Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (24 page)

In contrast, Glassman moved quickly to attack the extremists’ ideological message and divert young people from the path that led them to become terrorists, areas Hughes studiously avoided. The biggest obstacle facing Glassman, besides Al Qaeda itself, was time. He had just over six months in the waning days of a lame-duck presidency to make an impact, but he took on the challenge, arguing that the rise of the Internet, long considered an ally of extremists, could be turned against them. Glassman explained that Al Qaeda was more in control of what he called Web 1.0, where terrorists broadcast messages and followers receive them. In Web 2.0, where social networks are ascendant and followers can challenge their leaders, Al Qaeda could lose its strict control of the narrative, as Zawahri did when he was forced to respond to the online questions. He recognized that terrorists were moving away from old media like CDs, DVDs, and cassette tapes, which were cumbersome and expensive. New media was cheaper and mostly online. “What terrorists want to do with young people is indoctrinate them, isolate them, bombard them with messages and exhortations, like a cult does,” Glassman said. “But once you open that up, they [Al Qaeda] are at a major disadvantage.

“The one thing we saw over and over again being a major obstacle was the narrative that the United States and the West are out to destroy Islam and replace it with Christianity,” he continued. “If that becomes the prism through which you see everything, it’s a big problem.”

When Glassman arrived at his offices at the State Department, he had not only scant time to make headway but little money to work with. Glassman said that of Public Diplomacy’s $800-million budget, two thirds was designated for student exchange programs. Little was left for what Glassman called “diversion” programs, initiatives to steer young people into various activities and away from terrorist ideology. But he worked with what he had. He gave $300,000 to an organization called the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, which aims to reform radical madrassas in Pakistan. He and Zarate championed support for a range of emerging grassroots organizations that opposed violent extremism, including the Alliance of Youth Movements, Sisters Against Violent Extremism, Global Survivors Network, and the Quilliam Foundation, an anti-extremist think tank. But even Glassman acknowledged that in such a short time, it was difficult to gauge the impact of his new approach. “How do you measure whether you are effective or not?” he said. “Nobody really knows the answer.”

Fledgling efforts at strategically important U.S. embassies in the Muslim world also faced an uphill fight to change the financing priorities for public diplomacy that in many ways still seem locked in the Cold War. When Gonzalo Gallegos, a longtime State Department spokesman, arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad in 2008, his budget for public diplomacy was a paltry $1.4 million, only about twice the amount allotted to the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica, a peaceful tourist mecca, for the same purposes. Traditionally, that budget paid for educational and cultural exchanges and for travel expenses to bring teachers, musicians, and Pakistani American professors or imams from the United States to give voice to a positive American experience. These programs, while well-meaning, had little effect on the anti-American sentiment building in the country. “We were losing the battle,” Gallegos said. “We needed a way to get ground back.” Armed with funds from Glassman, the embassy teamed with a group of Pakistanis in Islamabad to run a print advertising campaign and a polling project. The ad campaign targeted the culprits responsible for exploding a truck bomb at the entrance to the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on September 20, 2008, that killed more than 50 people and wounded more than 250 in one of the worst acts of terrorism in Pakistan’s history. The blast had gone off just a few hundred yards from the prime minister’s house, where all the leaders of government were dining after the president’s address to Parliament. The campaign bought half-page and full-page ads in the Urdu and English-language press that showed photographs of the mangled hotel front and these messages: “This is horrible.” “What kind of people do this?” To measure the impact of the campaign, a poll was taken. The results were discouraging, as few people remembered seeing the ads. Due to limited funds, the campaign ran only for a week, and it was limited by the fact that it ran at the end of the Ramadan holiday, when newspapers shut down.

Gallegos figured that to make another campaign work, the embassy would have to coordinate more closely with the Pakistani government and with the powerful media arm of the Pakistani Army. Any further effort would also need a lot more money. As the clock ran out on the Bush administration, the embassy went hat in hand to the State Department as well as to the military’s Central Command and Special Operations Command for financing to combat the extremist narrative in Pakistan. In the end, the military commands and the civilian departments could find only about $10 million to give to the embassy to address one of the country’s top counterterrorism priorities.

*   *   *

In June 2009, Glassman’s successor, Judith A. McHale, vowed that the United States would combat Al Qaeda with both “new and old media.” “This is not a propaganda contest—it is a relationship race,” she said. “And we have got to get back in the game.” But unity of effort was lacking, and painfully so, across the government. Despite the Obama administration’s best intentions to capitalize on America’s media expertise—in styles ranging from Madison Avenue to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter—the bureaucracy confounded those efforts at many turns. In meeting after meeting, Pentagon and military officers showed up and applied their standard rule to planning new missions, whether on the battlefield or on the airwaves: First, figure out the desired end state—exactly what was to be accomplished—then figure out what to do. Diplomats spoke a different language and shaped their mission more in terms of themes and outreach and audiences. “The Defense Department would identify the gaps, really the vacuum, in our communications to the Islamic world,” said one top administration official directly involved in the negotiations. “The State Department would show up basically talking mostly about the need to respond faster.”

Meetings also were marked by a tug-of-war over whether the messages would focus on specific themes of countering terrorism or address the broader range of underlying causes across a specific region of the Islamic world. And the coordination of those messages with military action, if required, continued to create abrasive relationships between soldiers and diplomats. “It’s both microphones and drones,” said one Pentagon official. “Communications is a tool. It can take you a certain distance down the road. But if the road gets dangerous, you need guns.”

And even as the administration committed to building up the capabilities of partner nations to fight violent extremism on their own, Pentagon officials continued to express deep frustration that the State Department, with only a tiny fraction of the military’s manpower, did not have the capacity to run the countermessaging campaign. The discussions ranged from low-level negotiations about sending military personnel on temporary duty to assist the State Department to a cabinet-level dialogue where Secretary of Defense Gates turned to Secretary of State Clinton and in essence offered to write a check for whatever she needed to get the crisis communications effort off the ground. That check wasn’t accepted, and others couldn’t be cashed. In fact, Pentagon officials kept a record of the number of official budget transfers from Defense to State for countermessaging efforts that were returned. One, in particular, was galling. The Pentagon offered to pay the bill for one State Department communications project but then called for the funds to be returned when the State Department, short of personnel, let out a bid for contracts to outsource the mission.

The State Department’s efforts to counter violent extremism picked up pace following President Obama’s Cairo speech in June 2009. However, the department struggled to align the personnel, authority, and resources needed to follow up on the president’s message. In July 2010, more than a year after the speech, President Obama grew frustrated by the lack of progress in institutionalizing the countermessaging capabilities of the U.S. government. When Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s top counterterrorism official, briefed Obama that month on upcoming initiatives to counter violent extremism in the Muslim world, he included in his briefing the concept of a Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, an interagency cell within the State Department that would be designed to counter the effects of terrorist messaging around the world. The new communication center would double the size of the department’s existing digital outreach teams to about twenty native Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu speakers who would operate in online chat rooms, Web forums, and other social media to try to break up the “echo chamber” effect of jihadist movements. The teams would monitor more Web sites than before and be more aggressive in confronting the extremist narrative rather than just parroting American policy. The center’s staff would also include military officers specializing in information operations; intelligence specialists from the CIA, the National Counterterrorism Center, and other agencies; as well as State Department public diplomacy experts. Obama immediately embraced the idea but also vented his anger and irritation at the delay in getting it up and running. “I thought I asked for this a year ago,” he complained. “What do I have to do to get this done around here?”

White House officials winced at the president’s scolding. “I got my butt chewed in that meeting pretty hard,” said Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser. “It won’t happen again, I can tell you that.” Following the meeting, there was a rush within the State Department to start the new communications center to comply with the president’s order. Further complicating the project was the need to find suitable space for the new center, adequate funding, and a trained staff. (The center was designed to draw on specialists from the State Department, the military, and the intelligence agencies. It would build upon the digital outreach team that had been established years before.) After initial delays, the center received $6 million to cover start-up costs. Despite the president’s clear directives to the State Department and other government agencies stating that this was one of his top priorities, the communications center was still at a very nascent and understaffed stage five months later, and the U.S. government’s message against terrorism and other expressions of violent extremism still was not making the desired headway.

By early 2011 the center finally seemed poised to turn a corner. Its coordinator, Richard LeBaron, a respected career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, acknowledged the initial difficulties as well as the long-term challenges facing his effort. “If this were easy, people would have done it a long time ago,” he said. The center’s focus is as much about understanding its target audience—eighteen-to-thirty-year-old men, mostly in the Middle East—as it is about devising messages that steer them away from violent extremism. “The words are important, but they only get you so far,” said LeBaron. “It’s about translating those messages so they resonate with the right people and people around them who have influence.” In one online video mash-up posted to YouTube in February 2011, the digital outreach teams spliced together scenes of jubilant protesters celebrating the resignation of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak with a videotaped statement in 2008 from Ayman al-Zawahri insisting that “there is no hope to remove the corrupt regimes in Muslim countries except by force.” When Zawahri asked, “Let anyone who disagrees give me a single example,” the video clip shifted to the jubiliant throng in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Forty-eight hours after the video was posted, it had garnered 42,000 hits.

Within Benjamin’s office, another small team oversees global efforts to combat extremist voices. The effort seeks to identify and support grassroots campaigns intent on organizing civil society against violent extremism. These groups must operate independently of the U.S. government in order to have credibility in challenging extremist ideologues. One such organization is Sisters Against Violent Extremism, part of the global Women Without Borders campaign. This organization links women in countries like India, Pakistan, Yemen, Northern Ireland, and Israel into a global network. SAVE organizes country-specific training programs for women interested in participating, programs that cover topics such as computer literacy, English-language education, and small-business skills. The State Department helps to support this organization with a small grant every year to supplement its own fund-raising efforts. According to an official involved in the program, the State Department does not participate in any of the program’s planning or advocacy programs.

Even as Obama aimed his rhetorical missiles at Al Qaeda, the Pentagon and State Department were drawing on state-of-the-art technology to thwart the militants’ message from literally reaching its intended target. American officials in Kabul devised a sophisticated jamming campaign, and the technology and techniques used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan are something they want to share with the Pakistanis to employ on their side of the border. It is a specific type of jamming called overbroadcast, whereby favorable programming is sent with a stronger signal over the precise frequency used by insurgent “pirate” radio stations. That’s the first step. The second step is to have counterprogramming also broadcast to either side of the dial from the pirate station that is the target of the overbroadcast. What happens then is that the insurgents’ audience spins the dial left or right in search of the insurgent programming but lands instead on the favorable programming on the adjacent channel. This system not only blots out the insurgent transmissions but also drives listeners to channels filled with programming that counters the extremist message. The trick is that this has to happen in real time, since some of the pirate stations are in the backs of trucks or even towed in trailers behind motorcycles. But the United States has technology to track the pirate signals, determine the broadcast frequency, and set in motion a system of overbroadcast and adjacent counterprogramming. “The goal is fuzzing out the militants’ radio broadcasts so everybody has to turn to another station—and that station is yours,” said one official involved in the effort. “The capability to track, direction-find, locate and overbroadcast a signal is commercial, off-the-shelf stuff for about $10,000,” the official said. “Put it on a truck with a little power, say fifty watts, and you’re in business. Most of the bad pirate radio is just two or three watts—village-level stuff.”