When it comes to analyzing the seriousness of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, Michael Sheehan seems like the kind of guy whose perspective should matter. He’s fought guerrillas in Central America as a U.S. Army Green Beret in 1980s; he was an NSC official under both H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; and he was the ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism from 1998 to 2000.
Sheehan has a new book out, “Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves,” which touts a provocative thesis — we didn’t take al Qaeda seriously enough before 9/11, and it “just isn’t the existential-twilight-struggle threat it’s often cracked up to be” now.
Sheehan told Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey, “I want people to understand what the real threat is and what’s a bunch of bull.”
Before September 11, said Sheehan, the United States was “asleep at the switch” while Al Qaeda was barreling down the track. “If you don’t pay attention to these guys,” said Sheehan, “they will kill you in big numbers.” So bin Laden’s minions hit U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, they hit the Cole in 2000, and they hit New York and Washington in 2001 — three major attacks on American targets in the space of 37 months. Since then, not one. And not for want of trying on their part.
What changed? The difference is purely and simply that intelligence agencies, law enforcement and the military have focused their attention on the threat, crushed the operational cells they could find — which were in fact the key ones plotting and executing major attacks — and put enormous pressure on all the rest. […]
Sheehan’s perspective is clearly influenced by the three years he spent, from 2003 to 2006, as deputy commissioner for counterterrorism at the New York City Police Department. There, working with Commissioner Ray Kelly and David Cohen, the former CIA operations chief who heads the NYPD’s intelligence division, Sheehan helped build what’s regarded as one of the most effective terrorist-fighting organizations in the United States…. [T]he police have limited resources, so they’ve learned the art of terrorist triage, focusing on what’s real and wasting little time and money on what’s merely imagined.
“Even in 2003, less than two years after 9/11, I told Kelly and Cohen that I thought Al Qaeda was simply not very good,” Sheehan writes in his book. Bin Laden’s acolytes “were a small and determined group of killers, but under the withering heat of the post-9/11 environment, they were simply not getting it done … I said what nobody else was saying: we underestimated Al Qaeda’s capabilities before 9/11 and overestimated them after. This seemed to catch both Kelly and Cohen a bit by surprise, and I agreed not to discuss my feelings in public. The likelihood for misinterpretation was much too high.”
That’s certainly true. If a political figure tried to argue that we’re overestimating the terrorist network responsible for 9/11, the blowback would be pretty dramatic. But Sheehan makes a compelling case, even if no one wants to say so publicly.
At the Global Leadership Forum co-sponsored by NEWSWEEK at the Royal United Services Institute in London last week, the experts and dignitaries didn’t want to risk dissing Al Qaeda, even when their learned presentations came to much the same conclusions as Sheehan.
The British Tories’ shadow security minister, Pauline Neville-Jones, dismissed overblown American rhetoric: “We don’t use the language of the Global War on Terror,” said the baroness. “We actively eschew it.” The American security expert Ashton Carter agreed. “It’s not a war,” said the former assistant secretary of defense, who is now an important Hillary Clinton supporter. “It’s a matter of law enforcement and intelligence, of Homeland Security hardening the target.” The military focus, he suggested, should be on special ops.
Sir David Omand, who used to head Britain’s version of the National Security Agency and oversaw its entire intelligence establishment from the Cabinet Office earlier this decade, described terrorism as “one corner” of the global security threat posed by weapons proliferation and political instability. That in turn is only one of three major dangers facing the world over the next few years. The others are the deteriorating environment and a meltdown of the global economy. Putting terrorism in perspective, said Sir David, “leads naturally to a risk management approach, which is very different from what we’ve heard from Washington these last few years, which is to ‘eliminate the threat’.”
Yet when I asked the panelists at the forum if Al Qaeda has been overrated, suggesting as Sheehan does that most of its recruits are bunglers, all shook their heads. Nobody wants to say such a thing on the record, in case there’s another attack tomorrow and their remarks get quoted back to them.
That’s part of what makes Sheehan so refreshing. He knows there’s a big risk that he’ll be misinterpreted; he’ll be called soft on terror by ass-covering bureaucrats, breathless reporters and fear-peddling politicians. And yet he charges ahead. He expects another attack sometime, somewhere. He hopes it won’t be made to seem more apocalyptic than it is. “Don’t overhype it, because that’s what Al Qaeda wants you to do. Terrorism is about psychology.” In the meantime, said Sheehan, finishing his fruit juice, “the relentless 24/7 job for people like me is to find and crush those guys.”
I have not yet read Sheehan’s book, but from what I can tell from his Newsweek interview, he’s not talking about scaling back counter-terrorism efforts at all, but rather, refocusing them onto real threats.
What a concept.
The point isn’t that terrorists have disappeared and we can take it easy. The point is large-scale wars won’t make us safer — targeting cells and training camps will.