The evolution

Of course it is not unimaginable for al Qaeda or other jihadists to think outside the box and attack a chemical storage site or tanker car, using the bulk chemicals to attack another target — much as the 9/11 hijackers used aircraft as the means to attack the end target. However, while such an attack could release enough of a deadly chemical to kill many people, most people would be evacuated before they could receive a lethal dose, as past industrial accidents have demonstrated. Therefore, such an attack would be messy but would be more likely to cause panic and mass evacuations, rather than mass casualties.

The same can be said of a radiological dispersion device (RDD), sometimes called a “dirty bomb.” While RDDs are easy to deploy — so simple that we are surprised one has not already been used against the U.S. homeland — it is very difficult to immediately administer a lethal dose of radiation. Therefore, the bomb part of a dirty bomb would likely kill more people than the device’s “dirty,” or radiological, component. However, use of an RDD would result in evacuations and could require a lengthy and expensive decontamination process. Because of this, we refer to them as “weapons of mass disruption” rather than weapons of mass destruction.

The bottom line is that a nuclear device is the only element of the CBRN threat that would create mass casualties and guarantee the success of a strategic strike. Al Qaeda, however, would find it very difficult to obtain (or manufacture) such a device while it is under the intense pressure it faces today. If the organization had possessed such a device since before 9/11, as some have claimed, we believe operatives would have used it long before now.

We believe the United States is long overdue for a jihadist attack. Like U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, we believe the elements are likely in place for such an attack in the near future. However, we do not believe the attack will be of the same magnitude as the 9/11 attacks.

The problem for al Qaeda is that the core group, in the words of the NIE, is “likely to continue to focus on prominent political, economic and infrastructure targets with the goal of producing mass casualties, visually dramatic destruction, significant economic aftershocks and/or fear among the U.S. population.” It is one thing to launch an attack against the Sears Tower, for example; it is quite another thing to succeed in bringing it down. We believe al Qaeda can attack a target like the Sears Tower, but our assessment is that the organization currently lacks the ability to launch a devastating strategic attack — one that would destroy the target.

Does this mean al Qaeda will lack this capability forever? No. If the United States and its allies were to cease pressuring the organization, and the jihadist movement as a whole, it could in time regenerate the capability. However, we disagree with the NIE assertion that the group already has regenerated to that point. Al Qaeda prime is still dangerous at the tactical level, but strategically it is only a shell of its former self.

There is nothing in bin Laden’s audio segment to indicate it was recorded recently. The production does include a still photograph of him — one taken from what appears to be a real bin Laden video released Sept. 7 (in which he sports a dyed beard), but bin Laden’s comments about the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi suggest they were recorded during al Qaeda’s 2006 media blitz.

The release of two successive bin Laden messages, however, has again focused attention on bin Laden, who before last week had not been seen on video since late October 2004. This increased attention has once again caused people to question why the United States has failed to find bin Laden — and to wonder whether it ever will.

While the feds generally get their man in the movies or on television, it is very difficult in real life to find a single person who does not want to be found. It is even harder when that person is hiding in an extremely rugged, isolated and lawless area and is sheltered by a heavily armed local population.

The United States and Pakistan have not launched a major military operation to envelop and systematically search the entire region where bin Laden likely is hiding — an operation that would require tens of thousands of troops and likely result in heavy combat with the tribes residing in the area. Moreover, this is not the kind of operation they will take on in the future. The United States, therefore, will continue to pursue intelligence and covert Special Forces operations, but if it is going to catch bin Laden, it will have to wait patiently for one of those operations to produce a lucky break — or for bin Laden to make a fatal operational security blunder.
Needle in a Haystack
Finding a single man in a large area with rugged terrain is a daunting task, even when a large number of searchers and a vast array of the latest high-tech surveillance equipment are involved. This principle was demonstrated by the manhunt for so-called “Olympic Bomber” Eric Rudolph, who was able to avoid one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history by hiding in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains. The task force looking for Rudolph at times had hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officers assigned to it, while some of its search operations involved thousands of law enforcement and volunteer searchers. The government also employed high-tech surveillance and sensor equipment and even offered a $1 million reward for information leading to Rudolph’s capture.

However, Rudolph’s capture in May 2003, more than five years after he was listed on the FBI’s most-wanted list, was not the result of the organized search for him. Rather, he was caught by a rookie police officer on a routine patrol who found Rudolph rummaging for food in a dumpster behind grocery store. The officer did not even realize he had captured Rudolph until he had taken him to the police station for booking.

But it is not only the terrain that is hostile. In the Great Smokies, there are some people who are not happy to see “revenuers” and other government agents — or other strangers, for that matter — but at least the area is under the federal government’s control. The same cannot be said of the lawless areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border — the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). The presence of Pakistani military forces is resented in these areas, and troops are regularly attacked by the heavily armed tribesmen living there.

This is not a new phenomenon by any means, though. The Pashtun tribes in the rugged area along the Durand Line (the line set to demarcate the border between the British Raj and Afghanistan, which later became the Afghan-Pakistani border) have always been difficult to control. Even before the establishment of Pakistan, the inhabitants of the area gave the British colonial authorities fits for more than a century. The Britons were never able to gain full control over the region, so they instead granted extensive power to tribal elders, called maliks. Under the deal, the maliks retained their autonomy in exchange for maintaining peace between the tribesmen and the British Raj — thus allowing commerce to continue unabated.

However, some dramatic flare-ups of violence occurred against the Britons during their time in the region. One of the last of them began in 1936 when a religious leader known as the Faqir of Ipi encouraged his followers to wage jihad on British forces. (Jihad against invading forces is a centuries-old tradition in the region.) The Faqir and his followers fought an extended insurgency against the British forces that only ended when they left Pakistan. The United Kingdom attempted to crush the Faqir and his followers, but the outmanned and outgunned insurgents used the rugged terrain and the support of the local tribes to their advantage. Efforts to use spies to locate or assassinate the Faqir also failed. Although the British and colonial troops pursuing the Faqir reportedly numbered more than 40,000 at one point, the Faqir was never captured or killed. He died a natural death in 1960.

The parallels between the hunt for the Faqir of Ipi and bin Laden are obvious — though it must be noted that bin Laden is a Saudi and not a native-born Pashtun. However, many of the challenges that the United Kingdom faced in that operation are also being faced by the United States today.

Aside from the terrain — a formidable obstacle in and of itself — U.S. forces are hampered by the strong, conservative Islamic conviction of the people in the region. This conviction extends beyond the tribes to include some members of the Pakistani military and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies — especially those at the operational level in the region. It must be remembered that prior to 9/11 the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency and military openly supported the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies. In addition to the relationships formed between bin Laden and the so-called “Afghan Arabs” (foreign jihadists) during the war against the Soviets, Pakistani troops also trained and fought alongside the Taliban and al Qaeda in their battles against the Northern Alliance and other foes. Because of these deep and historic ties, there are some in the Pakistani government (specifically within the security apparatus) who remain sympathetic, if not outright loyal, to their friends in the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Additionally, and perhaps just as important, many in the Pakistani government and military do not want to kill their own people — the Pashtuns, for example — in order to destroy the much smaller subset of Pakistani and foreign militants. The challenge is to eliminate the militants while causing very little collateral damage to the rest of the population — and some in the Pakistani government say the airstrikes in places such as Chingai and Damadola have not accomplished this goal. In August, Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri told television channel AAJ that Pakistan had done all it can in the war on terrorism and that, “No one should expect anything more from Islamabad.”

In an operation such as the manhunt for bin Laden, intelligence is critical. However, the Taliban and al Qaeda so far have used their home-field advantage to establish better intelligence networks in the area than the Americans. According to U.S. counterterrorism sources, U.S. intelligence had gathered some very good leads in the early days of the hunt for bin Laden and other high-value al Qaeda targets, and they shared this intelligence with their counterparts in the Pakistani security apparatus to try to organize operations to act on the intelligence. During this process, people within the intelligence apparatus passed information back to al Qaeda, thus compromising the sources and methods being used to collect the information. These double agents inside the Pakistani government did grave damage to the U.S. human intelligence network.

Double agents within the Pakistani government are not the only problem, however. Following 9/11, there was a rapid increase in the number of case officers assigned to collect information pertaining to al Qaeda and bin Laden, and the CIA was assigned to be the lead agency in the hunt. One big problem with this, according to sources, was that most of these case officers were young, inexperienced and ill-suited to the mission. The CIA really needed people who were more like Rudyard Kipling’s character Kim — savvy case officers who understand the region’s culture, issues and actors, and who can move imperceptibly within the local milieu to recruit valuable intelligence sources. Unfortunately for the CIA, it has been unable to find a real-life Kim.

This lack of seasoned, savvy and gritty case officers is complicated by the fact that, operationally, al Qaeda practices better security than do the Americans. First, there are few people permitted to see bin Laden and the other senior leaders, and most of those who are granted access are known and trusted friends and relatives. Someone else who wants to see bin Laden or other senior al Qaeda leader must wait while a message is first passed via a number of couriers to the organization. If a meeting is granted, the person is picked up at a time of al Qaeda’s choosing and taken blindfolded via a circuitous route to a location where he is stripped and searched for bugs, beacons and other tracking devices. The person then reportedly is polygraphed to verify that his story is true. Only then will he be taken — blindfolded and via a circuitous route — to another site for the meeting. These types of measures make it very difficult for U.S. intelligence officers to get any of their sources close to the al Qaeda leaders, much less determine where they are hiding out.

The areas where bin Laden likely is hiding are remote and insular. Visitors to the area are quickly recognized and identified — especially if they happen to be blond guys named Skip. Moreover, residents who spend too much time talking to such outsiders often are labeled as spies and killed. These conditions have served to ensure that the jihadists maintain a superior human intelligence (and counterintelligence) network in the area. It is a network that also stretches deep into the heart of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Islamabad’s twin city and home to the Pakistani army’s general headquarters.

This drive to recruit new jihadists to the cause and to help continue operational activity is what led to the lucky break that resulted in the 1995 arrest of Abdel Basit, the operational planner and bombmaker responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Basit had tried to recruit a foreign student to assist him in one of the attempts to conduct “Operation Bojinka,” a plan to bomb multiple U.S. airliners. Having gotten cold feet, the student revealed the plot, thus allowing Diplomatic Security special agents the opportunity to coordinate an operation to arrest Basit.

Al Qaeda has learned from the mistakes made by the men it has lost and has better secured the methods it uses to communicate with the outside world. This increased security, however, has resulted in increased insulation, which has adversely affected not only communications but also financial transfers and recruiting. Combined with U.S. efforts against al Qaeda, this has resulted in a reduction in operational ability and effectiveness.

The tension between operations and security poses a significant problem for an organization that seeks to maintain and manage a global militant network. By opting to err on the side of security, bin Laden and the others could escape capture indefinitely, though they would remain operationally ineffective. However, should they attempt to become more operationally active and effective — and decrease their security measures to do so — they will provide the United States with more opportunities to get the one break it needs to find bin Laden.

Summer 2007: The Attack that Never Occurred

Oct. 17, 2007
The summer of 2007 was marked by threats and warnings of an imminent terrorist attack against the United States. In addition to the well-publicized warnings from Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and a National Intelligence Estimate that al Qaeda was gaining strength, a former Israeli counterterrorism official warned that al Qaeda was planning a simultaneous attack against five to seven American cities. Another warning of an impending dirty bomb attack prompted the New York Police Department to set up vehicle checkpoints near the financial district in Lower Manhattan. In addition to these public warnings, U.S. government counterterrorism sources also told us privately that they were seriously concerned about the possibility of an attack.

All these warnings were followed by the Sept. 7 release of a video message from Osama bin Laden, who had not been seen on video since October 2004 or heard on audio tape since July 2006. Some were convinced that his reappearance — and his veiled threat — was the sign of a looming attack against the United States, or perhaps a signal for an attack to commence.

In spite of all these warnings and bin Laden’s reappearance — not the mention the relative ease with which an attack can be conducted — no attack occurred this summer. Although our assessment is that the al Qaeda core has been damaged to the point that it no longer poses a strategic threat to the U.S. homeland, tactical attacks against soft targets remain simple to conduct and certainly are within the reach of jihadist operatives — regardless of whether they are linked to the al Qaeda core.

We believe there are several reasons no attack occurred this summer — or since 9/11 for that matter.

So, if the core al Qaeda has desired, and even attempted, to strike the United States, why has it failed? Perhaps the greatest single factor is attitude — among law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the public at large, the Muslim community and even the jihadists themselves.

It was only after Nosair’s associates detonated a large truck bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in 1993 that the existence of a threat to the United States was recognized. Yet, even after that bombing and the disruption of other plots — the July 1997 plot to bomb the New York subway system and the December 1999 Millennium Bomb Plot — the apathy toward counterterrorism programs remained. This was most evident in the low levels of funding and manpower devoted to counterterrorism programs prior to 9/11. As noted in the 9/11 Commission Report, counterterrorism programs simply were not a priority.

Even the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing made no real difference. Some changes were made, such as physical security enhancements at federal buildings, but they were merely window dressing. The real problems, underlying structural problems in the U.S. government’s counterterrorism efforts — resources, priorities and intelligence-sharing — were not addressed in a meaningful way.

Prior to 9/11, experts (including the two of us) lecturing to law enforcement and intelligence groups about the al Qaeda/transnational terrorist threat to the United States were met with indifference. Of course, following 9/11 some of those same groups paid careful attention to what the experts had to say. Transnational terrorism had become real to them. The 9/11 attacks sparked a sea change in attitudes within law enforcement and intelligence circles. Counterterrorism — aggressively collecting intelligence pertaining to terrorism and pursuing terrorist leads — is now a priority.