Report: Pakistan's ISI 'Fully Involved' in 9/11
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2004
The Sept. 11 Commission has found troubling new evidence that Iran was closer to al-Qaida than was Iraq. More importantly, and through no fault of its own, the commission missed the biggest prize of all: Former Pakistani intelligence officers knew beforehand all about the September 11 attacks.
They even advised Osama bin Laden and his cohorts how to attack key targets in the United States with hijacked civilian aircraft. And bin Laden has been undergoing periodic dialysis treatment in a military hospital in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province adjacent to the Afghan border.
The information came to the commission's attention in a confidential report from Pakistan as the commission's own report was coming off the presses. The information was supplied with the understanding that the unimpeachable source would remain anonymous.
Pakistan still denies that President Pervez Musharraf knew anything about the activities of A.Q. Khan, the country's top nuclear engineer who spent the last 10 years building and running a one-stop global Wal-Mart for "rogue" nations. North Korea, Iran and Libya shopped for nuclear weapons at Mr. Khan's underground black market. Pakistan has also denied the allegations by a leading Pakistani in the confidential addendum to the September 11 Commission report.
After U.S. and British intelligence painstakingly pieced together Mr. Khan's global nuclear proliferation endeavors, Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage was assigned last fall to convey the devastating news to Mr. Musharraf. Mr. Khan, a national icon for giving Pakistan its nuclear arsenal, was not arrested. Instead, Mr. Musharraf pardoned him in exchange for an abject apology on national television in English.
No one in Pakistan believed Mr. Musharraf's claim he was totally in the dark about Mr. Khan's operation. Prior to seizing power in 1999, Mr. Musharraf was -- and still is -- army chief of staff. For the past five years, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence chief has reported directly to Mr. Musharraf.
Osama bin Laden's principal Pakistani adviser before Sept. 11, 2001, was retired Gen. Hamid Gul, a former ISI chief who, since the 2001 attacks, is "strategic adviser" to the coalition of six politico-religious parties that governs two of Pakistan's four provinces. Known as MMA, the coalition also occupies 20 percent of the seats in the federal assembly in Islamabad.
Hours after Sept. 11, Gen. Gul publicly accused Israel's Mossad of fomenting the plot. Later, he said the U.S. Air Force must have been in on it since no warplanes were scrambled to shoot down the hijacked airliners.
Gen. Gul spent two weeks in Afghanistan immediately before Sept. 11. He denied meeting bin Laden on that trip, but has always said he was an "admirer" of the al-Qaida leader. However, he did meet several times with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader.
Since Sept. 11, hardly a week goes by without Gen. Gul denouncing the United States in both the Urdu and English-language media.
In a conversation with this reporter in October 2001, Gen. Gul forecast a future Islamist nuclear power that would form a greater Islamic state with a fundamentalist Saudi Arabia after the monarchy falls.
Gen. Gul worked closely with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan when he was ISI chief. He was "mildly" fundamentalist in those days, he explained after Sept. 11, and indifferent to the United States. But he became passionately anti-American after the United States turned its back on Afghanistan following the 1989 Soviet withdrawal and began punishing Pakistan with economic and military sanctions for its secret nuclear buildup.
A ranking CIA official, speaking anonymously, said the agency considered Gen. Gul "the most dangerous man" in Pakistan. A senior Pakistani political leader, also on condition of anonymity, said, "I have reason to believe Hamid Gul was Osama bin Laden's master planner."
The report received by the Sept. 11 Commission from the anonymous, well-connected Pakistani source, said: "The core issue of instability and violence in South Asia is the character, activities and persistence of the militarized Islamist fundamentalist state in Pakistan. No cure for this canker can be arrived at through any strategy of negotiations, support and financial aid to the military regime, or by a 'regulated' transition to 'democracy.'"
The confidential report continued: "The imprints of every major act of international Islamist terrorism invariably passes through Pakistan, right from September 11 -- where virtually all the participants had trained, resided or met in, coordinated with, or received funding from or through Pakistan -- to major acts of terrorism across South Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as major networks of terror that have been discovered in Europe.
"Pakistan has harvested an enormous price for its apparent 'cooperation' with the U.S., and in this it has combined deception and blackmail -- including nuclear blackmail -- to secure a continuous stream of concessions. Its conduct is little different from that of North Korea, which has in the past chosen the nuclear path to secure incremental aid from Western donors. A pattern of sustained nuclear blackmail has consistently been at the heart of Pakistan's case for concessions, aid and a heightened threshold of international tolerance for its sponsorship and support of Islamist terrorism.
"To understand how this works, it is useful to conceive of Pakistan's ISI as a state acting as terrorist traffickers, complaining that, if it does not receive the extraordinary dispensations and indulgences that it seeks, it will, in effect, 'implode,' and in the process do extraordinary harm.
"Part of the threat of this 'explosion' is also the specter of the transfer of its nuclear arsenal and capabilities to more intransigent and irrational elements of the Islamist far right in Pakistan, who would not be amenable to the logic that its present rulers -- whose interests in terrorism are strategic, and consequently, subject to considerations of strategic advantage -- are willing to listen to. ...
"It is crucial to note that if the Islamist terrorist groups gain access to nuclear devices, ISI will almost certainly be the source. ... At least six Pakistani scientists connected with the country's nuclear program were in contact with al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden with the thorough instructions of ISI.
"Pakistan has projected the electoral victory of the fundamentalist and pro-Taliban, pro-al Qaeda Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) in the November elections as 'proof' the military is the only 'barrier' against the country passing into the hands of the extremists. The fact, however, is that the elections were widely rigged, and this was a fact acknowledged by the European Union observers, as well as by some of the MMA's constituents themselves. The MMA victory was, in fact, substantially engineered by the Musharraf regime, as are the various anti-U.S. 'mass demonstrations' around the country.
"Pakistan has made a big case out of the fact that some of the top-line leadership of al Qaeda has been arrested in the country with the 'cooperation' of the Pakistani security forces and intelligence. However, the fact is that each such arrest only took place after the FBI and U.S. investigators had effectively gathered evidence to force Pakistani collaboration, but little of this evidence had come from Pakistani intelligence agencies. Indeed, ISI has consistently sought to deny the presence of al Qaeda elements in Pakistan, and to mislead U.S. investigators. ... This deception has been at the very highest level, and Musharraf himself, for instance, initially insisted he was 'certain' bin Laden was dead. ...
"ISI has been actively facilitating the relocation of the al Qaeda from Afghanistan to Pakistan, and the conspiracy of substantial segments of serving Army and intelligence officers is visible. ..."
"The Pakistan army consistently denies giving the militants anything more than moral, diplomatic and political support. The reality is quite different. ISI issues money and directions to militant groups, specially the Arab hijackers of September 11 from al Qaeda. ISI was fully involved in devising and helping the entire affair. And that is why people like Hamid Gul and others very quickly stated the propaganda that CIA and Mossad did it. ..."
"The dilemma for Musharraf is that many of his army officers are still deeply sympathetic to al Qaeda, Taliban militants and the Kashmir cause. ... Many retired and present ISI officers retain close links to al Qaeda militants hiding in various state-sponsored places in Pakistan and Kashmir as well as leaders from the defeated Taliban regime. They regard the fight against Americans and Jews and Indians in different parts of the world as legitimate jihad."
The report also says, "According to a senior tribal leader in Peshawar, bin Laden, who suffers from renal deficiency, has been periodically undergoing dialysis in a Peshawar military hospital with the knowledge and approval of ISI if not of Gen. Pervez Musharraf himself."
The same source, though not in the report, speculated that Mr. Musharraf may plan to turn over bin Laden to President Bush in time to clinch Mr. Bush's re-election in November.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large for The Washington Times and for United Press International.



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Tashkent Terrorists
The al Qaeda allies behind the attacks.
By Andrew Apostolou
The terrorist attacks in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, on Friday are a testament to the continued vitality of the al Qaeda movement. Three suicide-bomb blasts outside the embassies of Israel and the U.S. and the office of the Uzbek state prosecutor killed three terrorists and three innocent Uzbeks. Responsibility for the attacks has been claimed by the Jihad Islamic Group (JIG), a successor to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), an organization allied with al Qaeda. The JIG is also known as "Jamoat" (meaning "societies" or "groups" in Uzbek).
The IMU was probably behind car bombs in Tashkent in February 1999 that aimed to assassinate Uzbek President Islam Karimov and that killed 16 persons. In its new guise as Jamoat, the organization issued a statement in April 2004 claiming responsibility for a series of explosions from March 28 to April 1, 2004 that took the lives of 33 terrorists and 14 bystanders and policemen. The trial of 15 suspects from the March and April bombings began on July 26.
The IMU and its successor are a classic example of how the al Qaeda movement formed and then spread its tentacles from its Afghan base. Islamists gravitated towards al Qaeda, which provided funding and training, fought with the Taliban and now have returned to fight their jihad at home.
The history of the IMU began, like that of al Qaeda, with the defeat of Communism. The Soviet republics of Central Asia, in particular Uzbekistan, missed the wave of democratization that swept Eastern Europe and the western republics of the Soviet Union in 1989 and 1991. Instead, the old corrupt Communist-party bosses and their acolytes, men like President Islam Karimov who has run the country since 1989, clung to power.
Attempts to oppose the Communist party by secular groups were crushed. At the same time, small Islamist groups appeared in eastern Uzbekistan. Islam had largely been destroyed by the Communist dictatorship. Most mosques were closed and Uzbeks were largely ignorant of the basic practices of Islam. The radicals had little knowledge of Islam, but claimed to have easy answers to the economic and social crises that accompanied the collapse of Communism and the brutal ethnic unrest then sweeping eastern Uzbekistan.
While the Uzbek authorities successfully closed down the Islamist groups, many of their members fled to the neighboring former Soviet republic of Tajikistan. Some of these Uzbek Islamists participated in the Tajik civil war (1992-1997) on the side of an unusual alliance of Tajik Islamists and secular anti-Communists that fought against the former Communist government of Tajikistan. For most of these years, the Uzbek Islamists were based either in remote mountainous regions of Tajikistan or in northern Afghanistan.
When the Tajik civil war ended in 1997, the Uzbek Islamists found themselves at a loose end. Their Tajik allies signed a peace deal with their former opponents and went into government in Tajikistan. The Uzbek Islamists refused to lay down their arms. Instead, they threw in their lot with the new, dominant force in Afghanistan, the Taliban and their Saudi exile friend, Osama bin Laden.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who dreamt of establishing their rule in the historic centers of Islam in Uzbekistan, the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, gave the IMU bases and training. The connection soon bore fruit. The first attacks linked to the IMU were five synchronized car bombs in Tashkent on February 16, 1999. The bombings, which were similar to the attacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa in August 1998, had all the hallmarks of al Qaeda training.
It was only in May 1999 that the IMU formally announced its existence, broadcasting its manifesto on Iranian radio. The IMU charter advocates an Islamic state along the lines of the Islamic republic of Iran, with nominal participation by the population closely supervised by clerics. The declaration was replete with attacks on the U.S. and anti-Semitism, claiming, for example, that President Karimov of Uzbekistan is a Jew.
The IMU's jihad was a flop. The militarily incompetent IMU launched a series of crossborder attacks into Uzbekistan in August 1999 and August 2000 that were repulsed. Never more than several hundred strong, the IMU was unable to garner any real support in Uzbekistan where the population is largely secular and uninterested in Islamist politics.
After September 11, most of the IMU went down fighting with the Taliban. The U.S., in need of bases in Central Asia, asked Uzbekistan for access to the Khanabad airbase in southern Uzbekistan near the Afghan border. Although never officially acknowledged by the Uzbek government, U.S. forces flew combat operations from Khanabad and the base was the jumping off point for special forces and CIA teams working with pro-US Afghan forces in the campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda. A similarly well-guarded secret, until recently, were the Predator surveillance flights from Uzbekistan over Afghanistan in 2000.
The Taliban sent the head of the IMU, Jumaboi Khojiev (who used the nom de guerre Juma Namangani after his hometown of Namagan in eastern Uzbekistan) and his men to defend their northern front in October 2001. Most of the estimated 700 members of the IMU's para-military unit were captured or killed in fighting around Mazar-e Sharif and Konduz in November 2001. Namangani himself, who had fought as a Soviet paratrooper in Afghanistan in 1987-1989, reportedly died of wounds sustained during the fighting.
The remnants of the IMU then fled with their al Qaeda allies to the Afghan-Pakistan border area, emerging in March 2002 to fight U.S. and Afghan forces in the Shah-e Kot valley. Others were killed by Pakistani forces in a series of sweeps of the border areas and a few gave themselves up.
A stubborn rearguard, however, following the pattern of the rest of the al Qaeda movement, has returned home and started to recruit. Despite having been allied to the Taliban, the IMU, in its new guise as the Jamaot, has become ideologically flexible, seeking out unlikely recruits. The two suicide bombers who killed themselves, three policemen and a child in Tashkent on March 29, 2004, were women. One of them, Dilnoza Khalmuradova, was just 19 years old. Yet again, al Qaeda and its trainees have shown themselves to be as adaptable as they are fanatical.
Andrew Apostolou is director of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies a policy institute focusing on terrorism. He has covered Uzbekistan and Central Asia since 1992.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/apostolou200408020848.asp


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Minister confirms arrest of IT expert
ISLAMABAD, Aug 2: Minister for Information Sheikh Rashid Ahmad has confirmed that a computer expert linked to a terrorist network has been arrested.
APP quoted Sheikh Rashid as saying that terrorists were being arrested all over the country, adding that they were trying to carry out attacks at various places out of sheer frustration. They would not succeed in their nefarious designs, he added.
AFP ADDS: Sheikh Rashid said: "We've arrested a computer mastermind. He is linked to Al Qaeda. We got information from computer and email." He was ambiguous about the place where the man was arrested and said he was captured either in Lahore or Gujrat and declined to reveal his nationality.
The capture of the computer engineer was around the same time as the arrest of Tanzanian-born Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, Sheikh Rashid said, but would not specify the date. Ghailani's arrest also yielded valuable information, the minister said.
"After Ghailani, this is the second important arrest in Pakistan," Mr Rashid later told state television. "We have got valuable information from him," he said.
"We have arrested some more people in addition to these two," he said. Sheikh Rashid said that security agencies hoped to penetrate the terrorist network using the information gleaned from the latest detainees.

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Frontier Menace
What are we doing about the terrorists organizing on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border?
BY KATHY GANNON
Tuesday, August 3, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
ISLAMABAD--A sign outside the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reads: "The U.S. Embassy would be grateful if any of our friends who have information on terrorist activity or threats inform us between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. on Sunday through Thursday." Written on a big billboard in English as well as in Afghanistan's official languages, Pashtu and Dari, it stands directly across from the main gates of the embassy, which is encased by giant walls topped with rolls of barbed wire and guarded by sentries in sandbag bunkers.
The sign seems absurd. Is information that could help bring terrorists to justice only welcome during a two-hour time slot on working days? Yet it drives home the difficulty that the U.S. faces in gathering intelligence in countries like Afghanistan, where even non-military Americans have to wear bulletproof clothing and can only travel in massively armed convoys.
That means they can only talk to people handpicked for them, often by hosts who don't always want the whole truth told. It also leads to a heavy reliance on drop-ins--those who can muster the courage to face the overwhelming show of security and knock on the embassy gates, and then only during the right hours. That's true not just in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan, where unaccompanied journeys by U.S. intelligence personnel are equally unthinkable in the country's tribal regions. Instead, the U.S. embassy in Islamabad--another island surrounded by formidable security--places a significant reliance on drop-ins, according to a CIA official stationed there. Other intelligence is bought, by paying locals in these inhospitable regions to speak out.
The sections of the 9/11 Commission report on Pakistan and Afghanistan reflect this intelligence vacuum. The report states the obvious--that the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as southern and southwestern Afghanistan, are likely places for terrorists to congregate. It also gives the impression that the former Taliban regime gave birth to the isolated terrorist camps in Afghanistan, and the lawless atmosphere that allowed such activities to flourish.
The reality is that these camps predated the Taliban's September 1996 victory, and flourished unhindered when many of those associated with the current U.S.-backed Afghanistan government were last in power. For example, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a power-broker in Kabul now aligned to the U.S.-led coalition, requested and received Afghan passports for more than 600 Arabs in 1993-94, while he was a faction leader in the pre-Taliban government.
The sort of company that Mr. Sayyaf keeps was made all too clear at a recent press conference, where Ahmed Shah Ahmedzai, a close ally and former lieutenant in Mr. Sayyaf's Islamic Union, announced his candidacy for president. At that press conference, Mawlawi Mufleh, a radical cleric, denounced the presence of U.S. troops in the country and called for the establishment of an Islamic theocracy stretching from Afghanistan to Morocco.
Another region identified by the 9/11 Commission report as an ideal sanctuary for terrorists is the border region of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Again, the reality is that the region is a decades-old route used by drugs and weapons smugglers, in addition to would-be terrorists. A former member of the Taliban's security apparatus told me that this region is still being used to move money, mostly originating in Saudi Arabia, to the Taliban and al Qaeda.
He explained how the chain began with the money being given to Afghan businessmen living in Saudi Arabia, who used an informal money-transferring system to move it to Afghan businessmen in Iran. They, in turn, used their business connections to move the money to al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. A former member of the Taliban regime said that 1,000 al Qaeda operatives, possibly more, were in the border regions of Afghanistan--accessible from Pakistan--while the Taliban were in power, and are most likely still there. That is information that should have been readily available to U.S. intelligence services before 9/11, and which should have been acted on after the collapse of the Taliban.
Terrorists are also active on the Pakistani side of the border, where they are known to have links with local militants and even intelligence officials. But again there would appear to be an intelligence vacuum as far as the U.S. is concerned. For example, Wana in South Waziristan Agency has been the focus of recent antiterrorist operations. Yet no one of significance has been seen in the area, and only Chechen and Uzbek fighters are believed to be present. It seems the Pakistan military may be using the operation as a cover to tame the tribesmen of that area, rather than actually find and arrest significant members of al Qaeda.
A more logical area to focus on would be the Bajour Agency in northwestern Pakistan, which lies just across the border from Kunar and Nuristan regions in northeastern Afghanistan. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the renegade Party of Islam leader wanted by the U.S., is popular in Kunar and Nuristan--where heavily forested mountains make for easy camouflage, and Osama bin Laden was known to have camps before Sept. 11, 2001. While its Pakistani partners keep the U.S.-led coalition busy hundreds of miles to the south, Taliban and al Qaeda move with relative freedom farther north, and in some of Pakistan's most congested cities, including Quetta and Karachi.
The 9/11 Commission report also praises President Bush and Congress "for their efforts in Afghanistan so far." That however deflects from the many problems the country faces. Afghanistan is the world's largest opium-producing country and warlords allied with the government, either directly or indirectly, allow the drugs trade to continue to flourish. The Taliban, soundly defeated in 2001, are becoming increasingly active. Ordinary Afghans, disappointed at the pace of reconstruction, blame the international community for failing to disarm warlords. Many ordinary Afghans and even some in top government posts privately say elections should be postponed until the country has been thoroughly disarmed.
A more productive approach would be to take a hard look at the misplaced support and the allegiances of those the U.S. calls friends in Afghanistan. Why have the private armies controlled by commanders loyal to the Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim not been disarmed? Why has Mr. Fahim refused to hand over his weapons to the central government and been allowed to stymie the development of a national army?
Almost three years after the Taliban fell from power, the gun rules in Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai made a courageous decision last week when he chose not to include Mr. Fahim as running mate on his presidential ticket. For many, that was the first real sign of Afghanistan trying to break from its violent past. Yet within 24 hours of that announcement, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador, was meeting with Mr. Fahim, and publicly promising to heal his wounded feelings.
The 9/11 Commission report says, "The United States and the international community should help the Afghan government extend its authority over the country, with a strategy and nation-by-nation commitments to achieve their objectives." The tragedy is that, unless there is a rethink of existing policies and priorities, the opposite is in danger of happening.
Ms. Gannon, who has reported for the Associated Press from Pakistan and Afghanistan for 16 years, is writing a book about Afghanistan.

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An Oil-for-Food Connection?
From the August 9, 2004 issue: On whether any of Saddam's loot made its way into Osama's pockets.
by Claudia Rosett
08/09/2004, Volume 009, Issue 45
IF, as the 9/11 Commission concludes, our "failure of imagination" left America open to the attacks of September 11, then surely some imagination is called for in tackling one of the riddles that stumped the commission: Where exactly did Osama bin Laden get the funding to set up shop in Afghanistan, reach around the globe, and strike the United States?
So let's do some imagining. Unfashionable though it may be, let's even imagine a money trail that connects Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda.
By 1996, remember, bin Laden had been run out of Sudan, and seems to have been out of money. He needed a fresh bundle to rent Afghanistan from the Taliban, train recruits, expand al Qaeda's global network, and launch what eventually became the 9/11 attacks. Meanwhile, over in Iraq about that same time, Saddam Hussein, after a lean stretch under United Nations sanctions, had just cut his Oil-for-Food deal with the U.N., and soon began exploiting that program to embezzle billions meant for relief.
Both Saddam and bin Laden were, in their way, seasoned businessmen. Both had a taste for war. Both hated America. By the late 1990s, Saddam, despite continuing sanctions, was solidly back in business, socking away his purloined billions in secret accounts, but he had no way to attack the United States directly. Bin Laden needed millions to fund al Qaeda, which could then launch a direct strike on the United States. Whatever the differences between Saddam and bin Laden, their circumstances by the late 1990s had all the makings of a deal. Pocket change for Saddam, financial security for bin Laden, and satisfaction for both--death to Americans.
Now let's talk facts. In 1996, Sudan kicked out bin Laden. He went to Afghanistan, arriving there pretty much bankrupt, according to the 9/11 Commission report. His family inheritance was gone, his allowance had been cut off, and Sudan had confiscated his local assets. Yet, just two years later, bin Laden was back on his feet, feeling strong enough to issue a public declaration of war on America. In February 1998, in a London-based Arabic newspaper, Al-Quds al-Arabi, he published his infamous fatwa exhorting Muslims to "kill the Americans and plunder their money." Six months later, in August 1998, al Qaeda finally went ahead with its long-planned bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden was back in the saddle, and over the next three years he shaped al Qaeda into the global monster that finally struck on American soil. His total costs, by the estimates of the 9/11 Commission report, ran to tens of millions of dollars. Even for a terrorist beloved of extremist donors, that's a pretty good chunk of change.
The commission report says bin Laden got his money from sources such as a "core group of financial facilitators" in the Gulf states, especially corrupt charities. But the report concludes: "To date, we have not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attack. Al Qaeda had many sources of funding and a pre-9/11 annual budget estimated at $30 million. If a particular source of funds had dried up, al Qaeda could easily have found enough money elsewhere to fund the attack."
Elsewhere? One obvious "elsewhere" that no one seems to have seriously considered was Saddam's secret geyser of money, gushing from the so-called Oil-for-Food program. That possibility is not discussed in the 9/11 report, and apparently it was not included in the investigation. A 9/11 Commission spokesman confirms that the commission did not request Oil-for-Food documentation from the U.N., and none was offered.
Why look at Oil-for-Food? Well, let's review a little more history. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, the U.N. imposed sanctions, which remained in place until 2003, when the United States and its allies finally toppled Saddam. But in 1996, with the aim of providing for the people of Iraq while still containing Saddam, the U.N. began running its Oil-for-Food relief program for Iraq. Under terms agreed to by the U.N., Saddam got to sell oil to buy such humanitarian supplies as food and medicine, to be rationed to the Iraqi population. But the terms were hugely in Saddam's favor. The U.N. let Saddam choose his own business partners, kept the details of his deals confidential, and while watching for weapons-related goods did not, as it turns out, exercise much serious financial oversight. Saddam turned this setup to his own advantage, fiddling prices on contracts with his hand-picked partners, and smuggling out oil pumped under U.N. supervision with U.N.-approved new equipment. Thus did we arrive at the recent General Accounting Office estimate that under Oil-for-Food, despite sanctions, Saddam managed to skim and smuggle for himself more than $10 billion out of oil sales meant for relief.
And the timing gets interesting, especially the year 1998. Not only was that the year in which bin Laden signaled his big comeback in Afghanistan. It was also the year in which Oil-for-Food jelled into a reliable vehicle for Saddam's scams, a source of enormous, illicit income.
Oil-for-Food was set up as a limited and temporary measure, starting operations in late 1996 with somewhat ad hoc administration by the U.N., and a mandate that had to be renewed by the Security Council every six months or so. Less than a year into the program, however, on October 15, 1997, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan consolidated Oil-for-Food into what was effectively a permanent U.N. department--the Office of the Iraq Programme (OIP)--headed by a long-serving U.N. official, Benon Sevan. The Security Council still had to renew the mandate twice a year, but the process became routine.
Saddam began pushing the envelope, and it was quickly clear he could get away with a lot. Just two weeks after Annan set up the OIP, Saddam imposed conditions on the U.N. weapons inspectors that made it impossible for them to operate. Instead of shutting down Oil-for-Food, Annan on February 1, 1998, urged the Security Council to more than double the amount of oil Saddam was allowed to sell, a prelude to letting Iraq import oil equipment to increase production. Annan then flew to Baghdad to reason with Saddam, and on February 23, 1998 (having met in one of those palaces built under sanctions), Annan and Saddam reached an agreement that for at least a while allowed the weapons inspectors to return.
It was a busy time for al Qaeda as well. That same day, February 23, 1998, Osama bin Laden published his "Kill the Americans" fatwa. An intriguing feature of this fatwa was its prominent mention of Iraq, not just once, but four times. Analysts at the CIA and elsewhere have long propounded the theory that secular Saddam and religious Osama would not have wanted to work together. But Saddam's secular style seemed to bother bin Laden not a whit.
His fatwa presented three basic complaints. Mainly, he deplored the infidel presence in Saudi Arabia (i.e., the U.S. troops stationed there during and after the Gulf War). He also cited grievances about Jerusalem, while not even bothering to mention the Palestinians by name. The rest of his attention, bin Laden devoted to Iraq and "the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people" as well as "the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance" and--here is the specific reference to U.S.-led sanctions--"the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war."
Two paragraphs later, bin Laden picked up this theme again, calling Iraq the "strongest neighboring Arab state" of Saudi Arabia, and then citing Iraq, yet again, as first on a list of four states threatened by America--the other three being Saudi Arabia (bin Laden's old home and a big source of terrorist funding), Egypt (birthplace of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood and of bin Laden's top lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahiri, who also signed the fatwa), and Sudan (bin Laden's former base).
UNTIL 1998, Iraq had not loomed large in bin Laden's rants. Why, then, such stress on Iraq, at that particular moment, in declaring war on America? It is certainly possible that bin Laden simply figured Iraq had become another good selling point, a handy way to whip up anger at the United States. But it is at least intriguing that the month after bin Laden's fatwa, in March 1998, as the 9/11 Commission reports, two al Qaeda members visited Baghdad. And in July 1998, "an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with bin Laden."
Later in 1998, Saddam kicked out the weapons inspectors, and he would keep them out for the following four years. The U.N. in 1999 lifted the ceiling entirely on Saddam's oil exports and expanded the range of goods he could buy. It would keep his deals confidential to the end, and it let Saddam do business with scores of companies in such graft-friendly climes as Russia and Nigeria, as well as such terrorist-sponsoring places as Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Sudan, and such financial hideouts as Liechtenstein, Panama, Cyprus, and Switzerland.
Much of Saddam's illicit Oil-for-Food money has yet to be traced. There are now at least eight official investigations into various aspects of Oil-for-Food, but none so far that combines adequate staffing and access with a focus on Oil-for-Food itself as the little black book of Saddam's possible terrorist links. The same kind of bureaucratic walls that once blocked our own intelligence community from nabbing al Qaeda are here compounded by the problem that Oil-for-Food was not a U.S. program, but on U.N. turf. And though the U.N. is the keeper of many of the records, Kofi Annan has displayed no interest in investigating the possibility that Oil-for-Food might have funded terrorists. Nor has the Bush administration pursued the matter with the speed and terrorist-tracking expertise it deserves. Millions of documents believed to contain details of Saddam's Oil-for-Food deals, quite likely including leads to his illicit side deals, are reportedly locked up in Baghdad, socked away there by Paul Bremer this past spring, awaiting an audit from Ernst & Young that is just now getting underway--and not necessarily focused on possible terrorist ties. The U.N.'s own investigation, led by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, seems interested mainly in the U.N. itself. Various congressional investigators who, unlike the 9/11 Commission, are looking at Oil-for-Food, have had a hard time prying even the most basic documents out of the U.N.
The U.S. Treasury Department, in its hunt for Saddam's assets, is not looking specifically at Oil-for-Food, but has provided some of the most telling snippets of information. In April of this year, Treasury released a list of Saddam front companies its investigation has so far uncovered, including a major Oil-for-Food contractor in the UAE, Dubai-based Al Wasel & Babel. Along with trying to procure a sophisticated surface-to-air missile system for Saddam, Al Wasel & Babel did hundreds of millions' worth of business with Baghdad under Oil-for-Food, and was just one of some 75 contractors authorized by the U.N. to deal with Saddam out of the UAE. (As it happens, the 9/11 Commission found that some of the hijackers' funding flowed through the UAE, but working backward from the al Qaeda end, the trail eventually vanishes.)
But enough of facts. Let's return to the realm of possibility. Imagine:
From about 1998 on, Oil-for-Food became Saddam's financial network, a system he gamed to produce huge amounts of illicit income, in partnership with folks who helped him hide and spend it. If some of that money was going to al Qaeda while Saddam was in power, it may still be serving as a terrorist resource today. Amid all the consternation over missed signals and poor coordination leading up to September 11, is it too much to ask that someone versed in terrorist finances, and able to access both the U.N. Oil-for-Food records and the documents squirreled away in Baghdad, take a look--an urgent, detailed, systematic look--at whether Saddam via his Oil-for-Food scams sent money to al Qaeda?
For such a deal, both Saddam and bin Laden had motive and opportunity. And if you read bin Laden's 1998 fatwa with just a little bit of imagination, those mentions of Iraq, at that particular moment, in those particular ways, carry a strong whiff of what is known in our own society as product placement: a message from a sponsor.
Claudia Rosett is journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a columnist for OpinionJournal.com.
? Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

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Elaborate Qaeda Network Hid 2 Captives in Pakistan
By AMY WALDMAN and SALMAN MASOOD
LAHORE, Pakistan, Aug. 2 - In mid-May, a C.I.A. expert on Al Qaeda briefed Pakistani law enforcement officials on the existence of an elusive operative who was said to be eager to attack Americans, according to a Pakistani intelligence official. Nearly two months later, Pakistani officials traced him to the port city of Karachi and then here.
On July 13, they made an arrest in the case, picking up Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old computer engineer, when he went to the airport to collect a package from his father.
Pakistani officials say the arrest of Mr. Khan led officials to Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian operative of Al Qaeda who is accused of involvement in the bombings of American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and who was one of the F.B.I.'s 22 most-wanted terrorists. Mr. Ghailani was arrested July 25 in the small eastern city of Gujrat, where he had slipped in about six weeks earlier, according to the city's police chief, Raja Munawar Hussain.
The exposure of the two men, one an experienced foreign operative and the other a young Pakistani who is thought to have passed messages for Al Qaeda, illustrates how senior members of the terrorist network, possibly even Osama bin Laden, continue to successfully hide in Pakistan. Both men appear to have been part of what senior Pakistani officials describe as an elaborate and well-equipped underground network the group has established in this country, a critical American ally in fighting terrorism.
Statements by Mr. Khan about his travels and activities also appear to confirm long-running suspicions that foreign members of Al Qaeda have been able to safely operate from Pakistan's remote tribal areas for at least the past 18 months.
It is not yet clear whether Mr. Ghailani was living in the tribal areas before his move about six weeks ago to Gujrat. Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hyat said only that Mr. Ghailani had been successfully hiding in another part of Pakistan "for some time," without providing details.
But in Gujrat, at least, Mr. Ghailani managed to live in comfort with Pakistani help. He lived in a spacious two-story home in a middle-class neighborhood, apparently without raising suspicions in the local police force.
During Mr. Ghailani's time in Gujrat, a young Pakistani man lived in the house with him, apparently buying food and supplies from a nearby market and allowing the fugitive, a black African, to remain inside and go unnoticed, according to Mr. Hussain, the police chief.
Mr. Hussain, who suspended 64 local patrolmen and senior officers for negligence after Mr. Ghailani was arrested, said his officers had received no reports of unusual activity in the neighborhood. The police chief said he was alerted to the presence of a foreign terrorist only when he received an urgent phone call from Pakistani intelligence officials the night of July 24.
After a 16-hour gun battle, Mr. Ghailani, two South African men, three women, five children and a Pakistani surrendered the morning of July 25. Inside the house, the police found two laptop computers, two foreign passports in Mr. Ghailani's name, two satellite phones, maps and chemicals, Mr. Hussain said.
Mr. Khan would have had no trouble blending in. He is from a middle-class religious family in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city. The family lives on the first floor of a two-story house in a middle-class housing complex in the heart of the city. The house is situated near a madrasa, a mosque and a house where a small religious school for women is held.
His father, Noor Khan, an employee of the state airline, said Monday that his son had not been living with him for two and a half years, so he did not know what he had been doing or where he had been living.
"Today's offspring don't care about parents, so Naeem was living separately," he added. He said he did not even know whether his son had been arrested.
Mr. Khan told his interrogators that at a wedding in the 1990's, he met a Saudi man who introduced him to people who eventually sent him to a training camp for militants in Afghanistan, according to a Pakistani intelligence official.
Later, Mr. Khan said, a man he met with in Pakistan's tribal areas, an isolated region near the border with Afghanistan, introduced him to another man who eventually became his Qaeda handler. He dealt with that man's e-mail messages, and became part of an elaborate network for transmitting messages across Pakistan and then posting them in coded e-mail messages or on the Web.
Mr. Khan described several meetings with men believed to be Qaeda operatives - including one in January 2003 in Karachi, and one in July 2003 in the tribal areas, the intelligence official said.
The tribal areas have long been suspected of being a safe haven for members of Al Qaeda, including Mr. bin Laden. American soldiers say the region is used as a staging area for attacks on American forces in Afghanistan.
Mr. Khan told investigators that Qaeda leaders met in the Shakai Valley in the South Waziristan Tribal Agency. Pakistan's military has identified the valley as a stronghold for hundreds of foreign militants, officials say, and Pakistani forces have said they have bombed an important terrorist training facility and meeting center there.
Terrorist attacks carried out since January 2002 also have been linked to the tribal areas. Explosives used in one of two failed assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan were purchased in the Khurram Tribal Agency there, according to the intelligence official.
An investigator who worked on the disappearance of the American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 in Karachi also said phone records showed that his kidnappers had called the town of Wana in South Waziristan three times.
The failure of Pakistan to act in the tribal areas until recently has led some Pakistani and American analysts to question the seriousness of General Musharraf's efforts, but Pakistani officials insisted Monday that the two recent arrests were evidence of their commitment and success in fighting terrorism.
Amy Waldman reported from Lahore for this article, and Salman Masood from Gujrat. Mohammed Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, and Zulfiqar Shah from Karachi.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Russian parliament votes on controversial social reform
MARIA DANILOVA, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004
(08-03) 11:25 PDT MOSCOW (AP) --
Russia's pro-Kremlin parliament on Tuesday backed a bill that would replace benefits such as subsidized transportation and medicine with cash payments, dismantling remnants of the Soviet welfare state and affecting millions of vulnerable citizens, including war veterans and pensioners.
The proposed legislation is part of the unpopular and potentially painful reforms President Vladimir Putin has promised to tackle during his second term. It has sparked criticism across Russia, with nearly daily protests in Moscow last week and several rallies held in dozens of Russia's far-flung regions over the past month.
The State Duma supported the bill Tuesday in a 304-120 vote, with one abstention, and was expected to pass it in a final vote Thursday. The bill then must be approved by the upper house, which is also obedient to the Kremlin, before it goes to Putin for his signature.
Advocates of the government-backed bill say substituting cash for benefits will make aid more accurately targeted -- arguing, for example, that public transportation is scarce in rural areas and supplies of subsidized medicines are short. They also say it will put people less at the mercy of the country's laborious bureaucracy.
But opponents of the bill -- which affects over 30 million of the neediest Russians, more than one-fifth of the population -- say the proposed payments, which start at $5 a month, will be eaten away quickly by inflation and will not be paid in full by regional authorities. They also say some privileges, such as job guarantees for the disabled, are not subject to any monetary compensation.
"It's incompatible -- what they are giving and what they are taking away from us," said Mikhail Novikov, an activist for the disabled. He added that the monthly payment of some $35 he would be entitled to won't come close to covering needs such as medicines, regular medical care and sanatorium stays.
While lawmakers debated the bill, activists staged new protests in the vicinity of the Duma, which was cordoned off by police. Several young members of the liberal Yabloko party wrapped themselves in white bandages to resemble mummies and pinned notes on their bodies saying: "This is what we will become after they ban the benefits."
Tamara Kondratyeva, a 76-year-old retiree, who has to survive on an $85 monthly pension said she doesn't know how to make ends meet if free transportation and medical care are canceled.
"It really hurts. We tried so hard to beat those Germans (in World War II) and now they (the Russian authorities) are destroying us," Kondratyeva said bitterly.
Injured veterans of the war would receive a monthly payment of $53 under the law, Russian news agencies reported.
"This is what happens when you have a one-party parliament," independent lawmaker Svetlana Goryacheva told reporters Tuesday. The main pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, swept December parliamentary elections and now dominates the Duma, holding more than two-thirds of its 450 seats.
Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov, of United Russia, said in televised comments Tuesday that he "was deeply convinced" that the situation for citizens now entitled to benefits "will significantly improve" with the new law.
But lawmakers outside United Russia lambasted the bill.
"Scientists first experiment on animals. But our government is experimenting on people, on the whole country," said Gennady Seleznyov, an ex-Communist and former Duma speaker who now is an independent lawmaker.

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Paul R. Pillar
Counterterrorism after
Al Qaeda
? 2004 by The Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
The Washington Quarterly * 27:3 pp. 101-113.
THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY SUMMER 2004 101
Paul R. Pillar is a former deputy chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorist Center and author of Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy. The views in this article are theauthor's own. The fight against Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, the principal terrorist menace to U.S. interests since the mid-1990s, has come a long way. The disciplined, centralized organization that carried out the September 11attacks is no more. Most of the group's senior and midlevel leaders are either incarcerated or dead, while the majority of those still at large are on the run and focused at least as much on survival as on offensive operations. BinLaden and his senior deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, have survived to this point but have been kept on the run and in hiding, impairing their command and control of what remains of the organization. Al Qaeda still has the capacityto inflict lethal damage, but the key challenges for current counterterrorism efforts are not as much Al Qaeda as what will follow Al Qaeda. This emerging primary terrorist threat has much in common with Al Qaeda in that it involves the same global network of mostly Sunni Islamic extremists of which bin Laden has been the best known voice. "Al Qaeda" is often broadly applied to the entire terrorist network that threatens U.S. interests although, in fact, the network extends beyond members of this particular organization. The roots of this brand of extremism, if not its most visible advocates and centralized structure, remain very much alive and in some cases are growing deeper. They include the closed economic and political systems in much of the Muslim world that deny many young adults the opportunity to build better lives for themselves and, often, the political representation to voice their grievances peacefully over the lack of such opportunity. Among other lasting causal factors behind the rise of Islamist terrorism are the paucity of credible alternatives to militant Islam as vehicles of
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THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY SUMMER 2004 102
opposition to the established order as well as widespread opposition toward U.S. policies within and toward the Muslim world, especially the U.S. position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, more recently, the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In short, even with Al Qaeda waning, the larger terrorist threat from radical Islamists is not. That radical Islamist threat will come from an eclectic array of groups, cells, and individuals. Those fragments of Al Qaeda that continue to carry on bin Laden's malevolent cause and operate under local leaders as central direction weakens will remain part of the mix. Also increasinglypart of the greater terrorist network are like-minded but nameless groups associatedwith Al Qaeda, such as the Middle Eastern organization headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and regionally based groups with established identities such as the Iraq-centered Ansar al- Islam and the Southeast Asian Jemaah Islamiya. Many of these groups have local objectives but share the transnational anti-Americanism of the larger network. Finally, individuals best labeled simply as jihadists, who carry no group membership card but move through and draw support from the global network of likeminded radical Islamists, are also part of the picture. From their ranks, some will likely emerge with the leadership skills needed to organize operational cells and conduct terrorist attacks. In a word, the transformation of the terrorist threat from the Al Qaeda of September 11, 2001, to the mixture described above is one of decentralization. The initiative, direction, and support for anti-U.S. terrorism will come from more, and more widely scattered, locations than it did before. Although the breaking up of Al Qaeda lessens but does not eliminate the risks posed by particularly large, well-organized, and well-financed terrorist operations, the decentralization of the threat poses offsetting problems for collecting and analyzing related intelligence, enlisting foreign support to counter it, and sustaining the United States' own commitment to combat it while avoiding further damage to U.S. relations with the Muslim world. For these reasons, the counterterrorism challenges after the defeat of Al Qaeda may very well be even more complex than they were before. Uncertain Targets for Intelligence The small, secretive nature of terrorist plots and the indeterminate nature of the target--likely to become an even greater problem as the Islamic ter-
The centralized
organization that carried out the September 11 attacks is no more. THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY SUMMER 2004 Counterterrorism after Al Qaeda l 103 rorist threat further decentralizes--have always made terrorism a particularly difficult target subject. The mission of intelligence in counterterrorism is not only to monitor known terrorists and terrorist groups but also to uncover any individuals or groups who might conduct a terrorist attack against the United States and its interests. The greater the number of independent actors and centers of terrorist planning and operations, the more difficult that mission becomes. Exhortations to the intelligence community to penetrate terrorist groups are useless if the groups that need to be penetrated have not even been identified. The U.S. intelligence community's experience a decade ago may help it adjust to the transformation currently underway. Prior to the 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing, the terrorist threat against the United States was thought of chiefly in terms of known, named, discrete groups such as the Lebanese Hizballah. The principal analytical challenges involved identifying the structure and strength of each group as well as making sense of the pseudonymous "claim names" commonly used to assume responsibility for attacks. The 1993 WTC bombing and the subsequent rolled-up plot to bomb several other New York City landmarks introduced the concept of ad hoc terrorists: nameless cells of radicals who come together for the sole purpose of carrying out a specific attack. The term "ad hoc" was subsequently discarded as too casual and as not reflecting the links to the wider network that intelligence work through the mid-1990s gradually uncovered. Even with those links, however, the New York plots were examples of a decentralized threat in that they were evidently initiated locally. As demonstrated by the shoestring budget on which the 1993 WTC bombers operated, the plots were not directed and financed by bin Laden from a lair in Sudan or South Asia but rather by the operation's ringleader, Ramzi Yousef, and his still unknown financial patrons. Now, in 2004, with Al Qaeda having risen and mostly fallen, the threats that U.S. intelligence must monitor in the current decade have in a sense returned to what existed in the early 1990s; only now the threat has many more moving parts, more geographically disparate operations, and more ideological momentum. Much, though not all, of the intelligence community's counterterrorism efforts over the past several years can be applied to the increasingly decentralized threat the world now faces. Even the intelligence work narrowly focused on Al Qaeda has unearthed many leads and links, involving anything from telephone calls to shared apartments, that are useful in uncovering Even with Al Qaeda waning, the larger terrorist threat from radical Islamists is not. l Paul R. Pillar THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY SUMMER 2004 104 other possible centers of terrorist planning and operations. These links are central to intelligence counterterrorism efforts because linkages with known terrorists can uncover other individuals who may be terrorists themselves. Most successful U.S. efforts to disrupt terrorist organizations in the past, including the capture of most of the Al Qaeda leadership since September 11, 2001, have resulted from such link analysis. The danger now lies in the fact that the looser the operational connections become and the less Islamist terrorism is instigated by a single figure, the harder it will be to uncover exploitable links and the more likely that the instigators of future terrorist attacks will escape the notice of U.S. intelligence. In a more decentralized network, these individuals will go unnoticed not because data on analysts' screens are misinterpreted but because they will never appear on those screens in the first place. The September 11 plot helps to illustrate the point. Retrospective inquiries have given a great deal of attention to the tardiness in placing two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, on U.S. government watch lists. Had these individuals been identified, they might have been prevented from entering the United States and launching the attack. Ironically, less attention has been paid to what made al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi candidates for a watch list in the first place: their participation in a meeting with an AlQaeda operative in Kuala Lumpur. U.S. intelligence acquired information about the meeting by piecing together Al Qaeda's activities in the Far East and by developing rosters of Al Qaeda intermediaries whose activities could be tracked to gain information that would provide new leads. Although skillful and creative intelligence work, it relied on linkages to a known terrorist group, Al Qaeda--linkages that existed because bin Laden and senior Al Qaeda leadership in South Asia ultimately directed and financed the terrorist operation in question. A decentralized version of the threat will not necessarily leave such a trail. Muhammad Atta and some of the other September 11 hijackers were never even considered candidates for the watch lists because intelligence reporting had not previously associated them with known terrorists. In fact, one of Al Qaeda's criteria for selecting the hijackers almost certainly was that they were relatively clean, in that they did not have any such associations. In a more decentralized future network, such connections are even less likely. Yet, even a decentralized terrorist threat has some linkages that can be exploited, and this will be key to intelligence community counterterrorist ef- A decentralized terrorist threat will not necessarily leave an intelligence trail. THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY SUMMER 2004 Counterterrorism after Al Qaeda l 105 forts from here on out. Within the networks of Sunni Islamic extremists, almost everyone can be linked at least indirectly, such as through their past common experiences in camps in Afghanistan, to almost everyone else. The overwhelming majority of these linkages, however, consists of only casual contacts and do not involve preparations for terrorist operations directed against the United States, as the meeting in Kuala Lumpur evidently did. No intelligence service has the resources to monitor all of these contacts, to compile the life history of every extremist who has the potential to become a terrorist, or to construct comprehensive sociograms of the radical Islamist scene. Detecting the perpetrators of the next terrorist attack against the United States will therefore have to go beyond link analysis and increasingly rely on other techniques for picking terrorists out of a crowd. Mining of financial, travel, and other data on personal actions and circumstances other than mere association with questionable individuals and groups1 is one such technique. The potential for such data mining goes well beyond current usage. Yet, data mining for counterterrorism purposes will always require a major investment in obtaining and manipulating the data in return for only a modest narrowing of the search for terrorists. Numerous practical difficulties in gaining access to personal information, significant privacy issues, and the lack of a reliable algorithm for processing the data all inhibit the effectiveness of this technique. The September 11 attacks, however, significantly lowered the threshold for all investments in counterterrorist operations, including data mining, making this technique worth trying even if it appears no more cost effective than it did before September 11, 2001. The Transportation Security Administration already uses profiling to screen air passengers; the intelligence community might reasonably extend this technique to include profiling of foreigners to identify possible terrorists even before they buy an airplane ticket. It is the U.S. population and the U.S. government, not the intelligence community, that will have to make the most important adjustment concerning intelligence operations. The reality is that they will have to lower their expectations of just how much of the burden of stopping terrorists that intelligencecan carry. An increasingly decentralized terrorist threat and indeterminate intelligence target will mean that an even greater number of terrorists and terrorist plots may escape the notice of intelligence services altogether. The transformation in the threat itself coupled with the inherent limits of intelligence operations implies that more of the counterterrorist burden will have to be borne by other policy instruments, from initiatives to address the reasons individuals gravitate toward terrorism in the first place to physical security measures to defeat attempted attacks. l Paul R. Pillar THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY SUMMER 2004 106 Fragile International Cooperation The willingness of governments worldwide to join the campaign against terrorism has increased significantly over the last two decades--a welcome change from earlier days when many regimes, through their representatives at the United Nations General Assembly and elsewhere, were more apt to condone terrorism than to condemn it because of their support for "national liberation movements." The September 11 attacks further strengthened an apparent global antiterrorism consensus. This apparent collective commitment to counterterrorism should not be taken for granted. Despite many governments' declarations that they stand with the United States in combating terrorism, each decision by a foreign government on whether to cooperate with the United States reflects calculations about the threat that nation faces from particular terrorist groups, its relations with the United States, any incentives Washington offers for its cooperation, domestic opinion, and the potential effect of enhanced counterterrorist measures on its domestic interests. Such calculations can change, and the perceived net advantage of cooperating may be slim. In short, global cooperation against terrorism is already fragile. Much of foreign governments' willingness to help has depended on Al Qaeda's record and menacing capabilities. The sheer enormity of the September 11 attacks and the unprecedented impact they had on the U.S. government's priorities and policies have accounted for much of the increased willingness among foreign governments to assist in efforts to combat terrorism. The threat Al Qaeda has posed to some of the governments themselves, particularly the Saudi regime, also has helped the United States gain cooperation. The bombings in Riyadh in May and November 2003 were wake-up calls that partly nullified the numerous reasons for the Saudis' sluggishness in cracking down on Islamic extremists in their midst. Most of the victims of the November bombing were Arabs of modest means; this sloppy targeting undoubtedly cost Al Qaeda some of its support in the kingdom. Foreign cooperation will become more problematic as the issue moves beyond Al Qaeda. How will governments respond to a U.S. appeal to moveagainst groups that have never inflicted comparable horrors on the United States or on any other nation or against groups that do not conspicuously pose the kind of threat that Al Qaeda has posed to Saudi Arabia? How can regimes be motivated to tackle Islamic groups that may represent an emerging terrorist threat but have not yet resorted to terrorism, such as the Central Asian- based Hizb al-Tahrir? Without the special glue that the attacks of September 11 provide against a centralized and directed Al Qaeda, many of the past reasons for foot-dragging in counterterrorist efforts are likely to reassert themTHE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY SUMMER 2004 Counterterrorism after Al Qaeda l 107 selves. These reasons include the sympathy that governments or their populations feel for many of the anti-Western or anti-imperialist themes in whose name terrorists claim to act, an aversion to doing Washington's bidding against interests closer to home, and a general reluctance to rock local boats. Problems that the United States has already encountered in dealing with Lebanese Hizballah2 illustrate some of the difficulties in more generally enlisting foreign help against terrorist groups--even highly capable groups-- other than Al Qaeda. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage once called Hizballah the "A-team" of international terrorism;3 the group's 1983 bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut is second only to the events of September 11, 2001, in the number of American deaths attributable to a terrorist attack. Hizballah's terrorist apparatus, led by its longtime chief Imad Mughniyah, remains formidable today. The dominant view of Hizballah in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, however, is that the group is a legitimate participant in Lebanese politics: the group holds seats in Parliament and provides social services within the country. Despite the events two decades ago in Lebanon, including other bombings and a series of kidnappings of Westerners, Hizballah's accepted political status has prevented U.S. officials from effectively appealing for cooperation against Hizballah in the way that the September 11 attacks have allowed them to appeal for cooperation against Al Qaeda. Notwithstanding the major potential terrorist threat it poses, Hizballah has not been clearly implicated in any attack on Americans since the bombing of Khobar Towers eight years ago.
An underlying limitation to foreign willingness to cooperate with the United States on antiterrorist efforts is the skepticism among foreign publics and even elites that the most powerful nation on the planet needs to be preoccupied with small bands of radicals. Even the depth of the trauma that the September 11 attacks caused the American public does not seem to be fully appreciated in many areas overseas, particularly in the Middle East. In addition,the skepticism is likely to be much greater when the U.S. preoccupation is no longer with the group that carried out the September 11 attacks. Any reduced foreign support for the campaign against terrorism will not be clear or sudden. Certainly, no foreign government will declare that it now supports the terrorists. Instead, foreign governments may be a little slower to act, a little less forthcoming with information, or slightly more apt to cite domestic impediments to cooperation. Whether counterterrorism coopera- Foreign cooperation will become more problematic as the issue moves beyond Al Qaeda.
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tion weakens, therefore, will rest largely on whether and how Washington responds to the concerns and needs of its foreign partners. As antiterrorist cooperation becomes increasingly more difficult to obtain and more vulnerable to frictions over other issues, sustaining such cooperation will require increased sensitivity to foreign interests.
Muslims' Suspicions
Skepticism and distrust among Muslims across the world about U.S. counterterrorist efforts have impeded international cooperation and may become an even bigger problem in the post-Al Qaeda era. With the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks disabled and Muslims--especially Muslims claiming to act in the name of their religion--still dominating international terrorism, Muslims will still dominate Washington's counterterrorist target list. This fact will continue to encourage questions about whether the socalled U.S. war on terrorism is really a war on Islam. Many Muslims will ask whether a sustained counterterrorist campaign has less to do with fighting terrorism than with maintaining the political status quo in countries withpro-U.S. regimes. Other Muslims will see the campaign as many already see it: as part of a religiously based war between the Muslim world and a Judeo-Christian West.
The "war on terrorism" terminology exacerbates this problem, partly because a war is most clearly understood as a war against somebody rather than a metaphorical war against a tactic. The fact that counterterrorist operations have been aimed primarily at a particular group, Al Qaeda, has minimized this problem thus far. The less the fight is conducted against a single named foe, the greater the problem of misinterpreting the term "war." The problem has been exacerbated by extension of the "war on terrorism" label to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Even though much of the violence that has plagued Iraq since the operation began is unmistakably attributable to terrorism, the U.S. government undertook the military operation in Iraq primarily for reasons other than counterterrorism, feeding Muslim misperceptions and fears that the United States also has ulterior motives every other time it talks about fighting terrorism.
Such perceptions among Muslims will strengthen the roots of the very Islamist terrorism that already poses the principal threat to U.S. interests. They will encourage a sense that the Muslim world as a whole is in a struggle with the Judeo-Christian West and foster a view of the United States as the chief adversary of Muslims worldwide. Given the fact that Islamist extremism is likely to continue to be the driving force behind significant terrorist threats to U.S. interests, fighting terrorism without the effort being perceived simply as a
THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY SUMMER 2004 Counterterrorism after Al Qaeda l 109 war against Muslims may be a challenge that can only be lessened and not altogether avoided. President George W. Bush and senior U.S. officials have been careful to disavow any antipathy toward Muslims, which has helped to a certain extent. Most Muslims' attitudes will be shaped more by deeds than by words, however, which means that U.S. policies toward Iraq and the Arab- Israeli conflict in particular will be especially influential. Maintaining the Commitment The greatest future challenge to the U.S. counterterrorist efforts that may emerge with a more decentralized terrorist threat is the ability to sustain the country's own determination to fight it. The American public has shown that its commitment to counterterrorism can be just as fickle as that of foreign publics. Over the past quarter century, the U.S. population and government has given variable attention, priority, and resources to U.S. counterterrorist programs, with interest and efforts spiking in the aftermath of a major terrorist incident and declining as time passes without an attack. Important to keep in mind about the strong U.S. attention to counterterrorism during the last three years is that it took a disaster of the dimensions of September 11, 2001, to generate. Although intended to topple the twin towers and kill thousands, the 1993 WTC bombing sparked nothing near a similar amount of attention. Bin Laden and the prowess his group demonstrated with overseas attacks garnered full appreciation among U.S. government specialists of Al Qaeda's intentions and capabilities by at least the late1990s but still remained comparably unnoticed by the greater U.S. public and government. U.S. citizens and their elected leaders and representatives respond far more readily to dramatic events in their midst than to warnings and analysis about threatening events yet to occur. The further the events of September 11 fade into the past, the more difficult it will be to keep Americans focused on the danger posed by terrorism, especially that posed by terrorists other than the perpetrators of the WTC and Pentagon attacks.
The U.S. response to the March 2004 bombing of commuter trains in Madrid suggests how difficult it is to energize or reenergize Americans about counterterrorism. (Early investigation of the attack indicated that it wasalso a good example of the decentralized Islamist terrorist threat, being the work of Muslim radicals with only loose associations with Al Qaeda.) Commentary in the United States focused less on the continued potency of the global terrorist threat than on inter-allied differences over the Iraq war, with charges of "appeasement" leveled against Spanish voters for ousting the governing party in an election held three days after the attack. For most Americans, the difference between terrorism inside the United States and terrorism
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against even a close ally is huge, with only the former capable of boosting their commitment to counterterrorism.
Here again, the "war on terrorism" metaphor appears problematic. Americans tend to think in non-Clausewitzian terms, in which war and peace are markedly different and clearly separated states of being. War entails special sacrifices and rules that the United States does not want to endure in peacetime. Peace means demobilization, relaxation of the nation's guard, and a return to nonmartial pursuits. In U.S. history, in particular, peace has usually meant either victory or withdrawal and a rejection of the reasons for having gone to war in the first place, such as with the Vietnam War. Americans are not accustomedto the concept of a war that is necessary and waged with good reason but offers no prospect of ending with a clear peace and especially a clear victory.4 U.S. leaders have conveyed some of the right cautions to the public. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld correctly observed
that the war on terrorism will not end with a surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri.5 Attitudes in the United States, however, probably will be shaped less by such words of caution than by the historical conception of war and peace. Moreover, not having a clear end is not the same as having no end--and the latter is, for practical purposes, what the United States faces in countering terrorism during the years ahead.
In fact, an end, whether clear or not so clear, will be even more elusive in the fight against terrorism than it was during the Cold War. Though the Cold War did not conclude with the signing of any surrender agreement on a battleship, its end was nonetheless fairly distinct, highlighted by the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. It also entailed an indisputable victory for the West, achieved with the collapse of a single arch foe. Success in counterterrorism offers no such prospect.
The sense of being at war has been sustained thus far not only by war on terrorism rhetoric but also by certain practices that resemble those used in real shooting wars of the past, such as indefinite detention of prisoners without recourse to civilian courts. Although quite useful in mustering support for the invasion, the application of the "war on terrorism" label to the campaign in Iraq will compound the difficulty in sustaining domestic public support for counterterrorism in the post-Al Qaeda era. Even if the reconstruction and democratization of Iraq go well, the fact that this campaign will not
Skepticism and distrust among Muslims about the U.S. may become an even bigger problem.
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bring an end to anti-U.S. terrorist attacks elsewhere might lead many in the United States to question whether the sacrifices made in the name of fighting terrorists had been worthwhile. With so much attention having been paid to state sponsorship of terrorists, and to one (now eliminated) state sponsor in particular, further appeals to make still more sacrifices to defeat disparate and often nameless groups are apt to confuse many U.S. citizens.More specifically, an unfavorable outcome in Iraq would mean that the Bush administration could face an increase in skepticism about the credibility of warnings concerning threats to U.S. security, including terrorist threats. Meanwhile, the existence of a specific, recognizable, hated terrorist enemy has helped the U.S. population retain its focus. As long as Al Qaeda exists, even in its current, severely weakened form, it will serve that function. Yet, when will Al Qaeda be perceived as having ceased to exist? The group's demise will be nowhere near as clear as, say, the fall of a government.
For the U.S. public, the signal that terrorism has been eliminated as a threat is likely to be the death or capture of bin Laden. Americans tend to personalize their conflicts by concentrating their animosity on a single despised leader, a role that Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein played at different times in history. This personalized perspective often leads to an overestimation of the effect of taking out the hated leader, as if the conflict were a game of chess in which checkmate of the king ends the contest. The euphoria following Saddam's capture in December 2003 is an example. Bin Laden, although on the run since 2001, probably has played a role in Al Qaeda's operations almost as limited and indirect as Saddam's influence was on the Iraqi insurgency during his eight months in hiding. Yet, this is where any similarities with Iraq ends. The elimination of bin Laden, if followed by several months without another major Al Qaeda operation against the United States, would lead many in the United States to believe that the time had come to declare victory in the war on terrorism and move on to other concerns. Meanwhile, bin Laden's death would not end or even cripple the radical Islamist movement. Fragments of the organization are likely to spread, subdivide, and inject themselves into other parts of the worldwide Islamist network, like a metastasizing cancer that lives on with sometimes lethal effects even after the original tumor has been excised.
Context and Consequences
Any erosion in the U.S. commitment to counterterrorism that may occur in the years ahead will depend not only on popular perceptions (or misperceptions) of the terrorist threat but also on the broader policy environment in which national security decisions are made. Available resources constitute part of
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that environment. The resources devoted to counterterrorist operations may decline not because of a specific decision to reduce them but because any further reductions in spending for national security would reduce funds available for counterterrorism. Recent surges in both defense spending and budget deficits make some such reductions likely during the next several years. Departmental comptrollers seeking to spread the pain of those budget cuts will inflict pain on counterterrorist programs along with everything else.
Controversies over privacy and civil liberties constitute another part of the policy environment. The United States has already experienced a backlash against some provisions of the principal post-September 11 counterterrorist legislation, the USA PATRIOT Act. In the wake of the attacks, the U.S. government's investigative powers expanded in some ways that would have been unthinkable earlier. As the clear danger represented by Al Qaeda appears to recede, pressures to roll back those powers will increase.
Any diminution, for whatever combination of reasons, of the priority the United States gives to counterterrorist operations will have consequences that go well beyond specific counterterrorist programs. At home, the impact would be seen in everything from reduced vigilance by baggage screeners to less tolerance by citizens for the daily inconveniences brought about by stricter security measures. Abroad, a weaker commitment to counterterrorism on the part of the U.S. public would make it more difficult for U.S. diplomats to insist on cooperation from foreign governments.
How long any reduction of the U.S. commitment to counterterrorism lasts depends on how much time passes before the next major terrorist attack against U.S. interests, especially the next such attack on U.S. soil. Time, as always, is more on the side of the terrorist, whose patience and historical sense is greater than that of the average American. Americans' perception of the threat almost certainly will decline more rapidly than the threat itself.
The United States thus faces during the next several years an unfortunate combination of a possibly premature celebration along with a continuing and complicating terrorist threat. The counterterrorist successes against Al Qaeda thus far have been impressive and important, and the capture or death of bin Laden will unleash a popular reaction that probably will be nothing short of ecstatic. That joy could be a harmful diversion, however,
The greatest challenge will be the ability to sustain U.S. determination to fight terrorism.
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from attention that will be needed more than ever in the face of remaining problems: difficulty in cementing the counterterrorist cooperation of foreign partners, antagonism and alienation within the Muslim world that breeds more terrorists, and added complexity for intelligence services charged with tracking the threat.
The chief counterterrorist problem confronting U.S. leaders in the years ahead will be a variation on an old challenge: sustaining a national commitment to fighting terrorism even in the absence of a well-defined and clearly perceived danger. The demise of Al Qaeda will make the need for that commitmentless apparent to most U.S. citizens, even though the danger will persist in a different form. Political leaders will bear the heavy burden of instilling that commitment, and they will have to do so with analysis, education, and their powers of persuasion, not just with symbols and war cries. No doubt, that will be a very difficult task.
Notes
1. Paul R. Pillar, "Statement to Joint Inquiry of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence," Washington, D.C., October 8, 2002, www.cia.gov/nic/testimony_8oct2002.html (accessed March 20, 2004).
2. See Daniel Byman, "Should Hizballah Be Next?" Foreign Affairs 82, no. 6 (November/ December 2003): 54-66.
3. Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State, "Conditions Underlying Conflict Must Be Addressed, Armitage Says," September 5, 2002, http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/02090504.htm (accessed March 20, 2004) (speech and question and answer session with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Washington, D.C., September 5, 2002).
4. One of the more thoughtful statements that looks to a "victory" against terrorism is found in Gabriel Schoenfeld, "Could September 11 Have Been Averted?" Commentary 112, no. 5 (December 2001): 21-29. See also Commentary 113, no. 2 (February 2002): 12-16 (subsequent correspondence about Schoenfeld's article).
5. Donald Rumsfeld, interview, Face the Nation, CBS, September 23, 2001.