Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer have an incredibly detailed ( and long) account of the Bush administration's fight against al-Qaeda since 9/11. Gellman et al portray many early successes against bin Laden's group. But the political trends are going in the wrong way. That, in combination with the looming election year and the fight in Iraq, have caused the Bush administration to lose focus and resources against al Qaeda while political leaders try to spin a rosy picture out of failure. For example:
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In the second half of March 2002, as the Bush administration mapped its next steps against al Qaeda, Deputy CIA Director John E. McLaughlin brought an unexpected message to the White House Situation Room. According to two people with firsthand knowledge, he told senior members of the president's national security team that the CIA was scaling back operations in Afghanistan.
That announcement marked a year-long drawdown of specialized military and intelligence resources from the geographic center of combat with Osama bin Laden. As jihadist enemies reorganized, slipping back and forth from Pakistan and Iran, the CIA closed forward bases in the cities of Herat, Mazar-e Sharif and Kandahar. The agency put off an $80 million plan to train and equip a friendly intelligence service for the new U.S.-installed Afghan government. Replacements did not keep pace with departures as case officers finished six-week tours. And Task Force 5 -- a covert commando team that led the hunt for bin Laden and his lieutenants in the border region -- lost more than two-thirds of its fighting strength.
The commandos, their high-tech surveillance equipment and other assets would instead surge toward Iraq through 2002 and early 2003, as President Bush prepared for the March invasion that would extend the field of battle in the nation's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks
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[Frances] Townsend, who inherited [Wayne] Downing's duties [as head of Counter Terrorism at the National Security Council] this spring, said the best evidence of Bush's success "is every day that goes by that America doesn't suffer another attack."
"By any measure, to me, we're winning, they're losing," she said. "We know for a fact that it's very difficult for them to raise money and move money around. We've made it increasingly difficult to communicate. It is harder for them to travel without risk. . . . Is there something that they absolutely, 100 percent guaranteed, can't do? I'm not going to say that. The point is we have degraded their capability to act across the board."
John A. Gordon, Townsend's immediate predecessor, said in his first interview since leaving government in June that those measures of tactical success are no longer enough.
"People in the business would say, 'We've done all this stuff, we know we've pushed back some attacks,' but what does it mean to be safer?" he asked. "You decrease the probability of a major attack, but you haven't pushed it to anywhere near zero. If it happens, nobody's going to care whether we 'significantly affected' [the threat] or not."
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Classified tallies made available to The Washington Post have identified 28 of the approximately 30 names on the unpublished HVT [High Value Target] List. Half -- 14 -- are known to be dead or in custody. Those at large include three of the five men on the highest echelon: bin Laden, his deputy Ayman Zawahiri and operational planner Saif al-Adel.
More significant than the bottom line, government analysts said, is the trend. Of the al Qaeda leaders accounted for, eight were killed or captured by the end of 2002. Five followed in 2003 -- notably Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the principal planner of the Sept. 11 attack. This year only one more name -- Hassan Ghul, a senior courier captured infiltrating Iraq -- could be crossed off.
"I'll be pretty frank," Gordon said this fall after leaving the administration. "Obviously we would have liked to pick up more of the high-value targets than have been done. There have been strong initiatives. They just haven't all panned out."
As the manhunt results declined, the Bush administration has portrayed growing success. Early last year, the president's top advisers generally said in public that more than one-third of those most wanted had been found. Late this year it became a staple of presidential campaign rhetoric that, as Bush put it in the Sept. 30 debate with Kerry, "75 percent of known al Qaeda leaders have been brought to justice."
Although some of the administration's assertions are too broadly stated to measure, some are not. Townsend, Bush's homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, said "three-quarters" of "the known al Qaeda leaders on 9/11" were dead or in custody. Asked to elaborate, she said she would have to consult a list. White House spokeswoman Erin Healy referred follow-up questions to the FBI. Spokesmen for the FBI, the National Security Council and the CIA did not respond to multiple telephone calls and e-mails.
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George Bush became fascinted with Iraq because both he and his advisers all grew up in the Cold War and were out of power after it ended. As such, they did not see the danger in non-state actors and always assumed that al Qaeda had to have state sponsorship. They were wrong. Now they've flubbed Iraq, creating a haven for terrorists, have left the impression in much of the Middle East's mind that America is more dangerous than al Qaeda, and diverted attention from the fight against al Qaeda whil undermining their last reminaing justification for the Iraq War--promoting democracy in the Middle East. It could'nt have dbeen done worse if they tried.
# posted by N.D. Burnside @ 10:09 AM
