The 9/11 Wars (10 page)

Deal or no deal, what is certain is that British security agencies had difficulty tracking the shift in the orientation of militants in the UK over the decade. Whereas early arrivals had been largely focused on the ‘near enemy’, the regimes of their home countries, later on in the decade it was the ‘far enemy’ of the US and by extension its allies that had become the target for London-based militants. In this, of course, activists in the UK were following the broader trend across the Muslim world that had seen the ‘internationalization’ of Islamic radical activism over the decade. But such esoteric technicalities largely escaped those tasked with monitoring Britain’s radical population and there was trouble quantifying quite who threatened whom. Another strand that went virtually ignored was what was to eventually come to be called ‘home-grown militancy’. Throughout the 1990s, young British men of Pakistani origin made their way to Kashmir to fight with local groups there. Their activities were monitored by the security service but again were not seen as a potential threat to UK interests even when British citizens died in suicidal assaults on Indian troops or paramilitaries. Funds destined for Kashmiri groups, often collected in mosques in the Midlands or the north of the UK, were seized frequently, but logistic support networks were more or less tolerated.
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In general, however, security services were too busy with other issues raised in the chaos of the collapse of Communism to think too much about the apparently fringe problem of radical Islamist activism. A third of the 1,800 staff of MI5 was focused on Irish republican violence. Turkish groups such as the PKK or Dev Sol, which ran rackets in north London and were actively involved in criminal activities, were a significant concern. One major problem was that the service had very few offices outside London and none at all in the areas where much of the British Muslim population was concentrated.
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As relations with local police were often poor, this meant very limited visibility on the ground.

‘[Islamic radicalism] was a concern but far from a real priority,’ one senior MI6 official said later. ‘We had a lot going on [and] had suffered significant cuts in resources in the search for a post-Cold-War peace dividend. But we were not approaching the problem in the right way or digging in the right places. We were looking but simply not seeing.’
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Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee later said that the British JIC had in fact warned Blair in its weekly intelligence assessment of July 16 that al-Qaeda – operating from bases in Afghanistan – was in the ‘final stages’ of preparing a terrorist attack on the West, probably targeting Israelis or Americans, though the details, timings and methods of attack were not known. The nature of the threat was not ‘understood’ at the time, the Committee noted, ‘due to a failure of imagination’.
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A GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR

In the eight months between taking power and the attacks of 9/11 the president, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Colin Powell, the former general who had been appointed secretary of state, had shown little interest in the Middle East in general and in Islamic terrorism in particular, preferring to focus on more traditional sources of danger such as Russia and China or states with long records of hostility towards the US such as Iraq. One major preoccupation was the question of missile defence.

Rice later mounted a spirited rebuttal of the criticisms of the Bush team’s record in the months before 9/11, saying that their priorities were in line with briefings by the outgoing administration which had emphasized North Korea, Iran and the Balkans. Rice claimed too that a major strategy aiming to deny sanctuary to al-Qaeda and its various offshoots and affiliates in Afghanistan and to freeze the assets of the group and those of its benefactors was being put into action by the late summer of 2001.
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Much of the acrimonious argument after the 9/11 strikes revolved around a series of warnings received by the Bush administration during the summer of 2001. In his memoirs, Bush recalled that CIA intelligence before 9/11 had first pointed to an attack ‘overseas’ and that during the late spring security had been ‘hardened’ at embassies abroad, cooperation with foreign services increased and warnings issued to domestic American authorities about potential hijackings on internal flights. In early August Bush was briefed that bin Laden intended to strike in the US. Though the possibility of a hijack was raised, concrete details of what form that strike might take were thin.
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A meeting of the top-ranking ‘Principals Committee’ to discuss the terrorist threat – repeatedly postponed through the Bush administration’s first eight months in office – finally took place on September 4.
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By the time it met, it was, of course, far too late to do anything. ‘On 9/11 it was obvious the intelligence community had missed something big,’ the president later wrote.
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It is hard to escape the impression that, even if the warnings reaching him were vague, Bush, who had taken a vacation of record length through the summer, was at the very least guilty himself of a degree of slackness that bordered on the negligent.

Even more has been written since September 2001 on the internal workings of the Bush administration in the days and weeks following the September 11 attacks than on the failure to prevent the 9/11 plot. The immediate reactions to 9/11 on the part of key individuals in the Bush administration were clearly crucial in setting the broad lines along which US strategy would at least initially evolve and in ‘framing’ the conflict more generally for nearly 400 million Americans and many more people around the globe. The major long-term significance of the 9/11 attacks lay to a very large extent in the reactions they provoked.

Though privately the reaction of President Bush himself to the attacks was unequivocal – ‘my blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this and kick their ass’ – his initial public response was hesitant.
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It was only at his third attempt that he began to deliver the simple, reassuring and confident rhetoric that the hurt, frightened and angry US population expected, needed and appreciated. In his first major address, broadcast at 8.30 on the evening of the attacks, Bush said no American would ever forget ‘this day’, that ‘our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom’ had come under attack, that America had been targeted because it was ‘the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world’. He quoted Psalm 23: ‘though I walk through the valley of death’. No distinction would be made between terrorists and those that harbour them, he said. The perpetrators of the attack would be hunted down and brought to justice.
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With each further speech, the narrative of righteous vengeance, of a new era dawning and of religiosity, became better defined. Bush’s prose, terse and folksy as it may have been, was soaked in a sense of American exceptionalism, the ‘manifest destiny’, two centuries of American belief in its own role in the world as a beacon of enlightenment and progress, the sense of an existential battle between freedom and repression. ‘This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil. But good will prevail,’ Bush told Americans on September 12.

The president’s chosen strategy – the Global War on Terror – took around a week to be clearly formulated. Though often seen as a simple and instinctive product of a simple and instinctive view of the world, this is to underestimate its intellectual coherence and internal logic. The thinking among many in the American Department of Defense is revealed by the account of a lengthy debate among senior Pentagon political appointees on the day after the attacks. Related by Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, the conversation involved General John Abizaid, who was to take command of US forces in the key theatres of the war on terror within two years and who would start to develop the American military’s thinking on ‘the 9/11 Wars’.
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It took place on board a military transport plane bringing the Americans back to Washington from Moscow, where they had been discussing the abrogation of Cold-War-era missile control agreements.

The president had already told his most senior intelligence officials that their mission was now to ‘disrupt attacks before they had happened’ and stressed the need for deterrence.
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Starting from the principle that their primary task was not to punish those responsible for 9/11 but to prevent such attacks happening again, the men on the plane talked for many hours about how best to target the shadowy and elusive group of individuals responsible. The answer lay in the nature of the enemy, which, Feith argued, comprised two main elements: a network of interlinked terrorist groups apparently including al-Qaeda, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Indonesian Jemaa Islamiya and many others and the states which supported them. These latter included,
inter alia
, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and Taliban Afghanistan. If America was to be protected in the future – especially from the threat of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons – then this network needed to be broken up and these states – and potentially others such as North Korea and Libya – needed to be made to cease their sponsorship of terrorists. It followed that any strike on Afghanistan could only therefore be a component of a much broader effort against multiple targets. One key element of any campaign would be the necessity to intimidate actual or potential sponsors of terror around the world.
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Indeed, the operations in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda – part of the network – and the Taliban – the sponsoring regime – would have to be the first demonstration of the new strategy but far from the last. For if intimidation did not work, then forcing regime change needed to be considered too. America’s future safety lay in the resolve with which this new policy of prevention by deterrence was prosecuted. There had to be a definitive end to the drift and indecision that had so gravely weakened the USA over previous years. Otherwise, the logic ran, there would be another September 11.
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Over the coming weeks, despite the protest of many other loud voices in the administration who favoured a much narrower ‘law enforcement’ approach focusing on the perpetrators of 9/11, this reasoning would prevail. The thinking of senior figures such as Cheney and Rumsfeld as well as the input of less important but nonetheless ideological influential figures such as Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, a brilliant career academic and diplomat who had been appointed deputy defense secretary, would be condensed into the Defense Department’s strategic plan for what had become, after the idea of declaring ‘a War on Radical Islam’ or ‘a War on Islamic Extremism’ were both rejected, a ‘Global War on Terror’. Five days after 9/11, Bush was promising to rid the world of ‘evil doers’.
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Before two weeks had passed, he promised that ‘our war begins with al-Qaeda but it does not end there’. Instead, ‘it will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated’.
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All the major figures in the administration stressed repeatedly that this new conflict would last a long time.

OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM

By the end of September 2001 the US war plan for the first action of the Global War on Terror, the attack on Afghanistan, had been finalized. The aim of Operation Enduring Freedom was both to capture or otherwise eliminate al-Qaeda and to depose the Taliban.
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Difficult negotiations with Uzbekistan to secure basing rights for American planes had been successfully concluded. More crucially, General Pervez Musharraf, the army general who had seized power in Pakistan in a bloodless coup in 1999, had agreed to a list of seven demands including full intelligence sharing, the use of two small airstrips and a halt to his nation’s support for the Taliban.
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The close, if tense and unstable, working relationship that successive Pakistani governments and the Pakistani security and military establishment had established with the USA through the Cold War had soured through the 1990s, and the relative ease with which Musharraf’s acquiescence appeared to have been obtained through a mixture of cajolery and threat heartened the White House. Offers of assistance or cooperation from more than seventy countries ranging from the Republic of the Congo to South Korea had been received and, on the whole, politely rejected. Congress had appropriated $40 billion for the coming campaign.
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The strategy for Afghanistan decided on by Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the military was determined by a variety of considerations. One key element was the desire of the president to ‘change the impression’ he felt had been left by successive withdrawals in the face of threat over the previous twenty years. This had been an invitation to ever more brazen attacks. Only ‘the most aggressive’ of responses would suffice to deter the enemy.
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That did not mean huge numbers of troops, however. Both Bush and Rumsfeld believed that modern wars could be won by forces ‘defined less by size and more by mobility [and which] rely more heavily on stealth, precision weaponry and information technologies’.
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They thus explicitly rejected the ‘Powell Doctrine’, named after the administration’s secretary of state, who as an army general had commanded coalition forces in the First Gulf War. That doctrine had meant only going to war with massive and overwhelming numbers and was deemed outdated or, at the very least, unsuitable to Afghanistan. No one had any desire to end up where the Soviets had found themselves, and the key to this was seen as keeping a ‘light footprint’ to avoid becoming an army of occupation and sparking a generalized insurrection. There was also the wish, particularly of Wolfowitz, who had been heavily influenced by his direct experience of relatively successful processes of democratization in south-east Asia, to see ‘the Afghans liberate themselves’.
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Finally, there were longstanding American conservative suspicions, nurtured through the Clinton era, of the use of military forces for ‘soft’ liberal humanitarian-type tasks.