I can’t deny that it has been fun to see all the Bushies pushed on the defensive or jolted into attack mode so dramatically that you can’t help but discern just how insecure and vulnerable they are – as are most people who are at least dimly aware that they have advanced themselves on false premises, deep down inside. It is also more than a bit frustrating, however, to consider all the sound and fury being spent on issues that are more or less beside the point – not only about the past but about the character of the genuine terror threat that does confront the United States and people in that country and elsewhere who value freedom, decency, civility and personal dignity.
The Washington Post is pleased to have found – or at least people who say they have seen – a speech national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to deliver on – ta da! – September 11 2001 that was designed to outline, “the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday,” but which focuses, as the story by Robin Wright explains, “largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.” Fleshed out a bit more, the story says that “The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups, according to former U.S. officials who have seen the text.”
NO BIG NEWS
If your memory stretches back only a few weeks, to include the furor over former top terrorism official Richard Clarke‘s appearance on “60 Minutes” and then before the 9/11 commission, this might seem like a good “ah ha!” story. Ah ha! So Richard Clarke was right! The Bushies paid little or no attention to the emerging terrorist threat before 9/11, and even on 9/11 itself their definitive “emerging threats” statement was innocent of any knowledge of these baddies.
If your memory stretches back to before the day that “changed everything,” however, this is hardly a news flash. Of course the Bushies knew or cared little about the jihadist terrorist threat. The Clintonites, despite a few desultory moves in the wake of the African embassy bombings, the Cole bombing and the Khobar Towers bombing, didn’t do much either. What was shocking about the attack was that it surprised almost everybody.
Sure, with 20/20 hindsight it is possible to discern signs that should have been interpreted correctly, dots that should have been connected. But they weren’t, at least not by most of the professional analysts. Among the reasons are, quite probably, the overgrown and overly bureaucratic character of the various intelligence agencies, each of which was populated by people more interested in protecting their own turf and advancing their own little careers than in detecting genuine emerging threats. If the 9/11 commission identifies some of these shortcomings and suggests some reforms that are actually implemented, it might have performed a service.
It is more likely, however, that human nature will play a more important role in this country’s response than will any bureaucratic reform moves. Immediately after 9/11 almost everybody was more on the alert than before, and while some of this alertness has faded by now, we’re all a bit more aware (and nervous) than we were before 9/11. That heightened alertness has probably served us fairly well (although there have certainly been stupid missteps along the way, especially regarding body searches of little old ladies). I’m prepared to believe, although I have few ways to confirm it, that those who think of themselves as our guardians have probably detected and neutralized a few potential terrorist threats in the last few years or so – though I still doubt that holding a guy like Jose Padilla incommunicado for years has contributed a whit to your security or mine.
We can expect heightened awareness to serve us reasonably well for a few more years. If there are no new terrorist attacks on US soil, however, we can expect heightened alertness to dull over time, whatever reforms are put in place, or however well or poorly they are implemented.
Welcome to the human condition. Sorry if it’s not utopian.
MISSING AL QAIDA’S CHARACTER
What’s still somewhat shocking is how thoroughly most government officials are missing the changing character of the terrorist threat. The fact that Condi Rice was focusing on missile defense, the big conservative magic bullet of the 1980s, is hardly surprising. Long before the Maginot Line government and military officials tended to focus on the threats of the past and miss the threats of the future. It’s not hard to remember just how fascinated conservatives were in the first few months of the Bush administration with finally getting some forward motion on the pet project of missile defense, designed to meet the Soviet challenge in the early 1980s but quickly adapted – in justification and propaganda if not in form – as just the ticket to neutralize “rogue” nations and terrorists.
What’s more fascinating is how thoroughly most government analysts failed in the past and are failing still to understand the implications that follow from what kind of organization al Qaida – and the larger jihadist movement, sometimes linked to al Qaida, sometimes not – is. Most analysts would still prefer to treat today’s terrorism as state-sponsored terrorism, susceptible to being neutralized by attacks on (or diplomacy and negotiation directed toward) nation-states.
But al Qaida is no such thing. It did have, and made use of, a symbiotic relationship with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, of course, that gave it certain advantages. But it is more like a private organization than a state organization, more like a multi-national corporation than a supranational state-like outfit. Its initial funding – it seems to have developed other sources of revenue, probably including some from sympathizers running or employed by nation-states – came from a private fortune (insofar as any fortune in Saudi Arabia is truly private) not a government appropriation
Bruce Hoffman of Rand described al Qaida recently in a Global Agenda article available at the Rand website. “In terms of its organizational resiliency and flexibility, its structure and communications, al-Qaeda is not unlike a successful, smart company – or even a venture capital firm. It has a clear message, a charismatic leader, a firm purpose and is not afraid to delegate.” Hoffman goes on to suggest that “Few brand names today are more recognizable around the world than al-Qaeda.” He also says that “what bin Laden has done is to implement for al-Qaeda the same type of effective organizational framework or management approach adapted by many corporate executives throughout much of the industrialized world over the past decade.”
In that light, it is interesting to encounter a piece by Judith Apter Klinghoffer on the History News Network that analyzes the approach to al Qaida (the spelling I prefer for unfathomable reasons, though I’ll spell it different ways in direct quotes) during the Clinton years, based on her reading of Richard Clarke’s book.
Judith Klinghoffer contends that the Clarke approach “was the protection, strengthening and promotion of the ‘moderate Arab governments,’ or, more accurately, repressive Sunni autocracies. For following the Iranian revolution, successive US administrations were dedicated to preventing the emergence of another Shia theocratic state.” She believes that this fascination with the importance of state structures led to this kind of action: “Clarke believes that the way to fight Islamism is by taking he side of weaker Muslim populations against stronger non-Muslim governments as the Clinton administration did in Bosnia.”
But this missed the non-state character of al-Qaida, its radically decentralized character, its lack of dependence on state sponsorship. The Clintonites, if Judith Klinghoffer is right (and I think her argument is subject to valid criticism, the business of another day) the Clintonites could conceive of opposing terrorism only in essentially statist terms. The Bushies – especially with their relentless focus on overthrowing Saddam Hussein as the key to making progress in terrorism, but in many other ways as well – are making similar mistakes. They just don’t comprehend non-state structures and have little or not idea how to deal with them.
DIRECTION, LINKS, IMITATION
I talked briefly with Steven Simon, also of Rand, and co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror from Random House, with Uzbekistan as the starting point of the discussion. He told me that the militant Islamists in Uzbekistan were tied closely with al Qaida from the middle 1990s, but they were harmed by the defeat of the Taliban regime and the rather brutal crackdown by Uzbek President Islam Karimov. The attacks in recent weeks, then are probably al-Qaida-connected, but it is difficult to figure out the precise connections.
On one end of the al-Qaida spectrum, he suggested, are those who were in Afghanistan in the 1990s, recruited by Osama or one of his dozen top aides. On the other end are numerous “proliferated groups” that operate locally but have been influenced or are in sympathy with or have learned something about how to operate from al-Qaida – perhaps from one of the several operational handbooks floating around the Internet, perhaps just from news accounts. In between are groups with dozens of different levels of affiliation, from al-Qaida guys that drop in toward the end of planning for an operation with money, weapons or advice to groups that just get an occasional “attaboy” from somebody who may or may not be genuinely affiliated with al Qaida.
You might call it a World Wide Web.
Up against this flexible, decentralized, adaptable web of organizations we have highly bureaucratized structures like the CIA and the US military (not denying there are very knowledgeable and talented individuals within both outfits. And these centralized structures haven’t yet recognized the character of the adversaries. Don’t expect much success for a while.
