This paper will begin by defining al-Qaeda as a tripartite entity consisting of a hard-core, a network, and an ideology. In three chronological sections, this reality will be compared with the American intelligence community’s perception of, and performance against, al-Qaeda during each time frame, so as to evaluate the success of American intelligence in the war on terror.
By Lucie Parker
King's College, London
How
has the American Intelligence Community Performed against Al-Qaeda, in its
Various Manifestations, Since the Organisation’s Creation?
This paper will begin by defining al-Qaeda
as a tripartite entity consisting of a hard-core, a network, and an
ideology. In three chronological sections, this reality will be compared
with the American intelligence community’s perception of, and performance
against, al-Qaeda during each time frame, so as to evaluate the success of
American intelligence in the war on terror. Section one will demonstrate
America to be blind to the horizontal nature of al-Qaeda, arguing that the
intelligence community’s outdated Cold War structure limited its performance
against the perceived enemy. As a result, the intelligence community was unable
to both fulfil President Bill Clinton’s counter-terror policy, as well as
engage with al-Qaeda successfully during this time. Section two will highlight
the positive impact 9/11 had upon waking America up to the reality of al-Qaeda,
unleashing the resources needed by the intelligence community to fulfil
President George W. Bush’s objectives. Yet despite this epiphany, the
intelligence cycle was still geared towards a vertical threat and thus was
unable to perform successfully against the three facets of al-Qaeda. Finally,
section three will acknowledge the intelligence community’s success against the
al-Qaeda hard-core, due to the improvement in intelligence cycle tactics, yet
show that the neglect of al-Qaeda’s ideology in Obama’s strategy means that
America still faces the threat of Islamic extremist ideology today.
A New
National Security Threat
President Obama’s recent declaration that
‘al-Qaeda is on its heels’ (2014) reinvigorated debate over the prominence of
arguably the gravest threat the United States has faced in the 21st century.
This debate stems from the complexity of al-Qaeda; gone are the Cold War days
of a monolithic Soviet Union versus America, rather a multifaceted Islamic
extremist militancy poses the biggest challenge to US national security today.
In order to evaluate the success of America’s response to this threat, we must
scrutinise the performance of ‘Uncle Sam’s lifeblood in the campaign against
terrorism’ (Cilluffo et al., 2002: 61): American intelligence. The issue at
stake here is not only our understanding of the battle between the world’s
greatest intelligence power and al-Qaeda; we must also seek to comprehend
whether the intelligence cycle has been effectively handled to fight al-Qaeda
in line with policy requirements. This analysis is thus twofold. The first
strand will confront how successful the intelligence community was in helping
‘policymakers overcome insurmountable obstacles’ (Tenet, 2000: 134) against
al-Qaeda, using how well it informed American policy as a benchmark against
which to measure performance. The second will measure the impact this
performance had on eliminating al-Qaeda. Analysing a community which is by
its very nature clandestine does engender limitations; the restriction to
classified information does problematize an open-source appraisal like this
one. Yet using government policy as a benchmark opens a wealth of open-source
material that provides a realm of relevant intelligence, such as the 9/11
commission report.
Before commencing this investigation,
defining ‘al-Qaeda’ is crucial. Whilst the breadth of this paper is not wide
enough to do justice to the thorny debate surrounding al-Qaeda’s existence,
Burke captures the characterisation of this entity well. He argues that
al-Qaeda consists of ‘three elements: a hard-core, a network of co-opted
groups, and an ideology’ (2003: 8). He disregards the popular media perception
of ‘al-Qaeda as an “evil empire” with an evil mastermind at its head’ (2003,
XXV), demonstrating that al-Qaeda is a de-centralised, horizontal network
that comprises one of many Islamic militant groups. The hard-core is comprised of
Osama bin Laden and his close associates, whilst the network is formed of
ever-changing groups who have ‘multiple associations and multiple lines of
logistic support’ (2003: 11)—the former Egyptian al-Jihad is but one
example. The ideology is the ‘al-Qaeda worldview’: the aim to fundamentally
establish a ‘caliphate’ based on an extreme, Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni
Islam. Burke’s explanation of the fluidity of al-Qaeda is an invaluable element
of the definition; the changed reality of al-Qaeda is outlined in each section
to provide a clear understanding of the threat that the American intelligence
community is being judged against at that point in time.
1988–2001
America here faced a ‘networked organisation
of small dispersed units’ characterised by ‘doctrine, configuration, strategy
and technology in sync with the information age’. A ‘child of 1990’s
globalisation’, al-Qaeda was a sprawling web of the informal connections that
had solidified in 1988 between a ‘new generation of Sunni Islamic terrorists’
(Coll, 2004: 278). Access to Afghanistan from 1996 gave the al-Qaeda hard-core
its base, from which bin Laden established ‘an unknown number of “sleeper”
cells awaiting orders to launch future attacks’ (Shultz, 2003: 8-15). The Encyclopaedia
of Jihad provided the formula of unconventional warfare; the internet
cultivated the coordination required for the planning of these attacks. The
result was ‘a campaign of episodic attacks by various nodes of his network’
(Shultz, 2003: 21), e.g. the 2000 USS Cole bombing in Yemen. Bin Laden’s 1998
fatwa ordering Muslims to ‘kill Americans – including civilians – anywhere in
the world’ (Shultz, 2003: 22) made America the central target of this campaign.
Yet America’s understanding of this new enemy was inaccurate. ‘By the middle of
the decade, America discovered that ‘UBL was the head of a worldwide terrorist
organisation with a board of directors…and that he wanted to strike the U.S. on
our soil’ (Tenet, 2007: 100-102), however al-Qaeda was still treated as a
‘traditionally structured terrorist organisation’ (Burke, 2003:6). The
responses American intelligence thus formulated against this enemy were
inevitably unsuitable and largely ineffective.
The CIA provides a useful illustration of
America’s ill-suited response. During the 1990’s it was near rock bottom.
Constant budgetary cuts hindered a restructuring overhaul, keeping it
institutionally geared towards a SIGINT strategy that focused on a monolithic
enemy. Although SIGINT provided some valuable intelligence on al-Qaeda, e.g.
the NSA tapped bin Laden’s phone, the fact that HUMINT declined by 25% during
the 1990’s (Diamond, 2008: 242) was palpable, especially when bin Laden changed
his communication method. The fact that there was ‘no CIA station in
Afghanistan from which to collect intelligence’ (Coll, 2004: 5) meant that the
Langley-based Alec Station failed to collect ‘high-quality intelligence coming
from sources within al-Qaeda’ (Diamond, 2008: 243). Accordingly, the
intelligence community failed to understand al-Qaeda. Wright highlights that
these ‘radical extremists came from places few agents had ever been to’ (2006:
208); the necessity of getting agents into these places to gain an
understanding of them was paramount.
These structural problems hindered analysis.
The lack of intelligence collected on al-Qaeda meant that America still was
blind to the ‘jungle of poisonous snakes’ (Woolsey, cited in Ciluffo et al.,
2002: 62) that were mobilising against them. As intelligence analysis was
solely focused on bin Laden (epitomised in the fact there was a ‘bin Laden’
station, not an ‘al-Qaeda’ station), any valuable intelligence that stemmed
from one of the ‘snakes’ in the expansive al-Qaeda jungle was not given the
necessary attention: the East African al-Qaeda cell was picked up years before
the embassy bombings, yet lack of analysis due to the misunderstanding of
al-Qaeda’s structure resulted in a fatal failure. Zegart outlines the
intelligence community’s failure to piece together the evidence:
‘Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi had
attended an al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia with a major bin Laden figure; that
al-Mihdhar held a U.S. visa; and that al-Hazmi had already travelled to the
United States; that KSM, one of bin Laden’s most trusted operatives was
recruiting terrorists to travel to, and plan terrorist activities in, the
United States, that dramatic spikes in intelligence chatter suggested an
imminent catastrophic terrorist attack against American targets somewhere in
the world; and that a star FBI agent believed that bin Laden might be sending
operatives to the U.S. for flight training’ (2007: 28-9)
The intelligence community’s focus upon bin
Laden as the figurehead of a criminal organisation bound them rigidly to a
vertical analytical focus. Although the ‘Manson group’ had the right idea with
holistically mapping out Islamist networks (Coll, 2004), they were ignored by
those out in the field because this holistic intelligence was not operational
against the perceived threat. The CIA had been tasked with bin
Laden’s capture; this analysis was of no use to something that required
operational real-time intelligence.
The failure to collect HUMINT from inside
al-Qaeda, as well as to analyse its holistic horizontalness, resulted in poor
dissemination of intelligence to both Clinton and Bush, which then led to an
uninformed counter-terror policy. The major criticism here was that the ‘CIA
was giving Clinton too much unfiltered intelligence’ (Coll, 2004: 418). The
lack of actionable intelligence from human sources was problematic,
as seen with the Bush administration: the infamous August 6th 2001
Presidential Daily Briefing simply reported that ‘bin Ladin since 1997 has
wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US’ (PDB, 2001); a phenomenon that
was not new to America in 2001. Rather than disseminating concise
intelligence to inform policy, the intelligence community ‘generated volumes of
fragmented hearsay’ (Coll, 2004: 526) that lacked utility.
The intelligence cycle thus failed to support
policy. Through Presidential directive-39, Clinton’s ‘intent regarding covert
action against bin Laden was clear: he wanted him dead’ (Zelikow et al., 2004:
133). However the failures of the Tarnak Farm, Desert Camp and Kandahar plans
to even materialise demonstrates that the CIA did not fulfil this role, with
Tenet admitting that ‘as much as we all wanted bin Laden dead, we didn’t have
enough information to give policymakers the confidence they required to pull
the trigger’ (Tenet, 2007: 112). Under the Bush administration, Clinton’s bin
Laden-centric counter-terrorist policy took a backseat: the Principals
Committee had its first meeting on al Qaeda on September 4th 2001
(Zelikow et al., 2004: 212). As the intelligence community had no clear
direction assigned to them by Bush against al-Qaeda pre-9/11, it is impossible
to criticise them against a non-existent benchmark. Holistically, the
intelligence community also performed badly in their fight against al-Qaeda’s
network. A vertically stale CIA hindered an accurate understanding of this horizontal
enemy, preventing the adoption of successful counter-terror tactics.
Intelligence thus failed within the microcosm of American counter-terror
policy, as well as failed to effectively disrupt al-Qaeda, as was tragically
reflected by the 9/11 attacks.
2001–2003
9/11 provoked the Bush doctrine’s two
objectives: ‘to break the network of terrorist states’ (Wolfowitz, 2001)
responsible for 9/11, and ‘to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from
threatening America’ (Bush, 2002). The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan scattered
the hard-core, eliminating two thirds in the process. Meanwhile, the networks
were ‘disrupted by new campaigns by security forces all over the world’. Yet
rather than destroying al-Qaeda, the networks simply ‘dispersed and caused
significant radicalisation wherever they ended up’, for example
in Pakistan. Consequently the reality of 2001 was a ‘new phase of Islamic
militancy’, with a new style of attacks ‘executed by men who were committed to
the al-Qaeda agenda but in no way connected with the group itself’ (Burke,
2003: 260-266), e.g. the 2002 Bali bombings. Although the hard-core was
diminishing, the network of networks and their ideology enshrined
al-Qaeda’s existence. America’s understanding of al-Qaeda at this point
was epitomised in Bush’s hit list of the ‘hardest of the “al-Qaeda
hard-core”’ kept in his desk (Burke, 2003: 259). Although Bush acknowledged
this ‘new kind of war fought by a new kind of enemy’ (2002), the black and
white hunt for bin Laden and his associates suggests that his focus upon this
vertical elite was the priority. Thus although 2001–2003 was a pivotal moment
for the American understanding of the nature of al-Qaeda, their intelligence
tactics did not match their 9/11-induced epiphany.
Tenet’s long-cherished ambition of getting
HUMINT from Afghanistan was fulfilled via the invasion, giving
the intelligence community ‘access to people and documents that laid bare the
future plans and intentions of al-Qa’ida’: the capture of KSM is
one example. Furthermore, Tenet’s introduction of ‘a daily meeting’ to
‘cut short the time it took for information to flow from the people in the
field to me’ (2007: 229-31) collected a greater volume of information to be
coordinated horizontally with the CIA, FBI, NSA, and military. 9/11 also
sanctioned unprecedented intelligence community powers: the NSA ‘terrorist
surveillance program’ and the 2001 Memorandum of Understanding assigning covert
action authorities to the CIA. Yet the set-up of ‘black sites’ to interrogate
and torture captured al-Qaeda members, e.g. Abu Zubaydah, as a result of the
latter authority, demonstrated that despite their fundamental reassessment of
the reality of al-Qaeda, America still misunderstood their enemy. The hatred of
the West generated by al-Qaeda’s ideology was vindicated through America’s use
of these techniques upon their ‘brothers’. Rather than providing strong
intelligence to aid America successfully against al-Qaeda, torture added
fuel to the long-burning ideological hatred towards the West, indirectly
sustaining the al-Qaeda franchise that was mobilising against them.
Analysis and dissemination were vastly
improved due to 9/11. This is seen with the creation of the ‘threat matrix’: a
daily document given to Bush that detailed ‘the newest threats that had emerged
over the past twenty-four hours’. It was ‘an unprecedented mechanism for
systematically…debunking the voluminous amount of threat data flowing into the
intelligence community’, ensuring that only the intelligence ‘with the
necessary weight and quality’ consumed the President’s attention. The
establishment of an ‘imagination’ group by Tenet, assigned to brainstorm ideas
outside of the box further unbound intelligence analysis from its Cold War
strait jacket, allowing analysts to uncover the reality of al-Qaeda. The fact
that Bush ‘was in the trenches with us’ meant that intelligence was rapidly
communicated: ‘if you told him about an imminent operation on Monday, you could
be certain after a few days he would ask about it’ (Tenet, 2007: 232-36).
The shock of 9/11 unleashed the resources
needed for the intelligence community to break free from their Cold War
structure and execute a strong intelligence cycle geared towards al-Qaeda’s
defeat. Consequently they were better equipped to deal with the increased
demands of the Bush administration’s counter-terror doctrine. Although they
were unable to capture bin Laden or al-Zawahiri during this period, their
success is seen in the capture of KSM, amongst others (Tenet, 2007: 240). This
intelligence community action thus fulfilled Bush’s cry ‘to find [terrorists]
before they strike’ (2001). The increased understanding America held of
al-Qaeda’s nature, combined with the intelligence community’s unprecedented
authority and structural mobilisation, could have resulted in phenomenal
results. However it is obvious here that the intelligence community was still
adapting to this threat. America acknowledged al-Qaeda as a global network of
cells, yet set out only to destroy the hard-core by ‘mapping
the organisation in a traditional military structure, with tiers and rows’
(McChrystal, 2011). Although their perception of al-Qaeda was more accurate to
its reality, their maintenance of old tactics hindered their performance.
2003–Present
Al-Qaeda’s remarkably ‘flexible organisation
that exercises both top-down and bottom-up planning and operational
capabilities’ (Hoffman, cited in Jordan, 2014: 4) has ensured its survival
today, with ‘much of its hierarchical structure operational in Pakistan, thus
enabling it to carry out new attacks in the West’ (Jordan, 2014: 4), e.g.
Madrid 2004 and London 2005. Survival is continued through its franchise of
networks, with its brand ‘spreading like wildfire’ (Kagan, 2014), as seen with
groups like Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Yet America argues that
they are ‘within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda’ (Panetta, cited in
Katulis and Juul, 2011), with Bin Laden’s death hailed as a poignant milestone.
The gap between the reality and the U.S. policymaker’s understanding of
al-Qaeda is apparent again here. The Obama administration ‘considers al-Qaeda
primarily to be the group of individuals comprising its leadership during, and
having involvement in, the September 11 attacks’ (Jan, 2014). Although
2001-2003 unveiled to America the tripartite identity of their enemy, Obama’s
limited definition neglects this identity. It continues to frame al-Qaeda
vertically, thus stifling the intelligence community’s capacity to perform
successfully against it.
Using the al-Qaeda in Iraq insurgency as a
case study, McChrystal demonstrates that the tactics used by the intelligence
community caught up with their new understanding of al-Qaeda. The realisation
that ‘to defeat a networked enemy we had to become a network ourselves’ created
‘F3EA: find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyse’. Intelligence was collected
through raids, such as cell phones, and sent straight to analysts, who ‘turned
this raw information into usable knowledge’. This knowledge was disseminated to
people ‘from multiple units and agencies’. Intelligence was shared
horizontally, and ‘decisions were decentralised and cut laterally across the
organisation’ (2011). This new intelligence cycle informed the CIA’s primary
covert action tactic against al-Qaeda: targeted killings of the al-Qaeda
leadership through drone strikes, such as Anwar al-Awlaki. A classified CIA
paper from 2007 concluded that ‘al-Qaeda was at its most dangerous since 2001
because of the base of operations that militants had established in North
Waziristan’ (cited in Jordan, 2014), thus ‘CIA attacks have struck Pakistan’s
tribal areas on average once every five days during Obama’s first term’ (Ross
et al., 2012). These aggressive attacks on the al-Qaeda network have been
successful: the killing of bin Laden through ‘spot-on intelligence by the CIA’
(O’Neill, 2014) is one example. There is a strong argument here that the
intelligence community’s actions have pushed al-Qaeda onto the defensive, with
‘those who remain…just trying to survive’ (Hanif cited in Yousafzai, 2012);
al-Qaeda members have been forced ‘to devote substantial attention and energy
to self-protection’, rather than to executing attacks. This is empirically
substantiated; during 2001-2006 there were three major success operations
(9/11, Madrid and London), whereas during 2007-2012 thirteen operations
did not result in a single successful attack (Jordan, 2014).
Subsequently, the intelligence community’s
re-mobilisation of the intelligence cycle in line with an evolved understanding
of al-Qaeda, culminating in the successful elimination of bin Laden and others,
sufficiently fulfilled Obama’s policy. He ‘directed [Panetta] to make the
killing or capture of Osama bin Laden the top priority in [America’s] war to
defeat al Qaeda’, and this resulted in ‘one of the greatest intelligence
successes in American history’ (Obama, 2011). Yet although the intelligence
community was successful within the confines of Obama’s counter-terror
strategy, their overall performance against al-Qaeda was lacking. The CIA’s use
of covert action outlined that the U.S. still misunderstood a key element of
the al-Qaeda identity: ideology. Obama’s narrow definition of al-Qaeda meant
that the intelligence community excluded ‘large portions of the al-Qaeda
network from consideration’ (Zimmerman, 2014), failing to fully engage with the
entirety of their enemy. Furthermore, their new tactics actually strengthened
al-Qaeda’s ideology; the killing of innocent Muslims as collateral damage from
drones has increased radicalisation globally. Thus the intelligence community
has performed unsuccessfully against ‘al-Qaedaism’, demonstrating their
ignorance of it through the use of controversial tactics. This reinforces the
stark gap between America’s perception of their performance
and the realityof their performance against al-Qaeda.
The American intelligence community has
failed so far to perform to the extent of their capabilities against al-Qaeda.
The pre-9/11 misjudgement of al-Qaeda’s tripartite threat failed both to fulfil
Clinton’s political objectives, as well as succeed against the strong al-Qaeda
core from 1996-2001. A stale CIA structure froze this misconception at the
heart of the intelligence community, melting only with the impact of 9/11.
Despite the September 11 attacks revealing al-Qaeda’s horizontal identity, the
Bush and Obama administrations continued to treat it as a vertical problem.
Although the intelligence community here achieved what policy required of it
under both Presidents, the tactics used from 2001-2003 were inappropriate for
fighting their multilateral enemy. It was not until the 2003 invasion of Iraq
that these tactics evolved in line with the U.S.’s newly born comprehension of
al-Qaeda’s structure. Yet Obama’s strategy mired the evolution that was needed
to fully confront al-Qaeda with this reformed intelligence cycle. Furthermore,
the controversial tactics adopted from 2001 serve only to reinforce the
pervasive gap between the reality of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence community’s
perception of it. This neglect of al-Qaeda’s ideology has only made the world
more dangerous, with the rise of the Islamic State proving that the intelligence
community, although successful against the al-Qaeda hard-core, has failed to
fight every facet of Islamic militancy effectively.
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