Steve Coll: Ghost Wars

I was reading James Risen's New York Times Book Review of Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies and Steve Coll's Ghost Wars, and was struck by Risen's description of "the mush that was the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policy." I've been reading Coll's book, and while "mush" might be a word to sum up the results of Clinton's policies, it is also misleading. It suggests that Clinton was soft on al Qaeda. But the evidence is pretty clear that Clinton was as fanatical as his successor. The difference was that Clinton had people to call his bluster, so he wound up pulling his punches. (Excepting the cruise missile attack on the Sudan, which played badly all over the world, and taught Clinton a lesson.) Consider the following quote, from Coll (page 498):

Clinton pleaded with [General Hugh] Shelton [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] after a Cabinet meeting for even a symbolic raid: "You know," the president told the general, "it would scare the shit out of al Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp. It would get us enormous deterrence and show these guys we're not afraid." But when Shelton returned with an options briefing, his plans all outlined large deployments and cautioned that there would be scant probability of success.

Shelton felt the pressure from Richard Clarke especially. Clarke pressed the Pentagon relentlessly for smaller, stealthier plans to attack bin Laden. Shelton saw the White House counterterrorism chief as "a rabid dog." He conceded that "you need that in government--you need somebody who won't take no for an answer." Still, Shelton and the generals felt Clarke and other White House civilians had "some dumb-ass ideas, not militarily feasible. They read something in a Tom Clancy novel and thought you can ignore distances, you can ignore the time-distance factors."

Shelton's comment reflected the rather pedestrian fact that the U.S. had no place to base helicopters close enough that they could fly into Afghanistan without refueling. But it seems to me that the jihadists would cut the ninjas to pieces before they landed -- unless they were laughing too hard, which I wouldn't count on with such sourpusses.

Throughout this whole section of the book the working assumption is that all one had to do was kill Bin Laden to vanquish the Al Qaeda threat. That seems dubious. Coll gives two examples of what we might call freelance terrorism from the early '90s: Mir Amal Kasi and Ramzi Yousef. The former shot people at CIA headquarters; the latter blew up the World Trade Center, and had numerous imaginative plans, including the idea of hijacking an airliner and smashing it into a building (the CIA headquarters). Bin Laden's big claim to fame was mostly to organize a think tank and systematize training for freelance terrorists, and to publicize it. But the thinking and training was already going on, and once Bin Laden became famous his real work was done. Beyond that, his longevity taunted the Americans, provoking them to do stupid things. Clinton tried, but mostly came up short. Of Clinton's cruise missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, Coll writes (p. 412):

Bin Laden's reputation in the Islamic world had been enhanced. He had been shot at by a high-tech superpower and the superpower missed. Two instant celebratory biographies of bin Laden appeared in Pakistani stores. Without seeming to work very hard at it, bin Laden had crafted one of the era's most successful terrorist media strategies. The missile strikes were his biggest publicity payoff to date.

Bush tried, too. And unfortunately Bush was surrounded by people who didn't throttle his fantasies: if anything, they egged him on. In the wake of 9/11 Bush got everything that Clinton dreamed of: bases in central Asia and Pakistan, full Pakistani support, war on the Taliban. And even with all that Bush couldn't kill Bin Laden, let alone Al Qaeda. For all the effort, all the disruption, all the out-of-commission bodies locked away in Cuba, there have been far more Al Qaeda-linked terrorism acts/deaths since 9/11 than before.

You may be tempted to say that that's just because we didn't kill him when we had the chance. But had we ever? That doesn't seem very likely given what Coll reports. And would it have made a difference? That doesn't seem very likely either. The idea that all you have to do to fix a deep-rooted, longstanding problem is to go out and kill someone is very hard to prove -- in large part because it doesn't make much sense. Even in the best case you still have a deep-rooted, longstanding problem; you're just creating an opportunity for someone else to exploit it. Just today General Sanchez was talking about how the "Coalition" is going to kill Muqtada al-Sadr, to put an end to the Shi'a rebellion in Iraq. Like that's all it will take to put the idea of rebellion back in the bottle. Bring on the ninjas.

posted 2004-04-12