The
9-11 Commission's final report will be remembered for
its nonpartisan tone, unwillingness to find the "fall
guy" in relation to terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, thoughtful recommendations for institutional and
procedural reorganization, and for identifying al-Qaeda
not merely as an organization, but as a movement that
will continue to threaten the United States even after
its current top leadership is eradicated. However, on
the issue of sharpening America's message toward the
world of Islam, the final report is quite short on
offering many new ideas in its recommendations.
On September 11, 2001, the report of the
10-person National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon
the United States says that the US became a "nation
transformed". To ensure that a tragedy of that magnitude
is not repeated, it makes two sweeping recommendations:
bureaucratic and procedural reorganization of a radical
nature; and a hard look at policy changes. By
definition, each of these solutions necessitates massive
transformation of the executive branch and, to a lesser
extent, that of the US Congress.
What went
wrong? As much as transnational terrorism posed a
threat to the US through the 1990s, the commission's
report states that the top US officials were not very
clear about it. "Though top officials all told us that
they understood the danger, we believe there was
uncertainty among them as to whether this was just a new
and especially venomous version of the ordinary
terrorist threat the United States had lived with for
decades, or it was indeed radically new, posing a threat
beyond any yet experienced." To accentuate its point,
the report states, "As late as September 4, 2001,
Richard Clarke, the White House staffer long responsible
for counter-terrorism policy coordination, asserted that
the government had not yet made up its mind how to
answer the question: Is al-Qaeda a big deal? A week
later came the answer."
So government officials
regarded al-Qaeda as a threat, but not serious enough
that it demanded imminent action, and certainly not such
drastic action as reorganization of national-security
institutions, until it was too late. The commission was
not interested in singling out the administrations of
Bill Clinton or George W Bush, but distributing the
blame in a bipartisan manner, a profoundly prudent
approach given the impending general elections come
November. Both presidents Clinton and George W Bush
pursued strategic agendas in which responding to
terrorism was one of the top items, but there were other
equally, if not more, competing demands. Only in
retrospect can one argue that countering terrorism
should have been given the utmost priority.
Then
there was another powerful factor that is entirely
missed when retrospective analyses of the inability of
the US government to take radical actions against global
terrorism are made. The US was at the time operating
under an entirely different international environment in
which US proactivism would have caused major global
controversies and charges of "hegemonism" and
"imperialism". Recall the criticism that Bill Clinton
encountered for shooting cruise missiles at Sudan in
1998.
At the bureaucratic level as well, the
national-security organizations were operating under
different rules and capabilities. The 9-11 Commission
report notes that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
"had minimal capacity to conduct paramilitary operations
with its own personnel, and it did not seek a
large-scale expansion of these capabilities before
[September] 11. The CIA also needed to improve its
capability to collect intelligence from human agents."
At the same time, the Department of Defense was not
engaged at any point before September 11 in the mission
of countering al-Qaeda. The Federal Bureau of
Investigation had the most inadequate capabilities in
the domestic area, especially its "capability to link
the collective knowledge of agents in the field to
national priorities". Finally, America's "homeland
defenders" - the Federal Aviation Administration and
NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) - were
ill-prepared to deal with a contingency of domestic
hijacking.
What is to be
done? "Reorganize" is the operative word of the
9-11 Commission report. Three significant
recommendations are to "unify strategic intelligence and
operational planning against Islamic terrorists across
the foreign-domestic divide"; "unifying the intelligence
community with a new National Intelligence Director
(NID)"; and creating a National Counter-Terrorism Center
(NCTC) that "would become the authoritative knowledge
bank" and "would build on the existing Terrorist Threat
Integration Center and would replace it and other
terrorism 'fusion centers' within the government".
The NID should be located in the Executive
Office of the President (EOP) and report directly to
him. As the intelligence community's "head", according
to the commission's report, the NID should have two main
jobs: "to oversee national intelligence centers that
combine experts from all the collection disciplines
against common targets - like counter-terrorism or
nuclear proliferation"; and "to oversee the agencies
that contribute to the national intelligence program".
The report also recommends the creation of five National
Intelligence Centers: WMD (weapons of mass destruction)
Proliferation, International Crime and Narcotics, Middle
East, Russia-Eurasia, and China/East Asia. These centers
"would be unified commands of the intelligence world -
long-overdue reform for intelligence comparable to the
1986 Goldwater-Nichols law that reformed the
organization of national defense".
Dealing
with al-Qaeda The 9-11 Commission rightly
identifies al-Qaeda as an ideological movement. As such,
its recommendation is to dismantle the al-Qaeda network
and "in the long term" prevail "over the ideology that
contributes to ... terrorism". It is on the topic of
prevailing over al-Qaeda that the commission's report
gets awfully fuzzy. For instance, it urges the US
government to "define" its message "and stand as an
example of moral leadership in the world". So we might
be witnessing a chorus and a counter-chorus of moral
leadership from the directions of the US and al-Qaeda.
One wonders whether the 9-11 Commission has given much
thought to the serious questions the US moral leadership
currently faces in the Middle East and the Muslim world
at large.
In the final analysis, the 9-11
Commission's recommendations for reorganization are not
likely to be acted on until the middle of next year.
Even then, the makeup of the US Congress and the
occupant of the White House will have a major say about
how many of those recommendations will be implemented,
curtailed, transformed or ignored. In terms of dealing
with al-Qaeda, the commission is on firmer ground when
it offers such suggestions as "support for public
education and economic openness" in the world of Islam,
but certainly not in its proposal for emphasizing
America's moral leadership. Such contentious rhetoric
would only result in similar claims from the other side,
creating a perfect setting for a dialogue of the deaf.
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