"Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001," by Steve Coll. Penguin Press, 2004, 695 pages.  

  "The 9/11 Commission Report," by the National Commission on Terrorist Atacks Upon the United States. WW Norton & Company, 2004, 516 pages.  

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The Paper War on Terror

by Christopher Hartwell

The 9/11 commission hearings monopolized the headlines earlier this year. The media and Democrats gleefully seized upon former counterterrorism guru Richard Clarke's assertion that the Bush administration was so obsessively focused on Iraq that it ignored al Qaeda, despite the protestations and pleadings of the outgoing Clinton administration. Republicans countered that the foreign policy drift of the Clinton years, including the desultory "wag the dog" missile attacks in 1998, did nothing to counter al Qaeda ascendance and required President Bush to confront eight years of neglect.

Two recently published books seem to vindicate both sides of this debate; indeed, they can be seen as a two-volume exposé of America's failed policies in Afghanistan and the Middle East, written in a rare bipartisan consensus. The central lesson of both "Ghost Wars," Steve Coll's new book on the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan, and "The 9/11 Commission Report" is that the U.S. government has become so weighed down dealing with issues outside its purview that it now fails at just about everything, including its most important responsibility: defending the country. Contrary to things you will hear and have heard during this campaign, Iraq is not the distraction from the war on terror — everything else that government does is.

Of the two books, "Ghost Wars" has more depth. Coll paints a damning picture of a superpower that built up an armed resistance in Afghanistan, erroneously funded some of the most virulent anti-American jihadists (though not bin Laden himself; the bulk of CIA funding went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, now on the lam from U.S. troops), and then walked away when the Cold War abruptly ended. The anarchy that Afghanistan plunged into provided ripe conditions for the rise of the Taliban and al Qaeda just as America was taking its vacation from history.

Inextricably linked to this tale of America's myopic foreign policy is the more malicious story of America's role in shaping the Afghan resistance and rebuilding the country. America deferred continually to its allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, with nary a thought as to what a post-resistance, post-communist Afghanistan would look like. Pakistan had been calling the shots in Afghanistan for quite some time, as CIA funding to the mujahedeen was channeled through Pakistan's notorious intelligence service, the ISI (and matched by Saudi funds that went to the most radical commanders). The CIA was not concerned with where or to whom specifically the money went, so long as it was used effectively. As Milt Bearden, the CIA station chief in Islamabad, kept repeating to anyone who would listen, the mission was to kill Soviets, and the "CIA was not going to have its jihad run 'by some liberal arts jerkoff.'" (p. 166)

Coll's book, by design, tells a tale of the past but does not seek to offer recommendations for the future. This task has been taken up by the government itself, in the form of "The 9/11 Commission Report" prepared by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

Much of this work corroborates Coll's tales of missed opportunities to nab bin Laden, although in much less detail, and concentrates on both the attacks themselves and how the government can reinvent itself to prevent an even worse disaster.

Despite the headlines yanked by the media from the report (declaring, for example, that Saddam and bin Laden never collaborated "operationally"), the report itself is a sober and, dare I say, nuanced effort. Being a product of bipartisan investigation, it paints the Clinton administration as much less inept than some critics on the Right claim, although how much of this owes to the fact that the Commission's reconstruction of events is dependent upon testimony from Clinton himself, I can't say. The report shows that the government as a whole was not able to deal with terrorism in any systematic way, especially when terrorist attacks actually occurred.

Those who plotted the Sept. 11 attacks suffered setbacks and confronted obstacles, but still succeeded because of the sheer incompetence of their enemy. The 9/11 Commission's retelling of that late summer morning appears as a culmination of all the bureaucratic failures that Coll laboriously depicts. In fact, one of the disheartening lessons of the report is how flexible and adaptable al Qaeda was, in sharp contrast to our government, and how it was able to work as a lean machine on limited funding. Of course, part of the reason is that al Qaeda didn't face the same political pressures that governments do; there is little call for a government-funded pension program when your members expect to die between the ages of 18 and 35 in a fiery cataclysm. But the continued improvisation of al Qaeda shows the difficulty we were and are facing. Even the Commission itself notes that the plotters had:

• [L]eaders able to evaluate, approve, and supervise the planning and direction of the operation;
• Communications sufficient to enable planning and direction of the operatives and those who would be helping them;
• A personnel system that could recruit candidates, vet them, indoctrinate them, and give them necessary training;
• An intelligence effort to gather required information and form assessments of enemy strengths and weaknesses;
• The ability to move people; and
• The ability to raise and move the necessary money. (173)

What's striking is not that al Qaeda accomplished this; it's how a government as expansive as ours was unable to accomplish this and prevent the plot. Indeed, some of the biggest successes in the fight against terrorism, such as the discovery of the January 2000 plot to detonate a bomb in the Los Angeles International Airport, were only achieved because of alert individuals, not because of governmental action. The opening chapters are alternately gripping, infuriating, frightening, and illuminating. They detail exactly what happened on Sept. 11, and how individuals working outside the rules were the only ones with any success that dark day. Stewardesses willing to risk their lives by calling for outside help via cell phone, passengers not willing to acquiesce to terrorists over Pennsylvania, and air traffic controllers who circumvented normal procedures were the only ones who managed to alert the military and the nation of the threat, despite an elaborate chain of command that was supposed to prevent something like this from happening. If anything, the opening chapter of this report shows that homeland security begins and ends at the level of the individual.

Both of these books are meticulously compiled, researched, and argued, but the interlocking narrative leads the reader to the unmistakable conclusion that the attacks of Sept. 11 weren't the fault of Reagan for arming the jihadists during the 1980s, nor were they the fault of the Clinton administration's ambivalence towards terrorist threats. Nor, as Richard Clarke claims in his latest book, did the attacks of Sept. 11 occur because George W. Bush had to destroy Iraq at all costs, Osama be damned. No, the lesson of America's approach to Afghanistan and international terrorism is that our government is too big, too unwieldy, and too slavishly devoted to process and interagency meetings to handle a thousand terrorists in a mud fortress on an open plain.

Time and again, both books point out the bureaucratic infighting that crippled intelligence operations. What would have happened if there hadn't been at least five different agencies (the State Department, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the NSC) pulling in different directions while dealing with the threat from Afghanistan, with these agencies themselves bitterly divided into bureaus and task forces and country desks? Even though the report tries to salvage some of the Clinton administration's supposed determination to eradicate bin Laden and stop al Qaeda, the method the administration chose for signaling urgency was less than efficacious — as the report says, "the Principals [i.e. the cabinet members at Secretary level] met constantly" (179).

What these books expose is the U.S. government as an organizational nightmare. Having worked at the Treasury Department on the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Kosovo, I can attest that the worst aspects highlighted in both books are perhaps not highlighted enough. In fact, our successes in deposing both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein are threatened because of the same bureaucratic processes and infighting. Endless meetings that leave subordinates scrambling to brief their superiors, incessant quibbling about wording of memos and communiques, and inter- and intra-agency feuding that require any communication on letterhead to receive approval from at least eight people do nothing for our national security, much less for our liberty.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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