Beyond Bin Laden (8 page)

I should add that I endorse talks between the United States and those Taliban leaders willing to engage. Direct communication is much preferable to either the Pakistan or Afghan government acting as an intermediary. Thus, the decision announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in February 2011 to drop preconditions for talking to the Taliban was a step in the right direction. The same logic holds for rejecting any Taliban preconditions. What matters in a dialogue is less where it begins than where it ends. The Taliban should understand that U.S. forces will attack them if they associate with terrorists, and that the U.S. government will only favor their participation in the political process if they forego violence. There is a chance that the Taliban might be more open to considering such commitments in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden and the inevitable surfacing of questions about Al Qaeda's future. It might also help influence Taliban calculations to make clear that the United States will continue to provide military training and support to the Afghan central government and to local groups of its choosing.

No one should kid himself, though: There is unlikely to be a rosy future for Afghanistan any time soon. The most likely future for the next few years and possibly beyond is some form of a messy stalemate, an Afghanistan characterized by a mix of a weak central government, strong local officials, and a Taliban presence (supported out of Pakistan) that is extensive in much of the Pashtun-dominated south and east of the country. Resolution of the ongoing conflict by either military or diplomatic means is highly unlikely and not a realistic basis for U.S. policy. Walking away from Afghanistan, however, is not the answer. Instead, this country should sharply scale back what it is doing and what it seeks to accomplish, and aim for an Afghanistan that is "good enough" in light of local realities, limited interests, and the broad range of both domestic and global challenges facing the United States.

 

Richard N. Haass
is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of
War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars
. This chapter is drawn from testimony he delivered to the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, on May 3, 2011.

 

The director of central intelligence was narrating the show. On Sunday afternoon, May 1, the president and vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a host of senior officials crowded into the White House Situation Room as CIA director Leon Panetta, speaking on a video screen from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, described, in real time, the hunting and killing of Osama bin Laden. The nation's top spymaster was appropriately cryptic and discreet. "We have a visual on Geronimo," he said, using the code name for Bin Laden. A few silent minutes passed. "Geronimo EKIA," intoned Panetta: Enemy Killed in Action. "We got him," said President Obama.

It was just like the movies, or the umpteenth episode of
24
. Efficient and deadly; neat and tidy, in a spooky kind of way. But in the long history of the CIA, the United States government's attempts to capture and kill enemies of the state have rarely worked so smoothly or so well. Assassination is a difficult business. Recall that in the opening moments of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, stealth bombers struck a target near Baghdad where Saddam Hussein was supposedly hiding. He was nowhere near there; the intelligence was faulty. It took U.S. Special Operations forces another nine months to find Saddam, even though the American military was occupying Iraq. Historically, assassination has been a double-edged sword, which can cut back in dangerous and unexpected ways.

The Central Intelligence Agency, the spy service charged with doing our nation's dirty work, once embraced assassination. In 1960, the agency, then in its high age of covert action, created an "executive action" capability, as assassination was euphemistically called. The code name was ZRRIFLE, and in the CIA's labs a top scientist named Dr. Sidney Gottlieb brewed lethal toxins and developed James Bond-ish delivery systems like poison pens. (There was even a plot to make Fidel Castro's beard fall out, using a woman's hair remover.) But the CIA never actually killed anyone. The Communist dictator of Cuba will probably die in his sleep, a half century after the CIA hired the Mafia to try to slay him in a "gangland-style" murder.

The murky and sometimes darkly comic reality of CIA assassination plots is best illustrated by the story of Lawrence Devlin, the Harvard-educated CIA station chief in the Congo in 1960. That summer, CIA headquarters cabled Devlin that he would receive a visitor identified only as "Joe from Paris." Joe was the mysterious Dr. Gottlieb, who arrived in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), the capital of the Congo, with a toothpaste tube of poison. Devlin was ordered to somehow administer the poison to Patrice Lumumba, the Congo's leader, who was believed to be under the sway of Communist Moscow. Devlin was told that the order came direct from President Dwight Eisenhower.

Devlin thought that trying to kill Lumumba was a bad idea—immoral, impractical, and possibly dangerous. So, like any clever and experienced government servant, he smartly saluted and proceeded to stall. He hid the poison toothpaste in his refrigerator and waited. Eventually, Lumumba was killed by his political rivals. Devlin threw the poison into the Congo River.

During the mid-1970s, when the Watergate scandals forced the CIA to expose its "Crown Jewels," its record of secret dirty tricks, there was a public outcry. Assassination was outlawed, sort of, though the president could seek a congressional "finding" to kill a foreign leader. Presidents were understandably wary of the tool. During the late 1990s, as the CIA saw that Al Qaeda was a growing threat, President Bill Clinton asked why the military couldn't get "some black ninjas" to attack Osama bin Laden in his hideout. General Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, threw up a host of excuses—the logistics were difficult, it might seem like an invasion of Afghanistan, etc. The CIA was, if anything, more reluctant to get back into the assassination game. CIA officials had become "risk averse," in bureaucratic jargon.

That changed after 9/11. When President George W. Bush declared that he wanted Bin Laden "dead or alive," CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black responded that the agency would deliver Osama's "head in a box." But in the end, it took a decade before the agency could find Osama "hiding in plain sight," as one intelligence official put it, in a house thirty-five miles from the capital of Pakistan.

Intelligence gathering is much harder than it looks in the movies. American technology is good at eavesdropping and satellite reconnaissance. But terrorists sometimes use only couriers and carrier pigeons (Osama's hideout had no internet connection). For critical human intelligence (HUMINT), the CIA depends on sometimes fraught or shaky liaison relationships with foreign intelligence services that use unsavory methods like torture and often distrust or mislead U.S. intelligence. Our relationship with the Pakistani intelligence service is so poor that we decided against tipping it off to the strike on Bin Laden.

The problem is not just our allies. Risk aversion dies hard in bureaucracies. After 9/11 picked up the pace of covert actions, top agency officials began buying insurance policies to pay legal fees in case they were called to testify before the inevitable congressional investigations. They did not trust their bosses or their political leaders to take the fall. Experience has taught them that blame passes down.

Working with the military, the CIA has gotten more efficient at targeting and killing suspected terrorists in recent years. Though the numbers remain classified, perhaps a thousand jihadists have been eliminated in their lairs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Sudan. The killing is usually done by unmanned airborne drones but sometimes by old-fashioned boots on the ground, like the Navy SEAL team that took out Bin Laden. But just because the intelligence and special operations community has become practiced at assassination does not make it a good idea. NATO forces specifically deny that they are trying to kill Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi by targeting his "command sites." But they killed some of his family members in a recent strike. Gaddafi is vengeful. In 1986, after U.S. warplanes killed some of his relations by dropping bombs on his family compound, Gaddafi ordered a terrorist attack on an airliner, the Pan Am flight blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Cornered, the half-mad Libyan dictator could lash out again, possibly with chemical or biological weapons.

American political leaders need to think of the day when America no longer has a monopoly on drones with missiles. Throughout history, assassination has been a mode of revenge and a two-way street. It has never been clear if President Eisenhower actually ordered the assassination of Lumumba. The CIA, gung ho in those days, may have too literally interpreted the president's frustrated wish to "get rid" of the Congo's leader. But Ike surely had it right when he scolded a staffer for making a joke about "bumping off" Lumumba. "That is beyond the pale," President Eisenhower said, according to his staff secretary Andrew Goodpaster. "We will not discuss such things. Once you start that kind of business, there is no telling where it will end."

 

Evan Thomas
is an award-winning historian and the former editor at large of
Newsweek
. He teaches at Princeton University and is at work on a book about President Eisenhower.

 

September 10 is my wedding anniversary. On that day in 2001, my job with President George W. Bush had brought me and my family from Texas to Washington—not the best time, it seemed to me, to miss celebrating my anniversary with my husband, who had left his life in Texas to support my work. I asked my deputy Dan Bartlett to travel with the president to Florida that day, so I could have an anniversary dinner with my husband.

The next morning, September 11, I was scheduled to represent the White House at a Habitat for Humanity event. The suggested attire at the homebuilding site was blue jeans, and because we didn't wear jeans in the Bush White House out of respect for the office, I was getting ready to leave from my home in Northwest Washington when the phone rang. It was my assistant, Jill Angelo, calling with the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Odd, I thought: Must have been a small plane whose pilot had had a heart attack or some mechanical problem. I turned on the television in time to see the second plane hit the second tower, and suddenly everything changed.

Vice President Dick Cheney sent a military driver to pick me up and bring me to the White House. At this point downtown Washington was basically evacuating, and as we drove into the city, we were going against the flow. The pain and horror that started that day—then stretched into months and years—became the all-too-familiar story of our lives, no matter who we are or where we live.

Almost ten years later, on May 1, 2011, justice finally had its day. My husband and I were driving home from our traditional Sunday Mexican dinner in Austin when I got a news email alert saying that President Obama was going to make an announcement soon on an unspecified topic. I looked at the alert and told my husband, "I think we might have caught Bin Laden." He asked why my mind had jumped to that conclusion. It was instinct—an old communications director's instinct. For a president to suddenly and personally make a national announcement late on a Sunday night meant the news was almost certainly really big and really good. If it was bad news, somebody else would be making the announcement, and the other possibility, a presidential announcement of military action, seemed unlikely. Getting Bin Laden was really big and would be really good.

At home, when the official word came from President Obama, I felt a sense of relief and some satisfaction: It was a victory for peace and justice. Two things immediately went through my mind. First, I thought of the many people I have met along the way who lost a loved one to an Al Qaeda attack, either on 9/11 or in some other gruesome bombing somewhere else in the world. Then I thought of the people I had seen in the many meetings and visits—across the river at Langley, at CIA headquarters, at the Pentagon and the Defense Department's Central Command and Special Operations Command, in secure rooms in embassies across the world, in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan and remote islands in the Philippines—where I witnessed intelligence analysts and military personnel who made the hunt for Bin Laden their life's mission, sorting through so many minute pieces of information, often risking their lives to follow leads and track clues. This was their day, most of all.

As President Bush has said, our inability to find and bring Osama bin Laden to justice was one of the biggest regrets of his presidency. So many people did so much, gave and sacrificed so much, to stop this mass murderer, and I know how deeply my Bush administration colleagues regretted not being able to bring Bin Laden to justice during our time in office. But in the end, the hard work that spanned two presidential administrations brought about a triumph for America and the broader peace of the world. President Obama deserves great credit for making a tough and courageous decision to act on intelligence and send the U.S. Navy's elite Seal Team 6 into the compound to get Bin Laden. And President Bush deserves credit for making the central priorities of his administration preventing another attack on our homeland and the hunt for Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders.

But Al Qaeda's brand of terrorism is not just an American problem. It is the world's problem. I came to understand the global nature of the threat with new appreciation when I served as under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2005 to 2007.

In the years immediately after 9/11, while Bin Laden was a pariah in America and many Western nations, many of the world's populations did not share that point of view. Public opinion surveys showed shockingly high admiration for him among many audiences, especially in Muslim-majority countries. One of the priorities of the United States, the United Kingdom, and our other coalition partners was to undermine that popular support. In fact, one of the three pillars that guided my work at the State Department was to "isolate and marginalize violent extremists who threaten the freedom and peace sought by civilized people of every nation, culture, and faith."