Henry Crumpton isn’t a household name, but he has a pretty important job: he’s the Coordinator for Counterterrorism for the State Department. Crumpton recently announced his resignation, and with about two weeks left before stepping down, he apparently feels less compelled to stick to the party line.
An ex-CIA operative, Crumpton told NEWSWEEK that a worldwide surge in Islamic radicalism has worsened recently, increasing the number of potential terrorists and setting back U.S. efforts in the terror war. “Certainly, we haven’t made any progress,” said Crumpton. “In fact, we’ve lost ground.” He cites Iraq as a factor; the war has fueled resentment against the United States. (emphasis added)
Crumpton noted some successes, such as improved joint efforts with foreign governments and a weakening of Al Qaeda’s leadership structure. But he warned of future attacks. “We don’t want to acknowledge we’re going to get hit again in the homeland, but we are,” he said. “That’s a hard, ugly fact. But it’s going to happen.”
Demonstrating the kind of commitment to counterterrorism for which the Bush White House is famous, Crumpton, a career CIA agent who led the agency’s campaign in Afghanistan after 9/11, will be a civilian in two weeks — and no one has been nominated to replace him in the key counterterrorism position.
Indeed, it’s also worth remembering that Crumpton has only been on the job for about a year, during which time the administration has not taken his concerns seriously.
It may have something to do with why he’s resigning.
Paul Kiel noted a few weeks ago that Crumpton hasn’t had the impact he’d hoped for.
By all accounts widely regarded, he, along with his deputy, have tried to push the Bush Administration toward a more expansive approach to the “War on Terror” – as documented extensively by George Packer in the current issue of The New Yorker. Packer, in his adulatory piece, profiles Crumpton’s deputy David Kilcullen, a former captain in the Australian Army who’s become Crumpton’s chief strategist:
“‘You don’t play to the enemy’s global information strategy of making it all one fight,’ Kilcullen said. He pointedly avoided describing this as the Administration’s approach [i.e. The War on Terror]. ‘You say, ‘Actually, there are sixty different groups in sixty different countries who all have different objectives. Let’s not talk about bin Laden’s objectives-let’s talk about your objectives. How do we solve that problem?’ ‘In other words, the global ambitions of the enemy don’t automatically demand a monolithic response.'”
Kilcullen’s (and Crumpton’s) “ideas have yet to penetrate the fortress that is the Bush White House,” Packer notes.
And as a result, we “haven’t made any progress” in deterring terrorists, and we’ve actually “lost ground.”
Remind me again why Bush thinks counterterrorism is one of his strengths?