It Takes A Village to Defeat Terrorism: What President Obama Should Do to Correct the Bush Errors in Responding to Terrorism and Terrorist Threats
By Larry Johnson on December 22, 2008 at 1:55 AM in Current Affairs
(bumped up by Susan from 2:00 p.m. Sunday)
I am fortunate to have something of an inside perspective on what the Bush Administration is doing ( and not doing) to combat the threat of terrorism and actually hold those who carried out terrorist acts responsible for their actions. I have served at the CIA and in the U.S. Department of State’s Office on Counter Terrorism. Although I left the Government in 1993, I have worked as a consultant supporting the Department of Defense in training the U.S. military forces that are specifically tasked with going after the terrorists since 1994. So what?
I have insight and understanding into the interagency monster that is the mechanism for tracking and going after terrorists. It is on this front that the Bush Administration, despite its success in preventing new attacks inside the United States since 9-11, has utterly failed. The failure is in two key areas:
1. They have pushed the false construct that terrorism must be fought as a military matter rather than a law enforcement/intelligence effort.
2. They did not to put in place an effective, functional coordination mechanism that compelled the various bureaucracies to work together, to share information, and to prioritize targets.
Let’s start with the military failure. Our military forces with the mission of finding and killing terrorists are being asked to do a mission that generally they are not capable of doing because of the nature of the terrorist targets. For starters, there are not that many terrorists. You think I’m wrong? Okay, let’s turn the question around. Outside of the U.S. military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and along Pakistan’s western border, where has the U.S. military conducted operations against terrorist targets and which terrorists did they get. It is a short list:
Good luck trying to come up with an accurate list of the names of the “terrorists” that have been killed in these operations. No one knows for sure in many cases.
Please do not misunderstand or misinterpret what I am trying to communicate. I support the use of military force. But terrorists do not operate and live in ways that make them easy targets for the military to hit. The groups that engage in terrorist attacks rarely mass forces. Mass forces? That means they don’t come together in big groups. More often than not they are in clusters of two or three people interspersed among civilian populations. If you can find a camp of 50 jihadists training for mayhem then blow them to hell. Fine by me.
But here is the fact. We have rarely done that in the last seven years. It is not because the Bush Administration lacks the desire. Are you kidding me? If there were such targets they would hit them. We do not face a burgeoning army of jihadists training systematically in camps around the world. That is a fact.
We also face the problem of national sovereignty. The Washington Post has a fascinating article today that highlights this problem–Craig Whitlock’s Extradition of Terror Suspects Founders. Whitlock whines about the problems of relying on judicial systems and procedures:
Soon after al-Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, a U.S. federal judge issued a warrant for Khalid al-Fawwaz, an accused conspirator in the attacks and a confidant of Osama bin Laden. . .
But a decade later, none of the defendants has moved any closer to a U.S. courtroom. One died of cancer in July. The other two, including Fawwaz, remain in prison here as their hearings drag on.
As the long-delayed British extraditions show, it is extraordinarily difficult to bring international terrorism suspects to justice by prosecuting them in U.S. civilian courts. The cases underscore the challenge facing President-elect Barack Obama as he tries to find a way to close the Navy prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and end the military tribunals set up by the Bush administration to handle terrorism cases from abroad.
Britain and other allies have long complained about Guantanamo, the tribunals and extralegal U.S. tactics used to fight al-Qaeda. At the same time, however, they have often blocked or resisted efforts by the U.S. government to prosecute accused terrorists in federal court.
All true. But what does this mean in terms of policy prescription? Invade the United Kingdom? At no point in the case raised by Whitlock was there a viable military option. I am not arguing that a judicial procedure is the cure all or the preferred solution, but at some point we have to come to grips with reality–our military forces can only operate in a miniscule number of countries without having to worry about getting permission from the local government to use airfields, deploy forces to a country, and conduct operations.
In the bullshit fantasy worlds of writers like Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn all things are possible and military units go where they want without a problem. Flynn put out some nonsense a few years back that had Delta force landing in Baghdad to grab a nuke stored below a hospital. Hell, we’ve had big Army in Baghdad for 5 years and haven’t found nukes. That’s the reality. I suppose we should not fault the likes of Clancy and Flynn–neither has military experience and are insufferable jock sniffers–but some Government officials, like Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia, take these guys seriously. Despite telling good stories neither Clancy or Flynn know the first thing about the actual deployment of the units that would have to carry out the missions. In the real world, the U.S. military normally has to have permission to enter a country and an airfield or airfields for basing and staging operations.
The other problem is the military itself. The force footprint–i.e., the aircraft required to move the force and the logistical requirement to sustain the force in the field–normally is so large that it resembles a Barnum and Bailey circus parade rather than a covert, low visibility team of operators. If you could see the equipment list for what one of the highly classified units would carru with it on a mission you would readily understand that we are not talking about one guy schlepping everything in a hi-tech backpack.
I am not insulting or dismissing our military capabilities. The units that have counter terrorism missions are staffed with brave men and women who have made enormous sacrifices over the last seven years. But let’s get real and admit there are limits to what they can do. For example, why did our special operations forces stay home rather than deploy to Mumbai, India when Americans were being held hostage and being killed by terrorists a few weeks back? It is the answer to that question which explains why the military will rarely be given the opportunity to respond to terrorist incidents overseas–whether reactive or proactive.
This brings us to the coordination issue–or better stated, the lack of coordination. The interagency problems in sharing information and prioritizing targets that existed before 9-11 have not been solved and, in some cases, are worse than ever.
What is my evidence for this statement? Very simple. The U.S. Government does not have a single, coordinated list of terrorist targets. FBI has its own list as does the CIA. DOD has a couple of different lists. Consequently, each agency pursues its targets according to its own internally derived priorities.
It is important to recognize who is not at the table. The DEA is the only U.S. Government agency that has authority to operate internationally and domestically at the same time. They have some unique intelligence capabilities that the largely are ignored by the CIA, the FBI, and DOD. And those capabilities have not been harnessed to help with the counterterrorism mission. Here we are seven years since 9-11 and the government is still not being forced to work together to accomplish a single mission.
So what should Barack do?
He has made the right first move by selecting General Jim Jones to head the NSC. The people Bush chose failed him–I’m talking Condi Rice and Stephen Hadley at the top and Fran Townsend and Juan Zarate, who had the coordination task within the NSC.
On the afternoon of January 20th, after the oath is administered to Barack Obama, General Jones should convene a meeting of every major government department and agency that has a military, law enforcement, or intelligence mission. The tasking will be simple–go back to your home agency and prepare the list of the top ten terrorist targets/threats we need to eliminate and return to the White House on 26 January.
On January 26 General Jones will then convene an interagency task force that will consist of the following departments and agencies–Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, Director of National Intelligence, Department of State, Department of Justice, FBI, Homeland Security, DEA, Department of Treasury, Secret Service, and Department of Energy. The people at that meeting must come up with a single list by January 31st of the priority terrorist threats and targets.
Who is the number one threat/target? I don’t care and I am not sure it matters whether Bin Laden is number one or number five. What needs to happen is the U.S. Government must assemble a prioritized list. Once that list is ready then we assign the personnel and resources to find and eliminate the people on that list. (By “eliminate” I mean capture or kill.) A specific task force should be set up to go after each target. We must use all of the resources available at every agency. Right now agencies, the CIA in particular, continue to act as if they have the monopoly on intelligence and in their arrogance refuse to take advantage of the skills and resources that exist in other parts of the U.S. Government. This is stupid and short sighted and must not be allowed to continue.
Here comes the hard part. It will be up to General Jones to ensure the mission is carried out. Remember when George Tenet claimed he declared a war on terror after the attacks on our embassies in east Africa in August 1998. The CIA developed a plan to go after Bin Laden. Let’s ignore for a moment that Tenet did not hold regular meetings to hold people accountable for implementing and executing that plan. Swell. But it was only a CIA plan. It was not the plan of the U.S. Government. It did not harness all of the resources of the U.S. Government–for example, the DEA’s operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan had relevant sources and resources that could have assisted the CIA effort and were not used. And we have seen that the CIA plan was a debacle. Bin Laden is still walking around, as is his deputy, Zawahiri.
Terrorism is not the greatest threat we face. There are worse things. But it is a serious threat that we can defeat if we approach it smartly in an organized, coordinated fashion. Let’s recognize we will need to use military force at times, but we will also have to rely on police work, diplomacy, intelligence collection, covert operations, and other nations. There is no single silver bullet. It takes a village to fight terrorism. Seems to me that someone in the Obama Administration is familiar with this concept.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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