Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (22 page)

American officials know that if they damage the terrorists’ reputations and credibility with their fellow Muslims, they are decreasing the “territory” that the extremists hold dear. British counterterrorism experts (schooled in the craft after decades of fighting the Irish Republican Army) and allies in the Muslim world are helping American officials devise a strategy to get in front of Al Qaeda’s narrative. A Saudi militant captured in Iraq and nicknamed “Bernie” by the Americans (because he was badly burned in an attack) was sent home and conducted a series of television interviews in which he said that he had been lied to and manipulated by Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq. Worse, he said, there had been no long lines of Iraqi women willing to service him, as had been promised. Efforts like this are part of the war of persuasion and instantaneous countermessages, not unlike a modern political campaign.

Many of the American efforts center on drawing attention to civilian deaths caused not by allied forces in Iraq or Afghanistan but by Al Qaeda or the Taliban. A study by the West Point Center for Combating Terrorism in December 2009 found that only 15 percent of the people killed in Al Qaeda attacks between 2004 and 2008 were Westerners. The vast majority of the victims were Muslims. The report struck a nerve with Al Qaeda. Adam Gadahn, an American-born spokesman for Al Qaeda, responded within days with a poor-quality video in which he stuttered and tripped over words in denouncing the criticisms leveled in the report.

Obama’s Cairo speech, in which he quoted repeatedly from the Koran and sprinkled his remarks with Arabic, began by identifying and confronting the tensions between the United States and the Muslim world: Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iran, nuclear weapons issues, democracy, women’s rights. “Our view of the speech was pretty simple,” said Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and the main speechwriter for the Cairo address. “It was acknowledge the tensions, name them and work through each of them.” The second half of the address tackled what the president’s aides said had been a glaring shortcoming in a comprehensive strategy to deter terrorist ideology. “We were countermessaging al Qaeda,” said Rhodes, “but we weren’t crafting a positive message that was relevant to people’s lives in these countries.”

To articulate that positive message, Rhodes studied public-opinion polling in several Muslim countries and American intelligence reports and also consulted a range of independent experts, businesspeople, and prominent Muslim Americans to determine what the people in the Muslim world cared about most. He was surprised by the results. “Terrorism usually wasn’t on the list,” Rhodes said. “Basically we were crafting messages in many cases based on what we cared about but not on what the audience cared about. Anyone who has run a political campaign or an ad campaign knows that if you want to communicate a message, you need to know your audience.” What the people did care about in those Muslim countries was science, technology, education, and entrepreneurship. “The things they still admired about America and the areas they still wanted to partner with America were in areas that we weren’t doing that much in,” Rhodes said.

In response, and in the wake of the president’s speech, the administration expanded business and education exchange programs. It dispatched science envoys. It started new health initiatives. President Obama hosted 250 entrepreneurs from around the Muslim world in April 2010 and created a fund to promote technological development. “We’re basically trying to create deeper networks with Muslim majority publics,” Rhodes said. “We don’t expect Al Qaeda to surrender next year because we are having an entrepreneurship summit or expanding educational exchanges or sending a science envoy to Cairo. But we need a long game.” A long game in political parlance is a long-term strategy. “The long game has to be just as it was in the Cold War, things that expand your networks into these places, things that expand not just government connections, but civil society connections—things that bring people here and give them a positive impression of America,” Rhodes said.

In a sign of how important the president considers the legacy of the speech, Rhodes said that Obama keeps a checklist of its themes and goals, and demands regular memos updating him on the initiatives that were launched following the address. “We have an accountability loop on that,” Rhodes said. “I can assure you that the interested groups on the outside also know we have a checklist.”

However, more than a year after Obama’s speech, there was a widespread feeling in the Muslim world that the president and his advisers had failed to follow through sufficiently on Cairo’s lofty goals and that they had underestimated the difficulty in meeting the raised expectations. Rhodes’s “long game” was in place, but the Muslim street wanted more dramatic short-term results. Despite the preparation and soaring rhetoric, Obama had failed to change the narrative he set out to destroy. A June 2010 report from the Pew Global Survey concluded, “Roughly one year since Obama’s Cairo address, America’s image shows few signs of improving in the Muslim world, where opposition to key elements of U.S. foreign policy remains pervasive and many continue to perceive the U.S. as a potential military threat to their countries.” An Arab Public Opinion Poll (conducted by the University of Maryland and Zogby International) found that respondents in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates with a positive view of Obama had declined to 20 percent in 2010 from 45 percent a year earlier.

One senior State Department official said that Obama had boxed himself in by failing to deliver on a promise in the speech to take a hard line with Israel and to bridge the deep divisions between Israelis and Palestinians. “The Cairo speech, initially at least, was very important because he broke one of the major taboos of American foreign policy, which is to get tough with Israel and to bash heads with Netanyahu,” said the official, referring to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “For a time period, he very clearly tackled a very critical issue in the Arab world. The Cairo speech was clearly a major dent into that image of steadfast American support for Israel. But he cornered himself by going really hard on Israel and not delivering.” An American ambassador to a Muslim country also expressed disappointment at what he called a missed opportunity to build on the promises in the speech, citing the administration’s failure to engage the Middle East peace process more aggressively or to seek closer ties to Yemen, Lebanon, and even Syria.

Rhodes acknowledged that the president may suffer in the short term but argued that the final judgment on the speech and what it achieved is still years away. He asserted that Obama’s personal popularity in Muslim countries, which ranks higher than that of the United States overall, shows that the president’s personal appeal remains a challenge to the terrorists’ ideology. “What I think we got after that speech and what we didn’t have at the end of the Bush administration is the benefit of the doubt,” Rhodes said. “People want the president to do what he said he would do in the speech and he hasn’t done that yet. That is good, they want him to continue, they want him to succeed.” Nonetheless, Obama’s checklist still has several empty boxes.

The turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa that erupted in January and February 2011 has complicated Obama’s accounting. The White House faced strong criticism from human rights groups for not backing the pro-democracy movements in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere sooner and more forcefully. Whether the populist uprisings help or hurt Al Qaeda’s brand appeal is still playing out. Al Qaeda and its affiliates played no role in the initial rebellions and were caught flat-footed by the tumult. Osama bin Laden was silent, and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, issued only a handful of rambling statements. The largely nonviolent, secular revolts in Egypt and Tunisia amounted to a rejection of Al Qaeda’s belief that murderous violence and religious fanaticism are necessary to topple the despots bin Laden denounced as puppets of the West and to replace them with an Islamic caliphate. “It’s a discrediting of Al Qaeda’s agenda,” said John Brennan. By late March, however, Al Qaeda appeared to have regained its propagandist footing. Its leaders claimed that Islamist extremists delighted in the success of protest movements against regimes they abhorred, and they exhorted the protesters not to let up. Zawahri urged Egyptians who had toppled President Hosni Mubarak to disdain the United States, reject democracy, and embrace Islam as the answer to their grievances. Whether Al Qaeda successfully exploits the chaos in Libya to set up bases in the thinly populated southern desert or in Yemen to expand AQAP’s influence is unclear. The long-term impact of these changes on Al Qaeda will depend partly on how leaders of the Middle East adapt. But if the underlying political and economic problems persist, Al Qaeda’s siren song may once again sound attractive to a small but potentially lethal group of extremists.

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The U.S. government has struggled mightily in the years since the September 11 attacks to develop an effective and credible campaign to counter the ideology and messaging of Al Qaeda and other extremist groups. In early 2002, the Pentagon quietly created the Office of Strategic Influence, a small but well-financed arm of the Defense Department’s policy branch, in response to concerns that the United States was losing public support overseas for its war against terrorism, especially in Muslim countries. The program’s supporters said they were filling a void left by traditional public diplomacy carried out by specialists at the State Department. The goal of the office was not only to broadcast messages into hostile countries but also to expand operations to friendly nations in the Middle East, Asia, and Western Europe. The proposals included aggressive campaigns that used foreign news media and the Internet as well as covert operations. But when the
New York Times
disclosed in February 2002 that the office planned to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to unwitting journalists to influence public sentiment abroad, Secretary Rumsfeld was forced to shut it down.

There were also efforts made to communicate with terrorist leaders directly, but these seemed like long shots at best. The Bush administration’s secret program to send back-channel messages to bin Laden and his inner circle in 2001 was met with silence. It is unclear whether this highly classified program continued at all in President Obama’s administration, which has carried out a significant review of all Bush-era covert intelligence programs as well as counterterrorism policies and initiatives. Under the Bush administration, which swore never to negotiate with terrorists, publicly defending such a program would have been extremely difficult.

American officials have searched for an ideological counterweight to Al Qaeda, whose protean and inspirational character has made it unlike any foe the military and the rest of the American government has ever dealt with. “You can destroy the people in Al Qaeda, but you can’t destroy the idea of Al Qaeda,” General Abizaid warned. “The idea of Al Qaeda needs to be attacked in a very, very whole-of-government, whole-of-international-agency way, and it has to be done in a way that’s affordable.”

The Bush administration struggled with how to organize the effort to counter Al Qaeda’s message. The State and Defense departments fought any effort to subordinate their countermessaging efforts to the direction of a senior official at the National Security Council. And on a substantive level, many American officials admit that their most well-meaning efforts may fall short in combating Al Qaeda’s narrative; it will require the efforts of Muslim leaders themselves to address the ideological threat. “You’re putting your finger in the dike when you apply security measures against an ideological problem,” said Philip Mudd, a former top counterterrorism official at the CIA and at the FBI. “The people who can beat this ideology are in the Islamic world, not here—we don’t have the credibility in the ideological fight.” In Saudi Arabia, for example, not only have security forces virtually eradicated the Al Qaeda cell there following a string of fatal bombings beginning in 2003, but religious leaders in the kingdom have been ordered to denounce suicide bombings and violence. The government has established and financed religion-based deradicalization centers for militants, which include education, job training and counseling, and a commitment by a militant’s family to keep him from returning to violence. Counterterrorism experts say that these programs have had mixed success.

By 2007, these efforts and Al Qaeda’s own excesses began to have an impact. Increasingly, there were signs of divisions within the once unified ideological ranks. Saudi Arabia’s top cleric, Grand Mufti Sheik Abdul Aziz al-Asheik, gave a speech in October of that year warning Saudis not to join unauthorized jihadist activities, a statement directed mainly at those considering going to Iraq to fight the American-led forces. Abdul-Aziz el-Sherif, a leader of the armed Egyptian movement Islamic Jihad and a longtime associate of Ayman al-Zawahri, the second-ranking Al Qaeda official, completed a book in 2007 that renounced violent jihad on legal and religious grounds. According to Western and Middle Eastern diplomats, such dissents have served to widen rifts between Al Qaeda leaders and some of their former loyal backers, depressing their recruiting success.

Dissent can also shift the initiative away from jihadist leaders. On December 16, 2007, Zawahri invited journalists and jihadists to ask him questions via the primary jihadist Web forums, but when his responses were released nearly four months later, he seemed to be on the defensive. “We haven’t killed the innocents, not in Baghdad, nor in Morocco, nor in Algeria nor anywhere else,” Zawahri said, according to a transcript posted on Web sites linked to Al Qaeda on April 2, 2008. In May 2010, Saudi Arabia’s top religious leadership, known as the Council of Senior Ulema, issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, that denounced terrorism, including the financing of terrorist acts. Many other foreign governments, including those of the Netherlands and Pakistan, have employed counterrecruiting strategies, some aimed at the broad Muslim population, others tailored to reach disaffected young people who are easily radicalized.