More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Steve Coll
Read between
September 2 - October 10, 2024
The Americans were the “main enemy” of Muslims worldwide, an angry bin Laden told a British journalist who visited him in an eastern Afghan mountain camp weeks after his arrival in Jalalabad. Saudi Arabian authorities were only “secondary enemies,” he declared. As bin Laden saw it, the world had now reached “the beginning of war between Muslims and the United States.”
The Taliban were entering a new phase of power and ambition just as bin Laden arrived. They were no longer the humble, consultative Pashtun country folk of late 1994 and early 1995.
American tolerance of the Taliban was publicly and inextricably linked to the financial goals of an oil corporation. There were by now about 1.5 million Afghan war dead, dating back to the Soviet invasion. The land was desolate, laced with mines. The average life expectancy for an Afghan was about forty-six years. The country ranked 173 out of 175 countries on the United Nations human development index.42 Yet the few American officials who paid attention to Afghanistan at all talked as if it was a tax-free zone ripe for industrial revival, a place where vocational education in metallurgy could
...more
The Saudi-inspired Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice announced a ban on both sorcery and American-style haircuts.
Long practiced at covert programs in Afghanistan, the Pakistanis had deceived Washington about the Taliban for two solid years.
The State Department, adhering to a new economic sanctions regime, announced its first list of officially designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations that autumn of 1997. Bin Laden and al Qaeda were not on the list.
He had risen to the position of America’s chief spy partly by political accident but also because he was exceptionally gifted with people and with the Washington bureaucratic art typically called “process.”
“George sort of proved something I saw happen over and over in the Senate, which was that experience mattered less than the ability to interact effectively with people.” He had a “very unbureaucratic way of talking,” crisp and colorful. To some seasoned colleagues Tenet’s style of speech appeared to oversimplify complex issues, but it was effective and allowed him to stand out from the crowd.7
“He had an ambidextrous quality that was something Boren particularly valued,” recalled John Despres, a colleague on the intelligence committee. Tenet has “never been a great intellect. He’s an operator.” His role was to synthesize and organize the views of others so that elected officials could make decisions. There were hundreds and hundreds of people in Washington with strong opinions and ideologies. There were thousands of pointy-headed foreign policy experts and technical specialists. Much rarer was the staff man who knew how to traffic among them all, picking pockets and getting things
...more
he prepared his speech, Tenet returned to the CIA’s founding by Harry Truman. The agency’s purpose was to prevent another Pearl Harbor.
He defended the CIA’s small paramilitary department, modeled on some of the Pentagon’s Special Forces units, on the grounds that every president since Truman had found a need at times for this capability. Covert action was “a critical instrument of U.S. foreign policy,” but it “should never be the last resort of failed policy,” Tenet said, carefully arguing both sides.18 Tenet could get away with all this because he was so forceful and convincing personally. His eclectic, inclusive outlook did not seem to be a dodge; it seemed to reflect authentically who he was.19
Like bin Laden, al-Zawahiri believed that it was time for jihadists to carry the war to “the distant enemy” because, once provoked, the Americans would probably reply with revenge attacks and “personally wage the battle against the Muslims,” which would make them ripe for a “clear-cut jihad against infidels.” A key war-fighting principle, al-Zawahiri believed, was “the need to inflict the maximum casualties against the opponent, for this is the language understood by the West, no matter how much time and effort such operations take.”
Clarke compared his crusade to Winston Churchill’s lonely, isolated campaign during the 1930s to call attention to rising Nazi power before it was too late. If Churchill had prevailed when he first called for action, Clarke said, he would have gone down in history “as a hawk, as someone who exaggerated the threat, who saber-rattled and did needless things.”35 Increasingly, this was the charge Clarke himself faced. National security analysts and members of Congress accused him of hyping the terrorist threat to scare Congress into allocating ever greater sums of federal funds so that Clarke’s
...more
A lawyer and an advocate of international institutions, Clinton paid attention to evidence and to legal standards governing the use of military force, including the doctrines of customary international law.
That August and for six months to come, as he became only the second president in American history to face impeachment charges, Clinton had neither the credibility nor the political strength required to lead the United States into a sustained military conflict even if it was an unconventional or low-grade war fought by Special Forces.
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.
The president said that he would not allow minimizing civilian casualties to become a higher priority than killing or capturing bin Laden, but he wanted to achieve both objectives if possible.
In human history, he asserted with questionable accuracy, “no terrorist campaign has ever succeeded.”31
Pillar saw terrorism fundamentally as “a challenge to be managed, not solved,” as he put it later. Terrorist attacks seemed likely to become a permanent feature of American experience, he believed. He objected to the metaphor of waging “war” against terrorism because “it is a war that cannot be won” and also “unlike most wars, it has neither a fixed set of enemies nor the prospect of coming to closure.” A better analogy than war might be “the effort by public health authorities to control communicable diseases.”
it turned out, even the most cynical Americans were perhaps not cynical enough about Ziauddin’s motivations.
They struggled at times to persuade case officers in the Directorate of Operations to work on their requests. CIA field officers abroad did not like to “take direction from the ladies” working back at Langley, one Counterterrorist Center manager recalled.7
As they joined a violent movement led by the alienated, itinerant son of a Saudi construction magnate and a disputatious, ostracized Egyptian doctor, they pledged their loyalty to men strikingly like themselves.
They met again in Kandahar in early 1999 and bin Laden declared that Mohammed’s suicide hijacking plan now had al Qaeda’s backing. Bin Laden wanted to scale back the attack to make it more manageable. He also said he preferred the White House to the Capitol as a target and that he favored hitting the Pentagon. Mohammed pushed for the World Trade Center. His nephew had bombed the towers six years before but had failed to bring them down, and now languished in an American high-security prison; Mohammed sought to finish the job.
The White House first asked the Pentagon for detailed military plans to attack and arrest bin Laden in the autumn of 1998.
For their part, officers at the Pentagon and the CIA believed that Clinton, as commander in chief, had failed to make—or to force his Cabinet to make—a firm tactical decision about how best to capture or kill bin Laden and his lieutenants. There were no good options, they all admitted. But the White House fostered dispersed, highly compartmented, isolated operations and planning at the CIA and the Pentagon. Clinton’s policy seemed to involve the pursuit of many policies at once. He did not make clear, for instance, whether his priority was to kill bin Laden with cruise missiles or to mount a
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Sixty-seven Americans had been killed by terrorists during the Clinton presidency, Berger noted pointedly. There was no political context for an American war in Afghanistan.
It was in many ways the same failure of political vision that had shaped American policy toward Afghanistan between 1988 and 1992, under two Republican administrations. Then, as in 2000, the United States refused to commit to an emerging fragile alliance between Massoud and centrist Pashtuns. The effect of this refusal, in both periods, was to cede the field to Pakistan’s extremist clients: Hekmatyar earlier, and the Taliban later.
More than two years later the United States, an unchallenged global power with a military larger than all of its serious rivals combined, with aircraft carrier groups and B-2 bomber wings that could strike any target worldwide in twenty-four hours or less, still found itself stymied by this lightly defended mud-walled compound of several hundred acres, a fort that would not even have intimidated horsebacked Pashtun raiders several centuries before.
By refusing to declare the Taliban an enemy Clinton and his Cabinet made Tarnak a very complicated target. In another sense, however, the farm was a symbol of the political-military problem now commonly referred to in Washington as “asymmetric warfare,” which described the advantages that terrorists and guerrillas can exploit against a superpower by virtue of being small, dispersed, and blended with civilian populations.
Between May and July the National Security Agency reported at least 33 different intercepts indicating a possible imminent al Qaeda attack. Classified threat warnings about terrorist strikes ricocheted through the government’s secure message systems nearly every day. The FBI issued 216 secret, internal threat warnings between January 1 and September 10, 2001, of which 6 mentioned possible attacks against airports or airlines. The State Department issued 9 separate warnings during the same period to embassies and citizens abroad, including 5 that highlighted a general threat to Americans all
...more
The presidential policy document that would recast government-wide strategy against al Qaeda moved slowly through White House channels. When the final integrated plan—including tentative provisions for covert aid to Massoud—was ready for the full Cabinet to consider, it took almost two months to find a meeting date that was convenient for everyone who wanted to attend.
Tenet said later that “the system was blinking red” and that Bush’s cabinet understood the urgency.
BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S. was the headline on the President’s Daily Brief presented to Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch on August 6. The report addressed questions Bush had asked about domestic threats and included the possibility that bin Laden operatives would seek to hijack airplanes.
Historically, the CIA has carried out its most successful covert actions when its main patron under American law, the president of the United States, has been eager to push the agency forward and has proven willing to stomach the risks and failures that accompany CIA operations. This was not Clinton. The president authorized the CIA to pursue al Qaeda and he supported the agency to some extent. Yet he did not fully believe that the CIA was up to the job, and he at times withheld from Langley the legal authorities, resources, and active leadership that a president more confident about the
...more
The Counterterrorist Center’s failure early in 2000 to watch-list two known al Qaeda adherents with American visas in their passports appears, in hindsight, as the agency’s single most important unforced error.
