2009: War on terror part II

Barack Obama on 20 January will inherit some troubling legacies, not the least of which will be the increasingly messy global war on terror, declared by the Bush administration nine days after 9/11. 

It is a war that has had an uncomfortable local dimension as well: The last seven years have seen an unprecedented rollback of constitutional civil liberties and increased surveillance of US citizens.

The Bush administration's accomplishments have been mixed, and the so-called war's ultimate success or failure largely depended on the abilities and actions of the intelligence community.

The intelligence legacy of the administration's war on terror includes neglect, infighting, mismanagement and politicization, the most notorious example being the "cherry-picking" of intelligence to justify the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Briefly put, the response to 9/11 was to throw massive amounts of cash at both the intelligence community and the Defense Department, while ramming through domestic legislation such as the infamous Patriot Act. The massive 131-page act, chivvied through Congress without a House, Senate or conference report 45 days after 9/11, severely curtailed Americans' constitutional liberties by greatly expanding the ability of federal law enforcement agencies to search citizens' telephone, e-mail, medical, financial and other records while loosening restrictions on foreign intelligence gathering within the US.

The administration's commitment to the war on terror also created an explosion in defense spending and the US' military presence throughout the world. The major question facing the incoming administration is whether such enormous expenditures and curtailments of domestic liberties have ultimately been worth it.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established on 25 November 2002 by the Homeland Security Act. Representing the most substantial reorganization of federal government agencies since the 1947 National Security Act, the DHS incorporates 22 government agencies and with more than 200,000 employees and is the third largest Cabinet department in the federal government.

The US intelligence community now employs 100,000 staff. Its operating budget remained classified until two months ago. On 28 October, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John M McConnell reported that the aggregate amount of funds appropriated by Congress to the National Intelligence Program (NIP) for fiscal year 2008 was US$47.5 billion.

The DNI position epitomizes the incomplete post-9/11 intelligence reforms that have characterized the Bush administration. Following the recommendations of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act created the DNI. The position was politicized from the outset, however, when then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld politicked to ensure that funding authority over roughly 80 percent of the intelligence community's budget remained under DoD control. The end result was that authority of the new DNI was undercut, leaving him largely unable to impose greater intelligence coordination, which was reform's intention.

The 16 intelligence agencies under McConnell's purview include the military's intelligence-gathering agencies, the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA and the FBI. The ideal Washington bureaucratic flowchart would see all the units seamlessly integrated, but in reality they engage in frequent turf wars, while intelligence flows are vertical, rarely horizontal.

McConnell acknowledged this himself during a December address at Harvard University: "We designed our own system to make the attacks of 9/11 successful."

Another element in the bureaucratic consolidation process was the establishment in 2004 of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), whose operations room contains a giant plasma screen showing every plane approaching the US. The NCTC has five teams working 12-hour shifts to analyze more than 6,000 reports from satellite, electronic and human intelligence sources daily. In July, the American Civil Liberties Union reported that the nation's terrorist watch list had reached one million names.

The data used by NCTC analysts is provided by the NSA's top secret worldwide external pageEcheloncall_made electronic global surveillance network of satellites, and ground-based listening posts constantly feed streams of millions of intercepted telephone, e-mail, fax, microwave and cellular telephone transmissions into banks of NSA supercomputers.

Technological marvel that it is, the Echelon system is nevertheless constricted by a number of technical factors, including the increasing global use of fiber-optic communication cables, which must be directly tapped. Another bottleneck is the widespread availability of easily available encryption algorithms such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which slow Echelon's supercomputers' ability to decode encrypted messages.

The system's final constraint is human. NSA translators are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material that must be translated and subsequently analyzed from difficult languages.

The Obama administration also will have to confront the Pentagon's distended budget, engorged by massive funding increases since 9/11. For 2009, according to the DoD, its base budget request rose to US$515.4 billion, "a nearly 74-percent increase over 2001." The funding requests include "$70.0 billion as an emergency allowance to support activities related to the Global War on Terror into 2009." The Pentagon's fiscal requirements for 2009 total US$651.2 billion when emergency discretionary spending and supplemental spending are included. In contrast, former president Bill Clinton's last defense budget submission in 2001 totaled US$305 billion.

As its coffers have been filled by a compliant, fearful Congress, the Pentagon's global footprint has also expanded since 9/11. Washington Post writer Barton Gelman, who examined official Pentagon data, concludes that the US now has 737 bases in 63 foreign countries. According to a new study released by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, since 9/11, US military operations, including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have cost US$904 billion.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will have to make some hard choices about how and what type of weapons the Pentagon will buy, based on actual mission requirements. Gates has been a critic of both the Pentagon acquisition process and its predilection for high-tech, high-cost weapons systems such as the Air Force's F-22 Raptor, the only 5th generation fighter jet fully operational with stealth capabilities. In April 2006 the Government Accountability Office assessed the cost of the F-22 to be US$361 million per aircraft.

The terror epidemic

The US-led campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have both led to mission creep. In Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime has led to rising political aspirations among the Kurds and Shiites, both formerly repressed by his government. In the former instance, Turkey is watching with growing alarm as the Kurds in northern Iraq claim greater autonomy from Baghdad, leading to increased military clashes between the Turkish military and Kurdish PKK guerrillas. Iran has displayed keen interest as its coreligionists in Iraq, who seek to gain and consolidate political power.

In Afghanistan, attempts to subdue the Taliban and al-Qaida have effectively bled across the border into Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country with massive financial, political and ethnic problems of its own.
 
Since 2002, Washington relied principally on the Pakistani military as its proxy to combat terrorists based in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). During the period 2002-2007, of the nearly US$5.8 billion the Bush administration provided to Pakistan for activity in the FATA and border region, about 96 percent was reimbursement to Pakistan for military operations there. Islamabad deployed around 120,000 military and paramilitary forces in the FATA, which killed or captured hundreds of al-Qaida suspects at a loss of approximately 1,400 Pakistani security forces members.

On 9 January, McConnell and CIA Director Michael Hayden visited Islamabad and met with Musharraf and army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and secured agreement for Washington to use its Predator drones for strikes against al-Qaida members in the FATA. The US has since conducted more than 40 drone attacks inside Pakistan, killing more than 200 tribesmen, including children and women, with more than 20 missile strikes.

Last month, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said his government was considering "a number of options" to counter continuing attacks by US drones inside its territory. Pakistani military officers are increasingly convinced that Washington is covertly colluding with India and Afghanistan to weaken and perhaps fragment the world's only Muslim nuclear power.

As pressure in the FATA has risen, militants have struck against other, "softer" targets outside the border regions, including an attack on Islamabad's Marriott hotel in September in which 78 were killed. Militants have also taken to attacking the International Security Assistance Force's logistical lines through Pakistan. More than 300 NATO supply vehicles have been torched in six spectacular recent attacks.

The legacy of the excesses of the Bush administration's war on terror extend far beyond the US. Well-documented extralegal excesses, from torture to detention without trial and renditions have muted America's ability to speak with a moral voice on the subject as well as putting overseas US soldiers more in harm's way if captured.
From Egypt to Indonesia, the US example of straying from the rule of law has weakened the rule of international law and may well encourage regimes facing their own internal insurrections to apply equally harsh methods to their captives, allowing them if called to account to point to Washington's double standards.

In short, the Bush administration's example has diminished respect for the rule of law worldwide, and, as terrorism is frequently generated as a response to repressive regimes, made it more, not less, likely, especially if regimes torture and murder in the name of providing "security" to their citizens.

In Indonesia, the three Bali bombers convicted for their role in the 2002 attacks which killed 202 and injured hundreds more – Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, his older brother Mukhlas (also known as Ali Gufron), and Imam Samudra, having exhausted their legal appeals, urged retaliation for their pending deaths in numerous TV interviews broadcast to a national audience in Indonesia prior to their 9 November execution by a firing squad in Indonesia.

The bombers' trials and executions epitomized the legal contradictions and risks inherent in terrorism legal proceedings. Their deaths handed Islamists a propaganda victory; Jamaah Islamiyah leader Abu Bakar Baasyir commented, "Their fighting spirit in defending Islam should be followed. We will win the fight in this world or die as martyrs," while al-Qaida's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, praised the Bali bombers in an audio recording as "unshaken heroes who adhered to their faith." Critics of the legal proceedings noted that Mukhlas had alleged that he had been tortured in custody and that Indonesia's highest court ruled an anti-terrorism law enacted in the wake of the Bali attacks and used to convict the Bali bombers should not have been used retroactively.

Out with the alpha male?

Those looking for significant short-term "change" from an Obama administration in the prosecution of the global war on terror may be disappointed, as during the campaign, Obama said that he would surge more troops into Afghanistan and be willing to attack Taliban and al-Qaida sanctuaries inside Pakistan, adding, "If Pakistan is unwilling or unable to hunt down bin Laden and take him out, then we should." Accordingly, it seems likely that US regional policies will continue, including targeted Predator attacks, which, in turn, will likely produce further terrorist attacks in Pakistan outside of the tribal areas in retaliation.

If Obama's comments about Afghanistan and Pakistan give little hope for a lessening of conflict there, then closer to home, his remarks about closing the interment facility in Guantanamo, where about 250 prisoners still languish, is a campaign promise that he will be constantly prodded to fulfill.

Within the US, the Obama administration will also be pressed to modify or rescind some of the more intrusive legacies of the Bush administration's relentless assault on Americans' constitutional rights and civil liberties.

Within the US intelligence community, Obama's most immediate task will be to restore confidence in agencies repeatedly pressured to bend their analyses to serve partisan political ends, even as they were used as political scapegoats when the results were proved bogus, such as the administration's claims of WMDs in Iraq. The notorious outing of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame in July 2003 as a political reprisal by Bush administration officials further alienated CIA careerists by reminding them of the consequences of not towing the line.

The incoming administration is being lobbied to retain Hayden as CIA chief and McConnell as DNI, but both come with baggage that may interest the new Congress. On 9 December, both men flew to Chicago for a meeting with Obama.

Hayden became CIA head on May 2006; his role during his 1999-2005 tenure as director of the NSA, when he oversaw the controversial NSA Stellar Wind warrantless surveillance program targeting communications between US residents and alleged foreign terrorist groups. McConnell in his 15 February Washington Post editorial claimed that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) "has not kept up with the technology revolution we have experienced over the past 30 years" and that it "had not been modernized to reflect today's global communications technology." 

Certainly the intelligence community leadership thinks that it has done an outstanding job. High-ranking members of the Bush administration continue to defend its policies. On 15 December, during an interview on ABC News, Vice President Dick Cheney said of the severe interrogation methods used by the CIA: "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared." He also said that the US facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba should remain open until "the end of the war on terror." Further adopting a hawkish line, Cheney remarked that the intelligence errors did not matter and that the March 2003 US-led invasion was justified by Saddam's ability to re-establish destructive weapons programs.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the Obama administration is convincing the world that America under his administration will once again be a nation that operates as a member of alliances rather than as "first among equals" and respects international law. It will also need to convince the world that it will no longer operate as a rogue "alpha male" nation disregarding treaties that it has signed, such as the Geneva Conventions, much less practice torture, kidnapping, foreign renditions and continue operating "black sites," where suspects are detained for years on end with no day in court. 

As far as reforming the overworked and demoralized intelligence community, the new administration must seek extend its vision beyond its 'reactive" approach in merely identifying and neutralizing terrorists to a more "proactive" approach, understanding and analyzing their opponents' motivations beyond Bush's facile aphorism that "they hate us because they hate our freedom." The new administration must begin to look deeper to comprehend that an Afghan whose family has been killed by a "smart bomb" delivered by a stealth aircraft or an Iraqi family grieving at the slaughter of its members by a Blackwater team may not have the same perceptions of the nobility of US intentions as those inside the Beltway, and that such actions, far from neutralizing terrorism, facilitate its growth.

The Obama administration can begin by renouncing torture in the strongest possible terms and swiftly closing Guantanamo and let the remaining "worst of the worst" have their day in court. Obama will find substantial congressional support for such a move, as on 11 December the 25-member bipartisan Senate Armed Service Committee panel, without one dissent among its 12 Republican members, released the Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody.

In a repudiation of techniques authorized by the Bush administration, the report noted: "The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."

Quite aside from the moral issues regarding torture, there is even evidence from those involved in interrogations that such techniques are ultimately counterproductive and actually increased the terrorist threat. Matthew Alexander, a former special intelligence operations officer who led an interrogations team in Iraq two years ago, wrote in a 28 November Washington Post editorial, "I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq."

Domestically, the Obama administration can also work with Congress to repeal some of the more onerous legislative elements of the Patriot Act that have so alarmed civil libertarians as well as review some of Congress's more misguided legislation, such as its passage of the Protect America Act of 2007 (PAA), which legalized warrantless surveillance.

Despite leaving himself open to charges of being "weak on defense," Obama must tackle the Pentagon's insatiable appetite for funding and growing overseas presence. At a time of unprecedented recession, the new administration will to attempt to force the DoD to live within its means.

If the incoming administration for reasons of political expediency slacks on making good on its campaign promises, the only certainty will be that while domestic surveillance programs might continue to protect the "homeland" from a 9/11 repeat, US military personnel serving in the Pentagon's vast archipelago of more than 700 bases worldwide will continue to arrive home under cover of darkness.