies such as Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad Organization—sought to dislodge the American presence in the Levant.¹⁹ In response, the Reagan administration formally designated Iran a state sponsor of terrorism the following year.

So the situation remains. Today, the Islamic Republic still ranks as the world’s foremost sponsor of international terrorism—a designation its leaders wear proudly in the name of resistance against the Great Satan (United States) and, more broadly, the West. If anything, the thirteen-plus years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent start of the war on terror have seen the Islamic Republic continue, and even deepen, its investment in global instability. It has done so through what some scholars have described as an “action network”: a web of official and proxy organizations that are “involved in crafting and implementing the covert elements of Iran’s foreign policy agenda, from terrorism, political, economic and social subversion; to illicit finance, weapons and narcotics trafficking; and nuclear procurement and proliferation.”²⁰

The results are striking. In its most recent assessment of global terrorism trends, the U.S. State Department points out that Iran has

• maintained its “support for Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza,” as well as Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, which it has helped rearm after the latter’s 2006 conflict with Israel;

• “increased its presence in Africa and attempted to smuggle arms to Houthi separatists in Yemen and Shia oppositionists in Bahrain,” and;

• used its terror vehicles and proxies to “provide cover for intelligence operations, and create instability in the Middle East,” and has continued “to provide arms, financing, training, and the facilitation of Iraqi Shia fighters” to reinforce the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria against its opposition.²¹

The scope of Iran’s investment in terrorism is far broader than could be comfortably covered in these pages. But the challenge it poses to the United States and its allies is clear. As scholars Scott Modell and David Asher note, despite years of economic and political pressure, “Iran seems undeterred in its mission to confront the ‘enemies of Islam’ and create new centers of non-Western power around the world.”²² Today, one such potential center is emerging on Iran’s eastern border.

EASTERN PROMISES

For Iran, the start of the war on terror in 2001 was a significant existential challenge. The incursion of the Great Satan, the United States, and its coalition partners into Afghanistan on their eastern flank worried Iran’s ayatollahs, while the rapid way in which the United States and its allies dismembered the Taliban regime in Kabul raised concerns that the coalition might soon set its sights on the Islamic Republic. This sense of siege would only be amplified by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq two years later and the assumption of control over the country by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority thereafter.

In response, Iran adopted a two-pronged strategy toward its eastern neighbor. On the one hand, Tehran sought to expand its influence and political clout in post-Taliban Afghanistan, both as a way to prevent a possible tilt toward the West on the part of the central government in Kabul and to carve out a zone of influence that could serve as a strategic buffer. On the other, Tehran worked to counter the presence of foreign forces on Afghan soil and raise the cost for the coalition to remain there.²³

In pursuit of the first priority, Iran expanded its economic stake in Afghanistan. Over the course of five years, the Islamic Republic invested heavily in various infrastructure, mining, and industrial projects throughout the country. As of 2012, more than 2,000 Iranian companies were estimated to be operating in Afghanistan, and 110 technical-engineering projects totaling some $360 million in business were said to be active.²⁴ These economic links were cemented by a massive trade deal between the two countries in May 2012 that, among other things, granted Afghanistan access to Iran’s port of Chabahar.²⁵

Trade between the two countries ballooned. In 2008, Iran’s exports to Afghanistan totaled a mere $800 million annually. By 2011, that figure topped $2 billion.²⁶ And just three years after that, total bilateral trade more than doubled, reaching $5 billion annually and making the Islamic Republic one of Afghanistan’s most important trading partners.²⁷

Politically, Iran progressively co-opted Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban government. Iran had played a key role in organizing Afghanistan’s various political factions in support of President Hamid Karzai in the run-up to his election in December 2004.²⁸ Thereafter, it sought to expand its influence among the country’s politicians, using cultural ties, payoffs, and bribes to subvert the independence of Karzai’s government, with considerable success. A 2012 assessment by the Institute for the Study of War noted that “Iran’s influence permeates the Afghan government at all levels,” with many Afghan politicians and government functionaries on Iran’s payroll.²⁹ This rot extended to the very top of Afghanistan’s political power structure. In October 2010, President Karzai himself acknowledged accepting $2 million from Iran.³⁰ Karzai’s admission was a telling reminder to Washington of who wielded the real power in Afghanistan.

Simultaneously, Iran forged an alternative center of gravity in Afghanistan’s western provinces. In provinces such as Herat and Farah, Iranian influence—in the form of commercial goods, religious sway, and cultural pressure—facilitated a tilt away from Kabul, toward Tehran.³¹ And what Iran did not succeed in achieving there by engagement, it did through pressure. In August 2014, Herat’s police chief, General Samiullah Qatrah, accused Iran of being partly responsible for a wave of attacks in the province and demanded that “countries friendly with Afghanistan . . . [not] train elements of terror and fear on their soil.”³² Qatrah’s comments were proof that in Afghanistan’s wild east, the real power broker was not the Afghan central government but Iran’s clerical regime.

Expanding its influence is not Iran’s only priority, however. Iran also seeks to deny it to others, most prominently the United States and its allies. Over the past several years, Iran carried out a major covert campaign aimed at undermining the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan. The extent of this effort was neatly summarized by the U.S. State Department in its 2012 Country Reports on Terrorism, which noted that, “[s]ince 2006, Iran has arranged arms shipments to select Taliban members, including small arms and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, and plastic explosives.” According to the same assessment, “Iran has shipped a large number of weapons to Kandahar, Afghanistan, aiming to increase its influence in this key province.” Iran has also “trained Taliban elements on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives, and indirect fire weapons, such as mortars, artillery, and rockets.”³³

The goal of these efforts wasn’t success for the Sunni Taliban, which Shiite Iran saw as both a regional rival and a strategic competitor. Rather, Iran sought to blunt the coalition’s political impact and lessen its chances for strategic success. As General David Petraeus, at the time the commander of U.S. Central Command, noted in 2009, Iran does not want “an extremist Sunni regime running their eastern neighbor . . . but they don’t want us to succeed too easily either.”³⁴ Nevertheless, Iran’s assistance helped bolster the capabilities of Afghan insurgent groups, at significant cost measured in U.S. and Afghan lives.

The Obama administration’s announcement in mid-2011 of plans for a formal exit from Afghanistan kicked Iran’s efforts into high gear. By the following year, Western observers noted the “soft power” gains made by the Islamic Republic. An October 2012 expose in the Wall Street Journal disclosed that Iran was “funding aid projects and expanding intelligence networks across Afghanistan” in anticipation of coalition withdrawal, using proxies such as the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee as agents of influence.³⁵ The formula employed by Iran was simple and effective. It offered economic aid in the form of loans, stipends, and medical supplies in exchange for loyalty and actionable intelligence on coalition activities.³⁶

The fruits of Iran’s labor became visible in August 2013, when the two countries signed the Afghanistan-Iran Strategic Cooperation Agreement.³⁷ The significance of the deal, and the message behind it, was unmistakable: a year and a half before the coalition’s exit, Kabul already understood that Tehran, not Washington, was the long-term power broker in Southwest Asia.

So it remains. Afghanistan’s tumultuous election in October 2014 may have seen the rise of a new president, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, and a new power-sharing coalition in Kabul, but Iran’s influence remains significant, and so does the control it exerts over Afghanistan’s political trajectory. Ghani himself said as much in September 2014, when he told visiting Iranian vice president Hossein Shariatmadari that “Afghanistan relations with other countries shall not undermine its relations with Iran,” and that “no countries will face any threat from the soil of Afghanistan.”³⁸

A WAR ON ISRAEL

In the summer of 2014, a new round of hostilities broke out between Israel and the Hamas terrorist movement in the Gaza Strip. Over the course of some fifty days, Hamas rained hundreds of rockets down on Israeli cities and towns, terrorizing the country’s population and precipitating a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israel’s military forces.

When the dust cleared, the two sides reached what Israeli officials termed a “strategic tie.”³⁹ The Israeli government proved the operational effectiveness of its new Iron Dome missile defense system, which successfully destroyed an estimated 85 percent of incoming projectiles. Israel’s subsequent incursion into the Gaza Strip, too, yielded tangible benefits, allowing the Israeli military to identify and eradicate most (although not all) of Hamas’s “terror tunnels” and, in the process, foil at least one major planned attack.⁴⁰

But the benefits were arguably greater for Hamas, for whom the conflict was nothing short of a bid for continued relevance. Indeed, before the war, the group was on the ropes, both politically and economically. This was an unexpected development: Hamas’s sudden (and surprising) dominance in the late 2006 parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip made the group a power broker in Palestinian politics. This position was cemented several months later, when it successfully undertook a hostile takeover of the Gaza Strip, wresting control of the territory from the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and his Fatah faction. Since then, a series of reversals—including Israel’s successful Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012 and an ongoing blockade of maritime imports into Gaza—greatly dented the group’s legitimacy and mystique. But no event was more damaging to Hamas’s political and economic fortunes than falling out with its chief power broker, Iran.

Historically, the Islamic Republic has been a longtime key backer of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. But, beginning in late 2011, the two underwent what amounted to a strategic divorce over Syria. While Iran assumed a pivotal role as a defender of the Assad regime, Hamas came out vocally against Syria’s dictator and in support of the various opposition groups organizing his overthrow. In response, an irate Iran virtually zeroed out its financial support to Hamas and ceased its military cooperation with the group.⁴¹ Adrift, Hamas became critically short on cash, unable to pay salaries for its officials or administer basic governmental functions.⁴² And in the acrimonious negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas over the creation of a “unity” government during the spring of 2014, Hamas unexpectedly found itself thrust into the role of junior partner to Abbas’s Fatah faction. Against this backdrop, the Gaza war of August–September 2014 can be seen as a last grasp for political relevance on the part of the movement.

By all indications, the ploy worked. In the wake of the conflict, Hamas obtained a new lease on political life, proving to wealthy Gulf donors (like Qatar) that it remains an indispensable part of the resistance against the Jewish state. Perhaps most significantly, it also succeeded in mending fences with Iran.

Even prior to the Gaza war, relations between Hamas and Tehran had begun to move toward rapprochement. In the spring of 2014, negotiations between Hamas and Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, while failing to bridge differences over Syria, did manage to establish a modus vivendi in which Hamas would again garner Iranian support. Thereafter, Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani announced that Tehran was poised to resume financial support for Hamas, and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, agreed to meet with Khaled Meshaal, the movement’s political chief, in Tehran.⁴³ But the summer 2014 conflict brought the two sides closer still. Hamas had once again proved its worth as a core element of the “axis of resistance” arrayed against Israel. Iran, for its part, saw in a rejuvenated relationship with Hamas “an opportunity to improve its standing in the Islamic world, which had suffered—especially among Sunnis—thanks to its steadfast support of Assad.”⁴⁴ As a result, the strategic partnership between Iran and Hamas is now back on track—and the likelihood of a future conflict between Israel and an unrepentant, strengthened Hamas is high.⁴⁵

Iran’s stake in the Palestinian Territories is far larger than simply Hamas, however. It dates back to the early 1990s, when the Islamic Republic—championing resistance against the “Zionist entity” as an alternative to the Oslo Process then being pursued by the West—took on a leading political role in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.⁴⁶ It did so via two primary vehicles. The first was Hamas, with whom Tehran signed a formal accord codifying cooperation in 1992⁴⁷—an arrangement that would endure until the two sides fell out over Syria. The second was the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a smaller yet equally radical Palestinian group that was wholly beholden to Tehran for its existence, depending on the Islamic Republic for its entire budget (some $2 million annually).⁴⁸

By a decade later, that influence gave Iran a major voice in Palestinian politics—and a deciding vote in violence against Israel. In the early 2000s, one Israeli analyst estimated that Iran (via Hezbollah) was responsible for “no less than 80 percent” of terrorism directed against the Jewish state in the Palestinian Second Intifada (2000–2005).⁴⁹ Similarly, Israeli officials at the time judged that Iran had succeeded in assuming “control” of terrorism carried out by various Palestinian factions against Israel.⁵⁰

Israeli officials attempted to stem the tide of this support, with some success. In October 2002, Israeli forces seized the ship Karine A in the Red Sea, interdicting 50 tons of Iranian arms destined for the Palestinian Authority’s dominant Fatah faction, ruled by Yasser Arafat. The incident was the most public of a series of Israeli military successes preventing Iran from playing more deeply in the Palestinian arena. But Arafat’s death in 2004 and the subsequent (and somewhat unexpected) parliamentary victory of Hamas in the winter of 2006 provided the Islamic Republic with greater strategic reach throughout the Palestinian Authority.