TerrorismKSM: al Qaeda’s strategy is war of attrition to force U.S. out of Islamic lands

In one of the only statements he has made since his capture in 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks, has said al Qaeda is in “a war of attrition” with the United States.

He made the statement during a 27 February interview with U.S. defense attorneys for Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, who is facing conspiracy charges in a U.S. federal court in New York. Mohammed spoke in detail about the ideology which undergirded the 2001 terrorist attacks and changed the course of U.S. foreign policy.

The Guardian reports that throughout the interview, which was facilitated by the U.S. military command at Guantánamo Bay, Mohammed portrayed al Qaeda as a scrappy underdog compelled to attack a much more powerful United States in order to expose and thwart what al Qaeda saw was the leader of global iniquity, hypocrisy, and godlessness.

“The enemy occupier of the Islamic world is a super power with a budget of billions while we are a small organization whose members are limited in numbers and capabilities. There is no comparison between the two sides, so it is obvious that we would have to resort to a long war of attrition to which the military and media alike contribute,” Mohammed told attorneys for Abu Ghaith.

Abu Ghaith’s attorneys filed a motion with the court to allow Mohammed to testify from his Guantánamo Bay detention facility via closed-circuit television. The prosecution requested that Mohammed’s testimony be disallowed, but the judge on Monday did not immediately rule on the request.

Mohammed told defense attorneys Abu Ghaith “did not play any military role” in al Qaeda and probably did not swear an oath to Bin Laden. Mohammed also denied that Abu Ghaith played any role in a botched 2001 plot to smuggle bombs on planes inside shoes.

The Guardian notes that this is Mohammed’s most extensive public statement since his 2007 comments at a subsequently abandoned military commission at Guantánamo, which he termed an “inquisition” before saying he would plead guilty to the 9/11 attacks.

Mohammed said the primary operational goal of al Qaeda was to provoke the United States into futile, expensive, and bloody wars, thus advancing a strategic aim of forcing U.S. and Western retrenchment from Islamic lands.

“Every state of emergency declared and every change of alert level that inflicts specific procedures on the military and civilian sectors costs the country millions of dollars. It is enough that the U.S. government has incurred losses upwards of a trillion dollars in the wars it has waged in the aftermath of 9/11, the bleeding of which continues to this day,” Mohammed said.

Mohammed expanded on arguments he made at Guantánamo in 2007, when he accepted responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, saying that the United States is the hypocritical puppet-master of what amounts to a global besiegement of Muslims.

“Some visitors of every type met members of the government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and some even visited the Mujahideen camps if they were trustworthy from a security point of view. That does not mean that anyone who visited a Mujahideen camp or gave a lecture was a member of the group or agreed with their ideology,” Mohammed told Abu Ghaith’s lawyers.

Mohammed portrayed the United States as rapaciously hypocritical, funding extremist Islamic organizations during the 1980s as proxies against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “At the time, Jihadist speeches were accepted and even supported and applauded by the West because they mirrored their strategic interests,” he said. After Islamist uprisings began in Bosnia and Chechnya in the 1990s, “the term changed from ‘Mujahid’ to ‘terrorist’ and from ‘Jihad’ to ‘terrorism’.”

Mohammed did explain why, in his view, the United States began to demonize Muslim religious extremists whose goals coincided with those he attributes to Washington, such as checking the influence of Russian proxies in the Balkans or Russia itself in Chechnya.

He did describe Afghanistan under Taliban rule as a golden age, its people spared “pillaging, looting, killing, rape and gang violence.” Mohammed claimed Kandahar, Kabul and, Jalalabad under the Taliban were “even more secure than American cities such as Chicago, New York, Dallas and Los Angeles.”

Mohammed said the growth of al Qaeda in Afghanistan was the result of U.S. neglect of post-Soviet Afghanistan — “stupid foreign policy … completely blind to what was happening in the camps,” he stated — but then went on to claim Washington worked with Pakistani intelligence in the 1990s to keep Afghanistan weak.

“All of that was done to ensure that even if the Mujahideen prevailed and expelled the Russians they would be left powerless and Afghanistan would remain dependent on Pakistan, India, Iran or Tajikistan, just as the West desired,” Mohammed stated.