Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (33 page)

“Here we are, it is 2010, and it is the first time that the Department of Education has been brought in to do a roundtable and talk to professional educators about radicalization and the role they might play in helping to prevent it,” Leiter said. “I think it is great that we are doing it. But you have to have a lot more of these sorts of programs to see real progress.”

*   *   *

At the White House and Pentagon, and across the broad spectrum of intelligence agencies, senior officials concede that they underestimated the capabilities of AQAP prior to the Christmas Day attack. “We are not underestimating them today,” said Michele A. Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy. “No. I think they are under the microscope.” No plot better illustrated AQAP’s ability to shift tactics to try to avoid this heightened scrutiny than the group’s scheme in late October 2010, in which toner cartridges packed with explosives were sent from Yemen to out-of-date addresses for two Chicago synagogues. A tip from Saudi intelligence thwarted the plot, and the packages were intercepted in Dubai and Britain. Though the attack failed, AQAP took great delight in mocking the West, claiming that the operation had cost only $4,200 to carry out and had wholly disrupted global air cargo systems—an example of low-cost attacks designed to inflict huge economic damage. In its online magazine,
Inspire
, AQAP crowed, “Two Nokia mobiles, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us.”

Even though the plot failed, AQAP had also proudly claimed credit for the Christmas Day attack, seeing it not as a defeat but a victory. “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is now the most operationally active node of the Al Qaeda network,” said John Brennan, just days before the first-year anniversary of the airliner plots. “Their definition of ‘success’—stoking fear, even if their attacks fail—portends more such attempts.”

By the first months of 2011, Awlaki and AQAP had not been able to mount a ricin attack, either because of a lack of technical skill or because the plot was knocked off course by continued pressure from the U.S.-backed police and military troops in Yemen, who were carrying out attacks against suspected AQAP fighters. Despite this success, however, President Obama’s senior advisers still feared that a ricin plot remained a live option for AQAP. “We continue to treat it as worthy of serious concern,” said a senior administration official. “It is not just the narrow effect a ricin or other unconventional attack would have. It is what it might strike in the way of fear or concern across a whole host of dimensions if that might happen.” If that threat wasn’t cause enough for worry, Saudi intelligence sources later uncovered a diabolical twist to the ricin plot: Terrorists were attempting to place the toxin in bottles of perfume, especially a popular local fragrance made from the resin of agar wood, and then to send those bottles as gifts to assassinate government officials, law enforcement and military officers, religious scholars, and journalists.

So the devil is indeed in the details—underwear, shoes, perfume, cell phone chatter—all of which are dots that need to be connected in a global effort unlike any that the United States has ever before undertaken. It is an old saw that the military always prepares for the last war. When it comes to combating global terrorism, there
is
no last war. The administration and a great part of the American government are making it up as it goes along. The plots reflect AQAP’s ingenuity and resourcefulness, qualities not lost on Michael Leiter as the NCTC and the rest of the government try to prevent every attack, knowing that eventually the terrorists will succeed. “In this era of this more complicated threat and a more diverse threat and lower-scale attacks,” Leiter said in a December 2010 speech, “stopping all attacks has become that much harder.”

“We have to be honest that some things will get through,” he added. “Innocent lives will be lost.”

10

THE OBAMA STRATEGY

The air in the Roosevelt Room was filled with tension as more than a dozen senior Pakistani and American government officials gathered for negotiations on October 20, 2010. The discussions were animated; the frustration on each side palpable.

The Americans warned that unless Pakistan cracked down on militants hiding in the tribal areas of North Waziristan who were attacking and killing American soldiers in Afghanistan, the administration might be unable to persuade Congress to keep writing the checks for more than $2 billion a year in assistance to Pakistan. But the guests from Islamabad shot back that their forces were stretched thin. Trust us, they said: The Pakistani Army would carry out an offensive on its own timetable.

In a relationship suffused with tension and flare-ups—at that moment, over a NATO helicopter gunship that had accidentally killed three Pakistani border guards, which prompted Pakistan to retaliate by closing down a supply route for fuel and food to NATO troops into Afghanistan—the meeting had been expected to serve as a lubricant to keep the allies talking.

The Roosevelt Room is just a few steps from the Oval Office, in the West Wing of the White House. So not long after the meeting began, President Obama made a dramatic and unannounced entrance. The president had a message he wanted to deliver personally. Earlier in the day, he had convened the National Security Council for its monthly meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan. The administration was in the midst of a midcourse review of a strategy that Obama had set out in a speech at West Point nearly a year earlier, on December 1, 2009, to reverse Taliban gains in large parts of Afghanistan, better protect the Afghan people, and step up attacks on Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups in Pakistan. It was the Pakistan piece of the strategy that worried Obama that October afternoon.

There was nothing impromptu about the president’s dropping in unannounced. The main focus of his attention during the thirty-five-minute session was Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who was viewed as the most powerful man in Pakistan. Obama opened his comments by seeking to dispel Pakistan’s fears that the United States would abandon the region as it had after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. He even went as far as dismissing a standard ploy of Pakistani propaganda: that the Pentagon had a secret plan to steal Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, its main strategic deterrent against its archrival, India.

As the discussion moved toward Pakistan’s role in combating extremists, Obama fixed his gaze on Kayani. In measured tones more solemn than threatening, the president said that he was not interested in weakening Pakistan’s security. But he warned that Pakistan’s security strategy could not include supporting “murderous groups” such as the Taliban and the Haqqani network. If there was an attack against the United States that was found to have originated from the tribal areas, he, as commander in chief, would do whatever was necessary to protect the United States and its citizens. “Americans would expect no less of me,” Obama told Kayani and the rest of the delegation. “My first duty is to protect American citizens. I know Pakistan would feel the same way.”

He left unsaid the specific steps the American military would take in retaliation against such a terrorist attack. But Obama’s implicit warning that he would order a major military response—most likely massive air strikes on Pakistani territory well beyond the now-familiar CIA drone attacks and commando raids—left no doubt that he was serious, one Pakistani official and one American official recalled. The foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, and the other civilian Pakistani ministers nodded silently in agreement at the president’s position. Kayani, sphinxlike as always, betrayed no hint of what he was thinking.

This was a significant escalation of a similar message that General James L. Jones, the national security adviser, and Leon E. Panetta, the CIA director, had delivered to Pakistani officials in Islamabad in May. That meeting had come two weeks after Faisal Shahzad’s unsuccessful attempt to explode a crude car bomb in Times Square. But hearing the same blunt words from Obama himself, in the White House, well, “that got Kayani’s attention,” said the Pakistani official.

Obama’s warning to Kayani that his military needed to clamp down on the Islamic fighters who were using safe havens inside his country, or pay the price of devastating American air strikes, was yet another example of how the U.S. government was adopting classic Cold War notions of deterrence to protect the United States against terrorists. The message was clear: If we are attacked, you will be attacked. But the difference today was that the threat of punishment was sometimes invoked against nominal allies, with the president himself offering a national blood oath to hold Pakistan, an ally, responsible for acts of terrorism against the United States launched from its territory and to punish it.

But unlike Cold War deterrence, when the weapons were held in ready reserve, now, in the age of terror, the United States was not just threatening but already was on the attack, using armed Predator drones for constant strikes on terror targets inside the sovereign territory of Pakistan. The drone strikes had two complementary goals, one tactical and one strategic. The immediate, tactical goal was to bring about the death of Al Qaeda leaders, other militant commanders, and their operatives. But when looked at from a longer perspective, the fear of the remotely piloted, heavily armed drones overhead had proved to be a deterrent in itself, pushing Al Qaeda senior leaders deeper into hiding, preventing their gathering together, and keeping them constantly on alert, in motion, and off balance.

At the NSC meeting earlier in the day, the discussion had focused on the effectiveness of the drone strikes. While American officials acknowledged the limitations of the strikes and the fact that they could not substitute for troops clearing and holding ground, they had become the tactic of choice against Pakistani militants in Obama’s first two years in office. Pakistani Army operations in six of the seven tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan have helped drive fighters from Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, the Haqqani network, and other militant groups into the seventh tribal area, North Waziristan, where the insurgents run a virtual ministate the size of Rhode Island. By bunching up there, insurgents are ultimately making it easier for American drone strikes to hit them from afar. American officials are loath to talk about this silver lining to the storm cloud they have long described building up in the tribal area of North Waziristan. This is because they do not want to undermine the Obama administration’s urgent public pleas for Pakistan to order troops into the area or to give Pakistan an excuse for inaction.

While the overall effectiveness of the strikes is impossible to ascertain, there are many accounts to confirm that a significant number of insurgent fighters and leaders have been killed. Indeed, the drone strikes have been a signature weapon of the Obama administration. The outlines of this preference grew out of Obama’s presidential campaign, which hinged on his opposition to the Iraq War and his support for more and smarter efforts against Al Qaeda.

As the campaign reached its peak in the fall of 2008, both Obama and his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, began receiving classified intelligence briefings designed to prepare them for taking office. On September 2, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, flew to Chicago to brief Obama on the most pressing national intelligence. In scheduling the meeting, Obama made clear that he only wanted to discuss terrorism. He was serious. As McConnell recalled, “They gave us an hour and we spent fifty-five minutes on terrorism.” The discussion focused on the safe havens in Pakistan and the Bush administration’s frustrations in getting the Pakistani leadership to undertake large-scale operations against Al Qaeda and the other militants in the tribal areas.

As president-elect, Obama immediately embraced the aggressive campaign against Al Qaeda in Pakistan. And soon after taking office, he rapidly escalated the pace of the CIA’s attacks against Al Qaeda and its affiliates in the tribal areas. Increasing the number of strikes to a total of 53 in 2009, the new administration conducted more attacks in its first year than in the entire eight years under President Bush, and their number more than doubled to 118 in 2010. The drone strikes were coordinated to target specific leaders and areas deemed most critical to America’s counterterrorism efforts. Notably, in 2009 the CIA began targeting the Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan. The air campaign intensely took aim at its leader, Baitullah Mehsud, and his inner circle, launching 17 strikes against him alone that year. On August 5, the CIA finally found him. Predator drones launched a barrage of missiles at Mehsud as he received dialysis on the roof of a home in South Waziristan, killing him and his family instantly. That next month, the Pakistani Army launched a major clearing operation against the Pakistani Taliban and its allies in South Waziristan. The operation sought to eliminate the Taliban sanctuary and establish a command post in Mehsud’s former headquarters. In support of these operations, the CIA targeted militant groups fleeing into North Waziristan, the traditional home of the Haqqani network and a major base of Al Qaeda’s training camps.

In an effort to stifle the expanding drone strikes, Al Qaeda and its allies sought to attack the program and the American spy network using whatever means possible. On December 30, 2009, Al Qaeda deployed a double agent named Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani to Forward Operating Base Chapman, a secret intelligence base in the remote mountains of eastern Afghanistan. He was known to the CIA as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, and on this day he was determined to achieve martyrdom by detonating himself in the midst of a group of senior CIA personnel running the intelligence program for which he was an informant. Beneath Khorasani’s Afghan National Army uniform was a vest of explosives. The ensuing blast killed fourteen people, including seven CIA officers and a senior Jordanian intelligence official. The strike, orchestrated by senior Al Qaeda figures such as Ayman al-Zawahri and Hakimullah Mehsud, a member of Baitullah’s tribe (but not a close relative) who succeeded him as head of the Pakistani Taliban, dealt a painful blow to the CIA’s elite counterterrorism program. The bombing also triggered a brutal CIA counterattack against Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, and the Haqqani network. In the year following the attack, nearly every member of the terrorist network responsible for the bombing was targeted and killed, removing more than half of Khorasani’s fellow operatives, according to Flashpoint Global Partners, a New York–based security consultant. Hakimullah Mehsud himself narrowly survived a drone strike against him on January 13, 2010.