The Hindu Business Line : Rooting out <I>jehadi</I> terrorism

THE bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission, recently submitted its report to the US President, Mr George W. Bush. It is a watershed in the history of the US. Its findings linking the deficiencies and failures in the gathering and analysis of intelligence with the surprise attack by the Al Qaeda that obliterated the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York and destroyed one wing of the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001 have generated unusual interest.

Many of the large number of recommendations it has made for re-designing the intelligence architecture to prevent a recurrence of such a catastrophe have also been the subject of nation-wide debate fuelled by hearings in the Congressional committees to do with Government Affairs, Armed Forces and Intelligence Oversight.

The 9/11 Commission stands quite apart from the many past reviews of the working of intelligence agencies of the US. They were all within the conceptual framework of traditional threats from known quarters, using familiar methods and weapons, and operating from out of conventional organisational structures.

The rules of the game were the same or similar for adversaries. They employed overt and covert operations, including assassinations and proxy wars, subterfuges, sabotage, and subversion, espionage and counter-espionage, and formation of alliances and blocs with obliging nations. All these were age-old ways of countering and combating inimically disposed foreign powers.

For instance, the period of the Cold War saw both the US and the USSR trying to get the better of each other drawing heavily on institutions, infrastructure, techniques and devices that were mutually comprehensible and containable.

Hence, previous exercises undertaken in the US to revamp intelligence did not stray too far from the beaten track. They generally were concerned with making coverage by intelligence agencies both intensive and extensive, using state-of-the-art technology, strengthening surveillance, bringing about coordination and notching up the norms of oversight by the Administration and the Congress to control excesses.

Nebulous and elusive

At no time did it ever enter into the wildest calculations of anyone that four commercial wide-bodied jet airliners, simultaneously hijacked from the world's busiest and best guarded airport within the US in broad daylight by 19 youths armed with nothing more than box-cutters, could be ingeniously turned into weapons of mass destruction. Policy-makers and intelligence professionals were conditioned to expect repetitions of attacks on embassies and American military assets outside the country.

The Al Qaeda was a nebulous and elusive entity with cells capable of concocting a lethal mix of religious fanaticism, functional autonomy, operational flexibility, and suicidal determination. They could group and regroup at will, and showed themselves to be adept in taking full advantage of a free, open and trusting society in carrying out the tasks assigned to them from a faraway mastermind.

No wonder, then, the 9/11 Commission found the intelligence community stumbling and fumbling in dealing with the Al Qaeda menace with the capabilities it had developed during the Cold War. Here is a selection of the sombre words in which the Commission has censured the various agencies responsible for national security for their lack of alertness and preparedness:

The Department of Defence (DoD): "At no point before 9/11 was (it) fully engaged in the mission of countering Al Qaeda, even though this was perhaps the most dangerous foreign enemy threatening the United States."

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): "(It) had minimal capacity to conduct paramilitary operations with its own personnel, and it did not seek a large-scale expansion of these capabilities before 9/11. (It) also needed to improve its capability to collect intelligence from human agents."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): "The most serious weaknesses in (its) capabilities were in the domestic arena. The FBI did not have the capability to link the collective knowledge of agents in the field to national priorities. Other domestic agencies deferred to the FBI."

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA): "FAA capabilities were weak. Any serious examination of the possibility of a suicide hijacking could have suggested changes to fix glaring vulnerabilities — expanding no-fly lists, searching passengers identified by the computer-assisted passenger pre-screening system, deploying federal air marshals domestically, hardening cockpit doors, alerting air crews to a different kind of hijacking possibility than they had been trained to expect. Yet, the FAA did not adjust either its own training or training with the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) to take account of threats other than those experienced in the past."

NORAD: "America's homeland defenders faced outward. NORAD itself was barely able to retain any alert bases at all. Its planning scenarios occasionally considered the danger of hijacked aircraft being guided to American targets, but only aircraft that were coming from overseas."

The State Department: "Neither the State Department's consular officers nor the Immigration and Naturalisation Service's inspectors and agents were ever considered full partners in a national counterterrorism effort. Protecting borders was not a national security issue before 9/11."

The US Government: "(It) did not find a way of pooling intelligence and using it to guide the planning and assignment of responsibilities for joint operations involving entities as disparate as the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the military, and the agencies involved in homeland security."

Congress: "The legislative branch adjusted little and did not restructure itself to address changing threats. Its attention to terrorism was episodic and splintered across several committees. The Congress gave little guidance to executive branch agencies on terrorism, did not reform them in any significant way to meet the threat, and did not systematically perform robust oversight to identify, address, and attempt to resolve the many problems in national security and domestic agencies that became apparent in the aftermath of 9/11."

Unity of effort

The net result of all these inexplicable omissions was that Al Qaeda operatives had a free run of the US, deposited and withdrew large amounts from banks and became members of its flying clubs without let or hindrance, by flaunting fraudulent passports which contained suspicious indications of extremism. Further, their manifestly false statements on their visa applications and brazen violations of immigration laws during their stay in the US went unnoticed.

In the context of 15 disparate agencies in the field of intelligence ploughing their own furrows, with their own budgets and personnel, it is but natural that the 9/11 Commission should place the utmost emphasis on what it calls the "unity of effort".

There can be no such unity unless it is backed by a vision that permeates all branches of the Government and is predicated upon a strategy that makes sense to all the actors.

The 9/11 Commission makes no bones about identifying the enemy which, it says, is not just terrorism, but "is the threat posed specifically by Islamist terrorism, by Bin Laden and others who draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within a minority strain of Islam that does not distinguish politics from religion, and distorts both... .The enemy is not Islam, the great world faith, but a perversion of Islam. The enemy goes beyond Al Qaeda to include the radical ideological movement, inspired in part by Al Qaeda, that has spawned other terrorist groups and violence."

From this it inevitably follows that while the uncompromising national mission of the US should be, in general, to defeat all types of terrorism any where in the world, it should specifically be devoted to dismantling the Al Qaeda network, wherever found, and neutralising, regardless of the time it takes, the ideological hatred that is at the root of Islamic terrorism.

The Commission, in this light, proposes a three-pronged strategy: (1) attack terrorists and their organisations, (2) prevent the continued growth of Islamic terrorism, and (3) protect against and prepare for terrorist attacks.

Achieving the "unity of effort" on which 9/11 Commission puts the highest premium is akin to performing a miracle in a Government as vast and complex as that of the US. It entails the rationalisation, simplification and streamlining of structures, systems and processes which are now scattered and blurred and making them unremittingly focus on the execution of the strategy.

More than all, it involves giving a jolt to the prevailing mindset of intelligence operatives by forcing them to get out of the strait jacket of past assumptions into which they find themselves. It is, for instance, an iron-clad premise of their work culture that they should be privy to only that part of any information which they "need to know" for discharging their functions. The Commission now wants this to replaced by "need to share", as a prelude to the pooling of all the information in their possession and their pulling together as a homogenous team for the single-minded pursuit of freedom from terror.

No less pertinent is the Commission's call to the US Congress to integrate the multifarious turfs it has created for the review and oversight of security and intelligence mechanisms into a single, principal, permanent, standing committee for homeland security in each chamber.

That particular Committee's aim should be to clear all proposals for the nomination, financial sanctions, security clearance, and confirmation process for national security officials at the start of an administration, and leave them to concentrate on the vital tasks entrusted to them. This would avoid distractions such as what Mr. James Woolsey, a former CIA Director, had to face when, within a short span of two years or so on the job, he had to be attending 153 hearings of one kind another in both Houses of Congress during a period of 145 days!

The 9/11 Commission has done nothing more than refining and reorienting the role of the existing Terrorist Threat Integration Centre in suggesting in its place the setting up of a National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC) within the Executive Office of the President, headed by a Senate-confirmed official (with rank equal to the deputy head of a cabinet department) and functioning essentially as a "think tank" under the direction of the President and the National Security Council.

"Intelligence czar"

By far, the recommendation that has roused widespread interest is the creation of a new post of National Intelligence Director, again to be located in the President's office, reporting directly to the President, who would have the authority to consolidate and control all the intelligence budgets, and appoint, direct, control and supervise the chiefs of the CIA, FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), NCTC, and all the rest of the intelligence outfits, including the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) which currently accounts for 80 per cent of the total intelligence budget. He would have the unquestioned right to hire and fire intelligence personnel, and to set common personnel and information technology policies across the intelligence community.

No one is sure exactly how to react to the emergence of an "intelligence czar" with such formidable array of very nearly untrammelled powers in a country that had always believed in checks and balances and division of powers, and found centralisation of authority in any type of "czar" revolting. At the same time, the shock and awe of 9/11 are still haunting the nation and there is a strong current of opinion that nothing should be left to chance. Of course, the confirmed civil libertarians are worried about spooks and snoopers being all over the place, and the Defence Secretary, Mr.Donald Rumsfeld, is concerned that the changes might impair the effectiveness of his Department by placing "new barriers or filters between military combatant commanders and those agencies when they perform as combat-support agencies."

He had, in fact, told the Congress that the consolidation of the intelligence agencies under a single head "would be doing the country a great disservice."

The stalwarts of the intelligence community, however, are solidly for the National Intelligence Director, while the Congress wants to make sure that the contours of powers and authority are clearly specified in a special legislation.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush, to stave off the coming under attack for not acting on the 9/11 Commission report, especially when he is facing an election, and by way of deferring to the uneasiness felt by the liberals, has issued two orders: One, authorising the existing Director of Central Intelligence Agency himself to "determine and develop" the intelligence budget and present it to the President and the, two, establishing a `President's Board on Safeguarding Americans' Civil Liberties', to provide advice on avoiding the possibility of aggressive counter-terrorism efforts conflicting with civil liberties.

The final outcome of all these confabulations will be known only when the Congressional hearings are completed and the Executive and Legislative Branches arrive at an agreed approach to 9/11 Commission's recommendations.

It may hold lessons for India's intelligence community also — itself split into Intelligence Bureau (IB), responsible for domestic intelligence; the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), responsible for external intelligence; the National Security Council, responsible for making timely intelligence estimates on developments affecting security based on the available intelligence; the directorates of army, navy and air force intelligence, and assorted setups attached to the Border Security Force, the Coast Guard and the State administrations exercising surveillance to counter security threats.

It may also help the new Security Adviser to the Government, Mr M. K. Narayanan, to think beyond the dot and advise on the re-engineering of India's intelligence gathering and analysing structures to increase their professional competence and effectiveness.

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