Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (27 page)

The task force was initially designed to trap terrorists that Pentagon leaders believed would flee Afghanistan along traditional smugglers’ routes down the Persian Gulf, into the Arabian Sea, and past the Horn of Africa. But the overlapping ground, maritime, and air patrols across the region appear to have deterred the use of that route, prompting Al Qaeda senior leaders to hunker down in the tribal areas of Pakistan and some, perhaps, to travel instead to Iraq to fight American and coalition forces there.

“We by ourselves don’t really pursue the threat of terrorism in the Horn of Africa,” said Major General Samuel T. Helland of the Marine Corps, one of the task force commanders. “Our job is to prevent it, deter it, and to support the host nations as they develop the capability that they require to fight the terrorist threat that is germane to their countries.” The headquarters began the mission aboard a ship off the Horn of Africa in 2002 and moved ashore in 2003. But many within the Pentagon did not see the virtue of this mission and argued for reassigning the personnel back to a combat zone. One of those who fought to secure the mission was Lieutenant General Douglas E. Lute, the director of operations for Central Command from 2004 to 2006. He has since moved on to the National Security Council, where he served Presidents Bush and Obama as a director for policy on Iraq and Afghanistan. The Horn of Africa task force, he said, “is a model of how we can deter terrorists by interacting with local nationals in an effort to help them help themselves without the burden of a large American military presence. The model includes the ability to lace together not only all of the agencies and components of the American government, but also to reach out and bring in the strength of coalition partners.”

American intelligence and military officers are certain that members of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups continue to move through the region, with some small numbers setting up and operating in ungoverned corners of Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Camp Lemonier is just a dozen miles from the Somali border. And as if to emphasize the danger of not keeping an eye on the region, pictures hanging on headquarters walls at the base serve as reminders of the simultaneous Al Qaeda attacks in 1998 on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Those were the powerful images of Al Qaeda terror before bin Laden’s organization attacked the
Cole
, brought down the twin towers, and destroyed a wedge of the Pentagon.

Those reminders help offset the burden of serving in a very uncomfortable climate. Djibouti is the hottest place on the planet that sustains non-nomadic habitation, so it’s easy to see, and feel, how it and neighboring countries remain ripe to becoming a habitat for terrorists, too. Large youth population. Few jobs. Hot time waiting for a flight out can be spent counting the number of government cargo planes off-loading the country’s only cash crop: khat, the light narcotic, in chewable form, that for decades has been a revenue-generating crop for the government.

The task force was organized with responsibilities for the counterterrorism mission not only in Djibouti but also in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, an area almost 70 percent of the size of the continental United States. The location provides a unique platform for intelligence officers to watch for terrorists’ movements, and the military forces on the ground, along with those at other bases in the region always on call, keep the pressure on. The Special Operations and intelligence communities, under presidential “execute orders,” maintain smaller presences in some of those countries, missions they have tried to keep invisible.

Should military action be required, commanders say they have not forgotten the lesson of the CIA’s mission in November 2002, when a Predator surveillance aircraft blasted a car in Yemen, killing an Al Qaeda operative and five others, including an American citizen. The strike was characterized as a success, but it only added to the outrage of many leaders across the Horn of Africa that their sovereignty would not be respected. Djibouti continues to be a base for Predator reconnaissance missions across the region, but as a concession to local political sensitivities, and in an acknowledgment of the need to preserve relations with Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Yemeni president, for at least the next eight years there were no more armed Predator strikes against terror targets in Yemen flown from Djibouti. In the years since that strike, the United States has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Yemen’s security forces, hoping to give that vulnerable nation the ability to carry out the fight on its own.

The commanders at Camp Lemonier and senior officers at the Pentagon say that American forces in the Horn of Africa would act only in support of and at the request of the host government, a legal formulation that also characterizes past missions in such places as Pakistan, where unilateral American action always carries a heavy political price. The mission also focuses on border security and teaching counterterrorism skills to local forces, so they can better deter and disrupt terror networks on their territory by themselves. Those efforts, Pentagon officials say, represent an important focus of the policy of deterrence. In this region, that means preventing the creation of another Taliban-run Afghanistan, which served as a safe haven for Al Qaeda to plan the September 11 attacks. “It is a deterrent mission,” said one senior Pentagon policy planner involved in standing up the Horn of Africa task force. “Just the fact that it is not a problem does not mean it is a mistake to pay attention. We have prevented a problem. It is a place we keep an eye on lest it become a problem.”

*   *   *

Perhaps none of the military’s far-flung efforts at establishing counterterrorist networks to fight terror networks better illustrates the cost-benefit analysis than the small force committed to the Philippines. The decision on whether to maintain an elite six-hundred-troop unit there went all the way to Defense Secretary Gates, who ordered the military to sustain the effort despite the military’s difficulty in finding enough of these highly trained units for assignments to two wars as well as for the wider effort to combat insurgencies and militancy in other parts of the world deemed to be threats to American interests. The mission of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force–Philippines continues to be training local security units and providing logistical and intelligence support to Filipino forces to better understand and fight a local insurgency that has played host to terrorists with global ambitions. Nobody at the Pentagon or CIA has to be reminded that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef met in the Philippines for an operational planning session in advance of the September 11 attacks.

Senior officials say the American unit has been instrumental in successes by the Filipino armed forces in the years since 2001 in killing and capturing leaders of the militant group Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Island Liberation front, antigovernment organizations operating in the south. In a simultaneous counterinsurgency effort in the Philippines, members of the American force have completed hundreds of infrastructure projects, including roads, schools, clinics, and firehouses, and have conducted medical examinations and administered vaccines.

Admiral Timothy J. Keating, who oversaw the mission when he was commander of American forces in the Pacific, said that the task force’s work, with its tiny footprint, might never be completed. “The successes we enjoy, and the gains, can tend to anesthetize us a little bit,” he said. In making his case, he had the support of Leon E. Panetta, the CIA director at the time, who made quiet—and unannounced—visits to personally inspect the unit’s operations. The task force even gets high marks from the often skeptical international development and human rights community. “In general, the Joint Special Operations Task Force–Philippines has been regarded as a success story, especially in terms of winning hearts and minds through civic action and medical assistance projects,” said Mark L. Schneider, the senior vice president of the International Crisis Group.

Colonel Bill Coultrup, a veteran Special Operations officer picked to serve as Philippines task force commander, said that his goal was simple: “Help the Philippines security forces. It’s their fight. We don’t want to take over.” Coultrup, a veteran of General McChrystal’s Special Operations units, understands how it takes a network to fight one. His service includes deployments with Special Operations units in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Bosnia, where the mission focused on capturing or killing adversaries. But in the Philippines, Coultrup’s work has been only 20 percent combat related. That portion of the military mission is designed to “help the armed forces of the Philippines neutralize high-value targets—individuals who will never change their minds,” he said. Eighty percent of the effort, though, has been “civil-military operations to change the conditions that allow those high-value targets to have a safe haven,” Coultrup added. “We do that through helping give a better life to the citizens: good governance, better health care, a higher standard of living. That’s our network. If ours is stronger, and is there first—that’s how we prevent the bad guys from getting a grip on the local population.”

*   *   *

But none of those regional missions can compare to the delicate, sensitive, and critically important American support of Pakistan as it battles terror networks operating from safe havens on its territory. It is a mission that American officials do not like to talk about.

At an observation post in the bare brown foothills of the soaring mountains of South Waziristan, Major Shazad Saleem of the Pakistani Army’s 57th Punjab Regiment pointed across the Makeen valley to the craggy nine-thousand-foot peaks and warned two visiting reporters to pull their armored vests tight. “There are still snipers out there,” he said, with only a faint smile. It was June 2010, and nine months earlier thousands of Pakistani soldiers, including Major Saleem’s 326th Brigade, had fought through ambushes and roadside bombings to take back this strategically vital passageway between North and South Waziristan from militants sheltered in scrub and riverbank hideouts. Makeen, a small village fifteen miles east of the Afghan border, had been the home base for the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud before he was killed by a CIA drone attack in August 2009. At that time, the region teemed with Uzbek, Arab, Afghan, and Pakistani fighters. Makeen was also the village where the
New York Times
correspondent David Rohde and his two Afghan companions were held hostage during part of their seven months in captivity with the Taliban. A walled school compound that had been Mehsud’s headquarters lay in ruins, its metal corrugated roofing twisted like taffy from American drone strikes and Pakistani artillery fire. Makeen and several other small villages in the valley were quiet now except for Pakistani Army patrols motoring up and down the two-lane road. The army had ordered all civilians to leave Makeen before launching its offensive, an edict that extended throughout South Waziristan. The tactic enabled the army to turn the region into a free-fire zone, figuring anyone who stayed was a militant. But it also forced hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children into makeshift tent camps set up on the edge of the combat zone.

Major Saleem, a sixteen-year veteran whose grandfather served in the British Army when Pakistan was still a part of British India, said that his troops were the vanguard of a new program to train Pakistani soldiers for up to a year in “low-intensity conflict” before deploying. The Pakistanis do not use the term
counterinsurgency
, favored by the Americans, because they say it suggests the militants have some popular support among local residents. The soldiers have also borrowed tactics from the militants, employing surprise and deception to thwart ambushes and roadside bombings. With only a handful of night-vision goggles to share among them, Major Saleem’s soldiers have become more adept at operating by moonlight, often hugging the edges of steep riverbanks while on patrols to avoid detection. “We are determined to stay until we finish this menace,” he said.

In a larger regional offensive that had been under way for two years, the Pakistani Army was finding counterinsurgency warfare tougher and more costly than anticipated. On this day automatic rifle fire could be heard from deep in the valley. At a makeshift trauma center at the army’s base in Razmak, North Waziristan, a young Pakistani soldier lay anesthetized on the operating table, blood-soaked bandages applied in the field a testament to a near-fatal wound. The bullet through his neck from a Taliban fighter had narrowly missed an artery, and after some minor surgery, the army medics declared the patient out of danger.

Much like the challenge facing American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, a lack of Pakistani civilian authority has made it nearly impossible to consolidate military gains in contested areas like South Waziristan. While the long campaign has eliminated some Pakistani Taliban insurgents, it has also dispersed many other fighters, forcing the Pakistani Army in effect to chase them from one part of the tribal areas to another. The country’s devastating floods in 2010 have forced the military to shelve new attacks against safe havens in North Waziristan and settle for trying to hold areas already cleared of militants.

Part of America’s evolving “new deterrence” strategy is to train and assist national armies and security forces to fight their own insurgencies so American troops do not have to. From the Philippines to Mali to Pakistan, American forces are imparting their skills in marksmanship, tactics, and strategy, while trading on their partners’ knowledge of language, culture, and terrain to counter their local enemies.

A graduation ceremony in June 2010 for Pakistani troops trained by Americans to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda was the scene of festivities at the Warsak Center, north of Peshawar, which were intended as a show of fresh cooperation between the Pakistani and American militaries. But it said just as much about the limitations of such cooperation. Nearly 250 Pakistani paramilitary troops in khaki uniforms and green berets snapped to attention, with the top students accepting a certificate from a U.S. Army colonel after completing the specialized training for snipers and for platoon and company leaders. But the new center, twenty miles from the Afghanistan border, was built to train as many as two thousand soldiers at a time. The largest component of the American-financed instruction—a ten-week basic-training course—was months behind schedule, largely because Pakistani commanders said they could not afford to send troops for new training as fighting intensified in the border areas.