America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (34 page)

Today, years after NATO came to their rescue, a steady stream of Bosnians and Kosovars leave their homeland and head off toward Syria and Iraq, where they enlist as fighters in the ongoing anti-American, anti-Western jihad.
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By waging war on behalf of an entirely different set of universal values, these jihadists render a belated verdict on Operations Determined Force and Allied Force. In both cases, appearances of success have proven illusory.

Almost as an afterthought, the Clinton administration initiated a campaign of sorts against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Like the War for the Greater Middle East as a whole to this point, this campaign was, by any measure, ineffectual. Apart from a vague expectation that projecting sternness might possibly weaken Al Qaeda or give bin Laden pause, it possessed little by way of a sense of direction and less still of a sense of urgency. Not quite certain about what it ought to do, the administration made a show of doing
something
, lest it stand accused of doing nothing. However unwittingly, those charged with formulating U.S. policy gave bin Laden further reason to think that the Americans might not be any tougher than the Soviets had been.

Wealthy son of a Saudi tycoon and something of a popular hero due to his exploits in Afghanistan, bin Laden spent the 1990s struggling to hone Al Qaeda into an instrument of jihad. In that regard, he made no effort to conceal his intentions. A rambling, prolix manifesto penned in 1996 described bin Laden’s grievances and outlined his vision. His central complaint was that “the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice” at the hands of a “Zionist-Crusader alliance.” As a consequence, throughout the Greater Middle East, Muslim “blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies.” In the face of “massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience,” the world had done nothing. Armed struggle had therefore become imperative, with an immediate objective of expelling U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia, where they protected an “oppressive and illegitimate” royal family. Apart from belief in Allah, bin Laden wrote, “there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land.”
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Two years later, from his sanctuary in Afghanistan, bin Laden added a coda. Ever since Operation Desert Storm, he charged, the United States had been “occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.” To put an end to this intolerable situation, bin Laden now declared it “an individual duty for every Muslim” to kill Americans, soldiers and civilians alike. Evicting foreign armies from “all the lands of Islam” and liberating Muslim holy sites in Mecca and Jerusalem required and justified violence.
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These were not secret communiqués but public pronouncements. The challenge for U.S. officials was to decide whether to treat bin Laden’s fatwas as the ravings of a madman or as a serious plan of action. After 9/11, the answer appeared self-evident. Yet when these documents first appeared, things were less clear.

Although bin Laden had declared war on the United States, his approach to waging that war took the form of occasional hit-and-run attacks. While hardly trivial, al Qaeda’s demonstrated capabilities during the 1990s did not match its leader’s grandiose intentions.

Moreover, not every terrorist attack conducted by Al Qaeda targeted Americans, and not every terrorist attack targeting Americans was attributable to Al Qaeda. As the 1990s unfolded, other names on the list of American enemies in the Greater Middle East took precedence. When Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the United States was effectively “at war” with Saddam Hussein and would soon find itself “at war” with Mohamed Farrah Aidid and Slobodan Milo
š
evi
ć
. It took his administration several years to conclude that the United States was also “at war” with bin Laden.

The Al Qaeda leader himself entertained no doubts in that regard. Moreover, bin Laden detected a pattern in U.S. military actions in Iraq, Somalia, the Balkans, and elsewhere. The United States, he believed, was intent on dominating the region outright. In truth, as President Clinton deepened U.S. military involvement in the region, he (like his immediate predecessors) never devised anything remotely approximating an actual strategy. Prevailing assumptions about U.S. military supremacy and history’s direction seemingly made strategy—which implies establishing priorities, making choices, and matching means to ends—unnecessary.

So as bin Laden’s war against the United States unfolded in fits and starts, it took a while for senior officials in Washington to take notice. It took longer still for them to respond. And when that response finally materialized, it amounted to little more than a poorly aimed kick in the shins.

The first known Al Qaeda attempt to kill Americans occurred in December 1992 in Yemen. Bombs detonated outside of two hotels in the Yemeni city of Aden used to billet U.S. troops in transit to Somalia. The attack misfired, causing few casualties, none of them Americans.
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Occurring in the interval between a U.S. election and the inauguration of a new president, the episode attracted little attention.

The second attack achieved greater success and attracted slightly greater notice. On February 26, 1993, terrorists detonated an explosives-laden van in the parking garage underneath New York’s World Trade Center, killing six, injuring a thousand, and causing over $500 million in damages. President Clinton, barely a month in office, used part of his weekly radio address—its main theme was economic policy—to promise federal assistance to state and local authorities investigating the incident. Americans needed to feel “safe in their streets, their offices, and their homes,” the president said. “Feeling safe is an essential part of being secure, and that’s important to all of us.”
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The next day Air Force One flew Clinton to Newark for a previously scheduled appearance. Telling reporters that Americans should not “overreact to this at this time,” the president chose not to visit the site of the bombing just across the Hudson.
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Nor did he speculate as to the motives or identity of the perpetrators, who in a statement released to the press identified themselves as members of “the fifth battalion in the Liberation Army.”
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In fact, there was no Liberation Army. The first bombing of the World Trade Center was the handiwork of a small jihadist cell based in the New York metropolitan area.

After a considerable interval, a pair of attacks in Saudi Arabia itself followed. In November 1995, a car bomb blew up outside of a building in Riyadh where Americans trained members of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), the monarchy’s internal security force. Five Americans were killed. The Saudi government arrested, interrogated, and quickly executed four suspects without allowing U.S. investigators to question them.
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In June of the following year, another vehicular bomb, this time in Dhahran, ripped apart the Khobar Towers apartment building housing the 4404th Wing (Provisional), the U.S. Air Force unit supporting Operation Southern Watch. Nineteen Americans died, and another 372 were injured by the blast. Less than fully cooperative Saudi authorities steered a team of U.S. investigators led by FBI Director Louis Freeh to the conclusion that Hezbollah, acting on Iran’s behalf, had organized the attack. In fact, all of those involved in the attack were Saudis.
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The Pentagon held the American commander on the scene, Brigadier General Terry Schwalier, responsible for lapses in security and subsequently relocated U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia to more remote and presumably safer locations.
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Apart from predictable scapegoating and second-guessing by members of Congress, this defined the extent of any response.

Viewing these events from a post–September 2001 vantage point creates a strong urge to see them as unheeded warnings of what lay ahead. And, indeed, in each case, wisps of evidence did hint at bin Laden’s possible involvement. So at least some U.S. officials probing the incident at Aden had suspected.
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From what we now know, an Al Qaeda precursor known as Maktab al-Khidamat, co-founded by bin Laden, probably helped fund the first attack on the World Trade Center. And
after
9/11, some senior U.S. officials saw bin Laden’s hand in the SANG and Khobar Towers incidents. In 2007, for example, William Perry, secretary of defense at the time of the Khobar Towers bombing, recanted his previous views, opining that the attack “was probably masterminded by Osama bin Laden.”
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At the time, however, bin Laden’s involvement in these events was not self-evident. Only with the next major episode, the simultaneous bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998, did the Al Qaeda leader start garnering serious attention.
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The embassy attacks, executed precisely eight years after U.S. forces had first begun arriving in Saudi Arabia, were carefully planned and devastatingly effective. In each case, a truck packed with explosives produced massive structural damage of the intended target. In Nairobi, the attack killed 227, including twelve Americans, and injured several thousand others, the great majority of them Kenyan bystanders. In Dar es Salaam, ten embassy employees, none of them Americans, were killed, and several dozen others were wounded.

Within twenty-four hours, President Clinton took to the airwaves to explain what had occurred. “Americans are targets of terrorism,” he said, “because we have unique leadership responsibilities in the world, because we act to advance peace and democracy, and because we stand united against terrorism.” The statement was at best incomplete and at worst misleading, designed not to inform but to reassure and thereby to conceal. The smoldering U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania heralded a problem whose complexity—historical, ideological, and religious—the president was not prepared to acknowledge. In place of elucidation, he offered resolve, promising to “continue to take the fight to terrorists.”
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How or against whom the United States was going to fight went unspecified.

In fact, with U.S. intelligence agencies quickly fingering bin Laden as responsible—CIA director George Tenet characterized the evidence as a “slam dunk”—Clinton opted for direct but limited military retaliation.
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In effect, the scope of America’s War for the Greater Middle East was now widening to include Al Qaeda.

Among the distinguishing characteristics of this new adversary, one in particular stood out: It was not a state but a movement. As such, it transcended place. Even so, to initiate their campaign against Al Qaeda, U.S. officials decided on a missile attack targeting a small set of fixed facilities.

Alternatives existed—the employment of piloted aircraft, the commitment of ground troops on a large scale, or a raid by special operations forces—but upon examination they all presented difficulties: longer timelines, the risk of U.S. casualties, the possibility of domestic political opposition. General Shelton, representing the views of the unenthusiastic Joint Chiefs, emphasized those potential difficulties. By comparison, a standoff attack employing ship-launched missiles appeared straightforward and comparatively easy.
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On the night of August 20, naval forces under the direction of Marine General Anthony Zinni, now commanding CENTCOM, fired the first salvos in the U.S. military campaign against Al Qaeda. This was Operation Infinite Reach, which despite the grand name was for all practical purposes an El Dorado Canyon do-over.

In the Arabian Sea, several surface ships and a submarine unleashed approximately seventy Tomahawk cruise missiles aimed at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. In the Red Sea, two other U.S. Navy surface combatants launched thirteen Tomahawks at a pharmaceutical factory located near the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, where bin Laden himself had lived for a time before decamping to Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence officials like Tenet believed that Al Qaeda leaders, possibly including bin Laden, had convened for a meeting at the camp, located at Khost, southeast of the Afghan capital of Kabul and near the Pakistani border. They also believed that the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant, which had opened for business in Khartoum just the year before, was producing chemicals that could be used to manufacture deadly nerve agents likely to end up in Al Qaeda’s hands.