NATIONAL SECURITY
Counter-Terrorism At The Crossroads
By
Corine Hegland, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Hours after the bombing attack on London, an FBI team was jetting across the Atlantic to join the investigation. Outside the State Department, the Union Jack was flying at half-staff. In Scotland, President Bush was delivering his condolences to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who then left the G-8 conference to comfort a city suddenly at war. Two days after the attack, counter-terrorist investigators from 25 nations, including the United States, were already coming together to talk about what to do next.
What else was there to do? In the nearly four years since September 11, the world has been through bombs in Bali, suicide attacks in Casablanca and Istanbul, bombs on trains in Madrid, the sinking of a Filipino superferry, and now bombs in London. At least six enormous attacks have been notched onto the belts of Sunni Islamic extremists working outside of the Middle East, and by now, everybody knows the drill. There will be investigations asking who did this, who helped them, and how we can capture any of them who are still alive so they can't do it ever again. There will be inquiry commissions to determine how British intelligence -- which is among the best and strongest in the world, which had long predicted an attack in London, and which was following hundreds of militants around the city -- was unable to prevent this cell from carrying out its mission. And somewhere down the road -- maybe in London, maybe in Berlin, Paris, or perhaps Madrid again -- there will probably be another attack, and the whole process will repeat itself. "The war on terror goes on," Bush said after the London attack.
Four years ago, it was different. After 9/11, there was an enemy with a declared leader in a definite place, and the enemy had camps, commanders, and a far-flung network of battle-hardened men. Back then, Bush declared, "Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated."
Now, four years into that war, the battle has descended to trench level. But the trenches keep moving. And policy makers and experts are increasingly searching for the best strategies for fighting this multifront, almost subterranean, war.
Shortfalls In Strategy
"Is our counter-terrorism strategy today appropriate for the threat we now face?" asked Roger Cressey, former deputy counter-terrorism coordinator for the National Security Council. "The answer is: It needs to change."
Having done a "reasonably good job" of tackling Al Qaeda, he said, we're now faced with a leaderless movement, a network of networks, all of them underground, without a sole point of command. "The U.S. is incapable of stopping an army of extremists with law enforcement and intelligence," he said. "We need a long-term, implementable strategy, which, frankly, we suck at doing."
The Bush administration -- fresh from the massive intelligence shake-ups of last December's intelligence reform bill and the recommendations of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, many of which the White House accepted in late June -- is quietly working on just such a long-term strategy to deal with the worldwide rise of violent extremism. Two initiatives are under way: The National Security Council launched a comprehensive review of the administration's counter-terrorism policies this spring, with an eye toward developing a new set of strategy directives; and incoming Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes is preparing, in coordination with her deputy, Dina Powell, and her boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to launch a public-diplomacy initiative after she is confirmed by the Senate.
Some critics worry that these initiatives will be too little, too late. And many say that the high turnover in the Bush administration's counter-terrorism team since 9/11 has been nothing short of heartbreaking. "Nobody's coordinating. There's nobody in charge," said Larry Johnson, a former counter-terrorism official at the State Department, pointing to the turnover in key counter-terrorism positions. Since 9/11, six different people have filled the counter-terrorism coordinator slot on the National Security Council. At the State Department, four have had the top counter-terrorism job; the fifth has just been nominated. The FBI's counter-terrorism operation is on its sixth chief. "There is a rhetorical gap the size of the Grand Canyon, in which the Bush administration on the one hand insists that fighting terrorism is the No. 1 priority, and yet as far as personnel goes, it is treated as the last priority," Johnson said. "There's no effort or energy given to making sure you have the best people and ensuring there is continuity."
Others argue that the terrorist threat has changed so rapidly -- partially in response to our successes in the early parts of the war -- that the United States has had trouble being nimble enough and adapting quickly enough to the changing terrain. "We did well at the first two phases of the war on terrorism," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism analyst at the Rand corporation. "But they played to our strengths, going against some form of an established national state. [A war against] jihadists running around Madrid or the Netherlands or England doesn't play to our strengths."
London As Madrid
On the day that London exploded, Robert Leiken, director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center think tank in Washington, was trying to understand the new jihadists by scrambling through Lavapies, a slowly gentrifying immigrant neighborhood in Madrid. The mesh of languages, street life, phone centers, and bodegas reminded him of D.C.'s Adams Morgan neighborhood as it was 10 to 15 years ago -- home to both neighborhood businesses and petty crime, populated by lots of immigrant families and a few drug dealers.
Lavapies is also the source of the cellphones that were used to explode 10 bombs in Madrid last March, and the home of some of the suspects.
As the London authorities searched for clues among the bodies and debris last week, they called on their Spanish counterparts for help. The two attacks were strikingly similar, with coordinated bombs hitting public transit during rush hour. And as in Madrid, it seems that the London attackers were a group of homegrown jihadists.
But more than a year has passed since the Madrid terrorists killed 191 people, and still nobody can say what, exactly, happened. A month after the attack, seven suspects blew themselves up, as the Spanish police closed in. Some 29 others, mostly Moroccan, are in jail awaiting trial next year. The various suspects ran phone stores or clothing shops, sold real estate, studied at university, dealt drugs, and, along the way, converted to radical Islam, Al Qaeda-style.
"Some intelligence agencies believe that there was an Al Qaeda influence," Leiken said. "The police here tend to say there wasn't, that this was a completely self-starting group of first-generation Moroccans living here, running very small businesses, and sometimes bordering on petty crime. But nobody really knows the answer."
On the periphery of the core group in Spain floats a confusing constellation of friends, clerics, and mentors. These include suspected veterans of Al Qaeda, radical imams, and extremist buddies, some of whom have been tenuously linked to September 11, to the 2003 Casablanca bombing attacks, to the 2004 murder of a Dutch politician by Islamists, and to other, pre-empted plots in France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. There are rumors that a Qaeda envoy, apparently deputy to a Syrian who ran training camps in Afghanistan, visited Spain in December 2003; the Syrian is believed to have established logistical cells in Britain, France, Spain, and Italy, and he carries a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head for his role in the September 11 attacks.
But authorities have found no order, no clear chain of command, no single mastermind behind the Madrid attack. No simple explanation exists for how small-business owners, petty drug dealers, a veteran from the Bosnia mujahedeen, and a miner came together and decided to join the jihad and kill 191 people. Time and investigation will tell if the stories about the London bombers from Leeds are similar.
Joining The Jihad
We may never know exactly how the Madrid bombers came together. But we can deduce the general outlines of how a Muslim immigrant to Europe becomes a jihadist.
Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer-turned-forensic psychologist, has studied more than 400 jihadists. What he's found matches the picture generally emerging from Madrid. Most of the men he has studied joined the jihad while living in the Muslim diaspora, away from their birth country. Either they had family or friends already in the jihad or they joined it with a group of friends. Most of them hadn't been particularly observant Muslims beforehand; they become Islamists only after joining the jihad and usually, in the pre-9/11 days, by attending one of a few radical mosques around the world.
Those ripe for becoming jihadists, Sageman hypothesizes, become homesick overseas -- a natural response to moving to a new country. The men he studied "tried to congregate with people like themselves, whom they would find at mosques," Sageman said. "So they drifted toward the mosque, not because they were religious, but because they were seeking friends. They moved in together in apartments, in order to share the rent and also to eat together" in observance of Muslim dietary laws.
In other words, it is friendship and social networks, not necessarily direct orders or recruitment, that brings the jihadists together. The Madrid group, Sageman told National Journal, was a network of mostly Moroccan immigrants who together became radicalized by two waves of arrests of Islamic militants in Spain.
The first wave, in November 2001, swept up Imad Yarkas, the suspected head of Al Qaeda in Spain. Yarkas, who was charged with helping the 9/11 plotters, was a friend and leader to some of the men who became the Madrid bombers. He was put on trial for his role in the 9/11 attacks, and although a verdict isn't expected until the fall, the government's case is widely viewed as weak. But the arrest angered many of his friends and followers. One of them, a Tunisian named Sarhane Abdelmajid Fakhet, who studied economics and sold real estate, took care of Yarkas's children and wife while Yarkas was in prison. And he agitated over Yarkas's "unjust" imprisonment. "Why go to Afghanistan when we can fight the jihad here?" Fakhet exclaimed, according to Sageman.
The second wave of arrests, at the request of Moroccan officials investigating the Casablanca bombings, was in June 2003. Spanish police arrested two men, one of them a relative of one of the eventual Madrid bombers, according to Sageman. In December 2003, a jihadist tract was published on the Web. It called for attacks on Spanish forces in Iraq to force the troops out, and it included a sophisticated analysis of how such attacks could influence the Spanish elections scheduled for March 14, 2004. The tract also talked about isolating the British from their American allies and forcing them out of Iraq as well. How much the Web posting influenced the Madrid group isn't certain -- at least one member had already spoken in October 2003 of launching an attack in Madrid. But it is clear that in January 2004, members of the group started buying dynamite from a former miner they had met in prison -- the dynamite they used in the train bombings a couple of months later.
Beyond Madrid
Other terrorist plots on European soil over the past four years have followed a similar pattern of small groups of men apparently deciding among themselves to form, or join, a local jihad.
Take the Hofstad group, a few young Dutch Muslims who had worshiped with a radical Syrian, Redouan Issar, also known as Abu Khatib. Group members eagerly filled chat rooms with writings about their trips to Pakistan for training and about the beauty of the jihad. One member of the group eventually carried out a ritualistic execution of Theo van Gogh, a Dutch politician and film maker who had publicly denounced radical Islam, especially its treatment of women. On July 12, Mohammed Bouyeri, a member of the group on trial in Holland, confessed to murdering van Gogh. "I acted purely in the name of my religion," he said. To van Gogh's mother sitting in the courtroom, Bouyeri declared, "I do not feel your pain ... because I believe you are an infidel."
In London last year, eight young British citizens of Pakistani background, three of them cousins and seven of them under the age of 22, were arrested for planning a massive bomb attack. They had accumulated half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the stuff that had been used for the 2002 attack in Bali. They had somehow forged connections to shadowy figures in Pakistan: According to press reports, they were caught because the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted some of their phone calls to Pakistan. But the most chilling part of their case, apart from their youth, was their leader: a Canadian software engineer living in Ottawa whom they had met over the Internet, according to Sageman.
In France, a 23-year-old Muslim immigrant, whose primary connection to radical groups was through his Algerian ex-terrorist brother-in-law, set himself up as a preacher and recruited students from schools and mosques to learn Arabic, study the Koran, and join the jihad. He sent several of them off to fight in Iraq before he was arrested in January.
Leiken, whose visit to Madrid was the sixth of seven stops in Europe to research the jihad networks there, says that his travels to Muslim enclaves in Europe have been deeply disconcerting. The end of colonialism and the advent of liberal immigration policies have brought a surge of Muslim immigrants to the Continent, but these newcomers have not been integrated into European society. Unlike newcomers to America, where kids absorb the culture and become part of it, immigrants to Europe from the Middle East remain, by and large, part of their home culture in an overseas land. "They don't usually marry out of Islam; they don't [necessarily] speak the local language; they don't have an identity except for neo-Islam, which gives them an identity in a movement across the world of people just like them -- oppressed, scorned, and humiliated," Leiken said. "Some people go for that, and become terrorists."
The advent of jihadist Web sites has made it easier for young people to grab onto a jihadist identity. Before September 11, most men who joined the jihad did so through a handful of radical mosques around the world, according to Sageman's research. Now, with chat rooms, e-mail, Web sites, and Webzines, they need search no further than their computers.
"Their host countries don't do anything for them, their home countries don't do anything, so they're connecting through this network," said Scott Atran, who is a director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris and has studied suicide bombers and interviewed the groups that sponsor them. "That is what is empowering them. When you're on the Internet, you have no idea how much of a minority you may be."
Innumerable clerics and Muslim leaders have declared terrorism a perversion of Islam, and even terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah lost no time in denouncing the London attack. But the allure of the global jihad, in the abstract, is easy to see. It promises a sacred fight for a Koran-based government in the "liberated homelands," inhabited by human beings liberated by Islam. The Congressional Research Service describes the vision as a "contractual social relationship between Muslims and their leaders that would permit people to choose and criticize their leaders but also demand that Muslims resist and overthrow rulers who violate Islamic laws and principles."
The jihadists, Atran says, are looking for what they call the return of a just, egalitarian society under Islamic rule. "They're looking for a sense of community and mission," he said. "They're mostly in the diaspora, so they schmooze, talk, find a vague relationship with jihadists, start making connections, chat on the Internet. And eventually, a core group decides to go for something, to make something of their lives."
So how do we fight a war against people who are homesick for a world that never existed?
The Fight
"The business of counter-terrorism is countering terrorists," Cofer Black, former head of counter-terrorism at both the CIA and, until last November, the State Department, said dryly, in an interview. "It's not trying to address the entire spectrum of underlying issues."
And so, U.S. counter-terrorism policy in the years immediately following 9/11 was one of going after the terrorists head-on when we could, and indirectly when we couldn't.
In the year after Al Qaeda lost its bases in Afghanistan, its affiliates and similarly inspired Sunni extremists continued carrying out attacks in places where the United States couldn't counter them overtly: Algeria, Pakistan, Tunisia, Yemen, and then, on October 12, 2002, Bali, Indonesia, where the Southeast Asian affiliate of Al Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah, killed 202 people. Al Qaeda's center of gravity had been destroyed, but the new front lines of the war on terror ranged around the world, to almost any place with a restless Sunni Muslim population, within which a few members could be lured into the global jihad.
The terrorism component of "The National Security Strategy of the United States," released in September 2002, recognized that fighting these terrorists meant doing so indirectly -- mainly by helping their host countries hunt them down. The United States, the document declared, would continue to "encourage our regional partners to take up a coordinated effort that isolates the terrorists. Once the regional campaign localizes the threat to a particular state, we will help ensure the state has the military, law enforcement, political, and financial tools necessary to finish the task." The local focus was further sharpened the following February with "The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism," [PDF] which set out a mandate of what became known as the Four D's: defeat terrorist organizations; deny them further sponsorship; diminish the underlying conditions that terrorists exploit; and defend the United States.
The counter-terrorism strategy was released in Washington late on a Friday afternoon in the midst of a raging blizzard, shortly before the war with Iraq began. The Four D's sound bite suffered a quick death, surviving only in talking points toted out for congressional testimony over the next two years. But the crux of the strategy -- persuading other nations to fight terrorism and then helping them do it -- survived.
Whatever other countries needed to fight terrorists at home -- training, equipment, information, or a bit of arm-twisting -- the U.S. would endeavor to provide. The National Security Council's counter-terrorism working group coordinated the effort, and the State Department took charge of identifying specific countries' needs; other U.S. departments jumped in where needed.
In the Philippines, for example, where regional jihadists had long held a loose relationship with Muslim separatists in the chain's southern isles, the Pentagon provided counter-terrorist training to Filipino troops, and State offered President Gloria Arroyo $50 million in aid over two years if she could conclude, once and for all, stuttering peace talks with the separatists. In Thailand, a joint Thai-CIA operation caught a man known as Hambali, who was Osama bin Laden's Southeast Asia chief and the mastermind behind the 2002 Jemaah Islamiyah attack in Bali. In Pakistan, most of the arrests of terrorists linked to 9/11 have come with the help of U.S. intelligence. In the Sahel region of Africa, Amari Saifi, the man behind the 2003 kidnapping of 32 European tourists in Algeria, was arrested last year through a joint effort in which the Defense Department fed intelligence to the Algerians, Chadians, and Nigerians, as their respective military forces cornered and captured him. In Paris, The Washington Post recently reported, the CIA and French intelligence have established a secret base to coordinate intelligence and counter-terrorism operations involving Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States. It has handled at least 12 significant operations, according to The Post.
"I sometimes view the United States as the nervous system of the world," Black said. "We're facilitating information from one end of the globe to the other, introducing the police services of Asia to the intelligence services of Eastern Europe."
The U.S. counter-terrorism strategy, in effect, has been a global dragnet. And it has worked, mostly: At least 15 of the top 37 Qaeda leaders identified after September 11 have been killed or captured, and 3,000-some Qaeda members had been arrested by 2003, the last year in which the government released numbers. In addition, more than a hundred plots have been pre-empted since 9/11, according to John Arquilla, co-director of the Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School in California.
But at the same time, the global jihadists have been finding fertile ground for growth in local insurgencies and separatist movements.Part of the long-standing genius of Al Qaeda, said Michael Scheuer, former head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA, is in supporting local Muslims in their local fights. "When they arrive on the scene, they're not there to tell the local boys what to do. They ask, 'What do you need?' " Scheuer explained. "As long as the United States or its allies are being attacked, Al Qaeda is in for the fight."
Some experts worry that such a scenario is close to unfolding now in southern Thailand, where a low-level domestic Islamic insurgency suddenly escalated in January 2004 with a series of coordinated attacks on police stations. By last summer, the insurgents had learned how to detonate improvised explosive devices and cellphone bombs; by February of this year, they'd learned how to construct a car bomb; and in April, they pulled off a multiple-bomb attack in a provincial capital. Last month, Jane's Intelligence Review reported that some Thai intelligence agencies believe that a Syrian may have been involved in the attacks.
The Thai insurgency, whichmost analysts say has been horribly mishandled by the Thai government, is "slowly becoming internationalized," according to Zachary Abuza, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace.If the situation continues to escalate, Jemaah Islamiyah may well enter the fray. "If you look at what Jemaah Islamiyah was doing from 1999 to 2001 in Indonesia, it was fomenting sectarian conflict. They weren't invited in, they didn't start it -- but they showed up. And I'm very worried that's going to happen in Thailand."
The War Of Ideas
Last year, Sunni extremists murdered 2,547 people around the world. That figure includes more than 40 percent of all the people killed by all terrorists during the year.
"All the red flags should be waving right now," said Arquilla. Any way you look at the data on the number of attacks around the world, he said, "it's bad."
More than a third of those 2,547 deaths occurred in Iraq, which has been a cause celebre for the jihadist movement since the United States invaded in March 2003. The jihadists see the war as "proof" that America seeks to dominate and occupy Muslim lands. Jihadist Web sites explode with outrage over the U.S. occupation, lingering on images of bloodied Iraqi children. Foreign fighters traveling there are finding what an earlier generation of fighters found in Afghanistan: "a melting pot for jihadists from around the world, a training ground, and an indoctrination center," according to the State Department's Country Reports on Terrorism. Where Afghanistan provided a rural combat training ground, Iraq provides an urban one, and any jihadists who survive Iraq to go home again carry some new and dangerous skills with them.
But 1,601 of those 2,547 deaths took place in other countries around the world: Algeria, Eritrea, and Nigeria in Africa; Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan in Central and South Asia; Israel and the occupied territories, Saudi Arabia, and Syria in the Middle East; the Netherlands, Spain, Turkey, and Russia in Europe; and Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand in Southeast Asia. The only region spared by the gruesome litany is the Americas.
In Southeast Asia, about 300 members of Jemaah Islamiyah have been captured over the last few years. But the organization keeps carrying out major attacks at the same rate -- one a year. "You're just not going to decapitate these organizations," Abuza said. After a sweep of arrests, remaining members simply draw in new ones. "They can recruit and train new leaders faster than we can arrest them. Any counter-terrorism policy based solely on that is going to fail."
Rand's Hoffman agrees with Abuza. "There's more and more attention being paid to the idea that a strategy based on attrition tactics isn't going to work," Hoffman said. "We can't capture every jihadist around the world. We've got to have a robust and active strategy, with all the elements of national power, like we did during the Cold War. We have to think of ways to break the terrorist cycle of regeneration."
In other words, the war against terrorism can't just be a war against terrorists, just as the war against Communism wasn't just a war against Communists. The mission needs some ideas behind it, some broader vision and coherence.
"The argument we always made within the agency is [that] the best we could do as an intelligence service is to hold the ring [on terrorists] until the U.S. government figured out what its policy was going to be," Scheuer said. "America has never fought a war with only military and intelligence services. But here, we have no diplomatic, no public-diplomacy, no economic strategy -- there's nothing but guns or intelligence."
Bush strongly believes that freedom is the long-term answer to terrorism. "For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny -- prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder -- violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat," he said in his 2005 Inaugural Address. "There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom."
On some level, many experts say, in the very long term, Bush might be right. Democracy and freedom can help curb the passions of the moment and bring the disenfranchised into the mainstream. But in the short term, in democratic countries, the attacks continue. The attack in Madrid was carried out by men who had lived for years in one of the freest democracies on the planet. Mohamed Atta and some of the other 9/11 hijackers lived for years in democratic Germany before they attacked New York City and Washington. The London bombers, although of Pakistani descent, were born in England.
Certainly the jihadists' cause is helped when America's commitment to human freedom is drowned out by Web sites and imams flailing the imagery of Iraqi children bloodied by errant U.S. bombs, naked Iraqi prisoners humiliated by grinning U.S. soldiers, and hooded and cowed young Islamic men in orange suits paraded at Guanta namo Bay.
But Atran argues that there's something more to the jihadist appeal than just anger. "Why is no one asking, 'Why are so many millions enraptured of the jihadi message?' " he asked. "Is there anyone in Washington who thinks beyond economics and tactics?"
At the end of World War II, Atran points out, we embarked on another war over human freedom. That war was also fought with guns and intelligence -- but with something else as well, a whole-hearted commitment to understanding the enemy and using that understanding to defeat it. "There was a recognition that the Communists wanted something," Atran said. "They had a vision of society, and it was appealing not just to maniac bombers, but to youth and to people across the face of the Earth."
Today, he said, he's looking in vain to find a similar commitment by those fighting terrorism. "About jihadism, all we hear is that it appeals to the destitute and depraved, or the craven and the criminal. They are anything but that." The jihadists he has interviewed, Atran said, are motivated by the uncompromising vision of a fair and just society. And that vision enraptures not just the terrorists, but also Muslim youth in every town he visits, who are eagerly engaging in a debate similar to the one Americans are having about the moral foundations of society.
"It seems like those in charge think that if the world has access to shopping malls and is sufficiently protected, that will trump the deeper yearnings of people," Atran continued. "People have deeper yearnings than that, and if you don't address that, they're going to go elsewhere."
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