WHAT MUST BE DONE
By JONATHAN FOREMAN
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September 12, 2001 -- THE massacres yesterday were not a "disaster" -that word suggests something natural or inevitable, and the massive terrorist attack that has changed our world was neither.
It was something much worse: a bitter defeat, in what is essentially a war.
And there will be more such defeats with their terrible toll unless we react appropriately.
This means changing the way we deal with the rest of the world. America must now become the ruthless, far-reaching superpower we are so often caricatured as being.
This is not just a matter of retaliation, though retaliate and punish we must, and soon. It's also a matter of confronting the failure of those entrusted with the task of protecting us. (This does not just mean the airport security, though they have a lot to answer for.)
The fact that our intelligence services apparently had no inkling that a terrorist operation of such size and complexity was being prepared is unbelievable - and unforgiveable.
How could these agencies have possibly missed the movements of people and material to the U.S. from different parts of the Third World, the hiring of trained jet pilots for the hijackings, the vast money transfers that would have been necessary to arrange, multiple, simultaneous attacks on U.S. targets?
(To be sure, some of those who carried out the hijackings were probably "sleepers" planted in the U.S. years ago, just like the terrorists who planted the World Trade Center Bomb in 1993. But how hard can it be for the FBI not to keep a better eye on immigrants from the relevant Middle Eastern and South Asian countries?)At this point, most informed speculation suggests that this is an Osama Bin Laden operation: Of all our enemies, only he has the necessary resources, skills, manpower and relative invulnerability to attack.
Yet the CIA and other agencies have spent tens of millions of dollars probing Bin Laden's operations since the African embassy attacks in 1998.
For years, critics of the Central Intelligence Agency, and to a lesser extent of the NSA and FBI, have warned that they and other agencies have relied on high-tech electronic and signals intelligence, instead of the old-fashioned human kind.
Instead of sending spies who can speak the languages of terrorism, languages like Arabic, Farsi and Urdu - and the CIA has very, very few operatives from the relevant ethnic backgrounds, especially given the diversity of the U.S. population - they rely, foolishly, on satellites and listening stations.
In other words, we have plenty of eyes and ears in the sky, but too few down in the streets and tea houses of Baghdad, Damascus, Syria, Iran, Libya, Afhanistan and Pakistan.
Those intelligence assets we have are too often of poor quality, recruited by a bureaucratic and risk-averse agency whose senior officers seldom have spent enough time in any particular foreign country to develop real expertise.
To be sure, intelligence gathering of the kind necessary to combat international terrorism is not easy. It requires enormous amounts of time, hard-work, money and expertise. This is particularly true when it comes to the penetration of terrorist groups.
The Israelis and the British prevented huge bomb attacks by penetrating the organizations of their terrorist enemies. And if the CIA and the other U.S. agencies were at all serious about counter terrorism it would have done the same.They did not make the necessary efforts and we have paid for their dereliction in blood.
If George Tenet, the current head of the CIA, does not immediately take responsibility for his agency's abject failure to act as our country's shield, and resign, then you have to hope that he will begin a reorganization so thorough as to make it almost unrecognizable.
Free societies like our own are particularly vulnerable to terrorist attack, and we will suffer further defeats unless we have a foreign intelligence agency worthy of our people - one whose capacities better reflect our resources as a nation. We need an agency that can take the war to our enemies as the Israelis do, tracking down and assassinating their leaders.
Even more important, our enemies' enemies must be our friends in this struggle, just as they were during the Cold War.That means that we must work with the Indians, whatever the foolishness of their policies in Kashmir. And we must work with the Russians despite the brutality of their war in Chechnya. (Back in the mid '90s the Russians and the Chinese set up an organization called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to deal with Islamist terrorism in central Asia, and we should join it too.)Of course, successive administrations going back to the 1970s have not really taken anti-American terrorism seriously. Men sit in the governments of Syria, Iraq, Libya and Iran who have the blood of Americans on their hand. It seems that our lenity in dealing with them has only made our enemies bolder.
This does not mean that President Bush should order a few cruise missiles to be launched at rocky outcrops in Afghanistan. Such impotent gestures are arguably worse than doing nothing at all. Even more important none of our forces should be withdrawn from any of their foreign bases: it's all too likely that the removal of U.S. Marines from Jordan after Bin Laden threatened them this summer gave yesterday's perpetrators the encouragement they needed. This is a Pearl Harbor and the war it signals must end the same way, in the destruction of our enemies.
