Re: NBC: The Legacy of the Bush Administration?; by Victor Davis Hanson

War of Error

How Osama Bin Laden Beat George W. Bush

Peter Bergen, The New Republic Published: October 22, 2007

Omar bin Laden, the fourth son of the Al Qaeda leader, cuts a striking
figure. In one photo, he stares out from beneath an Adidas baseball
cap, his beard closely trimmed--an entirely different look from his
father's seventh-century aesthetic. He wears jeans and sits next to
his much older wife, a pale-faced British woman with pig tails, whom
he divorced a mere five months into their marriage. While his father
would not approve of his lifestyle choices, few men know the terrorist
mastermind so well. When the Sudanese government exiled bin Laden in
1996, Omar was part of the small contingent that flew in a jet to Al
Qaeda's Afghan sanctuary. He spent nearly five years living in the
notorious training camps that bin Laden assembled.

But, between his departure from Sudan and his marriage, something
happened to Omar: He turned against his father. I caught a small
glimpse of his anger when I spoke with Huthaifa Azzam, the son of
Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam, one of Osama bin Laden's most
important mentors. In 2003, Huthaifa had accompanied Omar on a Hajj
pilgrimage to Mecca, where they spent four days together living in the
same tent, performing religious observances, and talking about life in
Afghanistan. Omar heaped abuse on his father for attacking the United
States. "It's craziness. ... Those guys are dummies," he said. "They
have destroyed everything, and for nothing. What did we get from
September 11?" In fact, these attacks had driven a permanent wedge
between father and son. Soon after planes struck New York and
Washington, Omar left Afghanistan in disgust. And, in the years since,
he appears to have had no contact with his father.

When Omar fled the Al Qaeda training camps, the organization was in
disarray. A 2002 letter written by an Al Qaeda member--and addressed
to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of the September
11 attacks--gives a sense of just how demoralized the group was:

Consider all the fatal and successive disasters that have
afflicted us during a period of no more than six months. Those
observing our affairs wonder what has happened to us. Today we are
experiencing one setback after another and have gone from misfortune
to disaster. ... I say today we must completely halt all external
actions until we sit down and consider the disaster we caused. The
East Asia, Europe, America, Horn of Africa, Yemen, Gulf, and Morocco
[terrorist] groups have fallen, and Pakistan has almost been drowned
in one push.

Al Qaeda's cadres were right to be dispirited. The United States
appeared to have soundly defeated the terrorist organization. As Bruce
Hoffman, a Georgetown professor and one of the world's leading
authorities on terrorism, told me, "It's difficult to recall the
extent to which it was believed that a decisive corner had been turned
in 2002 as a result of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. We
believed not simply that Al Qaeda was on the run, but that it had been
smashed to bits."

But that was five very long years ago--five years during which Al
Qaeda has not only survived but also managed to rebuild at an
astonishing clip. The group's leadership has reconstituted itself and
now operates rather comfortably along the largely lawless Afghan-
Pakistan border. Last year, it came close to downing ten U.S.
airplanes using liquid explosives--an attack that would have rivaled
September 11 in magnitude. Al Qaeda has continually massacred Iraqi
civilians over the past three years and has managed to keep the
country locked in the grip of sectarian violence. Swathes of
Afghanistan are in danger of reverting to Islamist control. The
largest Algerian terrorist group announced last year that it was
putting itself under Al Qaeda's umbrella--and has subsequently
launched a series of attacks in North Africa against Western targets.
Britain's domestic intelligence chief said last November that 30
terrorist plots were underway in her country--some of which would
involve "mass-casualty suicide attacks"--and that Al Qaeda's Pakistan-
based leadership was giving direction to its British followers "on an
extensive and growing scale." Last month, Al Qaedalinked militants who
had trained at camps in Pakistan were arrested in Germany, where a
prosecutor said they had acquired enough chemicals for what would have
been "massive bomb attacks" targeting Americans in the country. In a
small but telling sign of its restored confidence, Al Qaeda's
production arm has cranked out a record number of videos and
audiotapes this year. To top things off, according to Hoffman, the
group's "determination to strike the United States from abroad again
remains undiminished." And it may be getting closer to doing just
that: A recent National Intelligence Estimate noted that Al Qaeda "has
protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack
capability."

America's most formidable foe--once practically dead-- is back. This
is one of the most historically significant legacies of President
Bush. At nearly every turn, he has made the wrong strategic choices in
battling Al Qaeda. To understand the terror network's resurgence--and
its continued ability to harm us--we need to reexamine all the ways in
which the administration has failed to crush it.

Al Qaeda has always had a fundamentally apocalyptic mindset, but never
more so than in December 2001. In the snowy mountains of eastern
Afghanistan, a place with the cinematic name of Tora Bora, bin Laden
and his men prepared for their final stand. They had watched the
United States evict the Taliban from power while incurring only small
numbers of casualties, and, now, they were on the run. As bin Laden
would later recount in a 2003 video, the 300 Al Qaeda militants
assembled at the mountain hideaway dug 100 trenches over an area of
one square mile in preparation for the battle to come. Ayman Saeed
Abdullah Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor now being held at Guantánamo,
painted for American interrogators a scene of desperation. "I was out
of medicine and I had a lot of casualties," Batarfi recalled. "I did a
hand amputation by a knife, and I did a finger amputation with
scissors."

I got a sense for just how pessimistic Al Qaeda's leadership must have
felt on my visits to Tora Bora in the years following the battle. The
complex of mountains dotted with caves lies a three-hour drive up a
narrow mud-and-stone road from the eastern Afghanistan city of
Jalalabad. You can still find bin Laden's shattered two-room mud house
and a destroyed crude swimming pool. In nearby fields, I saw enormous
craters where 1,500-pound daisy-cutters had left their mark. "Day and
night," bin Laden would later recall, "American forces were bombing us
by smart bombs that weigh thousands of pounds and bombs that penetrate
caves."

In fact, those bombs very nearly killed him. Late in the night of
December 9, according to Abu Jaafar Al Kuwaiti, an Al Qaeda operative
who was at Tora Bora, U.S. forces hit the bunker where bin Laden had
been staying with "massive and terrorizing explosions." Al Qaeda's
leader, however, was 200 meters away, having moved just two nights
before.

Bin Laden was clearly in trouble, and he knew it. At some point during
the battle, he would sustain a serious wound to his left shoulder.
And, on December 14, around the time he finally fled Tora Bora, he
wrote a final testament that included this bleak message to his
offspring: "As to my children, forgive me because I have given you
only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have
chosen a road fraught with dangers and for this sake suffered from
hardships, embitterment, betrayal, and treachery. I advise you not to
work with Al Qaeda."

Yet, even as bin Laden contemplated his own death and Al Qaeda seemed
on the verge of defeat, Gary Berntsen, then commander of CIA
operations in eastern Afghanistan, was worried. A gung-ho officer who
speaks Dari, the local Afghan language, Berntsen realized that Afghan
soldiers were likely not up to the task of taking on Al Qaeda's hard
core at Tora Bora. In the first days of December, he had requested a
battalion of Rangers--that is, between 600 and 800 soldiers--to
assault the complex of caves where bin Laden and his lieutenants were
believed to be hiding and to block their escape routes. That request
was denied by the Pentagon, for reasons that have never been fully
clarified. In the end, there were probably more journalists at Tora
Bora than the 50 or so Delta and Green Beret soldiers who participated
in the fight.

And so the task of encircling the area was passed off to local
warlords--one of whom declared a truce with Al Qaeda at a critical
moment in the battle, allowing members of the group to slip away.
Muhammad Musa, a massively built, laconic Afghan commander who led
several hundred of his soldiers on the Tora Bora front line, told me,
"There were six American soldiers with us, U.S. Special Forces. They
coordinated the air strikes. My personal view is if they had blocked
the way out to Pakistan, Al Qaeda would not have had a way to escape."
The strategy of relying on local proxies--a tactic that had served
America so well in overthrowing the Taliban--proved disastrous at the
Afghan campaign's crucial moment.

Everyone knows what happened next: Al Qaeda's leaders fled into the
tribal areas of western Pakistan, where they began the long process of
rebuilding their devastated organization. That process has gone far
better than they could possibly have imagined as they slipped out of
Afghanistan in late 2001 to the hum of American munitions blowing
apart their last refuge in a country that had once, more or less, been
theirs.

Over the subsequent six years, administration officials and their
defenders have offered two arguments to minimize the American failure
at Tora Bora. The first is that we don't really know whether bin Laden
himself was there. In fact, there is a great deal of evidence that Al
Qaeda's leader was at the mountain holdout in December 2001. Batarfi,
the Yemeni doctor, has said he saw him there. Moreover, Berntsen told
me that CIA officers at Tora Bora who were monitoring local radio
transmissions overheard bin Laden talking during the battle. And an
American military officer who was on the battlefield confirmed that
American "collectors" scanning for radio signals in the area heard Al
Qaeda's leader speak several times between December 7 and December 14.

The second argument is that, even if we did allow bin Laden and Al
Qaeda's other top commanders to escape, they are no longer all that
crucial to the organization's operations. And it is true that, in
recent years, Al Qaeda has become more decentralized than it was
before September 11. But, while they may no longer be ordering attacks
over the phone, no one should doubt the continuing ability of bin
Laden and his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri--who also escaped from Tora
Bora--to set Al Qaeda's worldwide agenda. Since December 2001, their
videos and audiotapes have reached hundreds of millions of people
worldwide, many carrying specific instructions for militant cells. For
instance, in September 2003, Zawahiri denounced Pakistani President
Pervez Musharraf for supporting the U.S. campaign against Al Qaeda.
Within three months, militants had launched two assassination attempts
against Musharraf. In October 2003, bin Laden called for action
against Spain because of its troop presence in Iraq. Five months
later, terrorists killed 191 commuters in Madrid. In December 2004,
bin Laden called for attacks against Saudi oil facilities. Fourteen
months later, Al Qaeda attacked a plant in Abqaiq, one of the most
important oil production facilities in the world.

In short, allowing Al Qaeda's leadership to escape from Tora Bora and
fight another day has proven to be a costly mistake. And it was only
the first of many.

The Bush team's next major misstep came as it set about rebuilding the
country it had just conquered--or rather, for the most part, didn't.
Afghanistan should have been a demonstration project of American
resolve and American compassion: a signal to our enemies that, once
evicted from their sanctuaries, they would never be allowed back; and
a signal to our friends that democracy could flourish in a land where
militant Islamists had once reigned. But, as Lieutenant General David
Barno, the commanding general in Afghanistan in 2003, has dryly noted,
"Nation-building' was explicitly not part of the formula." According
to a study by rand, "Afghanistan has received the least amount of
resources out of any major American-led, nation-building operation
over the last 60 years." Specifically, the initial deployment of
American soldiers to Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban was
the smallest per capita peacekeeping force of any U.S. post-conflict
deployment since World War II--some 6,000 soldiers in a country that
is both 50 percent bigger geographically than Iraq and more populous
too. Moreover, based apparently on its aversion to allies, the
administration blocked any non-U.S. troops from deploying outside
Kabul for the first two years of the occupation. Not only were we
unwilling to police Afghanistan; we weren't going to let anyone else
do it, either. The absence of Western boots on the ground meant that
responsibility for security was often entrusted to local warlords--
whose increased clout, in turn, slowed the formation of a real Afghan
national army.

You get what you pay for, and, today, Afghanistan resembles nothing so
much as Iraq in the fall of 2003, when the descent into chaos began.
In 2006, IED attacks doubled, assaults on international forces
tripled, and suicide bombings quintupled. In fact, last year saw the
highest number of U.S. military and nato casualties since the fall of
the Taliban. And 2007 is shaping up to be even worse, with suicide
bombings up 69 percent from last year. What's more, Afghanistan is now
supplying almost all of the world's heroin. In Helmand and Kandahar--
provinces in southern Afghanistan--more than a quarter of the
population supports the Tali- ban, according to a poll released in
March. Just one in ten Afghans has access to electricity, while the
capital, Kabul, only has electricity for a few hours a day. Amer-
ica's neglect of Afghanistan since 2001 can only be described as an
enormous missed opportunity.

And the reason for that missed opportunity was simple: By the time the
Taliban fell, the Bush administration's attention was already
elsewhere. According to Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, in late
November 2001--even before the battle of Tora Bora--Bush asked the
Pentagon to revamp its 800-page Iraq war plan. General Tommy Franks
"was incredulous," Woodward writes. "They were in the midst of one war
in Afghanistan and now they wanted detailed planning for another in
Iraq? Goddamn,' Franks said, what the *** are they talking about?'"
In the months and years to come, the Iraq war would divert important
resources, military and otherwise, from Afghanistan--missile-firing
Predators, satellites, and key units such as the 5th Special Forces
Group, which specializes in the Middle East and was pulled out of the
country in the spring of 2002. It is heartbreaking, today, to imagine
what might have been accomplished if the money spent on the Iraq war--
hundreds of billions of dollars so far--had been plunged into creating
a model state in Afghanistan.

The removal of Saddam Hussein would prove to be a boon to Al Qaeda--
creating a base for the terrorist organization where none had existed
before, energizing jihadists around the word, and confirming for many
Muslims bin Laden's contention that the United States was at war with
Islam. "Al Qaeda in Iraq" was founded in 2004 by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi,
who had previously run a Jordanian terrorist outfit that was somewhat
competitive with Al Qaeda. His group's subsequent attacks against Shia
shrines, clerics, and civilians were the critical factor in Iraq's
slide into civil war. Suicide attacks--the vast majority perpetrated
by Al Qaeda--have killed more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians, according
to Mohammed Hafez of the University of Missouri, whose 2007 book,
Suicide Bombings in Iraq, is the authoritative study of the
phenomenon.

To be sure, the administration has been able to claim some victories
over Al Qaeda in Iraq during the last year. When it controlled the
western province of Anbar in 2006, Al Qaeda imposed Taliban-style
measures and punishments on the population and killed tribal leaders
it considered rivals. This allowed U.S. forces an opening to begin
turning Sunni tribal leaders against Al Qaeda--and, eventually, the
group was run out of the province. The Anbar model of recruiting Sunni
leaders to fight Al Qaeda is now being applied in other parts of the
country with some success. But Al Qaeda in Iraq is hardly down for the
count. According to the U.S. military, more than 4,000 Iraqis were
killed or injured by Al Qaeda suicide attacks in the first half of
2007.

The fallout from the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq has been felt far
outside the country. Bush defenders have claimed that Iraq will reduce
terrorism by drawing jihadists to the country like moths to a flame--
where they can be killed or captured before doing damage in the West.
But this assertion is unconvincing, because it incorrectly assumes
that the world contains a finite number of jihadists. In fact, the
pool of potential terrorists has expanded in the past four years. As
the administration's own 2006 National Intelligence Estimate explains,
"[T]he Iraq War has become the cause celebre' for jihadists ... and is
shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives." To test
that thesis empirically, Paul Cruickshank of New York University and I
compared the period after September 11 through the invasion of Iraq in
March 2003 with the period from March 2003 through September 2006.
Using numbers from the authoritative rand terrorism database, we found
that the rate of deadly attacks by jihadists had increased sevenfold
since the invasion. And, even excluding terrorism in Iraq and
Afghanistan, fatal attacks by jihadists in the rest of the world have
increased by more than one-third since March 2003.

This was not the way things were supposed to unfold. Indeed, not so
long ago, the jihadists themselves believed that the United States was
eliminating terrorists at an impressive rate. In 2004, Abu Musab Al
Suri, a key Al Qaeda ideologue, released a book that summarized the
damage sustained by his fellow militants in the immediate aftermath of
September 11:

America destroyed the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan, which became
the refuge for the mujahideen. They killed hundreds of mujahideen who
defended the Emirate. Then America captured more than six hundred
Jihadists from different Arab countries and Pakistan jailed them. The
Jihad movement rose to glory in the '60s, and continued through the
'70s and '80s, and resulted in the rise of the Islamic Emirate of
Afghanistan, but was destroyed after 9/11.

But, since then, Iraq and Afghanistan have become locked in a self-
reinforcing downward spiral--one that has handed the momentum in the
war on terrorism back to our adversaries. After Saddam's fall, Iraq
became a new headquarters of sorts for jihadists. Meanwhile, with the
Bush administration's attention elsewhere, Al Qaeda took the
opportunity to reassert itself along the Afghan- Pakistan border. And
jihadists began to travel between the two regions, worsening the
situation in both. As Art Keller, a CIA officer stationed in the
tribal areas of Pakistan in 2006, told me, "People are going from the
Afghan-Pakistan border to Iraq to learn the tactics and then come
back. Seems like the reverse of the way the war on terror was supposed
to work."

In September 2006, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made one of
his periodic visits to the United States. He was here, in part, to
promote his grandiose memoir, In the Line of Fire, by sitting for an
interview with NBC's "Today" show and bantering on Comedy Central with
Jon Stewart. (Stewart obsequiously served the dictator tea and
pronounced the book "remarkable.") But Musharraf wasn't just looking
to drive up his Amazon ranking. As always, he was here partly to have
his despotic ring kissed by Bush. And the president did not
disappoint. At a joint Washington press conference, after telling
Musharraf, "I admire your courage and leadership," Bush went on to
address a deal that the Pakistani government had recently signed with
militants in the tribal area of North Waziristan on the Afghan border.
Bush assured the assembled reporters that his Pakistani counterpart
knew what he was doing: "When President Musharraf said the peace deal
is intended to reject Talibanization of the people and there will not
be Taliban, there will not be Al Qaeda--I believe him."

Unfortunately, several months after that peace deal was signed,
Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the top American commander in
Afghanistan, disclosed that cross-border attacks from that area of
Pakistan were 200 percent higher than the year before; and a U.S.
military intelligence officer told the Associated Press that,
following the deal, attacks in the border area had ballooned by 300
percent. Shortly thereafter, Lieutenant General Michael Maples,
director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate
Intelligence Committee, "Pakistan's border with Afghanistan remains a
haven for Al Qaeda's leadership and other extremists. In a September
accord with the Pakistan government, North Waziristan tribes agreed to
curtail attacks into Afghanistan, cease attacks on Pakistani forces,
and expel foreign fighters. However, the tribes have not abided by
most terms of the agreement." Finally, after months of denial,
administration officials were forced this summer to concede the
obvious: that Musharraf's policy of appeasing the militants had been a
failure.

And that, in a nutshell, characterizes Bush's approach to Pakistan:
showering Musharraf with affection and largesse, only to receive
progressively less in return with each passing year. America has
handed $10 billion to the Pakistani government since September 11. Yet
the Taliban and Al Qaeda remain headquartered in Pakistan. A U.S.
military official in Afghanistan with access to intelligence
information told me this spring that Taliban leader Mullah Omar "is
still in Quetta," a major Pakistani city. And a Western official based
in Pakistan told me that "target folders" about the locations of high-
value Taliban and Al Qaeda targets were provided by the U.S.
government to Pakistan in late 2006--but never acted upon. Moreover,
the Bush administration has, on at least one occasion, refused to do
what Pakistan will not: This July, The New York Times reported that
Donald Rumsfeld nixed a proposed 2005 attack on a meeting of Al Qaeda
leaders in Pakistan--a meeting thought to include Zawahiri--in part
because the operation, which would have involved several hundred
special forces and CIA personnel, could have destabilized Musharraf.

In the past few years, Musharraf has convinced the Bush administration
that he is the only person who can prevent radical Islamists from
taking over his country and getting their hands on Pakistan's nuclear
weapons. But this is self-serving fiction. A September poll found that
Pakistan's coalition of militant Islamist parties, known as the MMA,
would receive only 3.5 percent of the vote in a contested election.
(Last week, Musharraf coasted to reelection, as opposition parties
boycotted the vote.) Having been duped by the myth of Musharraf's
indispensability, Bush officials are now overly reluctant to push the
Pakistani leader too hard on confronting Al Qaeda--for fear he will be
seen as an American stooge, eventually toppled, and replaced by
someone far worse.

This situation has been compounded by the fact that, for much of the
past six years, few American spies were operating in Pakistan's tribal
areas. Keller, the CIA officer, ran a spy network in one of the tribal
regions in early 2006. While he noted that more agents have since been
deployed, he said that, at the time, he was one of only a "handful" of
CIA officers doing this kind of work in the seven tribal regions where
Al Qaeda and Taliban militants are concentrat- ed. "A great deal of
the resources have gone to Iraq," he explained. "I don't think it's
appreciated that the CIA is not really a very large organization in
terms of field personnel."

Small wonder, then, that Al Qaeda continues to enjoy a safe haven in
Pakistan's tribal areas. Or that militants linked to Al Qaeda have
killed 200 Pakistani soldiers in suicide attacks during the past two
months. Six years after September 11, the Bush administration has yet
to receive the cooperation it needs from Pakistan. To borrow a word
from Jon Stewart, this is "remarkable."

In the early 1990s, a former sergeant in the U.S. Army who went by the
name "Jeff" began taking photos in Nairobi. Jeff, it turned out, had
traded in his job with Uncle Sam for a position with Al Qaeda, and
Osama bin Laden had asked him to scout potential targets for an attack
in Kenya. Among the sites he studied was the U.S. Embassy. Eventually,
having drawn diagrams and compiled a report, Jeff decamped for
Khartoum, where he presented his findings to Al Qaeda's top brass.
"Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy," Jeff would
later recall, "and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide
bomber."

Jeff's report would serve as the basis for Al Qaeda's bombing of the
U.S. Embassy in August 1998, an attack that killed more than 200
people. For much of the '90s, Jeff had lived a double life: shuttling
in and out of Sudan and Afghanistan as an Al Qaeda operative while
also working as a computer network specialist in California. One month
after the 1998 bombing, Jeff--whose real name is Ali Mohamed--was
arrested by the FBI in New York. Prior to September 11, he was the
highest-level Al Qaeda operative in U.S. custody.

In time, Mohamed would prove to be a treasure trove of information
about Al Qaeda. Facing the possibility of life in prison without
parole, he entered a guilty plea and, as part of the bargain, detailed
bin Laden's personal involvement in the 1998 embassy bombings as well
as Al Qaeda's dealings with Hezbollah in the mid-'90s. He also agreed
to cooperate in prosecutions of other terrorists. None of this was
easy, of course. Daniel Coleman, a former FBI special agent who dealt
with Mohamed and is regarded as one of the nation's leading
authorities on Al Qaeda, recalls that "it took two years to get him to
the point where we could safely say that he was reliable and not
leading us on." But, eventually, he did--and physical coercion was not
involved. "There is no need to use anything else other than the full
legal scope and power of the justice system," Coleman says of his
approach to interrogations. "To go outside of that is completely
unnecessary."

Indeed, Coleman thinks the Bush administration's treatment of captured
terrorists--holding so many outside the traditional justice system at
Guantánamo while authorizing interrogation techniques that some
observers would consider torture--has been largely a bust. He told me
that most of the information he saw coming out of Guantánamo until his
retirement in 2004 "was of no particular value." And Coleman believes
that, unlike the intelligence the FBI extracted from Ali Mohamed, the
information provided by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed--the September 11
operational commander who is reported to have been subjected to
waterboarding while in U.S. custody--is "suspect" and "not useful in a
court of law."

Coleman isn't the only one who feels this way. Michael Rolince, who,
from 2002 to 2005, was special agent in charge of counterterrorism in
the FBI's Washington field office--which handles not just threats to
the capital region, but also many overseas cases--told me, "I don't
recall any information that was relevant [to my office] coming out of
Guantánamo." He also points out that "torture and coercion gets you,
in the vast majority of cases, wrong information that takes you off on
wild goose chases." And Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent who obtained
uncoerced confessions from two notorious terrorists--Ramzi Yousef,
mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Mir Aimal
Kansi, killer of two CIA employees outside agency headquarters that
same year--told me that "coercive interrogation techniques have proven
to be ineffective in producing reliable intelligence."

But Bush's decision to operate outside the boundaries of U.S. and
international law has been worse than simply unnecessary; it has also
actively harmed American interests. For one thing, by refusing to
bring terrorists to trial, we have passed up valuable opportunities to
dispassionately present evidence of Al Qaeda's bloodlust to the world
at large. (Testimony in the 2001 embassy-bombing trial established for
the first time that Al Qaeda had tried to acquire highly enriched
uranium in the mid-'90s--which had the effect of publicly underscoring
the group's plans for mass murder.) Moreover, Bush's legal approach to
the war on terrorism has torpedoed America's good reputation around
the world. In a BBC survey released this year, of the more than 26,000
people polled in 25 different countries, seven out of ten disapproved
of the treatment of Guantánamo inmates, while half thought the United
States plays a mostly negative role in the world. The numbers are far
worse in Muslim countries--including democratic ones that should be
natural allies. According to a recent Pew poll, America's favorability
rating stands at 9 percent in Turkey (down from 52 percent before
September 11) and 29 percent in Indonesia (down from 75 percent before
September 11).

If, as the president explained in a speech last year, the United
States is today engaged "in the decisive ideological struggle of the
twenty-first century," right now we are on the losing side of the
battle of ideas. Garrett, for one, understands why. "Interrogation
techniques that violate human decency ... can weaken others supporting
us in fighting terrorism and can actually create more enemies," he
says. In other words, Bush's legal strategy in the war on terrorism
has been counterproductive. And the consequences for our safety are
real.

Yet, for all Bush's obvious missteps, there is one inarguable bright
spot in the war on terrorism, and it is no small matter: Since
September 11, America has not been attacked again. Bush,
unsurprisingly, has not been shy about taking credit for this. Al
Qaeda, he explained last year, has failed to strike the United States
a second time "because our government has changed its policies--and
given our military, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel the
tools they need to fight this enemy and protect our people." And a
fair-minded observer might conceivably ask: Is it possible that,
despite all he has done wrong, Bush has somehow managed to get the
single most important thing right?

There is no doubt that some of the measures Bush has taken since
September 11 have made us safer. First, the much- maligned Patriot Act
accomplished something quite important, which was to break down the
legal "wall" that had been blocking the flow of information between
the CIA and the FBI. Second, the creation of the National Counter
Terrorism Center has led to various agencies sharing data and
analyzing it under one roof. (Although it should be noted that the
center was the brainchild of the 9/11 Commission--whose establishment
the Bush administration fought tooth-and-nail for more than a year.)
Third, it is now much harder for terrorists to get into the country
thanks to no-fly lists. Finally, cooperation between U.S. and foreign
intelligence agencies has generally been strong since September 11.
For instance, Al Qaeda's plot to bring down ten U.S. airliners was
disrupted last year by the joint work of U.S., British, and Pakistani
intelligence services.

That said, the key reason we have not been attacked again has nothing
to do with Bush. In sharp contrast to Muslim populations in European
countries like Britain--where Al Qaeda has found recruits for multiple
terrorist plots--the American Muslim community has overwhelmingly
rejected the ideological virus of radical Islam. The American Dream
has generally worked well for Muslims in the United States, who are
both better-educated and wealthier than the average American. There is
no analogous "British Dream," "French Dream," or, needless to say, "EU
Dream." None of this is to say that the limited job opportunities and
segregation that are the lot of many European Muslims are the causes
of terrorism in Europe--only that such conditions create favorable
circumstances in which Al Qaeda can recruit. And, in the absence of
those conditions on this side of the Atlantic, radical Islam has never
gained much of a foothold--largely sparing us the scourge of homegrown
terrorism. This is fundamentally a testament to American pluralism,
not the Bush administration.

Consider the jihadists who have plotted or carried out the worst
attacks here in recent years. Yousef flew in from Pakistan for the
1993 World Trade Center bombing. Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian, tried to
drive in from Canada on his way to bomb LAX airport in 1999. The
September 11 hijackers all traveled to the United States specifically
for the attacks. Of course, there are almost certainly homegrown Al
Qaeda wannabes in America. But, without the Al Qaeda infrastructure
that exists in Europe, these would-be terrorists are unlikely to have
the training or capabilities to pull off mass-casualty attacks.

For America, then, the threat does not come from within, but rather
from abroad. And, while Bush can take some credit for measures that
have made it harder for foreign terrorists to get into the country, he
must take the blame for the fact that his policies--in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Pakistan, and Guantánamo--have greatly increased the pool of
jihadist terrorists around the world. Since September 11, we have
largely managed to block these jihadists from entering. But no
country, no matter how vigilant, no matter how powerful, can hope to
lock out every last member of an ever-multiplying, ever-more-
sophisticated gang of trained killers forever. Which is why our best
bet--and maybe our only hope--in the war on terrorism is to stop Al
Qaeda long before it gets here.

It has been six years since we were a few hundred maddening meters
from killing Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora--and, perhaps, a few hundred
soldiers from finishing off his top lieutenants as well. Tora Bora
seems very far away from New York, and, in many ways, it is. But the
disastrous chain of events that began there in December 2001--a
bungled bid to snag bin Laden, followed by a war in Iraq that gave new
life to Al Qaeda, accompanied by a virtual abandonment of Afghanistan,
compounded by a naïve approach toward Pakistan, topped off by a set of
legal policies that has made America the bane of world opinion--may
yet end in the streets of Manhattan. Indeed, if the last few years
have taught us anything, it is that the steps from Tora Bora to
Waziristan to Anbar to London--to beyond?--are not so large at all.

And so it bears mentioning that, the last few times I visited
Jalalabad, my Afghan friends warned me strongly against traveling to
Tora Bora. The area, they explained, had been taken over by jihadists.
They were right: In August, American soldiers went into Tora Bora to
take on hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda militants holed up there.

Meanwhile, reports surfaced that perhaps bin Laden had been in the
area. Alas, we didn't get him this time either.

PETER BERGEN is a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation
and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know.

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