Getting Real About the War on Terror
Bush and his aides are correcting course and tacitly admitting errors. But they just can’t bring themselves to say so.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 8:52 p.m. ET March 1, 2007
March 1, 2007 - During Watergate, the Nixon administration was fond of issuing “nondenial denials”—criticizing The Washington Post’s reporting on the scandal without denying the facts in the stories outright. The Bush administration has grown enamored of making what I would call “nonconcession concessions.” President George W. Bush and his senior aides are correcting course big time—and implicitly admitting previous errors—without any acknowledgement that they are doing so.
One such concession was the administration’s decision to drop its opposition to talks with Iran and Syria at a regional conference on Iraq. “There’s no change in our policy,” insisted State Department spokesman Sean McCormack this week. But going back to 2002, the administration has consistently resisted engaging Iran and Syria on Iraq, even in the context of multilateral talks. In a meeting with former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan in the summer of 2002, Iran’s deputy foreign minister at the time, Javad Zarif, suggested that the governments launch a “six-plus-five” process on Iraq—meaning the “Permanent Five” U.N. Security Council members plus the six neighboring countries surrounding Iraq, including Iran. The Bush administration dismissed the idea. But that’s exactly the kind of meeting that’s now scheduled to happen in March and April.
Another shift came two weeks ago: the administration, which had long declared it would not succumb to Kim Jong Il’s “nuclear extortion,” announced an aid-for-nukes pact with North Korea. When I asked her about the new agreement at a Feb. 13 briefing, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied that it was a change of position, saying the deal was similar to a plan the administration was contemplating back in 2002 “when we got derailed.” Hard not to see that as a reversal, though, since in Bush’s first term, the administration made clear it would not even consider sitting down with the North Koreans unless Kim Jong Il dismantled his nuclear program first.
In fact, the whole premise of Bush’s first-term policy was called into question Wednesday when the administration’s top intel official on North Korea, Joseph DeTrani, admitted in congressional testimony that supposedly solid proof of North Korea’s uranium-enrichment program, offered up in 2002, was now considered tenuous. “They were acquiring technology, but whether there was an actual ‘program’ is another matter,” said a former senior Bush official, who would speak about classified details only on condition of anonymity. DeTrani’s testimony undercuts President Bush’s flat statement in November 2002 that the North Koreans were “enriching uranium.”
There’s been no bigger nonconcession concession than Dick Cheney’s bomb-plagued visit to Afghanistan this week. Though you won’t hear Cheney or any senior Bush official say it, the veep’s surprise diversion to troubled Central Asia from a trip to the Far East was an acknowledgement, in effect, that the administration’s confident assessments of Afghanistan have been mostly hype. As recently as last September, former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Afghanistan was making “excellent” progress. But now it is plain that increasingly large portions of the country are falling under control of the Taliban again.
Cheney may have gone to the region to try to crack down on the rising threat. But he found himself hamstrung in making tough demands of the Pakistani president. In an interview with NEWSWEEK on Wednesday, Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri said that, contrary to media reports, Cheney did not read the “riot act” to Musharraf, even though the vice president mentioned that congressional Democrats were threatening mildly to cut off aid. (Cheney himself, in remarks to reporters on his plane, denied that he had “beat up” on Musharraf.) This amounted to the vice president conceding that America is so constrained in Iraq, in terms of troops and resources, that it dares not put too much pressure on its dubious ally, Musharraf, any longer. On the contrary, the meeting was friendly, Kasuri said. “There was talk of the [Taliban’s] spring offensive. Naturally, we are worried, and the Americans are worried.”
How worried? Bush announced two weeks ago that he needed money to double the size of Afghanistan's national army, and he was extending the stay of 3,200 U.S. troops. What this means is that a lot of mistakes are coming back to haunt us at once in a part of the world that was home to the 9/11 plotters—a place that may be failing because it is the victim of what Bush’s former Afghan envoy, Jim Dobbins, calls "the most underresourced nation-building effort in history.” “The United States has consistently put Afghanistan on lesser priority than Iraq,” says former Pakistan diplomat Husain Haqqani. “And so when you do that, you end up depending on warlords in Afghanistan, and you have to take what you get from Pakistan.” And what Musharraf is willing to give, according to Haqqani and others, is the bare minimum. Until Cheney's visit, it had been more than a year since Pakistan offered up a high-level arrest or target to Washington. But abruptly Thursday, after weeks of denying that fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar or other senior Taliban officials were in the town of Quetta, Pakistan's government announced the arrest of a senior Taliban official there. Says Haqqani: "Most of Musharraf's actions against jihadis have been reluctantly taken under tremendous U.S. pressure, often preceding or just following a high-level American visit." (The Pakistan foreign minister insists this is nonsense, that his government is doing everything it can. But its influence is limited in the tribal areas. “What we’re trying to do is wean people away from the militants,” he says.)
Above all, Cheney’s trip was a tacit admission that the administration took its eye off the main task when it pivoted from All Qaeda’s base, in the mountains of Afghanistan, toward Iraq in early 2002. Indeed, the fact that Al Qaeda-type terrorists have rebuilt their haven in Afghanistan and the border region of Pakistan—combined with the fact that a new failed state has emerged in parts of Iraq—is the most powerful evidence to date that the Bush administration may have misconceived the “war on terror.” Al Qaeda was always a transnational movement, one rooted in failed states and in uncontrolled areas like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What’s now become clear is that the real center of gravity in the global war on terror was not “state sponsors” like Saddam (or the Iranians for that matter). Based on the evidence, these states were little more than interested observers, perhaps supplying some help or encouragement or looking the other way, but that’s about it.
There was only one fully committed state sponsor: Afghanistan's Taliban government, a movement bought and paid for by Osama bin Laden’s money. And we must now conclude that Bush’s critical diversion of attention and resources away from that fight cost us the death blow the United States might have delivered to both Al Qaeda and the Taliban had we stayed focused on Central Asia. (Just ask Gary Bernsten, the CIA officer in charge of the “Jawbreaker” operation at Tora Bora, who implored Rumsfeld in vain for more U.S. special forces while the trapped bin Laden escaped and the Pentagon began to turn its attention to Iraq.) Just as bad, the invasion of Iraq gave the Al Qaeda chieftain a new lease on life by vindicating his argument about the peril of the “far enemy,” as the United States was known in his group's rhetoric. On the eve of 9/11, according to documents obtained from Al Qaeda’s seized computers, bin Laden and his top aide, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had difficulty persuading their fellow jihadis that it was wise to take on the distant superpower. (One of them even compared bin Laden's grandiose war against America to "tilting at windmills.")
Bush ended that debate in bin Laden’s favor when he turned the U.S. into the “near enemy”—again, Al Qaeda rhetoric—in the Arab world by invading Iraq.
And now the merger between the old "near enemy"—the Sunni Arab regimes—and the new "near enemy"—America—is all but complete. The president’s newest conception of the global war on terror is that it is a fight that pits him and fellow “moderates” (Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Abdullah of Jordan and so on) on one side against “extremists” (the democratically empowered Islamists like Hamas and Hizbullah, who’ve been grouped with Al Qaeda) on the other. This is a dramatic expansion of bin Laden’s political base and undoubtedly, if he is still alive, it is a dream come true.
So we have gone from a war with just one front, Afghanistan, to a war on many fronts. Iraq is failing, and it has become a jihadi factory that could easily dwarf what Afghanistan was to Al Qaeda in the '90s. Afghanistan itself, meanwhile, seems to be making a comeback as a home to extremists. Yes, it's a good thing that the administration is finally getting real on many issues and ridding itself of previous unworkable or ill-considered policies. The Bush team appears more willing to negotiate—with North Korea, Iran and Syria—than ever before, and more open to acknowledging the hellhole Afghanistan has become. But while it has been belatedly getting its head straight, the rather simple battlefield Bush once faced on 9/11 has become infinitely more complex. And no amount of nonconcession concessions will change that ugly reality.
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