Selected excerpts of an article from from today's NYT.
Their enemy is a man, not a state, backed by acolytes, not armies. In this war, where high-tech weapons may prove less effective than pickups packed with dynamite, bin Laden, the exiled Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan, represents something different -- something that Milt Bearden, a former senior CIA official, calls "Terror Inc."
His organization, such as it is, is unlike any other. It has no real headquarters and no fixed address to target. It is a coalition of like-minded warriors living in exile from their homes in Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan and other Islamic nations riven by religious and political battles.
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"There is a quantum difference in the way bin Laden looks at terror," he said. "What we are seeing is a shift to terrorism on a more theological basis, to groups that are not after precise political goals. When you start to embrace goals as broad as bin Laden's, you are no longer constrained by the number of casualties you incur. You are now in a different game."
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The rebels fought the Soviet Army in a real war, sheltered in mountains and caves, and their battlements and bunkers have been fortified by bin Laden. Their numbers alone make bin Laden's organization by far the world's largest international terrorist group.
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And if history is a guide, the United States will not fight this war in the mountains of Afghanistan. The last two superpowers that tried -- the British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 1980s -- met bloody defeats.
Alongside bin Laden in Afghanistan stand leading members of the other two groups -- the Islamic Group and Jihad, both based in Egypt -- which are skilled in the art of political assassination.
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Their resumes include the murder of President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt in 1981 and the attempted murder in 1995 of his successor, Hosni Mubarak, two of the foremost pro-American Arab leaders of the last generation. These groups have killed 85 tourists in two attacks in Cairo and Luxor in the last two years.
One of her spokesmen, James Foley said: "A new era, in effect, is upon us. It's imperative that the American people understand and prepare themselves for facing this kind of a threat into the 21st century for as long as it's necessary to face the threat."
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But Bremer, the nation's counterterrorism ambassador in the 1980s, said: "There's no such thing as eliminating terror, any more than eliminating crime. What we're in for, if we're serious about it, is the kind of sustained effort it took during the Cold War -- not months, not years, but decades.
In this asymmetrical war, where a small band of suicidal bombers can hit the United States harder than the U.S. military can hit back, "good intelligence is 80 percent of the battle," Bremer said.
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Flush with success in identifying bin Laden as the likely author of the embassy bombings in Africa, and armed with at least six years of electronically gathered information and other secret intelligence on bin Laden, Washington's former ally in the Afghan war, the intelligence agency now has orders to play offense as well as defense against the man the world sees as the archenemy of the West. |
