Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (25 page)

But in the most contested battle spaces, the extremists have proved more nimble and adaptive in fighting the strategic narrative. In two audio recordings from Osama bin Laden released in early October 2010, the Al Qaeda founder showed a softer side by urging help for victims of the recent massive floods in Pakistan. Despite a considerable effort by the United States to get food, medical, and other supplies to the hard-hit areas, bin Laden’s call for disaster relief appeared to show that his concerns range beyond plotting murderous violence. In Afghanistan, allied officials acknowledge that the sophisticated multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign that the Taliban runs out of Pakistan has become adept at exploiting rifts between the Obama administration and the Afghan government, portraying the West as at the edge of failure in its campaign to defeat the insurgents and disparaging the Karzai government as a corrupt stooge of the West. Moreover, the Taliban appears nimble enough to respond to external criticisms. In September 2010, Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, issued a statement saying that his group would respect the rights of all Afghans, a reference to criticism of the Taliban’s treatment of women. Omar also said that the Taliban had a specific plan for leading the country again. While the Taliban posts messages on Facebook and Twitter that are easy to disseminate online, the American-led coalition is struggling to keep up by translating some of its own news releases into Dari and Pashto, the main languages spoken in Afghanistan.

With the Obama administration’s focus on “combating violent extremism,” government agencies are also revamping strategic messages at home and abroad. Daniel Benjamin at the State Department has launched a new program in coordination with embassies worldwide, designed to tailor counternarratives for specific communities, even neighborhoods, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. In town hall–style talks and media interviews, tackling violent extremism is a major theme for top Obama advisers, including Secretary of State Clinton, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and counterterrorism czar John Brennan. Denis McDonough underscored it in a speech to a mosque in Sterling, Virginia, in March 2011: “We can either play into Al Qaeda’s narrative and messaging or we can challenge it and thereby undermine it. We’re determined to undermine it.” The theme is often embedded in the memos Ben Rhodes regularly sends to Obama, updating him on the progress of initiatives launched after the speech in Cairo. And American officials are becoming more aware of their strengths and their limits in countering the violent extremist message. “We have come to a realization of what is in the art of the possible and what is not and what’s our role, and more importantly, what is not our role,” said John Tyson, the DIA analyst. “Now it is learning how to better execute those parts that we think we actually have a role in.”

In Washington, the officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center are dividing up responsibilities for countering the extremist narrative, assigning people to new jobs and allotting them budgets, and then making necessary adjustments. The first step, officials say, is to prevent extremism from spreading, before dismantling and defeating terrorist networks. That means engaging with groups who may not admire the United States but oppose Al Qaeda even more. “This is not about getting them to love us,” said one Defense Department official who is deeply involved in the discussions. “It is about getting them not to challenge our interests.”

Second, the Obama administration is confronting the same obstacles as the Bush administration before it. Is there a coordinated plan among all the federal agencies to combat violent extremism? “Every night, I get on my knees and pray for this kind of coordination,” the Defense Department official said, warning that terrorist networks are much more agile and fast-moving than large government bureaucracies. “We’re a half step behind or more,” the official added. “That gap ebbs and flows. Sometimes, we’re way behind.” Al Qaeda’s narrative can draw sustenance from the most unexpected quarters: a little known Florida pastor who set off a deadly rampage in Afghanistan when he burned a copy of the Koran in the spring of 2011, or an American-born radical cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki, now hiding in a remote corner of Yemen, whose English-language diatribes against the United States have motivated a new generation of Western jihadists.

The third major challenge is to tackle the growing threat from American citizens and residents who have been radicalized at home or abroad. A report published in September 2010 by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group, which is headed by 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton, found that no agency in the U.S. government is charged with monitoring and stopping the radicalization and recruitment of Americans. Michael Leiter of the National Counterterrorism Center argues that no single agency in the government should have that responsibility because no single organization has all the tools to counter radicalization effectively. Leiter’s strategy to counter the extremist narrative is multipronged, focusing on highlighting Al Qaeda’s failures but in a relatively quiet way: to deny the terrorists the publicity and stature they seek. “It is not always best for us to hammer the counterterrorism drum over and over again, because by doing so we can in fact glorify Al Qaeda,” he said in a speech in December 2010.

The United States, Leiter maintained, must also empower local governments and local organizations that have credibility in working with Muslim communities to solve local grievances. That will help counter Al Qaeda’s effort to wrap those local grievances into a global jihad with the toxic message that the West is at war with Islam. “The U.S. government clearly has a challenge in terms of messaging,” he said in an earlier speech in June 2010. “The single biggest change from the Bush administration to the Obama administration is the greater focus, though still not a perfect one, on counterradicalization and messaging rather than the hard elements of national power.”

Though Leiter warned that “we are farther behind than I would like” in reversing the trend toward the radicalization of American extremists, he remained confident. “We help make our own luck,” he said, referring to all the steps that have been taken since 9/11 to prevent another attack. However, the day is coming for the United States when that luck runs out.

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THE NEW NETWORK WARFARE

The community of professional national-security strategists in Washington travels on what some dismiss as a merry-go-round but really is an industrial-strength conveyor belt. By late 2010 both Barry Pavel and Matt Kroenig were back at the Pentagon; Pavel after a senior-level tour of duty on the National Security Council and Kroenig on a break from academic duties at Georgetown University. Pavel was there only briefly before moving out of public service and into the policy-analyst community. Kroenig remained into 2011, still working on deterrence issues, but this time applying lessons of Cold War deterrence to another twenty-first-century threat: how the United States should respond to the potential of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. A half decade after their proposal had been handed to President Bush at his Texas ranch by Donald Rumsfeld, their initiatives had been disseminated throughout the national-security apparatus and embraced by like-minded thinkers across the military, intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement communities. Their language had expanded to become part of the daily operational vernacular. Perhaps General Stanley McChrystal gave this broad analysis its most succinct expression: “It takes a network to defeat a network.”

It had not been an easy sell, especially to more traditional politicians, strategists, and the men and women operating in Afghanistan and Iraq who believed it would be impossible to influence the behavior of specific zealots like bin Laden short of brute force. But that was not the point, Pavel kept saying. He recalled one especially contentious conference at Central Command. “But once we showed that slide with the different actors in the network, then they get it,” Pavel said. “This guy is a banker; he is deterrable. This guy is a financier, this guy is a logistician, this guy is a Web site—that sort of is when it clicks and it is pretty obvious.” Even if you can’t deter bin Laden, Pavel argued and taught and argued again, the goal should be to deter a critical mass of the Al Qaeda network. The effect could be the same. “Hey, a banker can’t be nearly as committed as a foot soldier,” Pavel said. “So these guys go to work nine-to-five and they don’t want someone going to their door and saying, ‘Knock it off—or the consequences.’”

As they were briefing the concept to officials in other countries, Pavel and Kroenig picked up a few telling anecdotes, useful reinforcing thoughts, especially from Middle Eastern military and intelligence officers. “We learned that the Saudis often, when they would hear of a plot, they would go to the family of the operator, and sort of say, ‘You take care of this or we will.’ That is deterrence,” Pavel said. “The stereotype and monolithic image of the guy with the suicide bomb on his back isn’t the only type of actor in a terrorist network. It is far-flung; it is multifaceted and multifunctional. Almost every actor has something they value. And if the U.S. and its coalition partners can put those things that those actors value at risk in some way, then you have the beginnings of a deterrence approach.”

A senior-level proponent of the new theories of applying deterrence thinking to terror networks was Michael Vickers, who long before had surrendered his Green Beret and CIA security badge for policy pinstripes, returning to government service to work at the Pentagon in 2007 as the assistant secretary of defense in charge of policies for combating terrorism with military special forces as well as countering the proliferation of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. He became a favorite of Secretary Gates, not only for his combat training, espionage background, and strategic worldview but also for his passion for detail work. So when President Obama asked Gates to stay on in 2009, Gates asked Vickers to stay on, too. Some of Gates’s aides complain that too many senior Pentagon officials view themselves as principal players rather than as action officers for the defense secretary, who in turn is just an action officer (however senior, however well regarded) for the president. Gates had confided to his inner circle a frustration that many of the tasks he assigned to the assistant secretaries took too long to carry out and that the responses often came back with the initials of an underling. But not those sent to Vickers’s office, where the longtime counterterrorist planner had been put in charge of strategy for special operations and low-intensity conflict. Vickers was known for dropping whatever was on his agenda whenever Gates sent down a “tasker,” and his written responses were impressive. That discipline and quality of work earned him a significant promotion in 2011, from assistant secretary for special operations to undersecretary for intelligence. (While the CIA is a high-profile agency in the American intelligence community, the Defense Department actually spends three-quarters of every dollar Congress allots to American intelligence activities.)

Vickers said he routinely argued that much of the Pentagon planning remained old school: How should the military’s most elite combat teams capture and kill terrorists? But with each passing day on the job, more of his time was spent in the new world of counterterrorist strategy, trying to figure out how to prevent attacks by persuading terrorist support networks—those, like Muslim charities and wealthy Saudis, among other Arab donors, that enable terrorists to operate—to refuse assistance to stateless agents of extremism.

“Obviously, hard-core terrorists will be the hardest to deter,” Vickers said. “But if we can deter the support network—recruiters, financial supporters, local security providers, and states who provide sanctuary—then we can start achieving a deterrent effect on the whole terrorist network and constrain terrorists’ ability to operate. We have not deterred terrorists from their intention to do us great harm, but by constraining their means and taking away various tools, we approach the overall deterrent effect we want.”

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“It doesn’t take a lot of money to be a terrorist. But it takes a lot of money to be a terrorist organization.” That is the mantra of the financial tracking teams operating out of Central Command’s headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. “If it’s not job number one, then it’s number one-A,” said a senior officer. The challenges in cracking the financial support of terrorism are daunting. Significant funds are raised over the Internet, a virtual safe haven for terror organizations. “There are these terror web sites where, in essence, it says: ‘You know it’s your Koranic duty to make Jihad. If you can’t, click here to send money…’” said another Central Command money specialist. The Web relationship does more than fund militancy; it’s a scouting service. Any donation could be a first step to greater commitment by a potential future jihadist.

The other challenge to cutting off the movement of money by terror networks is the historic system of Hawalas, the money transfer houses operating throughout the Muslim world, an incredibly efficient and effective method based on honor, trust, and confidentiality. Walk into a Hawala office in one city. Hand over funds with a name and destination city. That Hawala operator phones or e-mails his contacts in that second city with instructions and, just as easily, a code phrase to identify the recipient. No paperwork. No wire transaction record. No signed receipts of deposit or transfer. Just a promise to settle the debt later, minus a small commission.

One successful military campaign was mounted in late 2009 and early 2010 against the Hawala network in Nangarhar, Afghanistan, which was funding vicious Taliban attacks in villages along the border with Pakistan. “Many Hawala buildings have three-hundred-plus separate family businesses doing the same work, so the Taliban and other insurgents have options if we take out one,” said a Central Command officer involved in the campaign. “So we took out six. We mounted an information-operations campaign that said to the others, ‘If you pick up the Taliban business, you will lose the quality of life and your families will suffer a drop in well-being.’ This requires patience and maturity.”