While the Obama administration is admirably devoting resources toward averting the “known unknown” of Iranian foreign statecraft being formulated by an apocalyptic-minded, radical religious ideologue with a nuclear arsenal at his disposal, a decades-old destructive feature of Tehran’s foreign policy continues to suffer more than just benign neglect: The Islamic Republic’s myriad forms of support for militant Islamist elements designated terrorists by not just the US, but also a majority of developed nations. Among them is al-Qaeda — there’s no question about it.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recently testified that al-Qaeda poses no less significant a threat to U.S. interests today than a decade ago. Yet demands from the administration that could serve to disrupt the so-called “secret deal,” as the Treasury Department put it in July 2011, between top Iranian officials and senior al-Qaeda leaders have not been forthcoming.
Just this month Treasury officials shared with the press that the Iranians have allowed a top al-Qaeda fundraiser, Yasin al-Suri, to continue operating inside Iran. Just this month Treasury announced the designation of another “key Iran-based al-Qaeda facilitator who supports al-Qaeda’s vital facilitation network in Iran, that operates there with the knowledge of Iranian authorities.” As noted by the Treasury Department, the al-Qaeda members and facilitators Iran is allowing to operate within its borders are playing important roles funneling people and money to al-Qaeda’s newest franchise, Jabhat al-Nusrah.
Meanwhile, Jabhat al-Nusrah — a Sunni insurgent group — is busy conducting attacks against both the Iranian regime’s top regional ally, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and Tehran’s chief terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. But more important, according to America’s top intelligence official, Jabhat al-Nusrah is preparing jihadis to attack the U.S.
As observed by Dipak K. Gupta in a June 2011 submission to the Journal of American History, contributors to the field of terrorism studies “often explicitly aim to influence public policies.” Regrettably, no contributors to this field have managed to spark activity on the foreign policy-making front sufficient to deter Iran from using terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy.
With respect to Iran’s history as a state sponsor of terrorism there is no shortage of low-hanging fruit any given member of Congress could use as the basis for crafting bills that seek to empower America’s Special Operations community to engage in more robust efforts to disrupt and deter such behavior. As lamented in 2011 by terrorism expert David C. Rapoport, Americans’ “indifference to history” has had a damaging impact on our ability to learn from past acts of terrorism — perhaps more appropriately, inaction in the case of Iran-backed terrorism — in order to improve America’s counterterrorism posture.
Still, the chorus of concerns about the Obama administration’s “policy entrepreneurship” on the Iran front flowing from the offices of Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike, can only mean Americans do not think fondly of the regime in control of Iran, and probably don’t favor reducing pressures placed on it by their government. In other words, despite such an “indifference to history,” Americans haven’t forgotten about the embassy hostage crisis (thanks in no small part to Hollywood), attacks in Beirut that claimed the lives of hundreds of U.S. servicemen, and so on.
Admittedly, late in April 2011 I, too, had the above aim cited by Gupta in mind when I presented the 100 or so members of Congress involved with Congress’s official think tank on terror-related concerns, the now moribund Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus (ATC), a report on this issue. Titled “The al-Qa’ida-Qods Force Nexus,” the report received a great deal of interest among policymakers on the Hill. One of them, Rep. Jeff Duncan, a member of the both the House Foreign Affairs and Homeland Security committees, inserted the report into the Congressional Record while then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was visiting New York in September 2011. Shortly thereafter Rep. Duncan’s co-authored the Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act of 2012. (My report was included among the short list of source documents distributed to members of the House and Senate by the bill’s authors.)
Quietly inked by President Obama late in December 2012, that act seeks to limit Iran’s capabilities to engage in an array of nefarious activities in the Western hemisphere. Its contents do not address matters like Tehran providing operating space sufficient for al-Qaeda to house its so-called “shadow shura,” to borrow a phrase from terrorism expert Seth Jones’ January 2012 article in Foreign Affairs, on Iranian soil.
Of course, given that a year earlier Iran’s Qods Force had sought to leverage the logistical resources of drug smugglers to execute attacks on foreign diplomatic facilities and officials in Washington, DC, it’s understandable American politicians were concerned about the operations in their own backyard of the Qods Force, an official Iranian entity established to help create, fund, train, and equip many of the Islamist militant groups the U.S. State Department has labeled Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
Nevertheless, in May 2011, at a time when President Obama was eyes-deep in activities that would solidify his legacy as a hunter and killer of senior al-Qaeda leaders — SEAL Team 6 members descended upon a compound that stood out like a sore thumb from its surrounding in Abbottabad, Pakistan two days after the ATC received my report — it seemed plausible that an administration willing to engage in a mini-invasion of territory controlled by our “ally” Pakistan might soon assert a bolder posture toward a much more hostile country also within arm’s reach of America’s warfighters in Afghanistan. Particularly since Iran has knowingly helped al-Qaeda’s leadership cadres survive the most expensive counterterrorism efforts undertaken in the history of the world. And especially because, with its support of an array of militant Islamist elements, Iran has been doing a fine job of killing Americans and our allies without nuclear weapons for the past 30 years, as foreign policy scholar and Iran expert Michael Ledeen likes to point out.
Moreover, despite ill-conceived views published a year after the Abbottabad raid by the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point in its analysis of a very limited number of the thousands of pages of intel seized from bin Laden’s home office (See “the relationship is not one of alliance”), officials familiar with the contents of the much larger, still classified sets of materials managed by USSOCOM were telling a conflicting story. Accordingly, and as highlighted in reporting by terrorism expert Tom Joscelyn, data obtained during the Abbottabad raid highlights outright collusion with al-Qaeda on the part of the government of Iran. Hence Treasury’s revelations regarding the “secret deal” between Iran and al-Qaeda that surfaced within months of the Abbottabad raid.
Fortunately, by highlighting the secret deal struck between these odd bedfellows, Treasury was moving discussion of this issue beyond the realm of “Gray Area stuff,” as an editor of a prominent publication devoted to geopolitics described it in a 2011 e-mail to me, before deeming the subject too risky to address. But theoretically more important, and as former CIA Mid East political analyst Dan Byman put it seven months later in a February 2012 Foreign Policy piece: “highlighting Tehran’s ties to al-Qaida, as the Treasury designation quietly does, is a valuable form of pressure. Because Iran and al-Qaeda both have an interest in keeping their relationship hidden, making it public may undermine it — or at least stop the ties from getting stronger.”
Indeed, months later, while responding to an invitation for a submission focused on this issue from the editor of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, this sort of shaming via open source publication was on my mind while coauthoring with former Dutch Military Intelligence officer Ronald Sandee a report titled “Iran and the Global Jihad: Exploring How the Impossible Became Inevitable.” However, as expected, a reviewer assigned to our piece advised that, although there is a need for more studies focused on the relationship, the material we submitted would be better suited for publication in a magazine than a scholarly journal. Fortunately, the report did receive mention in a March 2013 news piece focused on the Obama administration’s decision to try in a criminal court Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of bin Laden and an al-Qaida spokesman who lived in Iran for about a decade following the 9/11 attacks, which drew some interest.
Jump ahead about a year: We’re just months away from the 10-year anniversary of the publication of the 9/11 Commission Report. Its authors, after acknowledging the relationship between al-Qaeda and Iran demonstrates that Sunni-Shiite divisions “did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations,” concluded discussion of potential Iranian involvement in the deadliest terrorist attacks on US soil by noting, “We believe this topic requires further investigation by the US government.” It’s also been more than two years since a federal judge affirmed evidence of the government of Iran’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks. And today, the government of Iran is clearly desperate to reclaim assets frozen by the U.S. Treasury Department. Meanwhile, Treasury’s efforts focused on elevating awareness of Tehran’s ties to al-Qaeda are obviously not doing much to undermine this relationship.
Obviously, any successful effort to publicly shame Iranian government officials for their support of al-Qaeda will require participation from higher-profile officials than representatives of the Treasury Department. Given that, wouldn’t it make sense for President Obama to publicly ask Ayatollah Khamenei to hand over senior al-Qaeda leaders and key facilitators living comfortably in Iran in exchange for Iranian assets frozen by the USG?
Certainly, if tensions between radical Shiites and Sunnis are as severe as has been suggested by those who have detrimentally shaped American counterterrorism policy by blindly arguing Iranian officials will not assist al-Qaeda leaders, it should be politically easier for Iran’s Supreme Leader to oblige a quid pro quo proposal along these lines than one which entails halting a “nuclear energy” program that actually receives much popular support among Iranians.
The question is: What does President Obama stand to lose?
Michael S. Smith II is a co-founder of Kronos Advisory, counterterrorism advisor to members of the United States Congress, and a senior analyst with Wikistrat. Follow him on Twitter @MichaelSSmithII