47.Of the period when I was managing CIA operations against bin Laden, Richard Clarke has written: “I still to this day do not understand why it was impossible for the United States to find a competent group of Afghans, Americans, third-party country nationals or some combination who could locate bin Laden in Afghanistan and kill him. Some have claimed that the [U.S.] lethal authorizations were convoluted or the ‘people in the field’ did not know what they could do…but the President’s [Clinton] intent was very clear: kill bin Laden. I believe that those who in the CIA claim the authorizations were insufficient or unclear are throwing up the claim to excuse the fact that they were pathetically unable to accomplish the mission.” This, like much else in Mr. Clarke’s book and post-9/11 statements, is misleading. At no time in this period did the CIA have legal authorization to kill bin Laden; if we had, as I told Mr. Clarke to his face in spring 1998, bin Laden would have been long dead. What Mr. Clarke is doing in this statement is throwing up a claim to disguise the obvious: he, Mr. Berger, and President Clinton cared little about protecting Americans and were not manly enough to order such an attack, and their moral cowardice resulted in three thousand deaths on 9/11. See Clarke, Against All Enemies, 204.
48.Alexander F.C. Webster and Darrell Cole, The Virtue of War: Reclaiming the Classic Traditions East and West (Salisbury, Mass: Regina Orthodox Press, 2004), 210.
Part II: Six Years of War, 2001–2007
Chapter 3. Afghanistan—A Final Chance to Learn History Applies to America
1.For a recent, excellent study of Paine, see Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (New York: Viking Penguin, 2006).
2.Washington Journal, C-SPAN TV/Radio, October 22, 2006.
3.Scheuer, Through Our Enemies’Eyes, 275–86, and Imperial Hubris, 21–58.
4.Sir John Keegan, “How America Can Wreak Revenge,” Daily Telegraph, September 14, 2001, and “If America Decides to Take on the Afghans, This Is How to Do It,” Daily Telegraph, September 20, 2001.
5.Milt Bearden, “As the War Turns,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2001, and “Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires,” Foreign Affairs 80, no. 6 (November–December 2001).
6.Woodward, Bush at War.
7.al-Adl, “The al-Qaeda Organization Writes a Letter.”
8.Richard K. Betts, “The Soft Under-Belly of American Primacy: Tactical Advantages of Terror,” Political Science Quarterly 117, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 22.
9.Osama bin Laden, “Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans,” al-Islah (Internet), September 2, 1996, and “Text of the World Islamic Front’s Statement Urging Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” Al-Quds Al-Arabi (Internet), February 23, 1998.
10.If the U.S. military had been prepared to attack Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, it is likely that only minimal damage could have been done to al-Qaeda, but that heavy human and material damage could have been inflicted on the Taliban. Bin Laden and his lieutenants, of course, knew the attack was coming, and bin Laden has said that they learned of the precise attack date six days before the advent. Taken together these facts suggest that al-Qaeda’s personnel and matériel were well dispersed by 9/11. On the other hand, I have seen no indication that bin Laden tipped off Mullah Omar to the timing of the attack, and so Taliban manpower and material resources probably would have been sitting ducks immediately after 9/11.
11.Like the good Republican multiculturalists they are, the Bush team quailed at the thought of offending Muslim opinion and removed the word justice from its operational name for the invasion of Afghanistan. Likewise, Woodward’s book Bush at War shows that President Bush and his Cabinet officers were committed to victory in Afghanistan as long as it could be done in a politically correct manner—that is, with little or no “collateral damage.” See, for example, Woodward, Bush at War, 166, 208,210.
12.Ibid., 65.
13.Since Woodward’s book was published, President Musharraf has claimed that soon after 9/11 Washington sent Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to Pakistan to threaten a U.S. military attack on the country if Islamabad did not do everything the United States wanted done against bin Laden. Mr. Armitage has denied the story. See “U.S. Threatened to Bomb Pakistan,” BBCNEWS.com.uk, September 22, 2006, and “Armitage Denies Threatening Pakistan after 9/11,” MSNBC.MSN.com, September 22, 2006.
14.The downside of this savagery-limiting and time-wasting zeal for coalition-building can be seen in the run-up to the Afghan invasion. On September 30, 2001, for example, Secretary of State Powell advised his cabinet colleagues that the U.S. military should be assigned to “[g]o after some targets that won’t get us into trouble with either the Arabs or Europeans.” Here we have the secretary of state recommending attacks on politically correct targets—not the targets most worth destroying—in order to avoid offending current or potential coalition partners. Then on October 3, 2001—three-plus weeks after 9/11—General Richard Meyers (USAF), then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed the cabinet that “they [his staff] are still trying to find a role [in the coming Afghan war] for key allies.” Apparently finding a role for “key allies” was more important than annihilating as much of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces as possible before they could fully disperse. See Woodward, Bush at War, 181,191.
15.Chris Wallace, “Interview with President Clinton,” www.foxnews.com, September 26, 2006.
16.For the chances to kill or capture bin Laden that Mr. Clinton said he did not have, see Kean et al., 9/11 Commission Report, 126–43.
17.Wallace, “Interview with Clinton.”
18.Mr. Clinton seems to have been referring to a follow-on plan to an earlier one called Delenda Est—“[al-Qaeda] Must be destroyed”—which was put together by Richard Clarke after the 1998 East Africa bombings. Clarke’s Delenda Est was a plan (like the one Mr. Clinton described to Chris Wallace) that was meant to be a comprehensive and ongoing campaign against al-Qaeda until it was destroyed. In 1998 Delenda Est started and ended with the August 20, 1998, cruise-missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan. If Mr. Clinton did leave a plan for the Bush team—which I never heard of or saw—it was most likely a revision of Delenda Est. While working with Mr. Clarke in the 1990s, I found that he was very fond of planning large-scale, protracted counterterrorism campaigns. Each was grand in design, minimal in execution, and ultimately ephemeral in duration. For the Delenda Est plan, see Clarke, Against All Enemies, 181–204.
19.The perpetually adolescent quality of Mr. Clinton’s leadership shone through in his interview with Chris Wallace. When asked why he did not attack al-Qaeda after the bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole, Mr. Clinton responded that the “CIA and FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible while I was there.” That is, “I am commander-in-chief, but it is my subordinates’ fault that I did not defend America.” See Wallace, “Interview with Clinton.”
20.The term heroin factories might be foreign to American readers, as I know it was to me when I became chief for CIA operations against Afghan heroin producers in February 2000. The term is not an exaggeration, however. The Afghans who cultivate poppies for heroin production in southern Afghanistan are first and foremost modern and efficient businessmen; they are not nickel-and-dime entrepreneurs hustling dope in their spare time. Rather than small refining facilities, the major producers in southern Afghanistan—particularly in Khandahar and Helmand provinces—have either taken over or built towns dedicated to heroin production. Outdoor racks for drying, laboratory buildings for refining procedures, barracks for the workforce, motor pools, well-armed checkpoints and fighting positions, and warehousing for precursor chemicals and final product are located in the towns. These heroin-factory towns make easily locatable targets for air strikes.
21.Almost all the heroin consumed in the U.K. comes from Afghanistan, and in turn, the heroin trade drives most of the crimes in the U.K.’s cities. In an effort to destroy its heroin problem at the source, British troops assigned to Afghanistan have been deployed in the
southern provinces of Khandahar, Oruzgan, and Helmand. See Declan Walsh, “In Afghanistan, Taliban Turning to the Drug Trade,” Boston Globe (online version), December 18, 2005; Toby Hamden, “British Troops ‘Will Be Targets in Afghanistan,’” Sunday Telegraph (online version), January 29, 2006; Christina Lamb, “British Face 20-Year War to Tame Taleban,” Times Online, March 19, 2006; Mark Townsend, “Drugs Fuel Big Rise in Organized Crime,” Observer, July 30, 2006; and Paul Kelbie, “Cheap, Pure Heroin Set to Flood Britain, Say Police,” Independent, February 5, 2007. For Afghan heroin entering the United States, see Marisa Taylor, “Surge in Afghan Heroin hits United States,” www.contracostatimes.com, January 7, 2007.
22.The failure to appreciate Afghanistan as part of the Islamic whole (beyond the ephemeral sense of limiting collateral damage to avoid offending Muslims) helped Washington misjudge how long its welcome would last in the eyes of non-Afghan Muslims. Just after 9/11, in fact, the United States had some room for acting with savagery even in the eyes of Muslims. The Muslim world was stunned by the surprise, ferocity, and brazenness of the 9/11 attacks and spent the next year debating whether al-Qaeda had staged the attacks or whether the Israelis had done so in cooperation with the CIA. In addition, bin Laden received a good deal of criticism from his Islamist peers for not preceding the attacks with the Prophet-mandated warnings to Americans, offers of chances to convert to Islam, and offers of a truce. He also was criticized for not securing religious approval before the attack to kill so many people. The leaders of other Islamist groups also condemned him for bringing the superpower’s military wrath down on the Islamist movement, an event they considered fatal to the movement. These intra-Islamic debates and confusions—together with the Islamic religion’s deeply held belief in the righteousness of exacting an eye for an eye—gave America an operational period that, while still limited, was longer than it would have been had it invaded Afghanistan without the 9/11 predicate. For the Koran and hadith-based criticisms of bin Laden by other Islamists, see Scheuer, Imperial Hubris, 152–61. For the Islamists’ criticisms of bin Laden’s strategy of attacking the United States—the “far enemy”—and their belief that the U.S. military response would destroy the Islamist movement, see Fawwaz Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Dr. Gerges’s book argues that bin Laden destroyed the Islamist movement via the 9/11 attacks and the devastating U.S. military retribution they engendered. This argument is based mostly on his conversations with Egyptian and a few other Islamists, the commonality among whom is their dislike of bin Laden. Gerges’s thesis (and that of his sources) now lies in shreds and tatters as the United States edges toward final defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq. When that occurs, bin Laden’s strategy of attacking the American far enemy and then being patient until the U.S. administration of the day suffered more pain than it could stand and threw in the towel will have been vindicated, giving the then-victorious Islamist movement a new birth and bin Laden enormously enhanced stature.
23.See Philip Smucker, Al-Qaeda’s Great Escape: The Military and Media on Terror’s Trail (Dulles, Va.: Brassey’s, 2004), xxv.
24.Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s then-national security adviser, manifested the ignorance about Afghanistan that was present across the nation’s highest councils. On Kabul, Ms. Rice felt the rejoicing of the city’s populace as the Northern Alliance and the U.S.-led coalition occupied the city meant that Washington “had underestimated the pent-up desire of the Afghan people to take on the Taliban.” Ms. Rice, in addition, had earlier told President Bush and Secretary Powell, “You know, the Russians never took Kabul.” As striking as is Ms. Rice’s lack of knowledge about Afghanistan—she is a Soviet expert, after all—even more striking is that no one in the Executive Branch seemed to correct her mistakes. See Woodward, Bush at War, 219, 313.
25.The Western influence in Kabul is angering conservative Afghans. Afghan teens are wearing jeans, listening to Indian pop music, watching Hollywood movies, and gathering in mixed-sex groups. In addition, the presence of Western diplomats, military personnel, and Europeans working for more than six hundred Kabul-based Western NGOs has stimulated the establishment of hotels, bars, restaurants, stores selling alcohol, and brothels to flourish in the city. As much as the lack of law and order, these perceived Western perversions make Afghans recall the Taliban regime’s Islamic rule fondly. “Afghanistan is an Islamic country,” a senior Kabul cleric warned, “and it should be following the laws of Sharia. In the previous regimes there were no shops where they clearly sold alcohol. There were no houses of hotels where they had prostitutes. Now we do have these things.” See Ben Arnoldy, “Kabul Must-see TV Heats Up Culture War in Afghanistan,” ABCNEWS.com, May 10, 2005; Kim Barker, “In Afghanistan, Cultural Struggle Turns Dangerous,” Chicago Tribune, May 22, 2005; and Chris Sands, “Kabul Clerics Rally Behind Taliban,” Toronto Star, May 22, 2006.
26.One of the greatest post-9/11 disservices done to both America and the U.S. Intelligence Community is to be found in the testimony on HUMINT collection from then-DCI George Tenet and then-CIA deputy director for operations James Pavitt to the congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee and the 9/11 investigatory panels. The gist of that testimony was that if Congress had supplied more money and more positions to the clandestine service before 9/11, the quantity and quality of human intelligence would have been better and perhaps the attack might have been stopped. The implication was that a massive investment of money and new personnel would improve HUMINT immediately. This of course is not the case. Collecting HUMINT is difficult—you are, after all, trying to persuade someone to commit treason—and dangerous and cannot be counted on in the short term for more and better information simply because Congress allocates a large amount of money and positions. Such growth, over a good many years, is likely to produce better HUMINT, but there is no quick fix for the HUMINT problem. On this issue, Mr. Tenet’s testimony was particularly interesting, as in the decade or more before 9/11 (as chief of staff for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, NSC Director for Intelligence Programs, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, and then DCI) he was not known for an eagerness to expand the clandestine service.
The post-9/11 hunt for bin Laden offers an excellent example of how hard it is to collect reliable HUMINT against the Afghan and Islamist targets. For the CIA and other U.S. and foreign intelligence services, the Pashtun tribes residing along both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border present a formidable obstacle to the collection of intelligence, let alone the capture of major al-Qaeda and Taliban figures. The Pashtun people are divided into tribes, subtribes, and clans. These groupings are often at odds with each other, at times violently so, but they do form a relatively homogenous and strongly insular society. While Muslim non-Pashtuns are today more welcomed than they were a decade ago—occasionally to the point of intermarrying and becoming permanent residents—Westerners are not and, even when disguised, stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Even small U.S. Special Forces units are not likely to operate for long without being discovered. Clandestine HUMINT collection in the tribal regions, therefore, has to be done through surrogates (Pashtuns willing to work for us) or by close-in SIGINT collection against local radios, telephones, cell phones, walkie-talkies, etc.
CIA HUMINT-collection operations in the tribal regions since 1979 demonstrate that it is not hard to recruit Pashtun assets, but that it is almost impossible to recruit one who will betray a brother Pashtun or (because of tribal mores guaranteeing that, once accepted, guests be protected) a non-Afghan Muslim. As always, Afghans will take your money and tell you what you want to hear, but they generally will not provide actionable intelligence, and like those the U.S. military hired to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora, they always show up a few hours too late. This is a lesson that the CIA learned well during the Afghan jihad, that a new generation of clandestine officers is learning today, and that military officers and senior policymakers apparently will never learn.
Each of the points above applies in almost equal measure to the Pakistani intelligence and military services. The army and ISID are not much more welcomed than Westerners or unvouched-for Arabs in the border region. Tribal leaders usually tolerate the Pakistanis, but experience has demonstrated that their ability to collect reliable HUMINT in the Pashtun regions is limited, as is their willingness to share all of what they do collect. In addition, both the military and intelligence services consider themselves under constant threat, move only in well-armed, multivehicle convoys, and seldom venture out of their compounds at night. The situation for Pakistani military and intelligence units in the tribal regions has, of course, become much less tenable and much more dangerous in the wake of unprecedented, prolonged, and bloody Pakistani Army operations in the region since 2003.
27.Keegan, “If America Decides to Take On the Afghans.”
28.Keegan, “How America Can Wreak Vengeance.”
29.Lord Roberts is quoted in Frank L. Holt, Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 5. Dr. Holt is a distinguished classicist whose extraordinarily pertinent book should be mandatory reading for all hands in the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government, as well as for every Afghanistan-bound military and intelligence officer. In addition, Ralph Peters, one of America’s preeminent and most prophetic strategists, has seconded the importance of both Keegan and Lord Roberts for contemporary U.S. leaders. “We need to relearn the usefulness of punitive expeditions,” Peters wrote in 2005. There will be times in the future when “we simply will need to send in our military on a punitive expedition to exact a price that discourages further attacks on our homeland or on our interests, and then leave with our guns still smoking…Punitive expeditions are not described anywhere in our current military doctrine. That isn’t proof of our moral enlightenment but of the benighted state of our strategic thinking.” To date, sadly, the American governing elite has paid little attention to Colonel Peters’s always-acute insights. See Ralph Peters, New Glory: Expanding America’s Global Supremacy (New York: Sentinel, 2005), 83.
Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Page 39
