thedrifter
07-07-05, 05:38 PM
The long war
Four years later, are we any closer to winning the war on terror?
By Tom Brokaw
NBC News
Updated: 3:36 p.m. ET June 24, 2005
It’s nighttime in Afghanistan at a remote and heavily fortified base that is home to an elite unit of American special forces, and a land from which Osama bin Laden launched the 9/11 attacks against the United States. Almost four years after 9/11, how's the war on terror going? Osama bin laden is still at large -- why is that? Across the border in Pakistan, are they doing enough? In Saudi Arabia, the land of Osama bin Laden's birth, what are the new realities in their war against terror? At the CIA and the other American intelligence agencies, after four years of turmoil, are they better or worse? NBC’s Tom Brokaw travels to the highest echelons and deep inside the war on terror.
In Afghanistan, Marines are on the hunt for a man they suspect of killing two American servicemen. And now, in a show of force, the Marines are demanding answers, convinced that Afghan villagers are protecting the suspect. On this day, the Marines can't find their man and they retreat. It's a scene so much like the broader war on terror, the often frustrating search for a dangerous, but mostly invisible enemy.
Porter Goss: “It makes it all the more difficult to deal with because you're not quite sure where to look and obviously we don't want surprises. So we have to look everywhere all the time, and that is stressful.”
Porter Goss is the new director of the CIA, which was widely criticized for failing to anticipate the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans. In his first television interview, Goss told us what he believes it will now take to keep America safe.
Goss: “You have to get to the terrorists before they get to you. Defense alone will not win, so you have to take the offense. You have to go to the enemy in this.”
And the enemy is not in a central location. The CIA director calls it the "the belt of terror" extending from the Philippines in East Asia, across Indonesia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, through Iraq and the Middle East, and into West Africa and Western Europe. Who knows how many sleeper cells of terrorists are in this country, prepared to launch another 9/11 style attack on America, just as terrorists stunned Spain when they launched carefully orchestrated train bombings that killed almost 200 people in Madrid last year.
So four years after the 9/11 attacks, the war on terror is a global effort, a shooting war, a war of intelligence and a war of psy-ops, psychological operations, all of it costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
One of the earliest pitched battles in the war on terror was in the majestic Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan. In October of 2001, a month after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the CIA led a successful unconventional war against the Taliban government of Afghanistan, which had allowed Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida to use that country as a launching pad for its terrorists.
Today there are still some 18,000 American troops on the ground in Afghanistan in this forgotten war, and the fight against terrorists has intensified again this spring and summer.
In those first few months of the war, Bin Laden was thought to be cornered in the Tora Bora region. But American military officials on the ground decided local warlords should lead the effort to capture or kill him. They failed and Bin Laden escaped. Now, almost four years later, Bin Laden is still believed to be hiding somewhere in the wild country between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tom Brokaw: Over a ridge line and over a couple of more ridge lines is Pakistan. But before you get to Pakistan, you have the tribal regions. Probably Osama bin Laden is somewhere in there. Do you ever think about him?
Army captain: “Honestly he's not my focus. My focus is this valley and the next valley and the villages we can influence. I think by starting with the populous and separating the insurgents from the populous, then we'll take away that power base that Osama and his associates have.
Although he's rarely mentioned these days by American soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan or even by Bush administration officials back in Washington, Osama bin Laden remains public enemy number one.
Lt. Gen. David Barno was the overall commander of the American forces in Afghanistan for 18 months.
Brokaw: “Why is he so tough to find and bring down?”
Lt. Gen. David Barno: “Well he's one person in an area, a border area, that's about 1,500 miles, about the distance from Washington, D.C., to Denver, Colo, covered by the Rocky Mountains the whole way. So finding a single person in that structure here in a very tribal society, a very remote society in many ways is a pretty big challenge. But we're going to stay on it until we're successful.”
Just this week, Porter Goss told Time magazine that he "has an excellent idea" where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but said there are "weak links" in the chain that is necessary to bring Bin Laden to justice. One of the obstacles, he said, is that the United States can't move into "sanctuaries in sovereign nations." Most experts agree the sovereign nation he's talking about is Pakistan, run by President Pervez Musharaff, the general who presides over a large, volatile Islamic population. Musharaff reportedly has 75,000 troops hunting for Bin Laden in the tribal area of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.
Brokaw: “It's widely believed that Osama bin Laden and the other senior members of al-Qaida are in the so-called tribal regions. And that they're protected in part by the sympathetic attitudes of some of the Pakistani army units that are there.”
Goss: “I would suggest that that's pretty much sanctuary area for the terrorists. And I'm not sure it's an area that's fully under control of the Pakistani military.”
Brokaw: “Should the Pakistanis allow American units, including some of your own, to come in from Afghanistan and into those areas?”
Goss: “Now, that would be obviously a Pakistan sovereign issue, and that would be better put to President Musharraf.”
Musharraf is on a high wire, working closely with the Americans at the risk of triggering political explosions in his own country. He's already been the target of two close assassination attempts. For now, he forbids American troops from operating in Pakistan.
Brokaw: “There a danger for you personally and for your government that if Pakistani troops take down Osama bin Laden, in what would probably be a difficult struggle, it would cause an uprising in some of the cities in your country and in the refugee camps?”
President Pervez Musharraf: “Well, there will be effects, but we shouldn't be so naïve as to capture him and then go around telling everyone and going around with him everywhere. I mean there is a method of dealing with the situation.”
Brokaw: “But it would be delicate, wouldn't it.”
Musharraf: “It would be. Certainly delicate, not only here, but even in the Islamic world.”
If Musharaff is taken out, the consequences would be disastrous according to Roger Cressey, President Bush's former deputy director of counter-terrorism. He is now an NBC News analyst.
Cressey: “Our greatest fear when I was in government was that Musharraf's government would be overthrown, and you'd have a radical Islamist taking over, one who's sympathetic to al-Qaida and has the capability to access nuclear technology. That’s the great nightmare.”
And so, Pakistan has received more than $2 billion from the United States since 9/11, half of it to fight the terror war -- and there has been notable success.
Musharraf: “We have almost eliminated them from our cities. Then we seized all their bases which were in the valleys, their sanctuaries, which they were using as their command bases, their logistic bases, their propaganda bases. We got truckloads of discs and CDs and computers. So they are now on the run in small packs in the mountains, therefore, they cease to exist as a well-coordinated body.”
Is that because of bold moves by Musharraf, his army and special forces or does the United States have a much larger role than either side can or will acknowledge?
Pakistan's major cities such as Rawalpindi are crowded, chaotic affairs, and yet more major al-Qaida figures have been arrested in the cities than in the countryside, including the notorious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Remember this picture the night that he was arrested in early 2003? Top American intelligence officials tell NBC News that the CIA had a mole in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's inner circle, and one night the informer saw where he would be spending the evening. So he let his American handlers know, and they, with some help from the Pakistanis, moved in and grabbed him in the middle of the night.
Just this spring, another top al-Qaida leader, Abu Faraj al Libbi, was captured in joint U.S.-Pakistani actions. In spite of the successful captures in Pakistan, no one believes the terrorist threat has gone away. And now more than ever, experts are convinced it won't disappear even if Bin Laden himself is brought to justice.
Ironically, one of the most dangerous places, a breeding ground for terrorism is also considered to be one of America's staunchest allies in the war on terror.
The shooting part of the global war on terror began when the United States went into Afghanistan, but for the terrorists, the ideological center of their rage was in Saudi Arabia. Of the 19 young men who hijacked the four American passenger planes on 9/11, 15 of them were from Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia remains a primary source of terrorists.
It's estimated that almost half of the suicide bombers operating in Iraqi insurgency are from Saudi Arabia. Between mid-2003 and the end of 2004, terrorists inside Saudi Arabia itself launched six separate attacks against Saudi targets, killing 102 people. In one attack, militant supporters of Osama bin Laden used explosives and blasted their way into the U.S. consulate in the Saudi city of Jeddah. Eight people died.
Until that began to happen to them, many Saudi officials were in denial about terror in their own country. Then, they decided to take action.
Brokaw: “Osama bin Laden has said that he is motivated in al-Qaida to strike back, even at his own country, and at the West, because of what he says is the presence of the 'infidels' in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, and the continuing relationship between your country and the West.”
Prince Saud Al Faisal: “If there is anybody who has done more damage to Islam, to be considered an 'infidel,' it is Osama bin Laden and nobody else.”
Prince Saud al Faisal, a member of the royal family, has been the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia for 30 years.
Brokaw: “Does he still have standing in SaudI Arabia? If I went to the rural areas and talked to the young men there, I've been told that many would still find him heroic.”
Prince Saud Al Faisal: “I think you would find a tremendous change in Saudi Arabia in that. And this you have to do yourself, I can't convince you of that. But what they have done in Saudi Arabia, killing the innocents, indiscriminately acting against everybody, has lost them any kind of support that they had in the past.”
A building right in the heart of the Saudi Capital in Riyadh was the target of an enormous truck bomb explosion in December 2003. Five people were killed. Saudi officials have decided to keep it in this state, as a reminder to the citizens of this country of the very high price of terrorism. Since then, the Saudis have launched a national television campaign against terror and anti-terrorism billboards line the streets.
continued...
Four years later, are we any closer to winning the war on terror?
By Tom Brokaw
NBC News
Updated: 3:36 p.m. ET June 24, 2005
It’s nighttime in Afghanistan at a remote and heavily fortified base that is home to an elite unit of American special forces, and a land from which Osama bin Laden launched the 9/11 attacks against the United States. Almost four years after 9/11, how's the war on terror going? Osama bin laden is still at large -- why is that? Across the border in Pakistan, are they doing enough? In Saudi Arabia, the land of Osama bin Laden's birth, what are the new realities in their war against terror? At the CIA and the other American intelligence agencies, after four years of turmoil, are they better or worse? NBC’s Tom Brokaw travels to the highest echelons and deep inside the war on terror.
In Afghanistan, Marines are on the hunt for a man they suspect of killing two American servicemen. And now, in a show of force, the Marines are demanding answers, convinced that Afghan villagers are protecting the suspect. On this day, the Marines can't find their man and they retreat. It's a scene so much like the broader war on terror, the often frustrating search for a dangerous, but mostly invisible enemy.
Porter Goss: “It makes it all the more difficult to deal with because you're not quite sure where to look and obviously we don't want surprises. So we have to look everywhere all the time, and that is stressful.”
Porter Goss is the new director of the CIA, which was widely criticized for failing to anticipate the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans. In his first television interview, Goss told us what he believes it will now take to keep America safe.
Goss: “You have to get to the terrorists before they get to you. Defense alone will not win, so you have to take the offense. You have to go to the enemy in this.”
And the enemy is not in a central location. The CIA director calls it the "the belt of terror" extending from the Philippines in East Asia, across Indonesia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, through Iraq and the Middle East, and into West Africa and Western Europe. Who knows how many sleeper cells of terrorists are in this country, prepared to launch another 9/11 style attack on America, just as terrorists stunned Spain when they launched carefully orchestrated train bombings that killed almost 200 people in Madrid last year.
So four years after the 9/11 attacks, the war on terror is a global effort, a shooting war, a war of intelligence and a war of psy-ops, psychological operations, all of it costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
One of the earliest pitched battles in the war on terror was in the majestic Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan. In October of 2001, a month after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the CIA led a successful unconventional war against the Taliban government of Afghanistan, which had allowed Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida to use that country as a launching pad for its terrorists.
Today there are still some 18,000 American troops on the ground in Afghanistan in this forgotten war, and the fight against terrorists has intensified again this spring and summer.
In those first few months of the war, Bin Laden was thought to be cornered in the Tora Bora region. But American military officials on the ground decided local warlords should lead the effort to capture or kill him. They failed and Bin Laden escaped. Now, almost four years later, Bin Laden is still believed to be hiding somewhere in the wild country between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tom Brokaw: Over a ridge line and over a couple of more ridge lines is Pakistan. But before you get to Pakistan, you have the tribal regions. Probably Osama bin Laden is somewhere in there. Do you ever think about him?
Army captain: “Honestly he's not my focus. My focus is this valley and the next valley and the villages we can influence. I think by starting with the populous and separating the insurgents from the populous, then we'll take away that power base that Osama and his associates have.
Although he's rarely mentioned these days by American soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan or even by Bush administration officials back in Washington, Osama bin Laden remains public enemy number one.
Lt. Gen. David Barno was the overall commander of the American forces in Afghanistan for 18 months.
Brokaw: “Why is he so tough to find and bring down?”
Lt. Gen. David Barno: “Well he's one person in an area, a border area, that's about 1,500 miles, about the distance from Washington, D.C., to Denver, Colo, covered by the Rocky Mountains the whole way. So finding a single person in that structure here in a very tribal society, a very remote society in many ways is a pretty big challenge. But we're going to stay on it until we're successful.”
Just this week, Porter Goss told Time magazine that he "has an excellent idea" where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but said there are "weak links" in the chain that is necessary to bring Bin Laden to justice. One of the obstacles, he said, is that the United States can't move into "sanctuaries in sovereign nations." Most experts agree the sovereign nation he's talking about is Pakistan, run by President Pervez Musharaff, the general who presides over a large, volatile Islamic population. Musharaff reportedly has 75,000 troops hunting for Bin Laden in the tribal area of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.
Brokaw: “It's widely believed that Osama bin Laden and the other senior members of al-Qaida are in the so-called tribal regions. And that they're protected in part by the sympathetic attitudes of some of the Pakistani army units that are there.”
Goss: “I would suggest that that's pretty much sanctuary area for the terrorists. And I'm not sure it's an area that's fully under control of the Pakistani military.”
Brokaw: “Should the Pakistanis allow American units, including some of your own, to come in from Afghanistan and into those areas?”
Goss: “Now, that would be obviously a Pakistan sovereign issue, and that would be better put to President Musharraf.”
Musharraf is on a high wire, working closely with the Americans at the risk of triggering political explosions in his own country. He's already been the target of two close assassination attempts. For now, he forbids American troops from operating in Pakistan.
Brokaw: “There a danger for you personally and for your government that if Pakistani troops take down Osama bin Laden, in what would probably be a difficult struggle, it would cause an uprising in some of the cities in your country and in the refugee camps?”
President Pervez Musharraf: “Well, there will be effects, but we shouldn't be so naïve as to capture him and then go around telling everyone and going around with him everywhere. I mean there is a method of dealing with the situation.”
Brokaw: “But it would be delicate, wouldn't it.”
Musharraf: “It would be. Certainly delicate, not only here, but even in the Islamic world.”
If Musharaff is taken out, the consequences would be disastrous according to Roger Cressey, President Bush's former deputy director of counter-terrorism. He is now an NBC News analyst.
Cressey: “Our greatest fear when I was in government was that Musharraf's government would be overthrown, and you'd have a radical Islamist taking over, one who's sympathetic to al-Qaida and has the capability to access nuclear technology. That’s the great nightmare.”
And so, Pakistan has received more than $2 billion from the United States since 9/11, half of it to fight the terror war -- and there has been notable success.
Musharraf: “We have almost eliminated them from our cities. Then we seized all their bases which were in the valleys, their sanctuaries, which they were using as their command bases, their logistic bases, their propaganda bases. We got truckloads of discs and CDs and computers. So they are now on the run in small packs in the mountains, therefore, they cease to exist as a well-coordinated body.”
Is that because of bold moves by Musharraf, his army and special forces or does the United States have a much larger role than either side can or will acknowledge?
Pakistan's major cities such as Rawalpindi are crowded, chaotic affairs, and yet more major al-Qaida figures have been arrested in the cities than in the countryside, including the notorious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Remember this picture the night that he was arrested in early 2003? Top American intelligence officials tell NBC News that the CIA had a mole in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's inner circle, and one night the informer saw where he would be spending the evening. So he let his American handlers know, and they, with some help from the Pakistanis, moved in and grabbed him in the middle of the night.
Just this spring, another top al-Qaida leader, Abu Faraj al Libbi, was captured in joint U.S.-Pakistani actions. In spite of the successful captures in Pakistan, no one believes the terrorist threat has gone away. And now more than ever, experts are convinced it won't disappear even if Bin Laden himself is brought to justice.
Ironically, one of the most dangerous places, a breeding ground for terrorism is also considered to be one of America's staunchest allies in the war on terror.
The shooting part of the global war on terror began when the United States went into Afghanistan, but for the terrorists, the ideological center of their rage was in Saudi Arabia. Of the 19 young men who hijacked the four American passenger planes on 9/11, 15 of them were from Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia remains a primary source of terrorists.
It's estimated that almost half of the suicide bombers operating in Iraqi insurgency are from Saudi Arabia. Between mid-2003 and the end of 2004, terrorists inside Saudi Arabia itself launched six separate attacks against Saudi targets, killing 102 people. In one attack, militant supporters of Osama bin Laden used explosives and blasted their way into the U.S. consulate in the Saudi city of Jeddah. Eight people died.
Until that began to happen to them, many Saudi officials were in denial about terror in their own country. Then, they decided to take action.
Brokaw: “Osama bin Laden has said that he is motivated in al-Qaida to strike back, even at his own country, and at the West, because of what he says is the presence of the 'infidels' in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, and the continuing relationship between your country and the West.”
Prince Saud Al Faisal: “If there is anybody who has done more damage to Islam, to be considered an 'infidel,' it is Osama bin Laden and nobody else.”
Prince Saud al Faisal, a member of the royal family, has been the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia for 30 years.
Brokaw: “Does he still have standing in SaudI Arabia? If I went to the rural areas and talked to the young men there, I've been told that many would still find him heroic.”
Prince Saud Al Faisal: “I think you would find a tremendous change in Saudi Arabia in that. And this you have to do yourself, I can't convince you of that. But what they have done in Saudi Arabia, killing the innocents, indiscriminately acting against everybody, has lost them any kind of support that they had in the past.”
A building right in the heart of the Saudi Capital in Riyadh was the target of an enormous truck bomb explosion in December 2003. Five people were killed. Saudi officials have decided to keep it in this state, as a reminder to the citizens of this country of the very high price of terrorism. Since then, the Saudis have launched a national television campaign against terror and anti-terrorism billboards line the streets.
continued...