There are some significant points unaddressed in the Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States” dated April 2006. This blog has contended the October 2002 NIE on Iraqi WMD contained a serious omission. It misled by failing to specify whether Iraqi WMD programs had progressed to the point at which Iraqi trops were equipped, trained and ready to use them. Had it done so, Operation Iraqi Freedom might have been fought differently – or not fought at all. Townhall columnist Alan Reynolds Reynolds criticizes Congressional leaders for not seeing through the ambiguous and misleading statements in the October 2002 NIE on Iraqi WMD programs.
While the 2006 NIE tells us “…threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide.” It does not characterize these threats.
The characterization is crucial. Let’s accept Vice President Cheney’s “one percent doctrine” – that we must respond even if there is a one percent chance that a threat will materialize. Having accepted this point we must still ask, what will be our response? The danger of over-responding can be seen by an analogy to the Spanish flu. Scientists have wondered why the flu epidemic killed a disproportionately high number of young people. Scientists now realize that it was an most people died from a strong immune response to the flu virus. Paradoxically those with a weaker immune response survived the attack.
When I was at the US Army War College in 1990, we characterized threats as:
- Survival threats - a nuclear attack that could kill 100 million citizens in 30 minutes. Our response was to be sure that the President could make good on the threat to retaliate by killing 100 million Russians.
- Vital threats – Nazi Germany was a vital threat to the existence of free governments in Europe. Here are two tests to determine if a threat is vital: 1) would a just war advocate rate it as a “just cause” and 2) would you want your Senator to vote in favor of a military response that would send your son or daughter into harm's way?
- Major threats – a threat to which the country must respond by use of soft power or some sort of military action short of war.
We spent immense amounts of financial and social capital dealing with the survival threat. I spent 32 years analyzing the status of Soviet weapons programs. I’m proud of what we accomplished, but in a better world my efforts might have gone to a more positive cause. Other men and women put their lives on the line every day to combat that threat. The response was, in my mind, justified – and thanks to Ronald Reagan (and others), we survived the threat and our economy began to recover from what we spent.
In September Atlantic Monthly published a James Fallows' Declaring Victory (subscription required) that makes a similar point about the danger of an overly strong response to a small threat:
“…the most useful analogy was the menace posed by European anarchists in the nineteenth century. “If you add up everyone they personally killed, it came to maybe 2,000 people, which is not an existential threat.” But one of their number assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The act itself took the lives of two people. The unthinking response of European governments in effect started World War I. “So because of the reaction they provoked, they were able to kill millions of people and destroy a civilization.
“It is not the people al-Qaeda might kill that is the threat,” he concluded. "Our reaction is what can cause the damage. It’s al-Qaeda plus our response that creates the existential danger.”
Fallows finds the ability of al-Queda to mount another 9/11 scale attack has been significantly diminished. He quotes Rand Corporation terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins:
“The Taliban were dispersed, and al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan were dismantled.” Al-Qaeda operatives by the thousands have been arrested, detained, or killed. So have many members of the crucial al-Qaeda leadership circle around bin Laden and his chief strategist, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Moreover, Jenkins’s briefer warns, it has become harder for the remaining al-Qaeda leaders to carry out the organization’s most basic functions: “Because of increased intelligence efforts by the United States and its allies, transactions of any type—communications, travel, money transfers—have become more dangerous for the jihadists. Training and operations have been decentralized, raising the risk of fragmentation and loss of unity. Jihadists everywhere face the threat of capture or martyrdom.”
The terrorists are not in a position to attack a vital target - the destruction of which would collapse the American economy. In the classical Clausewitzian sense, there is no center of gravity that they attack. They can, however, mount small-scale attacks such as a suicide bombing or the nerve gas attack in 1995 in a Japanese subway. All loss of life is tragic – but the death of 10 people in a nerve agent attack is not a survival, or even a vital, threat.
If the centralized Al-Qaeda threat is diminished, we still face the threat of jahidis “self starter groups”. These can provoke us into self-damaging responses. Fallows makes the case that we have already over-responded to lower level threats:
The DHS now spends $42 billion a year on its vast range of activities, which include FEMA and other disaster-relief efforts, the Coast Guard, immigration, and border and customs operations. Of this, about $5 billion goes toward screening passengers at airports. The widely held view among security experts is that this airport spending is largely for show. Strengthened cockpit doors and a flying public that knows what happened on 9/11 mean that commercial airliners are highly unlikely to be used again as targeted flying bombs. “
…
Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan.
Bin Laden also hoped that such an entrapment would drain the United States financially
…
Higher-priced oil has hurt America, but what has hurt more is the economic reaction bin Laden didn’t fully foresee. This is the systematic drag on public and private resources created by the undifferentiated need to be “secure.”The effect is most obvious on the public level. “The economy as a whole took six months or so to recover from the effects of 9/11,” Richard Clarke told me. “The federal budget never recovered. The federal budget is in a permanent mess, to a large degree because of 9/11.” At the start of 2001, the federal budget was $125 billion in surplus. Now it is $300 billion in deficit."
The April 2006, NIE judges that the threat is now more diverse and lower in level:
We judge that most jihadist groups both well-known and newly formed will use improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks focused primarily on soft targets to implement their asymmetric warfare strategy, and that they will attempt to conduct sustained terrorist attacks in urban environments. Fighters with experience in Iraq are a potential source of leadership for jihadists pursuing these tactics.
With one exception:
- CBRN capabilities will continue to be sought by jihadist groups
Acquiring CBRN capabilities is very difficult, even for large, well-financed and centralized Al Qeda. Making a weapon out of Anthrax, Sarin or a making a dirty bomb requires laboratories, engineering talent, money, and time. Programs such as this are more difficult to conceal and vulnerable to accidents – as the terrorist group planning the Bojinka attack in the Philippines discovered.
The NIE’s error of omission is this: it fails to state that the more probable, lower level threats are not vital threats. As such they require a response. That response, however, must be calibrated. It will require the use of “soft power,” building democracy worldwide, coordinated federal and local police efforts, continued high level efforts against CBRN and other weapons of mass destruction.
It will also require a determined effort to resist playing into jahidist hands by over-responding to less than vital threats.
It would take a persuasive leader to convince the public that 1) there is little that can be done to eliminate the possibility of a suicide bomber or gunman in a downtown shopping mall and 2) that attempting to eliminate this possibility will harm the republic more than reducing it. Yet, reading the NIE, and Fallows, leads to this conclusion.
(Note to readers: As an Atlantic Monthly subscriber, I can have them send you a copy of the Fallows article. Please email me if you would like one.)
NOTE: this post linked to Beltway Traffic Jam for 10/02/2006.
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