The Washington Post ran a front-page story today on how the administration shifted its attention from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002. This may seem like well-covered ground, because it is, but this story really deserves to be read. It’s a breathtaking, behind-the-scenes look.
In particular, the piece looks at Bush’s approach to destroying al Queda. The White House calls is “decapitating the beast”; experts call it ineffective.
[A]t least a dozen current and former officials who have held key positions in conducting the war now say they see diminishing returns in Bush’s decapitation strategy. Current and former leaders of that effort, three of whom departed in frustration from the top White House terrorism post, said the manhunt is important but cannot defeat the threat of jihadist terrorism. Classified government tallies, moreover, suggest that Bush and Vice President Cheney have inflated the manhunt’s success in their reelection bid.
Bush’s focus on the instruments of force, the officials said, has been slow to adapt to a swiftly changing enemy. Al Qaeda, they said, no longer exerts centralized control over a network of operational cells. It has rather become the inspirational hub of a global movement, fomenting terrorism that it neither funds nor directs. Internal government assessments describe this change with a disquieting metaphor: They say jihadist terrorism is “metastasizing.”
Given the dangers, a “slow to adapt” administration seems like the worst possible leadership we can have right now.
The story also takes on Bush’s repeated-ad-nauseum claim that “75% of al Queda’s leaders have been killed or captured.” We’ve known for a while that this is total nonsense, but it’s even more startling to see just how little progress we’ve made.
Of the al Qaeda leaders accounted for, eight were killed or captured by the end of 2002. Five followed in 2003 — notably Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the principal planner of the Sept. 11 attack. This year only one more name — Hassan Ghul, a senior courier captured infiltrating Iraq — could be crossed off.
“I’ll be pretty frank,” Gordon said this fall after leaving the administration. “Obviously we would have liked to pick up more of the high-value targets than have been done. There have been strong initiatives. They just haven’t all panned out.”
Let’s see, 8 leaders in 2002, 5 in 2003, and 1 this year? Not only have we not gotten anywhere near 75% of the network’s leaders, our progress is going backwards.
But wait; it gets worse.
“Decapitating the beast” is part of a two-prong strategy. The other is targeting state sponsors of terror. This week, Spencer Ackerman explained how this approach highlights Bush’s fundamental misunderstanding of the terrorist threat, but the Post piece spoke directly to those who saw first-hand how we let terrorists get away in order to attack Iraq — because it allegedly supported terrorism.
At the peak of the hunt for bin Laden and his lieutenants, in early 2002, about 150 commandos operated along Afghanistan’s borders with Pakistan and Iran in a top-secret team known as Task Force 5. The task force included a few CIA paramilitaries, but most of its personnel came from military “special mission units,” or SMUs, whose existence is not officially acknowledged…. Task Force 5 dropped in strength at times to as few as 30 men. Its counterpart in Iraq, by early 2003, burgeoned to more than 200 as an insurgency grew and Hussein proved difficult to find.
[…]
“It’s been extraordinarily painful, very frustrating,” said a member of one elite military unit who watched what he considered the main enemy slip away. Even now, with a modest resurgence in U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, the task force “is not getting as much attention from the home office as Iraq.”
And here’s the real kicker: military and intelligence officials describe the approach needed — and it sounds exactly like Kerry’s strategy, not Bush’s.
[Retired Army Gen. Wayne A.] Downing, Bush’s first counterterrorism adviser after Sept. 11, said in a 2002 interview that hunting down al Qaeda leaders could do no more than “buy time” for longer-term efforts to stem the jihadist tide. This month he said, “Time is not on our side.”
“This is not a war,” he said. “What we’re faced with is an Islamic insurgency that is spreading throughout the world, not just the Islamic world.” Because it is “a political struggle,” he said, “the military is not the key factor. The military has to be coordinated with the other elements of national power.”
Many of Downing’s peers — and strong majorities of several dozen officers and officials who were interviewed — agree. They cite a long list of proposals to address terrorism at its roots that have not been carried out. Among them was a plan by Wendy Chamberlin, then ambassador to Pakistan, to offer President Pervez Musharraf a substitute for Saudi funding of a radical network of Islamist schools known as madrasas. Downing backed Chamberlin in the interagency debate, describing education as “the root of many of the recruits for the Islamist movement.” Bush promised such support to Musharraf in a meeting soon after Sept. 11, said an official who accompanied him, but the $300 million plan did not survive the White House budget request.
Anyone who supports Bush because of his alleged efforts on the war on terror just isn’t paying attention.