Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (34 page)

Through early June 2011, there had been thirty-four drone strikes in the tribal areas, and many top Al Qaeda and other militant leaders had gone deeper into hiding. The target list for the drones had been expanded to include lower-level militant commanders and clusters of fighters. Expanding the scope of the attacks was designed not only to kill more subcommanders but also to sow fear and dissent within the militants’ ranks. After each strike, Al Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban leaders typically round up several suspected informants and execute them, creating a cycle of fear that American and Pakistani intelligence officers say tears apart the terrorist cells from within.

The drone strikes are only part of the CIA’s secret war inside Pakistan that President Obama has approved. The arrest and detention in early 2011 of Raymond Davis, a former Special Forces soldier turned CIA security contractor, for fatally shooting two Pakistani men after what American officials have described as a botched robbery attempt, inadvertently pulled back the curtain on a web of covert American operations inside the country. A third Pakistani man on a bicycle was killed by an American team in an SUV rushing to help Davis. The CIA team with which Davis worked in Lahore, Pakistan, was tasked with tracking the movements of various Pakistani militant groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba. For the Pakistanis, such spying inside their country is an extremely delicate issue, particularly since Lashkar has longstanding ties to the ISI, Pakistan’s main spy service. Davis was released in March 2011 after weeks of secret negotiations between American and Pakistani officials, a pledge of about $2.3 million in “blood money” to the families of the men who were killed, and quiet political pressure by Pakistani officials on the courts. Nonetheless, the episode worsened already frayed relations between the CIA and the ISI, created a political dilemma for the weak, pro-American Pakistani government, and further threatened the stability of the country, which has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal.

The campaign in Pakistan underscores the blurring of lines between soldiers and spies in secret American missions abroad since 9/11. President Obama’s decision in late April 2011 to nominate Leon Panetta to succeed Robert Gates as secretary of defense and General David Petraeus to take Panetta’s job at the CIA marked the latest evidence in this trend. As CIA director, Panetta hastened the transformation of the spy agency into a paramilitary organization, overseeing the sharp escalation of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan and an increase in the number of secret bases and covert operatives in remote parts of Afghanistan. General Petraeus, meanwhile, aggressively pushed the military deeper into the CIA’s turf, using Special Operations troops and private security contractors to conduct secret intelligence missions. As commander of the military’s Central Command in September 2009, Petraeus also signed a classified order authorizing American Special Operations troops to collect intelligence in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, and other places outside of traditional war zones. The result is that American military and intelligence operatives are at times virtually indistinguishable from each other as they carry out classified operations in the Middle East and Central Asia.

*   *   *

Having taken office during a time of war, President Obama gave a simple initial order to his national security team: First, do no harm to successful plans. But the new administration also launched a top-to-bottom review of the highly classified “Execute Orders,” or ExOrds, an undisclosed reassessment of Bush policy conducted by Obama’s top advisers to continue, cancel, or reshape the standing priorities and powers granted the military for operations against global terrorist targets outside the official war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. It was partly an exercise in good governance to ask which military operations had been teed up and to analyze the rules of engagement under which military actions could be taken to achieve which counterterrorism objectives. But most of all, the new commander in chief wanted to know who was responsible at each step of the way with the authority to say go or halt.

Senior Defense Department and military officials involved in the effort stressed that many, even most, of the ExOrds inherited from the Bush administration were adopted without editing. But there was one significant change: Defense Secretary Gates, retained in his post from the previous administration, had privately expressed concerns even when serving under President Bush that a number of high-priority counterterrorist operations could be launched on the say-so of the global combatant commanders, the four-star generals and admirals who control American military forces and military action in separate regions of the world. Although the logic made sense—high-value targets are fleeting, the intelligence quick to expire—Gates was deeply concerned about the delegation of launch authority solely to regional four-stars, despite the prestige of those commands and the experience of those commanders.

“It has been my practice since I took this job that I would not allow any kind of lethal action by U.S. military forces without first informing the president or getting his approval,” Gates said. “I can’t imagine an American president who would like to be surprised that his forces were carrying out an attack someplace around the world without him knowing about it. So I decided that we should change all of the ExOrds to make them conform in policy with my practice—that, in essence, before the use of military force, presidential approval would be sought.” Cognizant that some high-profile terrorists might pop up only briefly and then vanish, Gates created a system where options for potential types of missions were discussed with the president in advance so that the commander in chief could delegate authority beforehand to strike specific fleeting targets.

Revising the ExOrds was just the first step in reshaping American counterterrorism strategy by the new president and his team. It was, to be sure, an effort that included both continuity and change, and its architect was the National Security Council’s John Brennan. While a staunch defender of the CIA drone strikes, Brennan also understood that it would take much more than killing or capturing Al Qaeda fighters to defeat Islamic extremists. As he told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington in December 2010, “A counterterrorism strategy that focuses on the immediate threat to the exclusion of the more comprehensive political, economic and development-oriented approach is not only short-sighted but also doomed to fail.”

Brennan was clearly indicating the shape of strategy to come: an official review of American counterterrorism policy. The new document was expected to be released on September 11, 2010, to mark the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but pressing government business and the standard interagency negotiations over language pushed the release into 2011.

Though it may seem like an academic exercise, a national strategy document does serve a purpose, focusing the government’s resources and attention, and clearly defining priorities in a way understandable to the nation. The Obama document seeks to be the U.S. government’s most detailed articulation of a national counterterrorism strategy in five years.

Rather than define terrorism as a global threat, it describes which regions of the world most warranted American attention as the source of the greatest risk. It focuses aggressively on the central leadership of Al Qaeda and its more violent affiliates, but it pauses before authorizing the use of military force against other extremist organizations if they are not a direct threat to the United States and its allies. It also pauses if striking those targets would actually inflame more tensions rather than create security. It elevates to the level of presidential policy the reality that all of government must unite to combat terrorism, and that tactical successes would nonetheless bring only stalemate if the United States continues its program of serially attacking terror leaders without also building up the security capacity of those nations at risk of hosting extremist cells. As a first principle, it states that counterterrorism objectives should not be the driver of American policy in the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, or North Africa, but should be just one part of a comprehensive foreign policy and national security plan. Perhaps most important, while labeling Al Qaeda as the number-one extremist threat, the Obama administration carefully lowers the Bush administration’s lingering rhetoric that terrorism is a truly existential threat to the nation.

Many European allies had accused the Bush White House of fearmongering. While counterterrorism cooperation between American spy agencies and their European counterparts remained strong in the Bush era, the political chill hindered broader efforts to win public support for the programs. Once in office, Obama made mending those political ties a priority and put his top European policy aide, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, in charge of the effort. By the spring of 2011, the deepening political relationships had helped boost the efforts of counterterrorism officials on both sides of the Atlantic. “The more the political friction was lifted out of that environment, the easier it was to have those conversations,” said Nick Rasmussen, a holdover from the Bush White House who is John Brennan’s top counterterrorism deputy.

The administration’s new strategy also expressed the belief that any hope for success requires the government and people of the United States to have, both physically and emotionally, the resilience to absorb the next attack and to recover and move on. That truly would minimize any gain terrorists would hope for in attacking.

“In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I remember it very vividly, we didn’t know what we were facing,” Brennan said. “There was a palpable fear about WMD attacks in the national capital region. It was the second wave that was amply reported; there was good intelligence it was going to happen. So people were talking about an existential threat because the magnitude of the threat—what Al Qaeda had put into place—was an unknown. I think over time we have come to understand better what Al Qaeda’s capabilities are and what its limitations are. Al Qaeda certainly would like to carry out an attack that could have the consequences equal to a 9/11, which is why they would like to get their hands on some kind of nuclear device. But I think one of the things we have recognized as a nation is that we can’t just guard against 9/11 type of attacks. It has become a multidimensional challenge to us, because it really spans the spectrum from potentially existential threats that could have devastating consequences, all the way down to an individual shooter who could also have a powerful psychological impact on the nation.”

The new counterterrorism strategy, Brennan maintained, would seek to take into account that range and would require the government to focus beyond one part of the threat. “We have to be prepared,” Brennan said. “I think that is what we are trying to do, whether it be the physical defenses, the security measures we put in place, or engagement with our partners. We are trying to minimize the prospects. The prospect of any one of these types of attacks along this spectrum is going to be diminished because of these actions.”

In cabinet-level meetings to chart the administration’s counterterrorism strategy, Gates shared his concerns that the nation’s political leadership must redefine how it thinks about and talks about another attack. “We’ve created an environment in which politicians are just waiting to jump on each other if there’s a failure,” said Gates, who has served eight presidents of both parties. “The idea of perfect security is completely contrary to the real world. And yet we’ve got an environment in which even a failed attempt becomes the subject of criticism, so that the government is willing to throw countless dollars at this problem in order not to look like they’re slacking off.” This is an issue, he said, that requires elected officials of both parties to, in essence, watch each other’s backs. “It almost has to be a bipartisan initiative in both the executive and the legislative branches to say, in effect, ‘We will not be afraid,’” Gates added. “We will do everything humanly possible. We will not distort our values. We will not let them claim victory by changing our way of life and the way we look at the world.”

The American public needs to change its mind-set, as well, Gates argued. “We appear as a people to be afraid all the time,” he said. “Americans in the past have always been resilient. I think this is a change for us. And I wish we could get back to where we were. We are not a fearful people.”

*   *   *

Since 2009, federal officials have braced for the threat of homemade bombs against civilian targets in the United States. In response, the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama began working closely if quietly with a wide spectrum of private businesses to guard against what were perceived as the most likely attacks. In December 2009, the department gathered dozens of security directors from the hotel and shopping mall industries at an undisclosed site in northern Virginia for an all-day exercise to test their responses to a simulated terrorist threat and series of attacks in a major American city. In one of four domestic and international scenarios, a resident called in a report of a suspicious package in a hotel’s underground parking garage. The city’s bomb squad quickly evacuated the area, found the package, and disarmed it. But just an hour later across town, a car bomb exploded next to a major hotel and shopping mall, killing or injuring dozens of people. About fifteen minutes after that, another bomb detonated sixty feet away from a staging area police were using to respond to the initial attack, injuring four officers and wounding seven other people.

With each piece of new information or each new event, the security officials responded as if they were facing a real attack, taking steps to secure their buildings and customers, and sharing information with federal, state, and local authorities. In doing so, they identified potential gaps in protective measures and information sharing, including which specific news items should be released to the public and how they ought to be disseminated. “These are all security officers so they’re not novices at this,” said Rand Beers, the Homeland Security Department’s senior counterterrorism official. “In some ways, we are showing the progression of sophistication on the part of the terrorist groups” by focusing on sequential attacks.