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Jay Leno, on the “Tonight Show”: “Saudi Arabia has just announced they’ve foiled a terrorist plot … apparently, they cancelled a check.”

At the end of an otherwise dispiriting article (”Al-Qaida PoWs revolt in Pakistan”), the Guardian reports:

Fifteen detainees from Mazar-i-Sharif have been turned over to the US Marines at a new jail at the American base at Kandahar. [...]

One prisoner is believed to be Abdul Aziz, a Saudi Arabian official of the Wafa humanitarian organisation, a US official said. Wafa’s assets have been frozen by President George Bush’s administration for alleged terrorist links.

Getting at the money, and understanding how it flows, is as important as rounding up Al Qaeda, so Aziz’s capture, if it indeed happened, could be a big break.

Our good friends the Pakistanis

But the rest of the Guardian story above paints a picture of a pretty leaky bucket when Al Qaeda types get to Pakistan, or within reach of Pakistan forces. The incidents described by the Guardian appear to be due to incompetence by the Pakistanis, but I have to wonder. In a similar vein, Seymour Hersh alleges in the New Yorker (”The Getaway“) that Pakistani forces got a lot of their friends out with them as the Kunduz noose tightened in November.

In interviews, however, American intelligence officials and high-ranking military officers said that Pakistanis were indeed flown to safety, in a series of nighttime airlifts that were approved by the Bush Administration. The Americans also said that what was supposed to be a limited evacuation apparently slipped out of control, and, as an unintended consequence, an unknown number of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters managed to join in the exodus. “Dirt got through the screen,” a senior intelligence official told me. Last week, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld did not respond to a request for comment. [...]

Indian intelligence had concluded that eight thousand or more men were trapped inside the city in the last days of the siege, roughly half of whom were Pakistanis. (Afghans, Uzbeks, Chechens, and various Arab mercenaries accounted for the rest.) At least five flights were specifically “confirmed” by India’s informants, the RAW analyst told me, and many more were believed to have taken place.

In the Indian assessment, thirtythree hundred prisoners surrendered to a Northern Alliance tribal faction headed by General Abdul Rashid Dostum. A few hundred Taliban were also turned over to other tribal leaders. That left between four and five thousand men unaccounted for.

Hersh has published a number of “insider” stories about the true course of the war now, generally of the “it’s not going quite as well as they say it is” tenor; I don’t know what his batting average will turn out to be. But if this is even nearly true, we may have really blown it at Kunduz. Why could we not have insisted those flights head to Uzbekistan under US fighter escort? “Good guys” would have gotten a ticket to Islamabad (and some thorough debriefing and photographing for future reference), bad guys a ticket to “Club Fed” in the lovely Caribbean. What alternatives would they have had? (”No, I’ll stay in Kunduz rather than accept such humiliation.” “Fine.”) As for Musharraf, I would think in some ways he might be pleased to have corralled and controlled some of his nation’s own wild and woolly military types, under the guise of “debriefing” or whatever.

Although hindsight is always 20/20, I really don’t understand the U.S. reasoning here — again, assuming Hersh got the story more or less right. We need the Pakistanis… because? Because we want to catch Al Qaeda. Where were the Al Qaeda? …. In Kunduz. Leaving out those who wound up in Mazar-e-Sharif, we seem to have had hundreds, maybe thousands of birds in the hand, that we seem to have traded for nothing in the bush.

For some coverage at the time, see my posts of 11/24/2001, “B-52 that airport now“, and 11/21/2001, “72 virgins not enough, argue trapped Al Qaeda fighters” (to explain, that was an attempt to poke fun at would-be martyrs suddenly eager to escape). Obviously not so much for my deathless prose, but the news links still work.

Slowly but surely, the “our good friends the Saudis” campaign (see Ken Layne and/or Charles Johnson on any given day) gathers steam. From the New York Times, “Dismay With Saudi Arabia Fuels Pullout Talk“:

A number of senior officials in Congress and the Pentagon are saying the United States should consider withdrawing military forces from Saudi Arabia because of frustration over what they consider the kingdom’s tepid support for the war on terrorism and the restrictions it places on American military operations.

Cons include all that time and money spent sprucing up Prince Sultan Air Force Base with high-tech command and control facilities. But as the Times quotes Senator Carl Levin (D-MI):

“…I think the war against terrorism has got to be fought by countries who really realize that it’s in everybody’s interest to go after terrorism. I think we may be able to find a place where we are much more welcome openly,” he said, “a place which has not seen significant resources flowing to support some really extreme, fanatic views.”

Levin is referring, of course, to Saudi support for the notorious madrassa schools instilling jihadism and Wahhabism — and nothing else — in Pakistan and elsewhere. Sentiment at the Pentagon is similarly unenthusiastic about the Saudis:

In the Pentagon, a growing number of commanders are frustrated with the Saudis’ refusal to allow American warplanes based at a sprawling airfield south of Riyadh to bomb Iraq and other Islamic countries, except in self-defense. “We’re pretty heavily invested in Saudi right now,” a senior military official said. “But if the opportunity arose to operate somewhere else in the region we’d be pretty interested.”

Other prominent Congressional Saudi critics identified by the article include Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO), and to a lesser degree Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL). A credible alternative to the Prince Sultan airfield would probably do wonders for Saudi Arabia’s attitude on investigations in that country, and cooperation with anti-terror campaigns elsewhere.

Following up on earlier posts about Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia: In the New York Times, the 12/27 article “Holy War Lured Saudis as Rulers Looked Away” provides an account of the role of Saudi secular and religious establishments in that country’s jihadist movement. Re religious establishment:

A half-blind man of 61, Sheik Sadlaan is a professor at the kingdom’s leading Islamic university and a religious adviser to a senior member of the royal family. What he says carries the weight of the ulemaa, Saudi Arabia’s official religious establishment, and what he says, carefully, is that the king is his imam, and the king does not currently advise young men to march off to holy war.

But asked about other scholars, like Sheik Hamoud al-Shuaibi, who since Sept. 11 and the American retaliation have openly called for jihad against the United States, Sheik Sadlaan stops short of condemnation.

“He made a mistake, but it was not a major one, and it does not detract from his reputation,” he said of Sheik Shuaibi, a former teacher.

Even the Saudi government is not known to have taken action against Sheik Shuaibi, despite his statements that those who support infidels, or unbelievers, should be considered unbelievers themselves, a statement that would seem perilously close to treason in Saudi Arabia, still home to more than 5,000 American troops.

Out of roughly 10,000 religious scholars in the kingdom, perhaps just 150 embrace such a radical view, according to American estimates. But among this group, only a handful is known to have been detained by Saudi authorities since Sept. 11…

This in a country known for crushing religious uprisings of whatever stripe, from the defeat of the Ikhwan in 1929 to the 1979 Mecca Mosque uprising to the 1992 Burayda roundups.* Mr. Sadlaan’s ambivalence may be changing in light of Crown Prince Abdullah’s call yesterday for unequivocal condemnation of terrorism (AP). Then again, it may not, given that “legitimate armed struggle” by the Palestinians was specifically distinguished from terrorism in Abdullah’s comments (Reuters). I don’t know whether Abdullah considers suicide bombing a pizza parlor or busloads of commuters “legitimate” or not.

Re government oversight, there is a lot of detail about the surveillance of Al Qaeda and “Afghan Arabs” by the Saudi government. But this is suggestive, I think:

But in private, Saudi and American officials say the real mystery to the Saudi government is not whether Saudi citizens took part [in the 9/11 attacks], but how so many of them were able to evade detection by the Saudi authorities. [...]

To the Saudis, American officials say, the fact that the Saudis involved in the assaults were unknown to them was almost as startling as the attacks themselves.

In recent years, the mubahith, the Saudi equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, infiltrated Al Qaeda cells within the kingdom, while the monitoring of the Saudis fighting abroad was thought to have kept a handle on potential troublemakers.

Assume for a moment that the article is accurate in portraying the Saudi government as merely feckless or negligent in their handling of the “Afghan Arabs.” It seems to me we are still left with a portrait of (1) extremist clergy tolerated in a notably intolerant country — suggesting the government either fears them, believes they are sufficiently well observed, or both — and (2) gaping blind spots in the mubahith surveillance of Al Qaeda. As a theory, I suggest that some of these mubahith officials, and likely some of the domestic mutaween religious enforcement police may be treasonously extremist Wahhabites themselves, and may have helped the 9/11 attackers evade detection in Saudi Arabia. The CIA, FBI, and reliable muhabith should be (and may well be) looking for “sleeper” cells in the Saudi government, particularly in their police forces.

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* Viorst, Shadow of the Prophet, Ch.7: “The Saudi Dilemma.”

This post was prompted by an e-mail from Jim Henley, who is working out his own views on these subjects in his ever-interesting “Unqualified Offerings” blog, most recently today with Saudi dearies, and Almost but not quite. I agree with him on many points, including the basic one that I don’t think the House of Saud had a direct connection to the 9/11 attacks. Rather than being accomplices to those attacks, I think they may have been and may continue to be criminally negligent: they are “merely” not inclined to work very hard to stop terrorists operating from their soil, as opposed to being terrorist lackeys like the Taliban were.

Saudi Arabia possesses two strategic assets: the cheapest-to-extract large oil reserves on the planet — and Mecca. The one makes it too important to the West to lose, the other makes it likely too dangerous for the West to take. I think the House of Saud is a family that has entered into two symbioses to preserve its status as the controllers of these two assets.

The Mecca symbiosis came first. (The following is cribbed liberally from Milton Viorst’s book In The Shadow of the Prophet, which I’ve mentioned before; see the chapter “The Saudi Dilemma”). In 1744 one Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (b. 1703) got together with an ambitious chief named Muhammad ibn Saud, living in the village of Diriyah — now on the outskirts of the similarly named Riyadh — to make a deal: Saud would provide the military muscle, Wahhab the “unitarian” ideology. That essentially totalitarian ideology proclaimed that any rethinking of Islam was heresy (bid’a: innovation), and that only Wahhab’s way — a return to (his version of) the era of the rashidun, i.e., Mohammed and his immediate successors — would do. Viorst writes:

In theory, the Saudi Monarchy is the executive, the Wahhabi “ulama”[clergy] the moral guide. In practice, the relationship is more complex. The two institutions, while allies, are often rivals, each tugging constantly at the other … The clerics prefer to call the head of the House of Saud “Imam”, to convey the holy source of his power; the Saudi monarch, having adopted the title Cusotodian of the Two Holy Mosques to assert his piety, lieks being called “King,” though in Arabic the title has a foreign ring that clerics scorn. Yet, while each hierarchy tries for a leg up on the other, the acknowledge their mutual dependence. Whatever the Saudi dissidents’ current demands for reform, history suggests that the regime has survived this long precisely because it has never, in its basic structure, given serious thought to reform at all.

The second symbiosis, with the United States, was caused by Saddam Hussein. Hussein’s attack on Kuwait resulted in the House of Saud’s epiphany that they needed permanent protection from their more populous, industrial neighbor. In the long run, this second symbiosis is incompatible with the first one: infidel U.S. bases on Saudi soil are hard for Wahhabites to square with their old-time religion view of Islam’s holy land. Many Saudis both inside and outside the House of Saud feel they made a Faustian bargain with the United States to protect themselves from Iraq; these critics more or less share Bin Laden’s distaste and even revulsion for Westerners in their holy land, but most probably believe it was the only realistic way to be sure of protection from Iraq. Viorst writes:

To many Saudis, basing infidels on the holy soil was not just a religious but a political lapse, defaulting on the compact by which the Saud family rules. [Said one university professor,] “…we all knew that soldiers from other countries were defending us because we were unable to defend ourselves… The West seems to think that the impact of the war was cultural, that we were upset by women in T-shirts driving jeeps. There’s some truth to that… but the more fundamental truth is that we felt the royal family had let us down.”[...]

“The King, deep down, is less rigid than the clergy,” an editor of an Islamic paper said to me. “By Saudi standards, he is probably very enlightened. But the people are Wahhabi, and I’m not sure how much social change the people want.”

I introduce all of this background mainly to point out that there is a built-in opposition to the House of Saud — the Wahhabite clergy — which may have more credibility with Saudis and more freedom of action than many of us were aware. I think it’s conceivable and plausible that the Saudi religious police who smuggled Al Harbi into Afghanistan did so on their own, in opposition to the House of Saud, U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, and the United States.

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A note to readers: I posted an even longer version of this last night, then had second thoughts a minute later. So I deleted it — but forgot to hit “publish”, meaning it stayed on the web for some 24 hours. While I could restore it to this blog, I like the revised piece better: it has more information, less speculation on my part, and meanders a bit less. I think the point (see last sentence) is pretty much the same; much of the first half or so is exactly the same. I’ll save the old version to this web page, in case anyone has cited anything from it or cares for some other reason. PS: I see now that Jim Henley did, making me wish I hadn’t gone down this path at all. Sorry for the inconvenience, everyone.

or The good cop/bad cop games theocracies can play

Via Ken Layne: ABC News commissioned a full translation of the Bin Laden video, revealing that Khalid al Harbi says he was smuggled into Afghanistan by Saudi Arabia’s religious police. A subsequent Washington Post account, again via Layne, differs on this important detail, stating that it was Iranian religious police who did the smuggling. After the first report, Ken Layne commented:

So, let’s get this straight: A Saudi millionaire from one of Saudi Arabia’s richest families plotted a massive attack on the United States using 15 Saudi citizens as hijackers, and this attack was praised by members of the Saudi Arabian government’s religious council while Saudi officials smuggled a fanatic Saudi cleric into Afghanistan to give praise to the Saudi who led the attack. The Saudis hustle the bin Laden family out of the United States within hours of the attacks — and with the White House’s help — and refuse to cooperate in the investigation of the 15 Saudi hijackers. Meanwhile, Saudi royalty runs loose in the United States, breaking the law and claiming diplomatic immunity whenever they’re caught.

Folks, Saudi Arabia attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. It doesn’t matter whether the command came from that bloated hog King Fahd or the fanatic religious leadership he can’t control. What is obvious to everyone except the Bush Administration is that our ally, Saudi Arabia, harbored, supported and created the terrorists who launched a war against the United States 100 days ago.

However, there is the “sting” angle I mentioned a few days ago — so take your pick:

1) the Saudi religious police were doing U.S. bidding to get the weasel Al Harbi and his HandyCam to Bin Laden. (I doubt the Iranian religious police would.)

2) the Saudi or Iranian religious police were doing their own nasty pro-Bin Laden business, and we were lucky to get the videotape.

Someone in Washington, D.C. knows, and I think the American people should know, too. I’m getting a little bit sick of the mantra about “protecting our sources”; we need the information to know just where we stand with Saudi Arabia. Even if it’s door number 1 above, Layne outlines very well why Saudi Arabia has a long, long way to go before I consider them an ally in any important sense. Al Harbi presumably wasn’t hallucinating about the prominent, non-fringe clerics who supported the 9/11 attacks. If it’s door number 2, and it was Saudis, then we have a very serious problem with Saudi Arabia (as if we didn’t know that already), and my most important reason for not going to war with Iraq does not apply: they are harboring, aiding, and abetting 9/11 attackers, before and after the attacks.

Final thought about the convenience/inconvenience of uncontrollable religious clergy: both Iran and Egypt are very similar in this respect. “Yes, but what do Khameini/Al Azhar University leadership say?” should be the constant question whenever “moderate” voices from these countries are mentioned.

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Update, 10:45pm: Justin Slotman (”Insolvent Republic of Blogistan”) points out this MSNBC article, which pins down the religious police involved as ““jalad alhayaa” (meaning, the article says, Saudi “religious police”) … So there you go.” Although those words may just mean “religious police,” perhaps still leaving it a matter of context and guesswork whether Al Harbi meant Iranians or Saudis.

In The Atlantic Unbound, Jack Beatty writes:

Egypt exports the terrorists the repression produces, but not before its state-dominated media has taught them to blame the misery and backwardness of Arab nations on the U.S. The terrorists then attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We are not a wicked nation but, as long as we subsidize this fated cycle, we are a stupid one. [...]

Instead of taking the war on terror to Iraq, we need to take it to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, terror’s source. We need to reach beyond these autocratic regimes to their peoples.

Any one who’s read Matt Welch, Ken Layne, Glenn Reynolds, Thomas Friedman, Mark Steyn or any of a number of other writers will be familiar with most of the arguments Beatty makes. But Beatty restates the case well. And read on to see who (dare I say characteristically?) sees only faith based thinking — Wahhabite, in this case — where most of us would merely see intolerance and hatemongering. That’s a blind spot we can’t afford any more.

New York Times: U.S. Pressures Foreign Airlines Over Manifests

The U.S. is insisting everyone provide passenger manifests in advance for foreign arrival flights, or passengers will be put through “extremely rigorous, lengthy searches.” Saudi reactions:

Saudi Arabian Airlines and the Saudi Embassy declined to comment on the new requirement. A spokesman for the Saudi Embassy said last month that his country was not in any hurry to sign up for the passenger information system.

“At this time,” the spokesman said, “hundreds of Saudi citizens are being detained and questioned with regard to the hijackings. A lot of them are innocent people. That number would probably quadruple if we shared advance information on air passengers with the United States.”

They’ll probably be in a bit more of a hurry after some Saudi prince gets “extremely rigorously” searched for the first time in his life. As for “a lot” of questioned Saudi citizens being innocent people, that would seem to admittedly leave “some” of them who aren’t. At least 15 on September 11, for example. Not that I’d care if four times as many Saudi citizens get questioned, but might this not lead to fewer, better targeted questions, rather than more? Whether or not that’s the case: no one’s forcing Saudis to fly to the U.S.

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(edited 10:30am)

Der Spiegel reports Saudis wollen angeblich ihre “Gotteskrieger” zurückholen (Saudis reportedly want to bring back their “holy warriors”), according to the Egyptian Arab daily Al-Hayat.

The government in Riyadh is already in communication with the “relevant capitals,” to save the lives of Saudi citizens fighting on the side of the Taliban. This also went for Saudi men trapped in Kunduz by the Northern Alliance, who could possibly become prisoners of war soon. They would be interrogated and put on trial in Saudi Arabia.

With about as much information shared with the U.S. as after the Khobar Towers bombing: none. It’s as if the Saudis have something to hide… What is the U.S. government’s position on this? On similar actions by the Pakistanis? I’ve read that General Franks doesn’t want us holding prisoners: why not?

I’ve been glad to see the extremely light U.S. casualties so far, but here is where we’re paying a price. By not having our own substantial ground forces attacking Kunduz, we have no leverage at all in determining what happens there: we can’t prevent massacres, we can’t prevent escapes, we lose access to people who could answer a lot of important questions: who do they know in the U.S., for example. I can understand that we don’t want to give the Taliban a rallying cause (”Americans are occupying us”) or a concentrated target to shoot at/gas/suicide bomb, but at this point I think we could risk that. American troops might be killed in greater numbers than we’ve seen to date, but we’d be able to take custody of (or kill) some very, very bad people we might never get our hands on again.

Saudi Grand Mufti Condemns Terrorist Acts in U.S. (9/15/2001):

“Firstly: the recent developments in the United States including hijacking planes, terrorizing innocent people and shedding blood, constitute a form of injustice that cannot be tolerated by Islam, which views them as gross crimes and sinful acts.

“Secondly: any Muslim who is aware of the teachings of his religion and who adheres to the directives of the Holy Qur’an and the sunnah (the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad) will never involve himself in such acts, because they will invoke the anger of God Almighty and lead to harm and corruption on earth.

“Thirdly: it is the duty of the Muslim ulema (religious scholars) to make facts clear in this respect, and to clarify that Islam never accepts such acts.

“Fourthly: the media which try to defame Islam and Muslims in order to rally against them the feelings of various nations, should immediately stop this unacceptable and unjustifiable practice, since all reasonable and just people know that such biased accusations have nothing to do with Islam.”

Three out of four ain’t bad, and the fourth depends on what you mean by “defaming Islam and Muslims.” I’m definitely not for wholesale bigotry against an entire part of the world, but it’s fair game to point out tenets of the Mufti’s own Wahhabite beliefs, or what some Muslims like Bin Laden and the Taliban believe.