Rumsfeld Questions Terrorism Strategy

A memo from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to his senior staff raises doubts about how much progress has been made in the war on terrorism and asks whether the Pentagon is the right agency to lead the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations around the world.

The sober tone of the memo, which refers to the campaign in Iraq and Afghanistan as “a long, hard slog,” contrasts sharply with the upbeat public face that Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials have put on U.S. efforts to defeat terrorists. Its disclosure has struck a chord in a capital where lawmakers from both major political parties have been increasingly questioning the Bush administration’s goals in Iraq and its direction in fighting terrorism.

Portions of Rumsfeld’s memo seemed aimed at the CIA, giving middling marks to the effort to capture terrorist leaders and raising questions about whether the agency has the authority it needs to do the job.

“Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror?.... Is our current situation such that ‘the harder we work, the behinder we get?’ ” Rumsfeld asks in the Oct. 16 memo, sent to Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy.

The memo was first reported in Wednesday’s editions of USA Today. It was later released by the Pentagon, where officials tried to deflate any suggestion that the memo reflected pessimism by Rumsfeld about the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and efforts to tamp down terrorism.

“It was not a memo about Iraq, and it was not a memo about Afghanistan,” Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita said Wednesday.

“It was a memo about the global war on terror, trying to ask the kinds of questions that need to be asked, that any leader should be asking.”

Rumsfeld’s intent, DiRita said, was to provoke candid discussion within the Defense Department about “the big questions in the war on terror.”

In a brief question-and-answer session with reporters in Canberra, Australia, President Bush said he hadn’t read the memo but that he agrees with the sentiment. “What I agree with is that the war on terror is going to be tough work, and it’s going to take a while. And we’re making great progress,” Bush said.

In the memo, Rumsfeld, one of the architects of the administration’s policy on fighting terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, asks whether the institution he leads is capable of waging the war in the future.

A “new institution,” he writes, may be needed to fight terrorism because “it is not possible” to transform the Pentagon fast enough to effectively conduct the war on Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

Such an institution might be formed within the Pentagon or outside it, but it must be one that “seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem,” the memo says. “It is not possible to change DoD [the Department of Defense] fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror.”

While Rumsfeld, Bush and others have said often that the war on terror will be long and difficult, the administration has talked frequently of the victories already achieved in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rumsfeld’s memo, by contrast, acknowledges that those battles aren’t yet won and that success is not a sure thing.

“It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.”

The memo may provide ammunition for critics who say the war in Iraq has distracted government leaders from the broader goal of fighting terrorism.

“Here’s one of the architects behind the Bush administration’s foreign policy and Iraq policy basically admitting that we may have missed the target,” said Charles Pena, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian public policy research organization in Washington.

But Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council counterterrorism expert and co-author of “The Age of Sacred Terror,” said, “It’s reassuring that someone is asking some of the hard questions, even if there’s a bit too much happy talk in the administration’s public rhetoric.”

U.S. intelligence officials took issue with some of Rumsfeld’s comments, particularly the implication that the war on terrorism was suffering from flagging energy or a lack of focus.

“There’s anything but complacency on this particular issue,” one U.S. intelligence official said. He added that he believed the United States had had more than “mixed results,” as Rumsfeld put it, in its efforts to corral senior members of Al Qaeda.

“If you look at the scorecards of how many in the top and middle tier have been detained, that is substantial progress,” the official said. He allowed that there had been a “slowing down” in the rate at which Al Qaeda operatives and others were being apprehended. “But it’s inevitably going to slow down some. You pick the low-hanging fruit, as it were, and then it gets tougher and tougher.”

But overall, he said, Rumsfeld’s memo was “an appropriate recognition of reality.”

The failure to capture Mullah Mohammed Omar and other senior figures of the Taliban of Afghanistan, noted in the memo, stems in part from the fact that capturing members of the deposed Afghan government has been a lower priority.

“They also melted away more than the [Arabs],” a second intelligence official said, referring to the ease with which Taliban figures blended into their homeland, while Arab members of Al Qaeda were forced to flee.

Intelligence officials dismissed Rumsfeld’s suggestion that the CIA might need a “new finding,” a presidential directive giving the CIA authority to carry out covert operations.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush has dramatically expanded the CIA’s authority to hunt and kill Al Qaeda operatives around the world. The scope of this new power was first demonstrated about a year ago, when the CIA fired a missile from an unmanned Predator surveillance aircraft, killing a carload of Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen.

A military intelligence official said the memo reflected Rumsfeld’s rising frustration with events in Iraq as well as a spate of setbacks in Afghanistan, where remnants of the Taliban have regrouped and launched attacks on American troops and the interim Afghan government.

The secretary is also feeling new pressure from the White House, said the official, citing the recent decision to give national security advisor Condoleezza Rice a larger role in managing postwar Iraq. “Why would he be in position to be outmaneuvered” unless there was dissatisfaction elsewhere in the administration? the official asked.

Although Rumsfeld and others in the administration have at times sought to cast the war on terrorism in broad terms and downplay the importance of capturing Osama bin Laden or ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, their ability to elude U.S. forces has also frustrated Rumsfeld, and has rallied their followers. The release of a new Bin Laden tape over the weekend served as another reminder of the limits of U.S. intelligence.

“It would be very helpful to get both of those individuals,” the military intelligence official said. “There are always those who say you’re not putting forth enough effort until you capture them.”

Bush has already granted the CIA the authority to kill or capture Bin Laden and other senior Al Qaeda figures.

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Times staff writer Maura Reynolds contributed to this report from Canberra, Australia.

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Rumsfeld’s past progress reports

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Past comments by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on progress in the war on terrorism:

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Sept. 24, 2003, before the Senate Appropriations Committee

“Earlier this month, the American people marked the anniversary of the September 11th attacks -- and took stock of all that had been accomplished in the two years since this war on terror was visited upon us two years ago.

Thanks to the courage of our men and women in uniform, two brutal regimes have been removed from power, two nations rescued from tyranny ... thousands of terrorists have been captured or killed -- including nearly two-thirds of known senior Al Qaeda operatives, and most of those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. With the support of dozens of nations, a number of planned attacks have been stopped, terrorist assets seized and thousands of lives saved.”

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Sept. 11, on PBS’ “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer”

“Well, the Al Qaeda has been put under enormous pressure. A good many of them have been captured or killed. Their ability to function has been significantly affected. They’re still dangerous. No question about that.... [But] we’ve made it very difficult for them to raise money, to move money, to move people across lines, to communicate with each other.”

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May 15, Pentagon briefing

“Is the problem over? No. Has everything been accomplished that one would want? No. But is it harder to raise money? You bet it is. Is it harder to get from one country to another? Yes, it is. There are an awful lot of countries that are -- have watch lists, where they’re looking for people. So it’s much more difficult for them to function. I would say that the progress has been quite good.”

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Feb. 5, before the House Armed Services Committee

“One could make a case that what we’re doing is exactly the right thing. We’re using all elements of national power. We’re using a 90-nation coalition. We’re putting pressure on terrorists, terrorist networks, states that harbor terrorists, and terrorist states that have weapons of mass destruction. And it is having an effect. There is no question.... We know the difficulty they’re having in transferring money, the difficulty they’re having in moving between countries, in buying capability, in executing terrorist acts. We see things that are stopped. We’re getting much better intelligence information.”

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Dec. 18, 2002, on CNN’s “Larry King Live”

“Think of the number of people that aren’t being recruited, because of the pressure that’s being put on. Think of the number of dollars that aren’t being fed into the network. Think of the number of bank accounts that were frozen. Think of the number of pieces of scraps of information from people who were arrested and interrogated. We get information every day from the detainees that we’ve arrested.”

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Oct. 24, 2002, interview on CNN International’s “Q&A;”

“The fact of the matter is that the president has put together 90 nations in the global war on terrorism. It’s the largest coalition in the history of humankind. It’s breathtaking in its breadth and its depth. And they are cooperating all across the globe with intelligence-sharing and closing bank accounts of terrorists. It’s been a wonderfully successful effort.”

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Source: Los Angeles Times