Authors: Aki Peritz,Eric Rosenbach
Find, Fix, Finish (3 page)
Lethal action, as in the case of Baitullah Mehsud, and rendition, as with KSM and al-Libi, remove individuals from the global battlefield and prevent them from harming US citizens and interests. Lethal action may also disrupt ongoing or imminent terrorist planning, as critical individuals are removed from future plots.
The mechanics of finishing terrorists is easier than ever before, but significant legal, ethical, and political complications remain. Some of the complications of nonlethal methods were demonstrated in the cases of al-Libi and KSM. Once a terrorist suspect is in custody, US officials must decide how to proceed with his incarceration. One option is to bring the terrorist suspect to trial, but this obliges American officials to provide some sort of legitimate legal process. Another option is to detain him indefinitely, which, beyond the likely unconstitutionality of this alternative, begs thornier questions of where to imprison him and under what conditions. US officials can deport a detainee to a third country, as in the case of Osama bin Laden’s driver Salim Hamdan. After spending time in the detention center at the Guantanamo Bay naval base, he was deported and is today living quietly in Yemen. But freed individuals may then engage in terrorism or militant activity, as was the case for former Guantanamo Bay detainees Said Ali al-Shihri, who became the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader, and Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, who became a Taliban commander.
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American attempts to adapt the find-fix-finish paradigm to a new era have not come without high political costs. The Bush administration famously stated that the war on terror should not be fought as a law enforcement exercise; at the same time, President Bush claimed that terrorists would be “brought to justice.” If we measure justice in terms of fair trials and convictions, the US has fallen short of that standard. Despite more than three hundred convictions for terrorist-related offenses in civilian courts and a handful in military courts since 9/11, the US has yet to place a single al-Qaeda leader on trial, let alone obtain convictions and sentences. Moreover, the ongoing debate inside and outside the Obama administration over whether al-Qaeda and Taliban militants should be tried in civilian or military courts—as well as other festering issues, such as the ongoing inability to shutter Guantanamo Bay—demonstrates the hard decisions Americans face in determining the appropriate manner of finishing the threat. The US continues to grapple with the thorny political, legal, and moral problems, seeking clear-cut answers that will maintain its legal and ethical footing in very uncertain, constantly shifting political terrain.
IN SEARCH OF MONSTERSSome might argue that America’s new national security paradigm ignores the warning that President John Quincy Adams uttered in 1821 and makes it a nation that goes abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” Whether the US has the foresight to cease, as Adams said, involving itself “beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom” remains up for debate. In an interconnected world, however, some of the monsters have the will to journey here unless they are stopped.
The ability of some organizations to create havoc should not be underestimated, especially when they have indicated a strong desire to procure chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Osama bin Laden said in 1998 that it was his obligation in furthering jihad to acquire weapons of mass destruction; this public statement followed al-Qaeda’s various attempts to procure uranium since the early 1990s.
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Beyond al-Qaeda, other terrorist groups, such as Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Jemaah Islamiya, Aum Shinrikyo, and Lashkar al Tayyib, have tried to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
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Indeed, the possibility of WMD—especially nuclear weapons—falling into the wrong hands is, as then-Senator Obama said in 2008, “the gravest danger” the US faces today.
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Beyond al-Qaeda, other terrorist groups, such as Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Jemaah Islamiya, Aum Shinrikyo, and Lashkar al Tayyib, have tried to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
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Indeed, the possibility of WMD—especially nuclear weapons—falling into the wrong hands is, as then-Senator Obama said in 2008, “the gravest danger” the US faces today.
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Pursuing an effective national security strategy abroad in the post-9 /11 era also requires a new approach to political consensus at home. Given the controversial nature of many of the tools now routinely used by the US government to protect our interests, it is critical to receive the support of Congress and the public at large. The hyperpartisanship displayed on various issues must not hinder our ability to pursue new threats to American security in an ethical and legal manner.
More importantly, scoring cheap political points at the expense of national security corrodes the public’s faith in the government’s ability to protect it from attack. What America sorely needs is an adult, bipartisan consensus within the legislative branch on how to proceed on security issues that brings legitimacy, intellectual rigor, and a sense of permanence to our often ad hoc security system. A new national security consensus will also allow the US to better appreciate the intelligence and military costs of these efforts, as well as rein in future leaders guided by a misplaced zeal to protect the country from attack.
Finally, to confront security threats in the twenty-first century, the US will require a more nuanced approach to the world, as foreign liaison relationships, particularly with Middle Eastern and South Asian countries, become instrumental in isolating and ending terror networks. A standoffish attitude toward international laws and norms jeopardizes international relationships and the nation’s moral standing. Furthermore, using the new tactical tools in a sloppy manner—such as rendering people to noxious countries like Syria or firing Hellfire missiles into dwellings in Pakistan without regard to civilian casualties—will undermine these methods politically and morally, and make protecting US interests more difficult. By revealing how America reinvented its approach to security after 9/11 and by showing its successes and failures, we hope to contribute to a wiser, safer future for the US and its allies.
CHAPTER 2
ATROPHY
National Security Before 9/11
O
n December 21, 1998, the head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit grumpily wrote to Gary Schroen, the CIA’s chief of station (COS) in Islamabad, that he had been unable to sleep the night before. “I’m sure we’ll regret not acting last night,” he told him in an e-mail. Faced with a National Security Council (NSC) “obsessed” with convincing the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Afghan tribal members to “do what we won’t do”—capture or kill Osama bin Laden—he was feeling very frustrated.
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n December 21, 1998, the head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit grumpily wrote to Gary Schroen, the CIA’s chief of station (COS) in Islamabad, that he had been unable to sleep the night before. “I’m sure we’ll regret not acting last night,” he told him in an e-mail. Faced with a National Security Council (NSC) “obsessed” with convincing the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Afghan tribal members to “do what we won’t do”—capture or kill Osama bin Laden—he was feeling very frustrated.
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The day before, the administration’s top national security and intelligence officials had assembled in response to intelligence indicating that bin Laden would be spending the night at the Taliban governor’s residence near Kandahar, Afghanistan. The question was whether or not to strike the house with a cruise missile, thereby ending the threat posed by bin Laden.
By this point, the NSC wanted to eliminate bin Laden. Just over four months earlier, al-Qaeda had simultaneously bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing over two hundred and wounding thousands more. Still, top officials debated whether to support and authorize a strike against bin Laden. Available analysis indicated that an air strike against him might kill hundreds of innocent people and damage a neighborhood mosque. Doubting the reliability of the intelligence—there was only a 50 percent chance it was accurate—the NSC decided that the plan was too risky and nixed it.
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This was not the first time the NSC had declined an opportunity to target bin Laden, nor would it be the last. By 1997, the intelligence community (IC) had recognized the magnitude of the threat he posed and had begun developing plans to capture or eliminate him. They took these proposed operations to President Clinton and NSC members. Following the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and the 1996 attacks on the Khobar Towers military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, they recognized the necessity of acting against terrorist networks.
By all accounts, President Clinton approved the plans that were placed before him and authorized the IC to carry them out.
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Still, various members of the intelligence, military, and policymaking communities opposed the implementation of almost every capture or strike proposed against bin Laden, claiming each time that the chances of success were too low and the risks associated with failure were too high.
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Thus no matter how firmly the Clinton White House publicly stated its intention to counter the threat posed by bin Laden, little direct action—with the exception of one round of cruise missile strikes in 1998—was taken against him before 9/11.
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Still, various members of the intelligence, military, and policymaking communities opposed the implementation of almost every capture or strike proposed against bin Laden, claiming each time that the chances of success were too low and the risks associated with failure were too high.
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Thus no matter how firmly the Clinton White House publicly stated its intention to counter the threat posed by bin Laden, little direct action—with the exception of one round of cruise missile strikes in 1998—was taken against him before 9/11.
The options, it seemed, were simply not good enough. Two days before the African embassy bombings, a note taker at a meeting of the NSC’s Counterterrorism Security Group scribbled that when it came to how the government should confront bin Laden, “there was a dearth of bright ideas around the table, despite a consensus that the [government] ought to pursue every avenue it can to address the problem.”
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In fact, a dearth of ideas wasn’t the problem; it was that for every plan there was a risk-averse counterreaction. In 1997 the CIA had begun developing plans to render bin Laden from Afghanistan and bring him to the US. These plans did not envision CIA operatives entering Afghanistan at all. Rather, the CIA would recruit and instruct members of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance to conduct the operations.
However, CIA leadership rejected one such plan—allegedly the most detailed proposal prior to 9/11—three months before the African embassy bombings: the risks were seen as too great considering the low chances of success.
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All future plans to send US forces after bin Laden would similarly be rejected by CIA’s leadership, often in conjunction with members of the NSC, for a laundry list of reasons: al-Qaeda might retaliate against US interests; Afghan tribal elements or Northern Alliance forces might prove unreliable; there might be a lack of prosecutable evidence against bin Laden and the US might fail to convict him once he was captured; the operation, if discovered, might be misconstrued as an illegal assassination attempt; the financial cost might be too great; killing or capturing bin Laden might bring more extremists flocking to al-Qaeda’s cause.
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All future plans to send US forces after bin Laden would similarly be rejected by CIA’s leadership, often in conjunction with members of the NSC, for a laundry list of reasons: al-Qaeda might retaliate against US interests; Afghan tribal elements or Northern Alliance forces might prove unreliable; there might be a lack of prosecutable evidence against bin Laden and the US might fail to convict him once he was captured; the operation, if discovered, might be misconstrued as an illegal assassination attempt; the financial cost might be too great; killing or capturing bin Laden might bring more extremists flocking to al-Qaeda’s cause.
The CIA could have eliminated one of the above objections—the unreliability of the Afghans—by sending a team from its Special Activities Division to hunt bin Laden. Doing so, however, would certainly have increased the risks associated with failure. Possessing relatively little capacity or will for paramilitary action and still reeling from budget cuts, personnel losses, and a decade of drifting leadership, the Agency was reluctant to risk yet another failed covert action.
Before 2001 the military was hesitant to conduct operations, despite the fact that it had some capacity to do so. Since the founding of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in 1980, the military had been honing a special operations capability for counterterrorism. Following the 1998 embassy bombings, it had developed plans for capture or kill operations against terrorist targets including bin Laden. Still, the military leadership remained hesitant to authorize complex quick-strike operations deep in hostile territory, pointing repeatedly to the disastrous effects of the 1980 hostage rescue attempt in Iran and the 1993 battle of Mogadishu memorialized in the book and movie
Black Hawk Down
. To complicate matters further, the military had no suitable bases in the region from which to conduct operations against bin Laden or maintain backup and search and rescue capabilities if the operation went poorly. US relations with Afghanistan’s neighbors Iran and Pakistan were, to put it charitably, somewhere between strained and nonexistent, and the closest US military bases were a thousand miles away in the Persian Gulf.
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Black Hawk Down
. To complicate matters further, the military had no suitable bases in the region from which to conduct operations against bin Laden or maintain backup and search and rescue capabilities if the operation went poorly. US relations with Afghanistan’s neighbors Iran and Pakistan were, to put it charitably, somewhere between strained and nonexistent, and the closest US military bases were a thousand miles away in the Persian Gulf.
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So despite the administration’s numerous requests for more options to eliminate bin Laden and al-Qaeda, launching cruise missiles from offshore naval vessels was the only one to satisfy everyone’s need to minimize risk. Unfortunately, even this effort by the Clinton administration failed to achieve its objective.
ADRIFT IN THE POST–COLD WAR ERA“What are you going to do now that you’ve lost your best enemy?” Mikhail Gorbachev laconically inquired of national security advisor Colin Powell in April 1988.
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Although he was referring to the introduction of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s query suggested the problems top US policymakers would face when the USSR collapsed three years later. The shattering of the two-superpower framework of the previous half century left the US leadership struggling to construct a new national security strategy.
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Although he was referring to the introduction of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s query suggested the problems top US policymakers would face when the USSR collapsed three years later. The shattering of the two-superpower framework of the previous half century left the US leadership struggling to construct a new national security strategy.
“The end of the Cold War was followed by a period of strategic drift,” remarked Brent Scowcroft, who took over as national security advisor in 1989.
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The first Bush administration promised that the period following the demise of the Soviet Union would provide a “peace dividend,” implying that the implosion of America’s greatest enemy had left the US with no tangible existential threats—and that a more peaceful world would emerge, with America as the undisputed beneficiary.
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The first Bush administration promised that the period following the demise of the Soviet Union would provide a “peace dividend,” implying that the implosion of America’s greatest enemy had left the US with no tangible existential threats—and that a more peaceful world would emerge, with America as the undisputed beneficiary.
It was a hopeful time.
President George H. W. Bush had a full plate of foreign affairs conundrums, including managing the fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the weakening of communism throughout Eastern Europe, and the first US confrontation with Saddam Hussein. However, Bush had no formal policy on counterterrorism because none seemed necessary. When Clinton took office in 1993, he similarly lacked a solid counterterrorism agenda. “The notion that terrorism might occur in the United States was completely new to us,” wrote Richard Clarke, head of the NSC’s Counterterrorism Security Group. “The National Security Council staff, which I had joined in 1992, had only ever concerned itself with foreign policy, defense, and intelligence issues.”
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