Losing the Battle of Benghazi

Clifford May:

Now that the election is behind us, perhaps we can put politics aside and acknowledge a hard fact: On Sept. 11 of this year, America was defeated by al Qaeda in the Battle of Benghazi. 

About this battle many questions remain. The media and Congress have a responsibility to get answers — not only because we should know the truth, not only to assign blame, but also to learn from failure.

At the very least, we should try to understand what lessons our enemies have learned — because they will apply those lessons in the future.

It is possible to lose many battles and still win a war. It is possible to win many battles and still lose a war. What is perilous is to misunderstand your enemies and underestimate the threats they pose.

This was the case prior to Sept. 11, 2001, as Condoleezza Rice candidly admitted to the 9/11 Commission in 2004. “The terrorists were at war with us,” she said, “but we were not yet at war with them.”

On Sept. 11, 2012, the situation was similar. Peter Bergen, a director of the New America Foundation and CNN’s national security analyst, had been saying for months that al Qaeda was “defeated,” a thesis endorsed by, among others, retired Lt. Col. Thomas Lynch III, a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University.

President Obama made this claim a central theme of his re-election campaign. Post-Benghazi, in his final stump speech, in Des Moines, Iowa, he reassured voters that “the war in Iraq has ended, the war in Afghanistan is ending. Osama bin Laden is dead!”

But in Afghanistan, we have not broken the Taliban; in Iraq, al Qaeda has been increasing the tempo of its suicide attacks; in Syria, al Qaeda is playing an increasingly significant role in the civil war; in Yemen, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is far from beaten; in Mali, al Qaeda has taken control of vast territories; in Iran, a regime whose ideology is no less anti-American than al Qaeda’s continues to develop nuclear weapons despite tightening sanctions.

According to The New York Times, in the months leading up to the “attacks on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, the Obama administration received intelligence reports that Islamic extremist groups were operating training camps in the mountains near Benghazi and that some of the fighters were ‘al Qaeda leaning.’”

That’s an oddly tentative way to refer to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an affiliate; Ansar al-Sharia, recently described by US government researchers as a group that “has increasingly embodied al Qaeda’s presence in Libya”; and the Muhammad Jamal network, which openly defends al Qaeda and, to quote Muhammad Jamal, “all jihad movements in the world.” These three groups were primary participants in the Benghazi attacks, American officials have said.

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What’s to stop “al Qaeda leaning” groups from replicating the Benghazi model elsewhere? What can be done to prevent jihadist training camps from springing up like weeds across North Africa and the broader Middle East and training wave after wave of bomb makers, suicide bombers and guerrillas? Are these threats even being taken seriously? I’m not confident.
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We now know that Africom had inadequate resources to deal with the attacks because Washington ignored the threat even though there was ample evidence of a gathering storm.   Ignoring threats will not make them go away.  A passive aggressive policy has its limits.

Wars do not end on a schedule.  Wars end when an adversary comes to believe that his cause is hopeless.  It is not enough that the Obama administration think al Qaeda's cause is hopeless. From that perspective it has always been hopeless, but the attacks will not stop until al Qaeda comes to that conclusion.