Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (7 page)

The Bush administration’s justification for the war in Iraq at first hinged on fears that Saddam Hussein was developing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, possibly to share with terrorists. When no such weapons were found, the administration’s rationale for toppling the Iraqi government shifted toward bringing democracy to the Middle East. But now, foreign fighters were being drawn to Iraq to fight the Americans. Iraq may not have been the central front in the war on terror immediately after 9/11, but it was now. Two months later, Abizaid briefed senior administration officials, allies, and lawmakers on what he called the Long War, which extended far beyond Iraq. “Despite remarkable victories, the fight against terrorism is far from over,” Abizaid told the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 25. “The enemy’s ideological base, financial networks and information networks remain strong. Indeed, the demographic and economic conditions that breed terrorists may be worsening and those conditions are heightening the ideological fervor associated with radical Islamic extremism.” Abizaid told the lawmakers that the Pentagon recognized that the spreading war was not against Islam. “It is not a war against religion,” he said. “It is a war against irreligious murderers.”

The gloomy message was sinking in. On October 16, 2003, Rumsfeld sent a two-page memo to Wolfowitz, Feith, Myers, and General Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against them?” Rumsfeld asked in the note. “Does the U.S. need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The U.S. is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists’ costs of millions. It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.”

Two years after 9/11, the U.S. government’s counterterrorism efforts had made great strides. Teams of Special Operations forces and CIA paramilitary officers were coordinating more closely in the field than ever before. The FBI had scored several successes with allied law enforcement agencies, including Pakistani authorities, to kill or capture top Al Qaeda leaders. Treasury Department analysts were cracking terrorists’ financial networks. Slowly, barriers to intelligence sharing were crumbling. But two years into the fight, it was dawning on Rumsfeld and Myers at the highest levels of government as well as on people like Jeff Schloesser, Juan Zarate, and Art Cummings on the front lines just how little the U.S. government knew about Al Qaeda and other militant organizations, and how they attracted a growing following in the Muslim world. Bush remained the self-declared “war-on-terror president.” But military commanders, senior intelligence officers, and law enforcement officials squared off every day against violent extremists while they also confronted unresolved questions within their own government about competing interests, competing strategies, and a competition for financial resources, personnel, and information. It left many of them wondering who was really in charge of the war on terror.

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THE NEW DETERRENCE

It was the late summer of 2005, and the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was fast approaching. The invasion in Afghanistan had drifted into a forgotten war, becoming what the military called an economy-of-force mission, where the military did just what it was able to. Only in Iraq was the military doing everything it had to, but still things were not going well. The strategy and focus of the war against terrorism was about to undergo a significant rethinking.

Donald Rumsfeld was en route to Crawford, Texas, for his annual summer sojourn and sharing of private concerns with President Bush at his ranch. Rumsfeld carried in his battered leather briefcase a series of briefing papers, actual hard copies of PowerPoint slides, on a half-dozen critically pressing national security themes. Each of those briefings for the president was spare. Rumsfeld was known to scold officers who showed up with rainbow-hued printouts of the slides full of tridents and spiderwebs and coiled ropes to depict the complex mix of threats to the nation. And knowing he was about to sit with the commander in chief, Rumsfeld had demanded this time that his staff “really neck down the number of words,” recalled one aide who helped in the preparation. Rumsfeld ordered that these slides for the president be conceived as a briskly paced visual guide to a verbal presentation and a follow-up discussion. No Technicolor. No fabric design. Brief. Blunt. Black-and-white bullet points.

The staff had paid particular attention to preparing an update on missile defense, which was a passion of the president. But nestled among the handful of sensitive themes for Bush’s consideration that day was a radical new concept for counterterrorism. The secret briefing by Rumsfeld bore the prosaic title “A Concept for Deterring and Dissuading Terrorist Networks.” But its half-dozen pages, distilled from a thirty-one-page master briefing, contained radical new thinking. The briefing laid out a truly new strategy that would apply the lessons of Cold War–era deterrence to a wholly new effort to counter shadowy, stateless terrorist networks.

For two years, Rumsfeld had been demanding answers to the blunt question he had put to his top aides in his October 2003 memo: “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” And as Al Qaeda grew stronger and new affiliates sprang up, his grim-faced lieutenants had but one reply: “No.” But now, from a completely unexpected quarter, came the kind of creative, even counterintuitive thinking that Rumsfeld had all but given up eliciting. As he prepared for the flight to Crawford and his crucial meeting with the president, Rumsfeld was convinced that he now possessed something that offered the new answers the United States needed in its “long war” against global terrorism, and his usual supreme confidence was mixed with a certain apprehension.

Rumsfeld’s brief grew out of work by Douglas Feith, a champion of thinking about what had come to be described as “the new deterrence” in his role as the Pentagon’s top policy official. Feith had told confidants that, with unusual brashness, he had politely, respectfully, scolded Bush in May 2004, saying that while senior administration officials met frequently on Afghanistan or Iraq or outreach to the Muslim world or terrorist financing, there had been absolutely no meetings to look systematically at the administration’s marquee national security issue: the “global war on terror.” No National Security Council meeting of the president, his cabinet, and his top-level advisers to assess the broader strategy of combating Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

“I said, ‘Mr. President, you never have a meeting on the war on terrorism,’” Feith recalled. “If we’re serious about the war on terrorism being a war with multiple elements and campaigns, one would think that at some point, you’d ask how we’re doing in the larger effort.”

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The briefing Rumsfeld gave President Bush on August 11, 2005, might not have happened were it not for a veteran Cold Warrior toiling deep inside the Pentagon’s policy bureaucracy who mentored a young Ph.D. candidate from the University of California at Berkeley assigned to the Defense Department as a summer fellow in June 2005. As was often the case with the impatient defense secretary known for his “wire-brush treatment” of subordinates, even four-star officers, it was an angry Rumsfeld outburst that spawned an important internal debate. That discussion yielded results that were eventually condensed into the PowerPoint briefing for President Bush, a forecast of what has since become a pillar of the new counterterrorism strategy.

The veteran Cold Warrior was Barry Pavel, one of those highly respected, long-serving civilian policy planners who can spend an entire career moving around from one place to another—the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the State Department, and the intelligence community—without their names ever surfacing in the media. That’s how they like it. The idea for applying principles of deterrence to terrorists? “It came from my head because I am a longtime nuclear deterrence/nuclear arms control guy,” he said. “Everybody was saying it can’t be done, it can’t be done. I just thought about it—and, well, terrorists are human beings and they have various incentive structures and it is not like they don’t value anything—they value something.”

One of Pavel’s subordinates in the Pentagon policy shop was a summer intern from Berkeley, Matthew Kroenig, a graduate student with the credentials to be one of Pavel’s counterterrorist Jedi trainees. A native of St. Louis and the son of an environmental engineer and a stay-at-home mom, Kroenig had spent a semester during his junior year at the University of Missouri aboard a research vessel at sea, traveling to twelve countries over four months. The experience sparked an intense interest in foreign affairs. Kroenig had gone on to study the proliferation of nuclear weapons and Cold War nuclear-deterrence theory while pursuing his doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley. He is Hollywood handsome, which runs in the family. His younger brother has been ranked as one of the world’s top models and his sister is a regional TV news anchor. Later, during a stint as an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Kroenig would rate a “chili pepper” at
ratemyprofessors.com
not for his lecture style but for being a “hot” teacher, as voted by the university’s students.

Atop the Pentagon policy organization was Feith, in his role as undersecretary of defense. A self-proclaimed hard-core neoconservative, Feith was placed in the Pentagon’s senior policy spot by the Bush administration as a favor to Richard Perle, a Reagan-era hawk who was one of the first—and continually most vocal—advocates of war with Iraq well before 9/11. Feith began pushing like Perle for an Iraq-first strategy in the early hours after the 9/11 attacks and soon was put in charge of the Office of Special Plans, a shadowy Pentagon-within-the-Pentagon to begin war planning even before invading Iraq became official U.S. policy. Feith and his boss, Paul Wolfowitz, also created a small intelligence unit deeper within the Pentagon policy shop to search for bits of information on Iraq’s links to terrorists, which antagonized the main intelligence agencies. Wolfowitz and Feith defended the team’s work data mining for raw files—in other words, reports completely without analysis or evaluation—that they suspected held leads to Saddam Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda that the intelligence community had missed or deliberately ignored. But any suggestions of Saddam’s close ties to Al Qaeda were proved spurious or inconsequential at best. The Feith team’s effort was denounced by intelligence professionals as “politicization” and “cherry picking.” Rumsfeld, according to his senior aides, was embarrassed by the disclosure.

While Feith was criticized by his foes within the national security establishment and within the military’s top ranks for being doctrinaire, in his leadership of the large policy directorate at the Pentagon he encouraged nondoctrinaire thinkers. He created a number of working groups to analyze the terrorist threat and to seek new methods for combating those who might attack the United States with unconventional weapons. The groups’ papers, full of ideas and recommendations, were adopted throughout the Bush administration and in time would be sustained by the Obama administration despite their parentage.

Pavel’s thinking during the summer of 2005 about whether Cold War deterrence could be applied to twenty-first-century threats appealed to Feith: If deterrence had kept the Kremlin leadership in line and eventually helped topple the Soviet giant, might there be tools from the Cold War arsenal of threat, bluff, and guaranteed nuclear punishment that similarly could be used to corner, combat, and conquer America’s present-day adversaries? Early in the summer of 2005, Feith had ordered one group to tackle how to deter peer competitors like China from attempting nuclear blackmail—let alone nuclear attack—against the United States. Another group would address how deterrence theory could be updated to manage unpredictable rogue states, like Iran or North Korea, with emerging nuclear capabilities. Matt Kroenig was assigned to lead the effort that colleagues told him was the least likely to succeed: how to deter terrorist networks from attacking the United States or its allies.

It was a widely accepted premise in President Bush’s war cabinet that it would be impossible to deter the most fervent extremists from carrying out deadly terrorist missions with weapons of mass destruction or of mass disruption. To the president’s top national security advisers, the answer was a matter of military action solely, of capturing or killing terrorist leaders and their foot soldiers. There was no middle ground and no interest in finding one.

But Kroenig was undaunted. If the only tool you have is a hammer, then of course every problem looks like a nail. Kroenig had planned to stay at the Pentagon for just a few months before returning to California to write his dissertation, so why not take on this complex assignment and view the terrorist threat through fresh eyes? Working in a windowless cubicle in a nondescript office, in a few days he completed a draft that combined his studies on classic deterrence theory with his growing knowledge of global terrorism, gleaned from highly classified assessments by the CIA, the NSA, and the rest of the American intelligence community. Kroenig and Pavel crafted a briefing to make the case that a combination of efforts—economic, diplomatic, military, political, and psychological, some highly classified and some carried out in the broad daylight of public debate—could in fact establish a new strategy and create a new and effective posture of deterrence against terrorist groups.