Bush Has Made Us Less Safe
Peter Bergen’s TNR article on Bush’s War on Terror strategy is simply devastating. Read it. Some choice bits and commentary below the fold.
Yet, even as bin Laden contemplated his own death and Al Qaeda seemed on the verge of defeat, Gary Berntsen, then commander of CIA operations in eastern Afghanistan, was worried. A gung-ho officer who speaks Dari, the local Afghan language, Berntsen realized that Afghan soldiers were likely not up to the task of taking on Al Qaeda’s hard core at Tora Bora. In the first days of December, he had requested a battalion of Rangers–that is, between 600 and 800 soldiers–to assault the complex of caves where bin Laden and his lieutenants were believed to be hiding and to block their escape routes. That request was denied by the Pentagon, for reasons that have never been fully clarified. In the end, there were probably more journalists at Tora Bora than the 50 or so Delta and Green Beret soldiers who participated in the fight.
And so the task of encircling the area was passed off to local warlords–one of whom declared a truce with Al Qaeda at a critical moment in the battle, allowing members of the group to slip away. Muhammad Musa, a massively built, laconic Afghan commander who led several hundred of his soldiers on the Tora Bora front line, told me, “There were six American soldiers with us, U.S. Special Forces. They coordinated the air strikes. My personal view is if they had blocked the way out to Pakistan, Al Qaeda would not have had a way to escape.” The strategy of relying on local proxies–a tactic that had served America so well in overthrowing the Taliban–proved disastrous at the Afghan campaign’s crucial moment.
Not only did we not get Bin Laden when we had the chance, Bush decided that we should instead focus on Iraq — which lead to a predictable decline in our nation-building mission in Afghanistan:
And the reason for that missed opportunity was simple: By the time the Taliban fell, the Bush administration’s attention was already elsewhere. According to Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack, in late November 2001–even before the battle of Tora Bora–Bush asked the Pentagon to revamp its 800-page Iraq war plan. General Tommy Franks “was incredulous,” Woodward writes. “They were in the midst of one war in Afghanistan and now they wanted detailed planning for another in Iraq? Goddamn,’ Franks said, what the fuck are they talking about?’” In the months and years to come, the Iraq war would divert important resources, military and otherwise, from Afghanistan–missile-firing Predators, satellites, and key units such as the 5th Special Forces Group, which specializes in the Middle East and was pulled out of the country in the spring of 2002. It is heartbreaking, today, to imagine what might have been accomplished if the money spent on the Iraq war–hundreds of billions of dollars so far–had been plunged into creating a model state in Afghanistan.
Not only did our mission against Al Qaeda and terrorism in general falter when we moved our focus from Afghanistan to Iraq, we created some more terrorists once we got there:
The fallout from the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq has been felt far outside the country. Bush defenders have claimed that Iraq will reduce terrorism by drawing jihadists to the country like moths to a flame–where they can be killed or captured before doing damage in the West. But this assertion is unconvincing, because it incorrectly assumes that the world contains a finite number of jihadists. In fact, the pool of potential terrorists has expanded in the past four years. As the administration’s own 2006 National Intelligence Estimate explains, “[T]he Iraq War has become the cause celebre’ for jihadists … and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.” To test that thesis empirically, Paul Cruickshank of New York University and I compared the period after September 11 through the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 with the period from March 2003 through September 2006. Using numbers from the authoritative rand terrorism database, we found that the rate of deadly attacks by jihadists had increased sevenfold since the invasion. And, even excluding terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, fatal attacks by jihadists in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third since March 2003.
Also turns out that indefinite detention in legal limbo and torture are both unnecessary to procure information from terrorist suspects, it also damanges our reputation abroad and enrages the Muslim world, making the threat of terrorism even greater:
Indeed, Coleman thinks the Bush administration’s treatment of captured terrorists–holding so many outside the traditional justice system at Guantánamo while authorizing interrogation techniques that some observers would consider torture–has been largely a bust. He told me that most of the information he saw coming out of Guantánamo until his retirement in 2004 “was of no particular value.” And Coleman believes that, unlike the intelligence the FBI extracted from Ali Mohamed, the information provided by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed–the September 11 operational commander who is reported to have been subjected to waterboarding while in U.S. custody–is “suspect” and “not useful in a court of law.”
Coleman isn’t the only one who feels this way. Michael Rolince, who, from 2002 to 2005, was special agent in charge of counterterrorism in the FBI’s Washington field office–which handles not just threats to the capital region, but also many overseas cases–told me, “I don’t recall any information that was relevant [to my office] coming out of Guantánamo.” He also points out that “torture and coercion gets you, in the vast majority of cases, wrong information that takes you off on wild goose chases.” And Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent who obtained uncoerced confessions from two notorious terrorists–Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Mir Aimal Kansi, killer of two CIA employees outside agency headquarters that same year–told me that “coercive interrogation techniques have proven to be ineffective in producing reliable intelligence.”
But Bush’s decision to operate outside the boundaries of U.S. and international law has been worse than simply unnecessary; it has also actively harmed American interests. For one thing, by refusing to bring terrorists to trial, we have passed up valuable opportunities to dispassionately present evidence of Al Qaeda’s bloodlust to the world at large. (Testimony in the 2001 embassy-bombing trial established for the first time that Al Qaeda had tried to acquire highly enriched uranium in the mid-’90s–which had the effect of publicly underscoring the group’s plans for mass murder.) Moreover, Bush’s legal approach to the war on terrorism has torpedoed America’s good reputation around the world. In a BBC survey released this year, of the more than 26,000 people polled in 25 different countries, seven out of ten disapproved of the treatment of Guantánamo inmates, while half thought the United States plays a mostly negative role in the world. The numbers are far worse in Muslim countries–including democratic ones that should be natural allies. According to a recent Pew poll, America’s favorability rating stands at 9 percent in Turkey (down from 52 percent before September 11) and 29 percent in Indonesia (down from 75 percent before September 11).
Democrats should be talking about all of these main points every day. The fact that the GOP has managed to be the party of national security since 9/11 is at the same time unsurprising and absolutely infuriating. Democrats needn’t run away and whine whenever the GOP says that they are the party of national security and that electing democrats will make America less safe. Instead, Democrats need to firmly reframe the terrorism debate and relentlessly point out the numerous failures of the Bush Administration’s terrorism and national security policies. We have good ground on which to make such claims.
