More than a decade after 9/11, it seems safe to say, the global war on terror has been both an extraordinary success and a colossal failure.
The Hunt for KSM, an in-depth account of the pursuit and capture of the architect of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, gives us the war on terror at its best and worst. Here we have the story of dogged agents painstakingly cultivating intelligence and running down every semi-credible lead as they chase one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists across the globe.
We also have the story of the bureaucratic infighting that may well have delayed KSM’s capture and certainly ensured that the agents who knew him best were nowhere in sight during the first three years of his interrogations in Pakistan and at a series of secret prisons.
At the centre of this intragovernmental warfare are two familiar antagonists, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), with their fundamentally different approaches to terrorism, epitomised by their reactions to 9/11. “The FBI, looking at the smoldering ruins in New York ... reflexively asked: What happened?” the authors write. “The CIA was far better at looking past the disaster that had occurred and asking the defining question of the period: what next?”
In the wake of 9/11, when the need to prevent another attack was pretty much all that mattered, the CIA became America’s pre-eminent antiterror agency, and the FBI, with its years of hard-earned knowledge of radical Islam, was shunted aside. In the case of KSM the result was especially tragic, according to Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer, both former journalists with The Los Angeles Times; it meant that Francis J Pellegrino, an FBI agent who had been obsessively tracking KSM since the World Trade Centre bombing in 1993, was essentially cut out of the loop.
When Mr Mohammed was betrayed to the CIA by an old friend and chased down to a safe house in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in early 2003, Mr Pellegrino was asked to provide a list of questions to his interrogators, private CIA contractors with no particular expertise in Al Qaeda. He declined. (“I don’t write questions,” he said. “I ask questions.”) The rest of the story should have been easy to predict: Mr Mohammed provided his interrogators with a lot of bad information in order to get them to stop torturing him.
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The authors have reconstructed an almost decade-long clandestine manhunt in exacting detail, an undeniably impressive feat of sleuthing. Narrative velocity is not a problem either; The Hunt for KSM moves along at the brisk pace of a good crime novel. Where the book falls short is in the depth and intimacy of its portraiture. It presents a tantalising cast of characters – most notably Mr Pellegrino, a former accountant, and Mr Mohammed, a modern-day Carlos the Jackal – but never quite brings us close to any of them.
Seth G Jones’s Hunting in the Shadows provides a wider-angle view of the war on terror. Rather than zeroing in on the hunt for a single bad guy, Mr Jones, a former senior adviser at US Special Operations Command, seems determined not to leave any out. The result is a seemingly endless rogues’ gallery of terrorists and their American pursuers since 9/11.
But if Hunting in the Shadows can at times make for slow reading, it is an important book, though less for the individual stories it tells than for the broader analysis Mr Jones uses to frame them. As he sees it, the history of Al Qaeda’s war against the Western world can be best understood as a series of “waves.” The first started with the embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998, crested on 9/11 and ended with allied forces striking back against Al Qaeda’s leaders in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. The second began in 2003, after the American invasion of Iraq, and ended when a growing number of tribal sheiks in Iraq turned on Al Qaeda. The third rose between 2009 and 2011, driven by the emergence of the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, and concluded with the killing of Osama bin Laden and several other Qaeda leaders last year.
Studying these waves can tell us a lot about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to fighting terrorism. Most fundamentally, we have learned the hard way that the war on terror isn’t really a war — that if we attempt to defeat Al Qaeda by deploying large numbers of conventional soldiers to foreign countries, we are only likely to create a backlash of radicalisation.
Instead, Mr Jones explains, we should rely on “a light-footprint approach” that favours special operations and intelligence-gathering. We should help local governments establish basic law and order in unstable areas where Al Qaeda is threatening to grow roots. And we should wage our propaganda battle against Al Qaeda, one that emphasises the organisation’s indiscriminate murder of civilians.
President Obama recently declared that victory over Al Qaeda was “within our reach”, and that the time had come to refocus the nation’s energy and resources on domestic affairs. Let’s hope he’s right. But if he’s not, and a fourth wave is still to come, he and his successors in the White House would do well to keep these lessons in mind.
THE HUNT FOR KSM
Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind,
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer
Little, Brown & Company; 350 pages; $27.99
HUNTING IN THE SHADOWS
The Pursuit of Al Qa’ida Since 9/11
Seth G Jones
W W Norton & Company; 534 pages; $27.95
©2012 The New York Times News Service
