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washingtonposhcom The Washington Post January 20, 2002, Sunday, Final Edition SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A01 LENGTH: 5414 words HEADLINE: A Strategy's Cautious Evolution; Before Sept. 11, the Bush Anti-Terror Effort Was Mostly Ambition BYLINE: Barton Gellman, Washington Post Staff Writer BODY: On a closed patch of desert in the first week of June, the U.S. government built a house for Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden would have recognized the four-room villa. He lived in one just like it outside Kandahar, Afghanistan, whenever he spent a night among the recruits at his Tarnak Qila training camp. The stone-forstone replica, in Nevada, was a prop in the rehearsal of his death. From a Predator drone flying two miles high and four miles away, Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency ground controllers loosed a missile. It carried true with a prototype warhead, one of about 100 made, for killing men inside buildings. According to people briefed on the experiment, careful analysis after the missile pierced the villa wall showed blast effects that would have slain anyone in the target room. The Bush administration now had in its hands what one participant called "the holy grail" of a three-year quest by the U.S. government — a tool that could kill bin Laden within minutes of finding him. The CIA planned and practiced the operation. But for the next three months, before the catastrophe of Sept. 11, President Bush and his advisers held back. The new national security team awaited results of a broad policy review toward the al Qaeda network and Afghanistan's Taliban regime, still underway in a working group two and three levels below the president. Bush and his top aides had higher priorities — above all, ballistic missile defense. As they turned their attention to terrorism, they were moving toward more far-reaching goals than the death of bin Laden alone. Bush's engagement with terrorism in the first eight months of his term, described in interviews with advisers and contemporary records, tells a story of burgeoning ambition without the commitment of comparably ambitious means. In deliberations and successive drafts of a National Security Presidential Directive approved by Bush's second-ranking advisers on Aug. 13, the declared objective evolved from "rolling back" to "permanently eroding" and eventually to "eliminating" bin Laden's al Qaeda organization. Cabinet-rank policymakers, or principals, took up the new strategy for the first time on Sept. 4. It called for phased escalation of pressure against Taliban leaders to present them with an unavoidable choice — disgorge al Qaeda or face removal from power.

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And the brass knuckles came on. America's frontline agents in the war on terror have hacked into foreign banks, used secret prisons overseas, and spent over $20 million bankrolling friendly Muslim intelligence services. They have assassinated al Qaeda leaders, spirited prisoners to nations with brutal human-rights records, and amassed files equal to a thousand encyclopedias. But the war is far from over. Last week, Osama bin Laden's top deputy exhorted the faithful to strike at western embassies and businesses. The injunction, from Ayman al-Zawahiri, came on the heels of bombings in Morocco and Saudi Arabia and caused the United States to close diplomatic posts overseas and increase the homeland security warning level from yellow to orange. Al Qaeda, one FBI veteran explained, "has one more 9/11 inthem." With all the headlines about the latest attacks and warnings, however, it is easy to miss the amount of damage America's terrorist hunters have inflicted on bin Laden's ragtag army. U.S. News has retraced the war on terror, starting in the very first weeks after 9/11, to examine in detail how Washington and its allies launched an unprecedented drive, led by the Central Intelligence Agency, to disrupt and destroy bin Laden's operation. Interviews were conducted with over three dozen past and current counterterrorism officials in a half-dozen INVESTIGATIVE REPORT

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THE NATIONAL INTEREST Number 72 • Summer 2003 No part of this article may be copied, downloaded, stored, further transmitted, transfered, distributed, altered or otherwise used, in any form or by any means, except: • one stored electronic and one paper copy of any article solely for your personal, non-commercial use; or • with prior written permission of THE NATIONAL INTEREST. THE NATIONAL INTEREST (ISSN 0884-9382) is published quarterly by the The National Interest, Inc., a non-profit partnership of Hollinger International, Inc. and The Nixon Center. Contact TNI for further permission regarding the use of this work.

Copyright © 2003 by The National Interest, Inc. All rights reserved.

CHAIRMAN OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Cmrad Black

CO-CHAIRMAN OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Henry A. Kissinger

PUBLISHER James R. Schlesmge?CO-PUBLISHER Dimitri K. Simes EDITOR EMERITUS Owen Harries EDITORIAL BOARD Zbignie-w Brzezinski • Eliot A. Cohen • Midge Decter • Martin Feldstein • Francis Fukuyama • Samuel P. Huntington Josef Joffe • Charles Krauthammer • Michael Mandelbaum • Richard Perle • Daniel Pipes • Alexey K. Pushkov • Stephen Sestanovich • Robert W. Tucker

From Current History vol. 101, no. 659 (December 2002), pp. 409-413. ^Security Strategy. fd :errorjs^ arfil %raijt§^an5 *4ncouragbig fbee afldTgp^ls^^li^Jal'ev^c^ e|miBj - -^/ .^: 4entl^&atit*l^ores!s;tfiattiiese:f^0gOai4<)fteiltoi^^$'j^ ^*-^AJ ^v.*. • ~>^griofity: America's commitment to its id^als^ora cot»Gejii"fo;r it§-s£ . r-'TJa&y? advice'jtaJhow td answer t;* ", ^ -f •*• jthese *i » y fluesi|plis/ f. —-^aj___ , j , t

Hard Choices: National Security and the War on Terrorism Ivo H. DAALDER, JAMES M. LINDSAY, AND JAMES B. STEINBERG

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underestimates the contribution that broad-based alliances and institutions make to furthering United States interests over the long term. Finally, the strategy warns that failed states threaten American security, but proposes economic and political assistance programs ill suited to alleviating the danger.

resident George W. Bush's National Security Strategy, which the White House released in mid-September, presents his vision of a "distinctly American internationalism."1 Media reports focused on the strategy's support for preempting emerging threats militarily, but the 31-page document covers a far broader set of issues. At its core, the National Security Strategy calls for the United States to use its "unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence" to establish a "balance of power that favors human freedom" and to defeat the threat posed by "terrorists and tyrants." These themes will likely resonate with the American people, who believe that the United States should play a leading role in making the world a safer and better place. Although the strategy's overarching goals make sense, its proposals on how to achieve them raise important questions. First, the National Security Strategy sets as a goal promoting global freedom but gives priority to a counterterrorism policy that relies heavily on the help of countries that in many cases do not share America's basic values. Second, the strategy fails to recognize the limitations of preemption as a policy tool for rogue states or to specify when it should be used. Third, the strategy emphasizes ad hoc coalitions as the preferred means for addressing threats to international security and

DEFENDING, PRESERVING, AND EXTENDING PEACE The cover letter President Bush submitted along with the National Security Strategy identifies its main objectives: "We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent." Curiously, the strategy is not organized around these themes, but this three-pronged approach captures the thrust of its recommendations. The first duty of government is to provide for the common defense. This, the Bush strategy maintains, requires defeating America's enemies—which it identifies as a mix of terrorists, tyrants, and technology. September 11 established beyond doubt that "shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores." Tyrants in a few countries have turned their states into rogues. They "brutalize their own people," "display no regard for international law," "are determined to acquire weapons of rriass destruction," "sponsor terrorism around the globe," and "reject basic human values and hate the United States." The diffusion of modern technology makes these terrorists and tyrants ever more dangerous. It could give them a "catastrophic power to strike great nations," enabling them "to blackmail us, or to harm us, or to harm our friends."

Ivo H. DAALDER and JAMES M. LINDSAY are senior fellows in, and JAMES B. STEINBERG is director and vice president of, the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution.

iThe full text of The National Security Strategy of the United States of America may be found at . 409