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COMMENTARY
November 3, 2001
The secret war
While the United States ratchets up both air and ground action in Afghanistan -- recent notches have included ground-based front-line targeting and the carpet bombing of confirmed Taliban troop positions by remarkably low-flying B-52s -- the hunt for the leadership of the Al Qaeda terror network is pursued off camera. Indeed the success of the Pentagon in focusing journalistic attention on the big bangs near Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul may be its first solid breakthrough in the propaganda war. For with the build-up of overwhelming force victory on these fronts is more or less assured. But success is much harder to assure in the countless mountain valleys and cave complexes which are now being combed chiefly in the eastern provinces of Paktia and Paktika. It remains at this stage an essentially military operation even if a sophisticated special forces one -- reconnoitre then secretly attack. It has been described in the media as "finding a needle in a haystack" but it is not quite so simple; more like finding every one of several needles in a thousand haystacks. For while Osama bin Laden may be "monarch" to a very far-flung terrorist operation there would appear to be as few as eight and as many as twenty "duchies" in affiliation each capable of independent operation even if the centre does not hold. What do you do with them when you find them? While it would be nice to take some prisoners in the hope of shaking out the information they might personally contain the short answer is that you kill them. That is the one assured way of ending their activities. But you have to know who you have killed and in effect why -- even after the event. As the Oxford historian the half brilliant half batty Sir Michael Howard has been explaining to the chattering classes we are engaged at this moment in a war beyond the frontier of civilization something the Romans called a guerra or hot pursuit against latrunculi -- "robbers pirates brigands outlaws the common enemies of mankind". Not a bellum or proper war against a legitimus hostis -- an organized state under the direction of a recognized government. The normal rules of warfare don't apply and it is foolish to worry about nice points of military etiquette; our enemy doesn't appreciate these. In particular a proper war against another state can and probably should be conducted without a policy of attempting assassinations. For as humans have anciently observed that is a game that two can play and there is no end to the chaos when nations at war begin to target each other's civilian political leaders. But in a war like this no other policy can be contemplated. As I have mentioned before it was obvious from the fact the White House and Congress were intended targets of the terror raids on Sept. 11 that the enemy seeks to annihilate our own political leaders. Moreover terrorists -- our modern-day latrunculi -- are not even legitimate soldiers. Their behaviour in trying to maximize casualties among defenceless civilians puts them beyond the pale of even the criminal law. To put no finer point on it either we kill them or they kill us. And as President Bush declared in his major war speech of Sept. 20 no distinction can be made between the terrorists in the field and the states that shelter them. No such state is a legitimus hostis. For instance when the war at a later stage is pursued against Iraq it will be remembered that Saddam Hussein ordered the attempted assassination of George Bush (the elder) when he visited Kuwait in 1993. The United States did not attempt to target the Iraqi despot personally during the Gulf War on the old point of international legal principle. But when (I don't think "if") war is resumed against him I doubt there will be any hesitation. Saddam will be the primary target as Osama bin Laden is now. This moral principle is as simple as the tactical one is complicated. The question isn't whether but how to kill all of the world's practising Islamist terrorists before any of them kill any more of us. While there is a constituency within the West that argues we should somehow capture them alive and bring them to trial before our domestic courts of law (one imagines FBI agents landing in Kabul or Baghdad with their satchels full of arrest warrants) I find the idea too fatuous to be worth discussing. It follows that what is done in plain view must also be done clandestinely. And indeed several weeks ago President Bush signed over the first $1 billion to the CIA for the creation probably from scratch of just such an international clandestine programme. Their remit is to pursue known terrorists in creative and unusual ways. Almost certainly their instructions will be to kill them when they find them -- but discreetly enough to pass under the radar of conventional police operations. No details of this programme are available and we must hope that no details will be available for a long time. We can only guess what will be attempted based on our knowledge of the characters involved and the precedents they are working from. On the characters it is clear that President Bush is no "baby" that in the defence of his realm and people he is prepared to be extremely ruthless. Like his defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld who is in some sense also among his mentors Mr. Bush is a sworn enemy of the "bureaucratic" frame of mind. In off-the-cuff remarks since becoming president in venues from Washington to Genoa to Shanghai he has repeatedly called attention to the problem of getting large bureaucracies to "cut to the chase". He is among the few politicians who grasp that this does not come naturally to them. In George Tenet the Clinton appointee who has directed the Central Intelligence Agency since 1996 the Bush team has found an unlikely colleague. Blamed by many members on both party sides of Congress for failing to anticipate the Sept. 11 strikes Mr. Tenet successfully defended himself at least to Cabinet by arguing that cumbersome and outdated organizational limitations prevented his mounting the kind of anti-terrorist operations he had been lobbying for years to do. Most critically the CIA is not allowed to track terrorist suspects within the U.S. itself but must hand over to the FBI which has no institutional responsibility for national security. The most important files get dropped between departments. This is now changing in a big way for Congress itself has withdrawn its objections to wider responsibilities for the CIA and the Bush administration is sitting over its various agencies with a whip hand demanding unqualified inter-agency co-operation. The shock of Sept. 11 itself has at least for a time put the bureaucrats off their normal feeding and featherbedding patterns. The CIA's whole institutional focus in this area is being radically re-oriented from "anti-terrorism" (passive study surveillance liaison and advice) to "counter-terrorism" (active prevention deterrence and interdiction). The chief precedent for the new clandestine operation which the CIA is attempting has got to be the Israeli Mossad's secret war against the Palestinian terror network Black September in the early 1970s. The Israelis decided on active measures after Black September succeeded in kidnapping and killing eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. It became obvious to Golda Meir the late Israeli premier that it was no longer good enough to simply refuse to negotiate with terrorists and take one's hits. She convened a "Committee X" which empowered the Israeli secret service Mossad to construct its own anti-terror cells to track down and kill senior Black September operatives regardless of where they were hiding. The story of this adventure or rather one of its strands is authoritatively reconstructed in the book Vengeance by the Canadian journalist George Jonas published in 1984 -- a book which desperately needs to come back into print. The Mossad created two parallel operations; one more formal and heavily funded within its own organizational structure and making use exclusively of its staff agents; and another very "informal" outside the arm and reach of government. The formal operation was almost immediately compromised and came to grief without accomplishing anything at all; the informal cells achieved one success after another eliminating nine of eleven assigned targets in a remarkably short stretch of time; although it too in the end ran afoul of an envious intelligence bureaucracy and was broken up. The operation helped break the back of Black September. In short order it turned the "balance of terror" against the terrorists themselves for even the survivors were left looking over their shoulders night and day and turned in distrust against their own "family" of bodyguards and protectors. In a thesis presented to the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College a student of the Mossad operation articulated the lessons learned from it: "Planners of sensitive covert operations must have a firm understanding of bureaucratic processes. Government bureaucracies inherently limit the degree of operational success by the nature of their systems. Bureaucracies cannot move effectively beyond a predetermined operational tempo and impose fatal restraints regarding operational tradecraft and tactics. Successful covert operations demand a flexible capability with full decentralized authority enabling officers to initiate actions as circumstances dictate enhancing the operational success-failure ratio. ... But: ... "When operational teams incorporate decentralized authority in concert with good tradecraft and tactical techniques success is virtually assured." This I think encapsulates the attitude the Bush administration and George Tenet too will now be taking in ordering covert operations against Al Qaeda and against other Islamist terror organizations as they come into view. The CIA will be training then unleashing multiple autonomous hit squads . These will have to operate often right under the noses of police and security forces in Europe the Middle East and North America itself. Already it appears the U.S. has warned its European allies to expect such action; and seems to have received reasonably favourable responses from them. We can assume the first teams are now being assembled. Alas at least in the near term we are only likely to learn about their failures. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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