Re: OT OBL
- From: VOTE HILLARY <VOTE_HILLARY@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 18:10:05 -1000
Paris Geller wrote:
Why we can't catch Bin Laden:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20430170/site/newsweek/
Short answer: we've got a boob in the white house.
The Ongoing Hunt for Osama bin Laden
He's still out there. The hunt for bin Laden.
By Evan Thomas
Newsweek
Sept. 3, 2007 issue - The Americans were getting close. It was early in the
winter of 2004-05, and Osama bin Laden and his entourage were holed up in a
mountain hideaway along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Suddenly, a
sentry, posted several kilometers away, spotted a patrol of U.S. soldiers
who seemed to be heading straight for bin Laden's redoubt. The sentry
radioed an alert, and word quickly passed among the Qaeda leader's 40-odd
bodyguards to prepare to remove "the Sheik," as bin Laden is known to his
followers, to a fallback position. As Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda
operative, later told the story, the anxiety level was so high that the
bodyguards were close to using the code word to kill bin Laden and commit
suicide. According to Said, bin Laden had decreed that he would never be
captured. "If there's a 99 percent risk of the Sheik's being captured, he
told his men that they should all die and martyr him as well," Said told
Omar Farooqi, a Taliban liaison officer to Al Qaeda who spoke to a NEWSWEEK
reporter in Afghanistan.
The secret word was never given. As the Qaeda sentry watched the U.S.
troops, the patrol started moving in a different direction. Bin Laden's men
later concluded that the soldiers had nearly stumbled on their hideout by
accident. (One former U.S. intelligence officer told NEWSWEEK that he was
aware of official reporting on this incident.)
And so it has gone for six years. American intelligence officials
interviewed by NEWSWEEK ruefully agree that the hunt to find bin Laden has
been more a game of chance than good or "actionable" intelligence. Since
bin Laden slipped away from Tora Bora in December 2001, U.S. intelligence
has never had better than a 50-50 certainty about his whereabouts. "There
hasn't been a serious lead on Osama bin Laden since early 2002," says Bruce
Riedel, who recently retired as a South Asia expert at the CIA. "What we're
doing now is shooting in the dark in outer space. The chances of hitting
anything are zero."
How can that be? With all its spy satellites and aerial drones, killer
commandos and millions in reward money, why can't the world's greatest
superpower find a middle-aged, possibly ill, religious fanatic with a
medieval mind-set? The short answer, sometimes overlooked, is that good,
real-time intelligence about the enemy is hard to come by in any war, and
manhunts are almost always difficult, especially if the fugitive can vanish
into a remote region with a sympathetic population. (Think how long—five
years—it took the FBI to track down Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympic
bomber, in the wilds of North Carolina.) That said, the U.S. government has
made the job harder than necessary. The Iraq War drained resources from the
hunt, and some old bureaucratic bugaboos—turf battles and fear of risk
undermined the effort. The United States can't just barge into Pakistan
without upsetting, and possible dooming, President Pervez Musharraf, who
seems to lurch between trying to appease his enemies and riling them with
heavy-handed repression.
The story of the search for the men known to American spies and soldiers as
high-value targets one and two (HVT 1 and HVT 2)—Osama bin Laden and his
possibly more dangerous No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri—is a frustrating, at times
agonizing, tale of missed opportunities, damned-if-you-do,
damned-if-you-don't choices, and outright blunders. It has been related to
NEWSWEEK by dozens of American, Pakistani and Afghan military and
intelligence officials, as well as a few Qaeda sympathizers like Omar
Farooqi. Capturing bin Laden "continues to be a huge priority," says
Frances Fragos Townsend, President George W. Bush's chief counterterror
adviser. It may be true, as Townsend points out, that Qaeda leaders do not
have anything like the safe haven they enjoyed in Afghanistan before 9/11.
But it is also true that Al Qaeda has been reconstituting itself in the
mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that the terrorist organization
is determined to stage more 9/11s, and maybe soon. "We have very strong
indicators that Al Qaeda is planning to attack the West and is likely to
attack, and we are pretty sure about that," says retired Vice Adm. John
Redd, chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, which coordinates all
U.S. intelligence in the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT). Hank
Crumpton, who ran the CIA's early hunt for bin Laden in 2001-02 as deputy
chief of the agency's counterterrorism center and recently retired as the
State Department's coordinator of counterterrorism, says, "It's bad; it's
going to come."
Before 9/11, the hunt for bin Laden was marked by a certain tentativeness,
an official reluctance to suck America into the dirty business of political
assassination or to get U.S. troops killed. Within days after 9/11,
President Bush was vowing to capture bin Laden "dead or alive," and Cofer
Black, the CIA's counterterror chief at the time, was ordering his troops
to bring back bin Laden's head "in a box." (In fact, CIA operatives in
Afghanistan requested a box and dry ice, just in case.) With old-fashioned
derring-do, CIA case officers, carrying millions of dollars, choppered into
Afghanistan to work with tribesmen to drive out Al Qaeda and its Taliban
hosts. The CIA's alacrity caused some heartburn at the Pentagon. According
to Bob Woodward's "Bush at War," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld steamed
impatiently while the military seemed to dither, stymied by weather and
fussing with complex backup and rescue arrangements before the brass would
commit any troops.
Rumsfeld's foot-stamping was rewarded. By mid-October, CIA case officers and
Army, Navy, and Air Force Special Operations units were working together in
unusual harmony, using high-tech air support and, at one point, mounting
what Rumsfeld gleefully called "the first cavalry charge of the 21st
century" to kill, capture or chase away thousands of jihadists. The Taliban
fled for the hills. Bin Laden, it seemed, would be cornered. Indeed, on
Dec. 15, CIA operatives listening on a captured jihadist radio could hear
bin Laden himself say "Forgive me" to his followers, pinned down in their
mountain caves near Tora Bora.
As it happened, however, the hunt for bin Laden was unraveling on the very
same day. As recalled by Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer in charge of the
covert team working with the Northern Alliance, code-named Jawbreaker, the
military refused his pleas for 800 Army Rangers to cut off bin Laden's
escape. Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the Special Ops commander sent out by
Central Command, told Berntsen he was doing an "excellent job," but that
putting in ground troops might offend America's Afghan allies. "I don't
give a damn about offending our allies!" Berntsen yelled, according to his
2005 book, "Jawbreaker." "I only care about eliminating Al Qaeda and
delivering bin Laden's head in a box!" (Dailey, now the State Department's
counterterror chief, told NEWSWEEK that he did not want to discuss the
incident, except to say that Berntsen's story is "unsubstantiated.")
Berntsen went to Crumpton, his boss at the CIA, who described to NEWSWEEK
his frantic efforts to appeal to higher authority. Crumpton called
CENTCOM's commander, Gen. Tommy Franks. It would take "weeks" to mobilize a
force, Franks responded, and the harsh, snowy terrain was too difficult and
the odds of getting bin Laden not worth the risk. Frustrated, Crumpton went
to the White House and rolled out maps of the Pakistani-Afghan border on a
small conference table. President Bush wanted to know if the Pakistanis
could sweep up Al Qaeda on the other side. "No, sir," Crumpton responded.
(Vice President Dick Cheney did not say a word, Crumpton recalled.) The
meeting was inconclusive. Franks, who declined to comment, has written in
his memoirs that he decided, along with Rumsfeld, that to send troops into
the mountains would risk repeating the mistake of the Soviets, who were
trapped and routed by jihadist guerrilla fighters in the 1980s (helped out,
it should be recalled, with Stinger missiles provided by the CIA).
To catch bin Laden, the CIA was left to lean on local tribesmen, a slender
reed. NEWSWEEK recently interviewed two of the three tribal chiefs involved
in the operation, Hajji Zahir and Hajji Zaman. They claimed that the CIA
overly relied on the third chieftain, Hazrat Ali—and that Ali was paid off
(to the tune of $6 million) by Al Qaeda to let bin Laden slip away. Ali
could not be reached for comment. But Crumpton, who admits that he has no
hard evidence, told NEWSWEEK he is "confident" that a payoff allowed Al
Qaeda to escape. Unsure which side would win, some tribesmen apparently
hedged by taking money from both sides.
Bin Laden was not so much seeking refuge as coming home when he disappeared
into the jagged peaks along the frontier of northwest Pakistan. He had
always liked hunting and horseback riding in the mountains, and had even
built himself a crude swimming pool with a spectacular view near Tora Bora.
Though a wealthy Saudi, bin Laden had long since learned to live close to
the ground, abjuring his followers to learn to survive without modern
comforts like plumbing or air conditioning.
Local Pashtun tribesmen were not about to turn bin Laden in for a reward,
even a $25 million one. The strictly observed custom of defending guests,
part of an ancient honor code called Pashtunwali, insulated Al Qaeda. The
Pakistan central government could do little to crack this social system.
The wilds of the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) have been
virtually ungovernable for centuries. The British Raj failed, and the
Pakistan government never tried very hard, leaving administration up to
federally appointed tribal agents and law enforcement in the hands of a
local constabulary of dubious loyalty. In the 1980s, during the
insurrection against Soviet rule in Afghanistan, the tribal agencies were a
kind of staging area for jihadists like bin Laden. Saudi money built
hundreds of madrassas—fundamentalist schools that radicalized local youth
and Pakistani intelligence (the ISI) formed alliances with the jihadists to
subvert the Soviet-backed Afghan regime.
The American effort to chase bin Laden into this forbidding realm was
hobbled and clumsy from the start. While the terrain required deep local
knowledge and small units, career officers in the U.S. military have long
been wary of the Special Operations Forces best suited to the task. In the
view of the regular military, such "snake eaters" have tended to be
troublesome, resistant to spit-and-polish discipline and rulebooks. Rather
than send the snake eaters to poke around mountain caves and mud-walled
compounds, the U.S. military wanted to fight on a grander stage, where it
could show off its mobility and firepower. To the civilian bosses at the
Pentagon and the eager-to-please top brass, Iraq was a much better target.
By invading Iraq, the United States would give the Islamists—and the wider
world—an unforgettable lesson in American power. Former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich was on Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board and, at the time, a close
confidant of the SecDef. In November 2001, Gingrich told a NEWSWEEK
reporter, "There's a feeling we've got to do something that counts—and
bombing caves is not something that counts."
When Franks refused to send Army Rangers into the mountains at Tora Bora, he
was already in the early stages of planning for the next war. By early
2002, new Predators—aerial drones that might have helped the search for bin
Laden—were instead being diverted off the assembly line for possible use in
Iraq. The military's most elite commando unit, Delta Force, was transferred
from Afghanistan to prep for the invasion of Iraq. The Fifth Special Forces
Group, including the best Arabic speakers, was sent home to retool for
Iraq, replaced by the Seventh Special Forces Group—Spanish speakers with
mostly Latin American experience. The most knowledgeable CIA case officers,
the ones with tribal contacts, were rotated out. Replacing a fluent Arabic
speaker and intellectual, the new CIA station chief in Kabul was a stickler
for starting meetings on time (his own watch was always seven minutes fast)
but allowed that he had read only one book on Afghanistan. One slightly
bitter spook, speaking anonymously to NEWSWEEK to protect his identity,
likened the station chief to Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny." (CIA
spokesman Paul Gimigliano insists "station chiefs go through a rigorous,
multistep selection process, designed to get leaders with the right skills
in the right places.")
The frustrations of the snake eaters are well illustrated by the
recollections of Adam Rice, the operations sergeant of a Special Forces
A-Team working out of a safe house near Kandahar in 2002. With his
close-cropped orange hair and beard, wearing a yellow Hawaiian shirt around
the safe house, Rice was not the sort to shine at inspections at boot camp.
But he had lived in Kabul as a child (his father had been a USAID worker)
and he had been a Special Forces operator for more than two decades. In
July 2002, a CIA case officer told Rice that a figure believed to be Mullah
Omar, the one-eyed chief of the Taliban, had been tracked by aerial drone
to a location in the Shahikot Valley, a short flight to the north. The
Taliban chief and his entourage would be vulnerable to a helicopter
assault, but the Americans had to move quickly.
Rice was not optimistic about getting timely permission. Whenever he and his
men moved within five kilometers of the safe house, he says, they had to
file a request form known as a 5-W, spelling out the who, what, when, where
and why of the mission. Permission from headquarters took hours, and if
shooting might be involved, it was often denied. To go beyond five
kilometers required a CONOP (for "concept of operations") that was much
more elaborate and required approval from two layers in the field, and
finally the Joint Special Operations Task Force at Baghram air base near
Kabul. To get into a fire fight, the permission of a three-star general was
necessary. "That process could take days," Rice recalled to NEWSWEEK. He
often typed forms while sitting on a 55-gallon drum his men had cut in half
to make a toilet seat. "We'd be typing in 130-degree heat while we're
crapping away with bacillary dysentery and sometimes the brass at Kandahar
or Baghram would kick back and tell you the spelling was incorrect, that
you weren't using the tab to delimit the form correctly."
But Rice made his request anyway. Days passed with no word. The window
closed; the target—whether Mullah Omar or not—moved on. Rice blames risk
aversion in career officers, whose promotions require spotless ("zero
defect") records—no mistakes, no bad luck, no "flaps." The cautious
mind-set changed for a time after 9/11, but quickly settled back in.
High-tech communication serves to clog, rather than speed the process. With
worldwide satellite communications, high-level commanders back at the base
or in Washington can second-guess even minor decisions.
In Pakistan, President Musharraf was wary of his American allies in the War
on Terror. In 2002, he told a high-ranking British official: "My great
concern is that one day the United States is going to desert me. They
always desert their friends." According to this official, who declined to
be identified sharing a confidence, Musharraf cited the U.S. pullouts from
Vietnam in the 1970s, Lebanon in the 1980s and Somalia in the 1990s. Still,
he quickly gave the Americans considerable leeway to operate inside
Pakistan. He did not demand prior approval of Predator attacks, and he
allowed "hot pursuit" for American forces five kilometers or more inside
the border. (With a grim laugh, one U.S. officer interviewed by NEWSWEEK
recalled watching on Predator video as insurgents fled across the border
and stopped on what they thought was safe terrain—until a U.S. Special Ops
helo reared up and blasted them.) Musharraf told the Americans he
understood that they would do what they had to do to attack high-value
targets, although he indicated the Pakistanis might have to issue pro forma
denunciations. His one request, said a U.S. official who dealt directly
with the Pakistani leader, was that bin Laden not be captured alive and be
brought to trial in Pakistan.
The cooperation has resulted in some high-profile successes. Working with
the Pakistani police, the CIA and FBI helped to capture "KSM"—Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, Al Qaeda's operations chief and mastermind of the 9/11 attacks—at
a house in Quetta, a city near the Afghan border, on March 1, 2003.
Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a Qaeda communications expert, was picked up in
Karachi in 2004 (and released, to the immense frustration of American
officials, last week by the Pakistan government without ever having been
formally charged with a crime). KSM's successor as chief of operations, Abu
Faraj al-Libbi, was seized in May 2005. Qaeda officials who came down out
of the mountains to make contact with jihadists risked exposure, especially
if they were at all careless about using cell phones that could be tracked.
But the mountains themselves have remained virtually impenetrable. After Al
Qaeda twice tried to assassinate Musharraf in 2003, the Pakistani leader
decided he had no choice but to go after the jihadists in their lair.
Generals blustered about trapping bin Laden between a "hammer" (American
forces operating out of Afghanistan) and an "anvil" (the Pakistani
military). Pakistani tanks and helicopter gunships began to rumble and roar
into the northwestern territories. But despite periodic claims of success,
the fighting on the ground went badly. The Pakistani forces had been
trained to fight on the plains of Punjab against the Indian Army. They were
not well suited for guerrilla war and sustained heavy casualties. More
broadly, questions remain about the loyalties of the Frontier Constabulary,
the militia responsible for security in the tribal areas. A Western
military officer with experience on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan
border says that FC troops often fail to warn U.S. units of militants
crossing over into Afghanistan; in May 2006 one FC soldier even shot and
killed an American officer in Pakistan. Musharraf can rightly claim to have
purged the ISI of agents with lingering Taliban and Qaeda sympathies, but
the Western officer claims that several of those former agents are now
unofficially aiding their former charges.
The Iraq War, meanwhile, has proved to be a black hole for the Americans,
devouring men and matériel and absorbing the attention of the brass in
Washington. In 2005, the CIA gave President Bush a secret slide show on the
hunt for bin Laden. The president was taken aback by the small number of
CIA case officers posted to Afghanistan and Pakistan. "Is that all there
are?" the president asked, according to a former intelligence official, who
declined to be identified discussing White House meetings. The CIA had
already embarked on a "surge" of sorts, and doubled the number of officers
in the field. But many were inexperienced and raw recruits, and they
produced little improvement in "actionable" intelligence.
CIA officials at Langley were anxiously watching their flank. At the
Pentagon, Rumsfeld, vexed by the CIA's inability to provide actionable
intel, had been pushing to get Special Forces into clandestine operations
and gathering of human intelligence (HUMINT). Under an "execute order"
approved by President Bush in July 2005, the Pentagon identified 350 Qaeda
targets globally, including senior leaders, recruiters, financiers and
couriers, according to a high-ranking Defense official who, like others
quoted anonymously in this story, did not wish to be identified revealing
such matters. The CIA naturally resisted this invasion of its turf.
Congressmen and ambassadors grumbled that they were being kept in the dark
about the military's black ops.
The Defense official claims that "the Horn of Africa has been a fruitful
place" for missions. But when it came to going after the top Qaeda
leadership along the Pakistan border, the military was still dogged by poor
intelligence and risk aversion. These two chronic failings combined to undo
what may have been America's best shot at killing or capturing some top
Qaeda leaders since the escape at Tora Bora.
In late 2005, the CIA and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command
came up with intelligence that gave them "80 percent confidence" that
either Zawahiri, bin Laden's longtime sidekick, or another of bin Laden's
highest-ranking lieutenants would be attending a meeting in a small
compound just inside Pakistan along its northern border with
Afghanistan. "This was the best intelligence picture we had ever seen"
about a so-called HVT, said a former intelligence official who was involved
in the operation. The spooks and Special Operations Forces planned an
airborne commando raid that could have been produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.
Some 30 U.S. Navy SEALs were to be flown by C-130 transport planes, under
cover of darkness, to a spot high above the Afghan side of the Pakistan
border, about 30 to 40 miles away from the target. The SEALs would jump
from the plane and use parasails—motorized hang gliders—to fly through the
night sky, across the mountains, to a secret staging point close to the
compound. They would attack the target and capture Zawahiri or whatever
other HVTs were on the premises, killing them only if necessary. The SEALs
would then spirit their captives away to another staging point, where two
CH-53 helicopters awaited to airlift them back to Afghanistan.
The plan was enthusiastically endorsed by the then CIA Director Porter Goss
and JSOC Commander Stanley McChrystal, who was a major at the time. But
when the Pentagon's civilian leadership, including Rumsfeld and his
principal intelligence adviser, Under Secretary Steve Cambone, pored over
the plan, they began raising questions. Was the intelligence good enough to
justify the risk to U.S. troops and the possible blowback on Musharraf if
the mission went bad? "Can't you get the confidence up to 100 percent?"
Pentagon officials asked their CIA counterparts, eliciting frustrated
eye-rolling in return, according to the former intelligence officer
interviewed by NEWSWEEK. According to a former Defense official close to
Rumsfeld, a familiar Pentagon planning maxim had already kicked in: the
more uncertain the intelligence, the more precautions the military wants to
take. The top brass was asking, were two helicopters really sufficient to
extract the SEALs? What if one was shot down or had mechanical problems?
Images of the failed 1980 Iranian hostage-rescue mission came to mind. Or
Rangers fighting their way through Mogadishu to rescue trapped commandos in
the 1993 fiasco known as Blackhawk Down. In order to bolster the rescue
part of the plan, JSOC proposed sending in teams of Army Rangers to add
security. As discussions continued, the size of the Ranger team grew to
150, about five times the size of the initial commando force.
To Rumsfeld, the operations began to seem more and more like an invasion of
Pakistan. Musharraf would have to be consulted, or at least informed. But
did that mean his unreliable intelligence service, the ISI, would leak the
plan to Al Qaeda? The official close to Rumsfeld says that the SecDef
became increasingly wary as he weighed potential risk against reward.
But time was of the essence. The C-130s were circling over the border, the
SEALs were ready to jump, while Rumsfeld was still deliberating with the
top brass. CIA Director Goss went to the Pentagon to implore him to go
ahead. At the last minute Rumsfeld called off the raid. "Believe me, if
this had been easy and there were certainty, we'd have done this," says the
former Rumsfeld adviser. "There just wasn't certainty."
Certainty is painfully hard to achieve in this hunt, despite America's
enormous technological edge. American spy satellites, designed for the cold
war against the Soviets, don't have antennas sensitive enough to pick up
cell-phone or handheld radio transmissions. So Special Ops teams—known as
Task Force Orange—have slipped into the tribal areas to plant listening
devices on various peaks. The listening posts have been useful, in several
cases pinpointing the locations of Qaeda operatives. But the jihadists have
adapted, and use codes to disguise the kind of actionable information the
hunters need.
The common saying among intelligence and Special Ops officers is that all
the thugs have been killed by now—but the smart guys have survived, and
become smarter. Predators have scored some hits, including killing Abu
Hamza Rabia, another Qaeda operations chief (al-Libbi's successor), in
2005. (To cloak American involvement, the Pakistani government cooked up
the story that Rabia had blown himself up experimenting with explosives.)
But the jihadists have learned to avoid the drones: it's easier to hear a
Predator, which sounds like a loud model airplane, in the Pakistani hill
country than in an Iraqi city. And when the Americans shoot and miss, the
consequences can be grave. In January 2006, a Predator fired a Hellfire
missile at a house in Damadola, Pakistan, where Zawahiri was supposed to be
meeting. Once again, the intel was unreliable: Zawahiri was not there, but
more than a dozen civilians were killed, and the survivors were enraged.
By 2006, Musharraf was weary. American focus on Afghanistan was fading; the
war in the territories was costly in terms of lives and public sentiment;
the jihadists were starting to spill into the cities. The president of
Pakistan decided to cut his losses, and in September 2006, his local
governor signed a peace deal with tribal militants.
Al Qaeda did not hesitate to assert itself. Jihadists paraded brazenly in
Waziristan, dragging "criminals" through the streets. American satellite
photos soon showed single files of foreign jihadists, their feet sometimes
wrapped in plastic bags against the snow, crossing the Pakistani border
into Afghanistan. An Algerian man known as "the Bombmaker," a seasoned
veteran of Iraq, set up shop to teach jihadists how to build IEDs. Local
militants ruled through assassination and intimidation. The experienced
Western military official interviewed by NEWSWEEK described how militants
killed a petty merchant and his entire family simply for selling
watermelons to the local constabulary. "Imagine what they'd do to the guy
who sells out Osama," said the officer.
In late 2006 and early 2007, anxious top American policymakers, including
Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, traveled to
Pakistan to persuade Musharraf to renew his military operations along the
frontier. "There is no question the peace agreement failed Pakistan and it
failed us," said Townsend, the White House counterterror chief. The
Pakistani president was in a difficult position, risking his unpopular and
shaky regime if he cracked down on the jihadists and risking it if he
didn't. Once more, Sisyphus began to roll the stone up the hill: Musharraf
ordered 20,000 soldiers to march into the territories, to reinforce the
80,000 who were already there. But "I don't think the Pakistani military is
going to move wholeheartedly against Al Qaeda," a knowledgeable Pakistani
military source told NEWSWEEK. "I don't think their hearts are in it." The
tough talk by American politicians calling for unilateral action is not
helping matters, says retired Pakistani Army Lt. Gen. Talat Masood, a
well-regarded moderate. "It's very humiliating for civilians and the
military alike," he says. (Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan's ambassador to
Washington, insisted that Pakistan is doing more than the United States to
attack Al Qaeda. "The threat to us is far greater," he said.)
U.S. Special Operations Forces have had considerable practice by now chasing
jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan. The JSOC headquarters at Baghram is so
full of high-tech listening and tracking equipment that it
resembles "something out of 'Star Wars'," says a Pentagon official who has
seen the place. In recent months, says John Arquilla, a Special Ops expert
at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., the U.S. military has
achieved a 100-to-1 kill ratio (100 dead guerrillas to every American). But
by calling in airstrikes, the Americans also kill a lot of civilians, which
breeds more jihadists. And according to Thomas Johnson, also at the Naval
Postgraduate School, the military's continued fixation on body counts and
kill ratios is irrelevant and even counterproductive. "When you kill a
person it's a multiplication factor. It demands that all the male relatives
join the fight."
The Americans will not find top Qaeda leaders unless they can win the trust
of local tribesmen who may know their whereabouts. Johnson, an Afghan
expert, spent last February at Forward Operating Base Salerno near the
Pakistan border, briefing commanders on the tribal custom of Pashtunwali.
He says only about 5 percent of American troops in Afghanistan ever leave
their bases—a statistic, he believes, that explains better than any other
why Americans are struggling in the battle for intelligence. He says most
soldiers in Afghanistan don't know simple phrases like "stop," "go,"
or "put your hands up." Americans continually make cultural blunders, like
using canine units to search people's homes (dogs are considered unclean in
Muslim culture). Meanwhile the Taliban works at winning the trust and
confidence of villagers—or intimidating them. "They go into villages and
say, 'The Americans have the watches but we have the time. We might not
come back in a week or a year, but you bet your britches we'll eventually
come back'," says Johnson.
The American military, understandably, puts a high priority on "force
protection," but as a practical matter that means staying behind armor and
barricades. Rice, the A-Team sergeant stuck in his safe house near
Kandahar, recalls that his team's frustration peaked when a memo came down
from the brass at Baghram, ordering men not to initiate fire fights and
even not to use words like "death" and "destruction" in their CONOPS. Among
Rice's men, it became known as the "limp dick memo." (The Defense
Department declined to comment specifically on Rice's memories.)
The American military is forever caught in a dilemma. During the early days
of the cold war, the old boys who ran the CIA began to reason that when it
came to fighting against an underhanded foe in a battle for global
survival, the rules of fair play they had learned as schoolboys no longer
applied. If the communists fight dirty, we must, too, they rationalized—or
freedom would perish. This ends-justifying-the-means rationale led to
foolish and ultimately unsuccessful assassination plots and other dirty
tricks that disgraced and demoralized the CIA when the agency's so-called
Crown Jewels were revealed during Watergate. After 9/11, Bush
administration officials, particularly Vice President Cheney, vowed to take
the gloves off against Al Qaeda. But in the aftermath of allegations of
torture in secret prisons, there has been a strong push back, particularly
among administration lawyers disturbed by the abuse of constitutional
rights. According to knowledgeable sources, Rumsfeld's deputy for
intelligence, Steve Cambone, engaged in an angry debate with the Pentagon's
top lawyer, William Haynes, over the activities of U.S. Special Forces—who
in the minds of some government lawyers and lawmakers have been given too
much, not too little, license to roam.
The frustrations at the top are understandable. There is a certain desperate
quality to the hunt for bin Laden. Some experts think he's constantly on
the move; others believe he must be holed up somewhere, never using
electronics, impossible to detect. After the close call in 2004, says Omar
Farooqi, "the Sheik" shrank his security staff and employed only faithful
Arabs. A Western military official who has worked both sides of the
Afghan-Pakistani border told NEWSWEEK that bin Laden may have deployed
small groups of bodyguards spread along the frontier with the
same "signature": small security detail, secretive, saying little to local
villagers, always moving on. That's a perfect disinformation campaign, says
the official. The nearby locals start whispering that bin Laden must be
nearby. "Word gets around that it must have been him," he says. "We react.
It throws us off the trail and makes us waste assets following bad leads.
And it's a cheap and easy way to do."
No wonder the intelligence community is reaching out to anyone who can glean
even a hint of bin Laden's whereabouts. As early as November 2001, John
Shroder, a geographer at the University of Nebraska, found himself
addressing an audience of intelligence officials, analyzing the rock
formations behind bin Laden in a video released that October. About all he
could do was tell the spooks that bin Laden seemed to be in the western
part of Afghanistan's Spin Ghar Mountains. "We were grasping at straws,"
says Michael Scheuer, who was special adviser to the head of the CIA's bin
Laden unit at the time. "We called in geologists. We had the Germans bring
in ornithologists because they thought they heard a bird chirping on a
video and wanted to see if it was particular to certain regions of South
Asia." The agency enlisted doctors to look for signs of kidney disease,
which bin Laden was rumored to be suffering from at the time. A Dec. 27,
2001, video, nicknamed by analysts "the Gaunt Tape," shows a
haggard-looking bin Laden, who seems to be unable to move his left
arm. "But the doctors couldn't pinpoint any problems with his health," says
Scheuer.
CIA analysts began calling bin Laden "Elvis" because he was here, there, but
really nowhere. Some wonder if he's dead. He has not issued a video since
the end of 2004, and he has not been heard on an audiotape for more than a
year. It is possible he is incapacitated by disease—the rumors of kidney
problems persist. There have been reports that bin Laden has sought
medication to be used in the terminal stages of kidney disease. But "I
don't have any reason to think he's dead," says Townsend, who sees all the
intelligence coming to the office of the president. "It's inconceivable to
me to think that he would expire and we wouldn't have some information,
intelligence, that something had happened to him."
If he is alive, there is no doubt he means to kill as many Americans as
possible. "The Sheik's desire is to strike another blow at the palaces of
the West," says Sheik Said, the senior Egyptian Qaeda leader. In 2003,
Scheuer points out, bin Laden even managed to gain religious sanction from
a radical Saudi cleric to kill "no more than 10 million Americans" with a
nuclear or biological weapon.
America remains his obsession. NEWSWEEK interviewed Nasser al Bahri, who
served as bin Laden's personal bodyguard for six years. Now under very
loose house arrest in Yemen, the former bodyguard still reveres "the
Sheik." According to al Bahri, bin Laden used to amuse himself by chanting
this bit of doggerel, part of a longer poem by a jihadist poet:
I am the enemy of America
Till this life is over and doomsday comes.
It's the root and trunk of destruction,
It's the evil on the branches of trees.
"The only thing that seems to rile him up is mention of America," says al
Bahri. "I think from the very beginning of his childhood he hated America.
I don't know why. He won't even drink a Pepsi."
Bin Laden's No. 2, Zawahiri, is just as baleful toward the United States.
According to various accounts, it was Zawahiri, a well-educated Egyptian
doctor, who before 9/11 persuaded bin Laden to turn his terrorist ambitions
from the "near enemy" (the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and
Egypt) to the "far enemy" (the United States). Zawahiri may represent more
of a threat to the West than bin Laden. By taking himself off the grid, bin
Laden may no longer be in operational control; capturing him might be more
symbolic than significant. But meanwhile Zawahiri has become more
visible. "In the past two years he has put out more than 30 messages," says
Rita Katz, director and founder of the SITE Institute, which monitors
jihadist Web sites. She notes that within hours of the storming of the Red
Mosque by Pakistani forces, Zawahiri's response was uploaded on the
Internet. "I believe he's in or near an urban area where he is able to get
news and respond to issues quickly," says Katz. "In 2005, you'd still see
videos with cheap fabric backdrops that rippled in the wind. Today, they
seem to be using better equipment, complete with artificial backgrounds
added postproduction." "Al Qaeda may have seventh-century ideas, but they
have 21st-century acumen for communications," says Georgetown University
terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman. "Al Qaeda has become a world brand and
their videos are the juice that fueled that recognition."
The overarching question is whether Al Qaeda has the ability to strike the
United States with another "spectacular" along the lines of 9/11, or
possibly something worse. When the Qaeda leadership was driven into the
hills in 2001, and many of their top operators were killed or captured, the
jihadist movement was sustained by local wannabes. They set off bombs and
blew up subways and discos from Indonesia to Britain. But they were not
very high-tech, and some were klutzes, like the two mokes who last June
failed to set off a pair of car bombs in London and then tried,
unsuccessfully, to become suicide bombers at the Glasgow airport. (One
eventually did die of his burns, but no civilians were injured when their
car caught fire but failed to explode.)
When the United States struck Afghanistan in 2001, "there were probably
3,000 core Al Qaeda operatives," says Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate
School. "We killed or captured about 1,000; about 1,000 more ended up in
distant parts of the world. And about 1,000 ended up in Waziristan. But the
great terror university in Afghanistan is gone; they've relied on the Web
since. They haven't had the hands-on instruction and the bonding of the
camps. That's resulted in low-skill levels. Their tradecraft is really much
poorer."
The danger now, says Arquilla, is that the longer the Iraq War goes on, the
more skilled the new generations of jihadists will become. "They're getting
re-educated," he says. "The first generation of Al Qaeda came through the
[Afghan] camps. The second generation are those who've logged on [to
Islamist Web sites]. The next generation will be those who have come
through the crucible of Iraq. Eventually, their level of skill is going to
be greater than the skill of the original generation."
It is disturbing to recall that when U.S. forces overran Qaeda training
grounds, they found scientific documents discussing nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons. (Zawahiri is reported to have a particular interest in
chem-bio.) A true weapon of mass destruction is very hard to come by, and
it may be a while before the jihadists can make, steal or buy a nuclear
weapon or a germ bomb capable of killing more than a few people. But dirty
bombs are less difficult to craft from conventional explosives and
radioactive material, the kind that can be found in the waste bins of
hospitals. Crumpton recalls that Zawahiri canceled a planned attack to set
off a cyanide bomb in the New York City subways in 2003. "We don't know
why," says Crumpton, or what became of the team Al Qaeda recruited to stage
the attack but apparently never dispatched to the United States. "You
think: Why did he call it off? Where are they?"
Intelligence officials in Europe and America have spent a jittery summer
seeing signs that Al Qaeda is gearing up to hit the West in some
significant way. In his interview with NEWSWEEK, Admiral Redd of the
National Counterterrorism Center was guarded about details. But it was
clear from his comments that the terror watchers are seeing signs and
hearing chatter that have put them on alert. For an attack on Europe?
America? "They would like to come west, and they would like to come as far
west as they can," is how Redd puts it. The intelligence community lacks
specific information about the movements of terrorists, he said. "What we
do have, though, is a couple of threads which indicate, you know, some very
tactical stuff, and that's what—you know, that's what you're seeing bits
and pieces of, and I really can't go much more into it."
Meanwhile, the hunt for bin Laden goes on. Recently, it has gone all the way
back to the beginning—to the Tora Bora region. This summer, about 500
jihadists—Taliban and Al Qaeda, increasingly indistinguishable—infiltrated
the area. After three American Special Forces soldiers were killed by a
roadside bomb in early August, the Americans launched a sweep of bin
Laden's old hideout, backed by aerial strikes. Last week a NEWSWEEK
reporter, led by a guide, hiked up into the mountains to visit the
battlefield.
On the way up, they passed small convoys of American Humvees and Afghan
National Army Ford Ranger pickups. Along the trail, past a few dozen
unmarked Arab graves from the 2001 bombing, they saw bits of shrapnel,
corroded bullets and scraps of military detritus, some of it quite old.
Leaflets blew around. They warned the locals that American troops would
hunt down people who sheltered terrorists. On the leaflets were garish
pictures of evil-looking masked men with glaring white eyes; one had the
word OSAMA in a red circle with a diagonal slash through it.
The NEWSWEEK reporter and his guide walked past a series of burned-out
Soviet tanks, scrawled with triumphalist Arab graffiti, leftovers from the
struggle against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Eventually, they
came to bin Laden's old cave complex, just above a gorge known as the
Malawa Valley. On a wide ledge was Osama's old swimming pool, dry now, but
with its still spectacular view. There had been rumors of sightings of the
Sheik and his entourage. But they were just rumors.
This story was reported by Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai on the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border; Zahid Hussain in Islamabad; Rod Nordland in
Tora Bora; Mark Hosenball, Michael Hirsh, Michael Isikoff, John Barry, Dan
Ephron and Eve Conant in Washington; Christopher Dickey in Paris, and Roya
Wolverson in New York. It was written by Evan Thomas.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20430170/site/newsweek/site/newsweek/
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