{"id":48454,"date":"2014-10-13T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2014-10-13T11:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=48454"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:29:40","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:29:40","slug":"the-khorasan-group-creation-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/10\/the-khorasan-group-creation-myth\/","title":{"rendered":"The Khorasan Group Creation Myth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Glenn Greenwald\u2019s report that the Khorasan group was hyped to mobilize support for attacking the Islamic State sounds credible.<\/em><\/p>\n

In a much-discussed article at First Look, Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain<\/a> analyze how the Khorasan Group suddenly emerged as the terrorist organization du jour. No, it\u2019s not that the news cycle is so short that the Islamic State is old news. Nor is it because the Islamic State is no longer a threat. Greenwald and Hussain write:<\/p>\n

As the Obama Administration prepared to bomb Syria without congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a\u00a0new years-long war\u00a0against ISIS, a group that clearly\u00a0posed no imminent threat to the \u201chomeland.\u201d\u00a0A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.<\/p>\n

The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded \u201cThe Khorasan Group.\u201d After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat \u2014 too radical even for Al Qaeda! \u2014 administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.<\/p>\n

An Associated Press<\/a> article to which Greenwald and Hussain link shows the hair-raising light in which the so-called Khorasan group was portrayed.<\/p>\n

\u2026 the Khorasan militants did not go to Syria principally to fight the government of President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials say. Instead, they were sent by al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to recruit Europeans and Americans whose passports allow them to board a U.S.-bound airliner with less scrutiny from security officials.<\/p>\n

Thus<\/p>\n

The bombing campaign in Syria was thus magically transformed into an act of pure self-defense, given that\u00a0\u201cthe group was actively plotting against a U.S. homeland target and Western targets, a senior U.S. official told CNN on Tuesday.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026The very next day, a Pentagon official claimed a U.S. airstrike killed \u201cthe Khorasan leader,\u201d and just a few days after that,\u00a0U.S. media outlets celebrated\u00a0what they said was the admission by jihadi social media accounts that \u201cthe leader of the al Qaeda-linked Khorasan group was killed in a U.S. air strike in Syria.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mission accomplished, write Greenwald and Hussain.<\/p>\n

\u2026 once it served its purpose of justifying the start of the bombing campaign in Syria, the Khorasan narrative simply evaporated as quickly as it materialized.\u00a0Foreign\u00a0Policy<\/em>\u2019s Shane Harris, with two other writers, was one of the first to question\u00a0whether the \u201cthreat\u201d was anywhere near what it had been depicted to be:<\/p>\n

But according to the top U.S. counterterrorism official, as well as Obama himself, there is \u201cno credible information\u201d that the militants of the Islamic State were planning to attack inside the United States.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In fact<\/p>\n

On September 25,\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 just days after hyping the Khorasan threat to the homeland \u2014\u00a0wrote\u00a0that \u201cthe group\u2019s evolution from obscurity to infamy has been sudden.\u201d And the paper of record began, for the first time, to note how little evidence actually existed for all those claims about the imminent threats posed to the homeland.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happened here is all-too-familiar,\u201d Greenwald and Hussain wrote.<\/p>\n

The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing\u00a0yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war.<\/p>\n

So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda\u2122, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS\u2122.<\/p>\n

This can also be viewed as a strategy employed by the administration to compensate and provide cover for its early paralysis. In a July article titled Obama administration knew Islamic State was growing but did little to counter it<\/a>, McClatchy\u2019s Jonathan Landay wrote:<\/p>\n

Like the rest of the world, the U.S. government appeared to have been taken aback last month when Mosul, Iraq\u2019s second largest city, fell. \u2026 A review of the record shows, however, that the Obama administration wasn\u2019t surprised at all.<\/p>\n

In congressional testimony as far back as November, U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials made clear that the United States had been closely tracking the al Qaida spinoff since 2012, when it enlarged its operations from Iraq to civil war-torn Syria, seized an oil-rich province there and signed up thousands of foreign fighters who\u2019d infiltrated Syria through NATO ally Turkey.<\/p>\n

The testimony, which received little news media attention at the time, also showed that Obama administration officials were well aware of the group\u2019s declared intention to turn its Syrian sanctuary into a springboard from which it would send men and materiel back into Iraq and unleash waves of suicide bombings there. And they knew that the Iraqi security forces couldn\u2019t handle it<\/p>\n

Then Landay asks, \u201cIf the Obama administration had such early warning of the Islamic State\u2019s ambitions, why, nearly two months after the fall of Mosul, is it still assessing what steps, if any, to take to halt the advance of Islamist extremists who threaten U.S. allies in the region and have vowed to attack Americans?\u201d After all:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a very clear case in which the U.S. knew what was going on but followed a policy of deliberate neglect,\u201d said Vali Nasr, the dean of Johns Hopkins University\u2019s School of Advanced International Studies and a former State Department adviser on the Middle East.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis miscalculation essentially has helped realize the worst nightmare for this administration, an administration that prided itself on its counterterrorism strategy,\u201d said Nasr. \u201cIt is now presiding over the resurgence of a nightmare of extremism and terrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAdministration officials,\u201d however, \u201cdeny the charges of inaction. U.S. policy, they contend, was aimed at helping the Iraqi government deal with the growing threat.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was also the desire of the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government wanted to act on its own with our assistance,\u201d McGurk told Congress this week. He insisted that Baghdad didn\u2019t formally request U.S. airstrikes until May.<\/p>\n

Returning to the subject of paralysis:<\/p>\n

\u2026 What is indisputable, [Phillip Smyth, a Middle East researcher at the University of Maryland]said, is that the White House became immobilized by the complexity of the crisis: Having declared that Assad had to go, it found that there was no opposition group that didn\u2019t have some ties to jihadists, and actively backing the rebels would put the United States on the same side as al Qaida.<\/p>\n

\u2026 While there are many reasons for the Obama administration\u2019s failure to tackle the rise of the Islamic State earlier, lacking intelligence is not among them.<\/p>\n

In support of that thesis, on Sept. 30, in the New York Times,<\/em> Peter Baker and Eric Schmitt<\/a> wrote that, though \u201cIntelligence agencies were caught off guard by the speed of the extremists\u2019 subsequent advance across northern Iraq,\u201d<\/p>\n

By late last year, classified American intelligence reports painted an increasingly ominous picture of a growing threat from Sunni extremists in\u00a0Syria, according to senior intelligence and military officials. Just as worrisome, they said, were reports of deteriorating readiness and morale among troops next door in\u00a0Iraq.<\/p>\n

But the reports, they said, generated little attention in a White House consumed with multiple brush fires and reluctant to be drawn back into Iraq. \u201cSome of us were pushing the reporting, but the White House just didn\u2019t pay attention to it,\u201d said a senior American intelligence official. \u201cThey were preoccupied with other crises,\u201d the official added. \u201cThis just wasn\u2019t a big priority.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, \u201cthe question of how [the administration] failed to anticipate the rise of a militant force that in the space of a few months has redrawn the map of the Middle East resonates inside and outside the Obama administration\u201d lingers. The U.S. government<\/p>\n

\u2026 as a whole was largely focused on the group as a source of foreign fighters who might pose a terrorism threat when they returned home, not as a force intent on seizing territory.<\/p>\n

\u2026 In interviews in recent weeks, administration officials privately agreed that they had not focused enough on the Islamic State\u2019s territorial ambitions but said they were hamstrung in responding by an Iraqi government that was fanning the sectarian divide that helped give rise to the Sunni extremists in the first place.<\/p>\n

One can\u2019t help but be sympathetic with the president:<\/p>\n

Even so, Mr. Obama was determined not to let the United States be dragged back into a war that he had opposed from the start and that he had promised during his first campaign for the White House to end. After five years in office, aides said, Mr. Obama was convinced that the United States was too quick to pull the military lever whenever it confronted a foreign crisis. He would not repeat what he considered the mistake of his predecessor President George W. Bush.<\/p>\n

Still, write Baker and Schmitt:<\/p>\n

To anyone watching developments in Iraq from mid-2010 and Syria from early 2011, the recovery and rise of ISIS should have been starkly clear,\u201d said Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. \u201cThe organization itself was also carrying out an explicitly clear step-by-step strategy aimed at engendering the conditions that would feed its accelerated rise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 fpif.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Glenn Greenwald\u2019s report that the Khorasan group was hyped to mobilize support for attacking the Islamic State sounds credible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}