The Longest War (18 page)

The 9/11 attacks were an enormous tactical success for al-Qaeda. They involved well-coordinated strikes on multiple targets in the heart of the enemy, magnified through their global broadcast. The 9/11 “propaganda of the deed” took place in the media capital of the world, which ensured the widest possible coverage of the event. Not since television viewers had watched the abduction and murder of Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics in 1972 had a massive global audience witnessed a terrorist attack unfold in real time. If al-Qaeda had been a largely unknown organization before 9/11, in the days after it became a household name.

An unexpected bonus of the 9/11 attacks for the al-Qaeda leadership was their financial impacts. Bin Laden later gloated that every dollar al-Qaeda invested in the operation cost the U.S. economy $1 million dollars: a leveraged investment of $500,000 by al-Qaeda in its “Holy Tuesday” operation ultimately cost the American economy $500 billion. Sounding more like an economist than a terrorist leader, bin Laden ticked off a number of the
economic consequences
of the attacks: Wall Street stocks lost 16 percent of their value, airlines and air freight companies laid off 170,000 employees, and the hotel chain Intercontinental fired twenty thousand workers. As a result of
the lessons he learned from 9/11, around the first anniversary of the attacks bin Laden released an audiotape announcing a new al-Qaeda policy aimed at
disrupting the global economy
.

While 9/11 may have brought bin Laden and al-Qaeda a great deal of notoriety and some personal satisfaction that they had bloodied the nose of the superpower, it did not achieve any of the group’s larger goals. It was certainly bin Laden’s intention to set off a Clash of Civilizations of the kind first predicted by the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. In his post-9/11 interview with Al Jazeera, the Saudi exile was asked: “[Do] you support the ‘Clash of Civilizations’?” Bin Laden replied: “
No doubt about that
. … The Jews and the Americans made up this call for peace in the world. The peace they’re calling for is a big fairy tale. They’re just drugging the Muslims as they lead them to slaughter.” Militant Islamists like bin Laden are fans of Huntington’s concept, which they see as an accurate description of the inevitable battle between the West and Islam—a battle that Islam will win in the long term.

But the Clash of Civilizations that bin Laden had hoped to spark never happened. Tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people around the world watched bin Laden’s call for holy war in his improbable global broadcast on October 7, 2001, as the United States launched its first aerial assaults against Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. But bin Laden’s call did not resonate with the planet’s more than one billion Muslims. Instead of mass outpourings of support for bin Laden, in the vast cities of Karachi and Jakarta there were demonstrations against the United States that numbered only in the
low tens of thousands
. And governments of Muslim countries lined up to help the fight against al-Qaeda, from the military regime of Pakistan, which had formerly been supportive of the Taliban, to countries like Yemen and Jordan, which during the Gulf War had sided with Saddam Hussein.

So why did bin Laden’s call for a global jihad against the “unbelievers” fall on so many deaf ears? First, and most obviously, it is simply
un-Islamic
to murder thousands of civilians. There is no justification for such an attack in the Koran or other key Islamic texts, and indeed, when bin Laden has been asked how such attacks could possibly be justified, he has generally fallen back on the political argument that American taxpayers are complicit in the policies of the U.S. government. Second, Middle Eastern governments well understood that bin Laden’s ultimate aim was regime change across the region to create a swath of Islamist theocracies and therefore that bin Laden’s
followers posed as much of a threat to their own governments as they did to the United States.

And so bin Laden’s grand project—to transform the Muslim world into a militant Islamist caliphate—has been, by any measure, a resounding failure. In large part, that’s because bin Laden’s strategy for arriving at this Promised Land is a fantasy. Al-Qaeda’s leader prides himself on being a big-think strategist, but for all his brains, leadership skills, and charisma, he fastened on an overall strategy that is self-defeating. Bin Laden’s main goal is to bring about regime change in the Middle East and to replace the governments in Cairo and Riyadh with Taliban-style rule. He believes that
the way to accomplish this
is to attack the “far enemy” (the United States), then watch as the supposedly impious, U.S.-backed Muslim regimes he calls the “near enemy” collapse.

This might have worked if the United States really had been a paper tiger that could sustain only a few blows from al-Qaeda. While the costs to the American economy of the 9/11 attacks were indeed high, at
an estimated $500 billion
, that could be absorbed in an economy with an annual output of $10 trillion, costing America around 5 percent of her 2001 gross domestic product.

Not only did bin Laden not achieve his war aims, but the attacks on Washington and New York resulted in the direct opposite of his stated goal of forcing a U.S. withdrawal from Muslim lands. After 9/11, American soldiers occupied both Afghanistan and Iraq and relations between the United States and the authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes became stronger than ever, based on their shared goal of defeating violent Islamists out for American blood and the regimes’ power.

For most leaders, such a complete strategic failure would require a re-thinking. Not for bin Laden. He could have formulated a new policy after U.S. forces toppled the Taliban in the winter of 2001, and have al-Qaeda and its allies directly attack the sclerotic “near enemy” regimes; he could have told his followers that, in strictly practical terms,
provoking the world’s only superpower
would clearly interfere with al-Qaeda’s goal of establishing Taliban-style regimes from Indonesia to Morocco. Instead, bin Laden continued to conceive of the United States as his main foe, as he explained in the many audio- and videotapes that he released after 9/11.

9/11 demonstrated that from a
tactical
standpoint, bin Laden is an effective leader. He intervened to make two key decisions that ensured the success of the attacks. The first was to appoint Mohammed Atta to be the lead
hijacker; Atta would carry out his responsibilities with grim efficiency. The second was to curb the 9/11 operational commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s early plans for
ten hijacked planes
to crash into targets in both Asia and the East Coast of America simultaneously. Such a large number of attacks would have been hard to synchronize and might not have succeeded.

But as the
strategic
leader of al-Qaeda, bin Laden has been an abject failure. His total dominance of al-Qaeda meant it was hostage to his strategic vision, and that became a problem for the organization because bin Laden’s cultlike control over his group was not matched by any depth of strategic insight. Because he was so blinded by his intense hatred for America, bin Laden’s strongly held belief that the United States was a paper tiger capable of only withstanding a few strikes before it would fall, taking down with it its client regimes in the Middle East, would turn out to be a disastrously naive view of the American response to 9/11. He showed no understanding of the intensity of outrage that would follow the first serious attack on the continental United States since the British burned the White House in 1814.

All you need to know
is that there was “before” 9/11 and “after” 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off.

—Cofer Black, the head of CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, to the
Senate and House Intelligence Committees on September 26, 2002

A state of war
is not a blank check for the president.

—Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, on June 28, 2004

W
hile al-Qaeda was reeling from its near-destruction in Afghanistan, the Bush administration was gripped by fears that the group might launch another devastating attack. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice remembers that the daily briefing, which now started the White House day at 7
A.M
. with an update of the detailed, raw intelligence of terrorist threats from around the globe, only served to stoke those fears. “We went from basically
no information to floods
. It just started flooding with everything. So now you were getting un-assessed intelligence. You know, just about anything anybody said might be a threat.”

Roger Cressey, a White House counterterrorism official, similarly recalls, “You’re being flooded with some of the most dogshit,
inaccurate threat reporting possible
. And the obligation was to put it out there. When Ground Zero is
still on fire, and we’re kicking the shit out of the Taliban in Afghanistan, it was a price of doing business in that environment…. So, threat reporting that I would laugh out of my working group on threats was now making it directly into the White House. And making it directly into the Oval Office because God forbid the FBI or the CIA didn’t tell the president or the White House of a threat and it became true.”

Adding to the intense concerns in the White House about the possibility of another wave of attacks was the news that on October 5, 2001, a photo editor at the
National Enquirer
in Florida had died after inhaling anthrax. In the next weeks an assistant to the NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw tested positive for the biological agent, and letters containing anthrax were found at the offices of Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The
anthrax letters
closed down the Capitol Hill mail delivery system as well as a major postal sorting station in Washington and eventually killed five people. The anthrax-laced letters all contained the message: “DEATH TO AMERICA. DEATH TO ISRAEL. ALLAH IS GREAT.”

Scott McClellan, the deputy White House press secretary, recalled that the anthrax attacks had “
an enormous impact
on President Bush’s mind-set.” The attacks seemed to be part of a second wave of terrorist assaults and added to the sense of imminent peril posed by terrorists this time armed perhaps with weapons of mass destruction. (The FBI would eventually identify the man behind the anthrax attacks as an American government scientist.)

Shortly before 9/11, an exercise positing a biological weapons attack on the United States conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a heavyweight Washington think tank, had received considerable attention from Vice President Cheney. Conducted in late June 2001, the exercise named “
Dark Winter
” gamed out the effects of a major smallpox attack on the United States, concluding that three million would be infected and a million would die. In the exercise the role of the president was played by former Senator Sam Nunn, who more than almost any other political figure had sounded the alarm on the parlous security of Russia’s nuclear weapons. Nunn’s participation in the simulated attack, and that of other establishment Washington insiders, ensured that the exercise received plenty of attention, as did the fact that Iraq was (incorrectly)
believed by the participants
in the exercise to possess smallpox.

In the months following 9/11, Cheney became convinced that the United States might be the subject of a smallpox attack, perhaps from Iraq, and
pushed for the immunization of the entire American population. It was estimated that those smallpox inoculations would probably kill three hundred Americans. Cheney believed the immunization program was still worth it, given that a smallpox attack might kill so many more.
Bush nixed the idea
.

The crisis atmosphere in the White House linking terrorism and WMD became more pronounced on October 29, 2001, when Tenet briefed the president and his senior advisers about a supposedly credible threat that terrorists might blow up a radiological bomb in Washington or New York. Following Tenet’s briefing, Cheney, who had spent decades involved in “Continuity of Government” exercises designed to ensure that elements of the American government could survive a nuclear attack, announced he was decamping for an “
undisclosed location
,” which was typically Camp David.

Bush administration officials were not alone in their fears of another serious attack. In the years after the attacks on New York and Washington,
Foreign Policy
magazine regularly surveyed some one hundred of the country’s top foreign policy experts; around a quarter of them
consistently believed that a 9/11
-style attack was likely within six months, while two-thirds or more believed that such a large-scale assault was likely within five years.

Before 9/11 senior Bush administration officials were narrowly focused on the threats posed by traditional state antagonists and were therefore utterly surprised by the attacks by al-Qaeda, and so overreacted. Compounding their real fears of another wave of assaults by bin Laden’s men, none of the key officials and lawyers who set the course of Bush administration policies on the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists had any meaningful knowledge about al-Qaeda nor had any of them served as federal prosecutors or in law enforcement, the professions that best understand the value and efficacy of standard, noncoercive interrogation techniques.
And none of the senior
Bush national security team had fought in the U.S. military and so they had little understanding that upholding the Geneva Convention is a core value of American soldiers on the battlefield. (The one cabinet official who had fought in a war, Secretary of State Colin Powell,
vigorously objected
to the overturning of Geneva protections for prisoners captured in Afghanistan.)