Rural Ruminations

[Originally published in the Rutland Herald and Barre Times-Argus.  Written by Steven Kleinman and Haviland Smith.]

Editor’s note: The authors both attended the June 24 conference cited below.

On June 24, Human Rights First published the following set of principles on torture and interrogation. The principles were put together during a two-day conference in Washington, D.C., by 15 former interrogators and senior intelligence officials with more than 350 years collective field experience in the military, the FBI and the CIA, spanning the period from World War II to Afghanistan and Iraq. They declared unanimously that torture is an “unlawful, ineffective and counterproductive” way to gather intelligence.

The officials stated the following:

“Non-coercive, rapport-based interviewing approaches provide the best possibility for obtaining accurate and complete intelligence.

We reject torture and other inhumane, abusive interview techniques. We believe such techniques are unlawful, ineffective and counterproductive.

Use of these techniques has resulted in false and misleading information, loss of critical intelligence and serious damage to the reputation and standing of the United States. Use of such techniques also facilitates enemy recruitment efforts, misdirects or wastes scarce resources, and deprives the U.S. of the standing to demand humane treatment of captured Americans.

There must be a single well-defined standard of conduct to govern the detention and interrogation of people in U.S. custody, consistent with our values as a nation.

There is no conflict between adhering to our nation’s essential values, including respect for the inherent dignity of individuals, and our ability to obtain the information we need to protect the nation.”

Of the 15 present, all but a few of them had been directly involved in the process of interrogation during their careers. All those who had been practitioners of interrogation agreed without exception or reservation with the above statement.

Interrogation is the process of obtaining intelligence and/or information from detainees. Over the many years it has been practiced by this country in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, it has become clear that coercive interrogation techniques not only do not work, but are often counterproductive.

Once a detainee is in our custody, the process of successfully obtaining what intelligence he has, is at its very best, a process of seduction during which the detainee is developed as a potential source of information. This involves a solid understanding of what motivates the detainee and an ability to use that motivation to the interrogator’s advantage.

For anyone who has been involved in a seduction, it will be immediately clear that coercion simply will not work. What works is the exact opposite – a careful and thoughtful exchange of ideas and attitudes that will help the interrogator find a path to the desired intelligence.

Coercive techniques do not build mutual understanding, rapport and respect, the bases of successful interrogation. In the world of terrorism, terrorists are taught to expect that the United States will torture them. Coercive techniques of any sort will be confirmation of that expectation and will thus harden their resolve not to divulge anything of value. On the other hand, humane handling will be disarming and disorienting for any such detainee, leaving him open to non-coercive manipulation.

Careful, non-coercive handling of the detainee from the moment of his apprehension is critical. Once in our custody, if coercion of any sort of coercion is applied to a detainee, the likelihood of a subsequent non-coercive approach being successful is just about over.

The FBI has never sought permission to use coercion on its detainees simply because they know it does not work, and they can succeed without it. The same is true with the Pentagon for the same reason and also because military use of coercive methods it is in violation of the Geneva Conventions and invites torture when and if its own personnel are detained by an enemy.

When people are tortured they will tell the interrogator what they believe he wants to hear or lie, simply to put an end to the torture. That puts the interrogator at the mercy of the detainee. Misinformation and disinformation are logical, often dangerous outcomes of coercive techniques.

We are now often told that coercive interrogation has produced actionable information, however, some of what has been produced under torture may have been at best inaccurate and at worst, deliberately false.

There is no way of knowing what results could have been achieved if a detainee who has been tortured had been humanely handled with non-coercive interrogation techniques from the moment of his capture. Such detainees often have the kind of massive, messianic ego that is easily manipulated by a really good interrogator.

Finally, there is the question of who we Americans really are. It is simply inconsistent with everything we say we stand for to indulge in coercive interrogation techniques. Even if they worked, which they do not, what kind of nation have we become in the eyes of the rest of the world as practitioners of torture? That is not an image that is likely to produce significant intelligence, let alone promote our worldwide interests.

Steven Kleinman is a military intelligence officer with 25 years of operational and leadership experience in human intelligence and special operations. He served as an interrogator in three major military campaigns in addition to teaching advanced interrogation and resistance to interrogation courses.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Eastern and Western Europe and the Middle East and as chief of the counterterrorism staff.

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[Originally published in the Baltimore Sun.]

America needs to develop a rational policy for dealing with terrorism.

Almost everything we are doing today is counterproductive. Our actions and attitudes create more radical Muslim terrorists and encourage moderate Muslim passivity toward those terrorists and their operations.

Let us accept, for a moment, as true the Bush administration’s claim that the techniques and tools that diminish our civil liberties at home and our reputation abroad are worth it because they have stopped terrorist attacks. Even then the argument fails, for such actions represent a tactical response to a strategic threat. They may stop the occasional attack, but they won’t address the fundamental issue.

Unless we find ways to counter not just the attacks but the movement that spawns them, there will be no foreseeable end to this problem.

Of course, we should continue to detect and disrupt terrorist plots. But the key to long-term success against fundamentalist Muslim terrorism is to weaken our enemies and empower our moderate friends in the Islamic world. One priority should be strengthening our intelligence liaison relationships.

It is extremely difficult to maintain productive ties with foreign intelligence services if relations between the two countries involved are not strong and mutually respectful. Our post-9/11 policies have turned many of our former friends against us. When we re-establish and strengthen our traditional alliances, our intelligence liaison relationships will prosper – and our ability to fight terrorism will be much improved.

In an increasingly decentralized terrorist environment, our intelligence liaison colleagues can penetrate terrorist organizations far more easily than Americans can. After all, they look, think and speak like the people they’re targeting.

It may take many years to soften the appeal of Muslim fundamentalism and diminish moderate Muslim indifference to that phenomenon. But when moderate Muslims begin to perceive the radicals to be a threat to them, the radicals will lose – and this can happen fairly quickly. Note how abruptly Iraqi Sunnis turned against al-Qaida in Iraq in 2007.

But Iraq presents a problem for us in this endeavor. As long as we have a military presence there, we will catalyze radical Muslim anger and suspicions about our motives. President Bush’s talk of “bringing democracy” to the Middle East doesn’t help, as it is often perceived as a further example of Western imperialism. And wherever we go in the Muslim world, we tote the unwelcome baggage of renditions, overseas CIA prisons, waterboarding, Guantanamo and military tribunals.

Thus, we cannot deal with Muslim attitudes by telling them how to behave. It will be more productive for us to get our own house in order through the restoration of full civil rights and the cessation of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” We can then present ourselves to the world as a model worth emulating.

Because of our long history of commercial, educational and diplomatic relations with the Muslim world, there are many Americans who know a great deal about terrorism and Islam. They can be of great service in this cause, and we need to listen to and learn from them in a climate that doesn’t intimidate them.

That requires new national leadership that will not only entertain but also encourage dissenting views and differing ideas. Any other approach will serve only to impoverish our search for the best policies.

In the meantime, our domestic counterterrorism programs concentrate on what happened on 9/11. What are we doing to protect an increasingly vulnerable national infrastructure? Like old generals, we are fighting the last war in a world that is rapidly changing. We have created a bloated and inefficient homeland security apparatus and have vested primary responsibility for our security from terrorism in the FBI – a law enforcement organization that does not have the culture or the structure for the counterterrorism job. We still need a domestic intelligence agency along the lines of Britain’s MI5.

There is much to do, and no time to lose.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Europe and the Middle East, as executive assistant in the director’s office and as chief of the counterterrorism staff.

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[Originally published on AmericanDiplomacy.org.]

In this broad condemnation of the Bush administration’s response to radical Muslim terrorism since 9/11, a retired CIA station chief and head of the Agency’s counterterrorism staff brings an intelligence professional’s perspective to bear on the nature of the terrorist threat we face and effective ways of countering it. — Ed

During the Cold War, American foreign policy was built on the twin bases of containment and alliances: containment of the Soviet Union and her allies and alliances with our friends in support of that containment. The critical element in the success of that policy was acceptance by both sides that the nuclear weaponry of the day would preclude any preemptive strike of one against the other. We called that MAD, or Mutual Assured Destruction. An additional important element in that policy was the fact that our allies, and to a somewhat lesser extent the allies of the Soviet Union, were able to exercise constraints on the policies and activities of both of the principals. Say what you will, even with a couple of very close calls, that policy prevailed and the Cold War never turned hot.

The role of the intelligence community during the Cold War, as it is (or should be) at any given time, was to provide policy makers with finished intelligence designed to help with the decision making process. Whether or not the collection and analytical processes succeed, all the intelligence-producing organizations in the intelligence community are designed to provide that product.

The demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the accompanying threat of Soviet nuclear weaponry brought a close to that era. The events of 9/11 set us on a completely different path. Since that horrible moment, we have embarked on a totally new foreign policy of preemptive unilateralism and an equally new domestic policy of intolerance for dissent and of creating and maintaining fear and anxiety in the American public. The question for examination is whether or not those changes and these new policies serve us well in the ongoing struggle with radical Muslim terrorism.

A Radical Revolution in Foreign Policy

Preemptive unilateralism represents a radical revolution in foreign policy. After a whole string of “reasons” for the attack on Iraq, we are now told that we needed to preemptively attack Iraq because they had the “intellectual capability” to create a nuclear weapon. Is that to be the basis for future foreign preemptions? The constraints placed on previous administrations by our Cold War alliances have gone completely out the window. The “unilateral” part of this new policy, as mirrored in our established refusal to listen to anyone about our plans for invading Iraq, has ruled out moderating counsel from any of our former friends and allies, leaving us almost friendless in today’s world. As we saw in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, it has been more important to the Bush administration to go ahead with its plans than to listen to its (former) friends and allies.

Although it is extremely difficult to sort out the true motivation behind that policy, what we have learned from the “kiss and tell” revelations of former members of this administration is that the decision to invade Iraq had been made well before 9/11. Given the fact that none of the litany of “justifications” (WMD, Iraqi ties to Al-Qaida, bringing democracy to the Arabs, etc.) for the invasion has held up to scrutiny, that decision would now appear to be based primarily on ideological imperatives.

For intelligence professionals, both active and retired, that raises the question of the role, if any, for finished intelligence in today’s foreign policy deliberations. The Bush administration’s disinclination to listen to counsel from the State Department, the unprecedented visits of the Vice President to CIA analysts, the creation of the Office for Special Plans in the Pentagon to “relook” old intelligence, and the willingness to listen to “Curveball,” a known fabricator, and Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraq National Congress, whose goal of overthrowing the Baathists in Iraq could only be achieved through misleading the United States into war, give a clear picture of an administration that was only interested in seeing intelligence that supported an already settled policy decision. The only conceivably worse basis for action would be if someone in the administration were listening to extraterrestrial voices!

Many past administrations, both Republican and Democrat, have made foreign policy decisions not only on the basis of the objective facts in the area under consideration, but also on the basis of their domestic political needs. It is difficult, however, to recall an administration that has so blatantly ignored objective realities as this one. As long as this is the way foreign policy is formulated, there will be little to no role for input from the intelligence community. However imperfect intelligence may be at any given moment or on any given issue, it does have a potentially constructive role to play in support of foreign policy. At minimum, intelligence deserves to be heard, not summarily dismissed.

Domestic Policy Problems

The administration’s domestic policy during this same period has been based solely on ensuring the “security of the American people.” That has brought us the Patriot Acts, wireless wiretapping, the abrogation of habeas corpus, torture, rendition, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc. And those are only the things we know about! We have been given a color coded terrorist threat warning system and daily hammering on what constitutional rights Americans have to give up to be “safe.” Most importantly, this administration and its supporters in the Congress, the media, and the public have resorted to the worst kinds of character assassination and name calling to maintain the atmosphere of fear and anxiety they have so adroitly created. If you disagree with the policy they support, you are “soft on terror,” “unpatriotic,” or, even worse, a traitor. In short, dissent is intimidated — a process never approved by our founding fathers.

These are results that must gladden the heart of Osama bin Laden. He has to know that without our inadvertent complicity in the Middle East and at home in America, he would not have come out looking nearly as successful as has been the case. The facts are that we are on the verge of creating chaos in the Middle East, and that we can hardly look like a “shining city on the hill” to people who once admired us. What more could he possibly ask, and how much of the result stems directly from our own policies?

The Terrorist World Today

Our preoccupation with fundamentalist Muslim terrorism will probably last a generation or more. That gives us plenty of time to continue to make mistakes, or to get it right. Certainly today we have got it wrong, probably because, as a result of 9/11, which was essentially a paramilitary operation, this administration concluded that we needed a military response. Afghanistan was the first response. In many respects, it satisfied America’s domestic emotional and political needs as well as our regional Middle East and general foreign policy needs. Our big mistake was in not carrying it through to a more favorable conclusion when we shifted our attention to Iraq.

Unfortunately, the threat from this kind of terrorism cannot be successfully challenged militarily. There can be no conventional war with these people. Our military might is not mighty. The real struggle is for minds, and we are hardly addressing that issue.

Because with our remaining allies we have focused on Al Qaida, much of the leadership of that organization has been killed or captured. This has weakened the “center,” and power has flowed outward to the more dispersed elements of fundamentalist Muslim terrorism. There has almost been a McDonald’s type franchising of the movement. This has meant that more recruiting, planning, and implementation has devolved to local organizations. There is less central control and probably less central knowledge of what is going on around the world. That changes the target for us.

All organizations change as they age. In the 1940s and 50s Soviets were hardly ever seen outside their embassies, and when they were, they were clannish and seldom mixed with foreigners. As time went on and Soviet goals and personnel changed, they became more approachable and engageable. The dispersal of Al Qaida has hastened this same process for that organization. Now, absent continuing central control, attitudes are changing. There is increasing friction between the “old hands” and the young Turks about what sort of activity is appropriate. This is reportedly true in Yemen, and it presents us with some opportunities wherever it obtains. It was at this stage of ageing that the Soviet system, for a variety of human reasons, produced “flawed” citizens who were susceptible to blandishments from the United States.

Muslims range from brown-eyed, black-skinned straight through to blond, fair-skinned and blue-eyed. They are everywhere in East Asia, the Subcontinent, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Not only do they look different from each other, they are different. In the world of terrorism, they range from types like Al Qaida, who really are terrorists in the truest sense of the word, to groups who use unconventional warfare (terrorist tactics) in pursuit of their own freedom from repressive rulers. It is important to keep them separately in mind and not equate Chechens with Al Qaida. When we do that, we create all kinds of credibility problems for ourselves.

Strategic Goals

Al Qaida has very simple strategic goals. They want to push us and our influence out of the Middle East and replace repressive secular Muslim regimes with theocracies.

American strategic goals are far more difficult to identify. It is simply too easy (and inaccurate) to say that our strategy is about oil. Sadly, we have lost our way in Afghanistan. Where our surge in Iraq seems predictably successful, our “strategy” of bringing harmony and democracy to a historically fractious “country” is daily more precarious. Our occupation of Iraq looks like a war on Islam and catalyzes Muslims against us, daily creating new terrorists. In fact, to say we have no clear-cut strategic goals may be more accurate.

Fundamentalist Muslim terrorists attack us wherever they can find us. At this moment they are working to kill us mostly on their turf or in adjacent parts of the world. The events of 9/11 notwithstanding, repeating that sort of operation here in the United States is no easy task. That is not to say that it will not happen, but the odds are not in their favor.

America’s tactics are different. Our public face to the world is a direct reflection of what we do and say. We are seen as cocky and arrogant: “Bring ’em on!” The puerile braggadocio with which we alternately dehumanize and belittle the Muslims may make some of us feel better, but is directly counterproductive to our goals for dealing with terrorism. Equating all Muslims with terrorism is not only inaccurate, but also demeaning and infuriating for mainstream, moderate Muslims.

We are viewed as hypocritical, duplicitous, and self-serving. When we push for democratic elections in the Islamic world and Hamas wins in Palestine, our emotional rejection of the results proves our hypocrisy to the moderate Muslim. The point here is that it matters what you say and how you say it, particularly when, through injudicious behavior, the only cause you hurt is your own.

A Strategy For America

At home, we need to stop the policies that lead to anxiety over terrorism and security. Perhaps we might even consider reinstating our civil liberties in the knowledge that doing so might invite another attack here. In this regard, we need to foster civil discourse by ceasing to label those with divergent ideas as “unpatriotic” or “soft on terrorism.” There are a lot of very smart Americans who know a great deal about terrorism and Islam. We might do well to hear what they have to say in a climate that doesn’t intimidate them. Personal attacks and defamation serve only to impoverish our search for the best alternatives.

Right now, we are sitting here in America pointing our finger at the Iraqis, Afghanis, Turks, Syrians, Pakistanis, and Central Asians and telling them what they have to do, while in many cases, we have lost the moral credibility to make such pronouncements. While we preach democratization abroad, we diminish democracy at home. As long as the world associates us with torture and renditions, we will have little credibility abroad. However, we do have the potential to once again become that shining city on the hill — a place that leads by example, by what it does and is, not by what it blusteringly says.

Our foreign policy today is not helping us. The key to success against fundamentalist Muslim terrorism is to minimize our enemies and maximize our friends. To do that we have to reestablish and strengthen our traditional alliances. The price for that will be to give them a say in what we do. That makes sense when their problem is identical with ours.

In this regard, we need to strengthen our intelligence liaison relationships. The best people to work against this target are the intelligence services of the countries in which they are operating. That is their home turf, and in the new “franchised” terrorist environment they are potentially far and away the most effective organizations to address those targets.

We need to soften the appeal of Muslim fundamentalism. To do that, we have to diminish the level of moderate Muslim indifference to that phenomenon. There are nearly 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. It takes only a tiny percentage of them to make major problems for us. The key to keeping those numbers down lies in the attitudes of moderate Islam.

In summary, it seems that just about everything we are doing in the so-called “Global War on Terrorism” is not helping. It is constantly claimed by Bush administration representatives that the techniques and tools to which so many Americans object (waterboarding, renditions, etc.) and which diminish our civil liberties, have spared us numerous terrorist attacks here in the homeland. Let’s just arbitrarily stipulate that that is true. Even if it is, it is only a tactical response to the threat. Optimally, it may stop the occasional attack, but it won’t solve the fundamental problem. We need a new strategy that deals with the weaknesses in this terrorist threat with a view to stopping the movement, not just the attacks. Without such a strategy, there will be no foreseeable end to this problem.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who was educated at Exeter and Dartmouth. After college, he served three years in the Army Security Agency as a Russian language intercept operator. After his discharge, he spent two years in Russian regional studies at London University, and then joined the CIA as a staff officer. He subsequently served in Prague, Berlin, Langley, Beirut, Tehran, and Washington. During those 25 years, he worked primarily in Soviet and East European operations, recruiting and handling agents or managing that process. His only ventures outside the Soviet operations arena were as chief of the counterterrorism staff and as executive assistant to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Frank Carlucci. Since his retirement in 1980, he has lived in Vermont.

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[Originally published in The Valley News.]

Americans are not united behind any one policy on when or how to get out of Iraq.  Why? Largely because “Iraq” is an internal political issue that stems from the Bush White House’s campaign to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people after 9/11.  During that campaign, a number of things that simply were not true got woven almost permanently into the Iraq tapestry.

This sales campaign stated that Iraq was somehow involved in 9/11; that there was an ongoing relationship between Saddam’s Iraq and Al Qaida; that there were WMD that would materialize in the form of mushroom clouds in the United States; that we could bring democracy to Iraq and that the Iraqis somehow could learn to live together.  All of these things when put together provided a persuasive argument that we needed to Invade Iraq.  That argument’s success is best measured by broad, bipartisan, congressional support.

Despite the inaccuracies and untruths of the sales campaign, much of it continues to be believed by significant portions of the American public.

Now, almost five years later, we are told that Iraq is the “front line of the war on terrorism”.   This is true, however the Iraqi front line was created solely by the U.S. invasion.  Al Qaida is active in Iraq only because there are American targets there.  There was absolutely no pre-invasion existence of Al Qaida in Iraq.  For that reason, Iraq is better viewed without being clouded by the “fighting terrorism in Iraq rather than here” mantra which is constantly mouthed by Republican politicians.

If you look at Iraq without the Al Qaida/terrorism filter, you will see a “country” made up of three major, competing groups.  That “country” has virtually no more hope of solving its internal differences than it has of embracing democracy.  Instead, it is sliding into full-blown civil war driven by age-old jealousies and rivalries.

There is, however, a major problem with Iraq.  The miserable military performance of the Israelis against Hizballah in Lebanon last summer has shown many Arabs that Israel is not invincible.   Like it or not, a precipitous, un-negotiated withdrawal of American troops from Iraq will fuel those fires by positing that, like Israel, America is weak and vulnerable.

“Arabia Decepta” was the title of an essay in Time Magazine just after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.  It spoke to the premise that Arabs have a predilection to self-deception on matters that are of great importance to them.  For example, the headline on the English language Beirut Daily Star on the third day of the 1967 war was “Israeli Lines Crumble”.  Many Arabs will persuade themselves that Israel, American and the West are weak.  That will greatly complicate our struggle with radical Muslim terrorism.  The only way to soften the effects of US withdrawal from Iraq is to undertake negotiations with all the neighbors, none of whom wants chaos in his neighborhood.   Muslims will not view negotiated withdrawal as a US defeat.

This distinction is important because Al Qaida is strong and growing in its ambitions and numbers.   Despite U.S. decimation of Al Qaida leadership, our ill-advised incursion into Iraq has been a recruiting and fundraising gold mine for them.   Al Qaida is not going away and, like it or not, they will be emboldened and empowered by any precipitous withdrawal.

America is not ready to unilaterally confront a resurgent Al Qaida; one that has already hit us at home and that appears to have a rapidly growing membership.  In the past five years of Bush administration Iraq policy, we have alienated most of our friends around the world.  Without friends, a worldwide struggle (not war) with Al Qaida will be difficult to win.  Enough “War on Terrorism”,” Axis of Evil”, “Dead or Alive,” Smoke ’em out” or “Bring ‘em on”.  This is not the Wild West.  Such cocky, intemperate pronouncements, which accurately characterize the Bush Administration’s attitude toward terrorism, only energize our enemies.

We need a new policy.  Rather than trying to arm ourselves to the teeth and unilaterally confront our radical Muslim enemies all around the world, we need to re-evaluate our policy and consider the alternatives.  Radical Muslim terrorism is supported by a tiny fraction of Muslims.  To be successful, radicals must get support from moderates.   The nature of terrorism demands that we examine the roots of terrorist movements and try to mitigate the factors that cause their anger and provide their support.

If we do not want to take on the entire Muslim world in armed struggle, we absolutely must look at existing, alternative policies that will weaken Al Qaida in the Muslim world and strengthen our hand against them.  We need friends for this struggle, the friends who have deserted us over our Iraq policy.

Unilateral bellicosity is no substitute for sober alliances.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff.

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[Originally published in the Valley News.]

During this year’s presidential campaign, President Bush and his supporters constantly tell us that this country needs his leadership to successfully fight the War on Terrorism. We are now three years past 9/11 and can ask the question: How successful has that war been to date?

Al-Qaida’s major goals are to humble and destroy the Western world, beginning with its leader, the United States. The motivation for this is fairly straightforward: Al-Qaida members resent the stationing of U.S. troops on the holy ground of Saudi Arabia; they hate American policy for what they see to be its rigidly biased support of Israel over Palestine; they want to bring an end to American and Western support of the repressive regimes that rule and exploit Arabs and other Muslims; and they want to put the control of the politics and natural resources of the Muslim world in the hands of its people and in accordance with the dictates of Muslim law.

Certainly, one of the best ways for al-Qaida to accomplish some or all of those goals is to start and then perpetuate a holy war between Muslims and the West. However, for al-Qaida to be successful, the West, and particularly America, would have to respond in the right way: We would have to be inadvertently complicit with al-Qaida.

Al-Qaida has pushed the notion that Arabs hate American values. The Bush administration, curiously enough, has sporadically pushed the same line. But a May 2004 poll conducted for the Arab American Institute by Zogby International, an organization that conducts polls in the Arab world, shows the opposite. It found that, despite their dislike of U.S. foreign policy, many Arabs still admire American values, culture and products.  Arabs don’t hate America, they hate our current policies.

Since 9/11, we have (quite justifiably) invaded Afghanistan. For less cogent reasons, we then invaded Iraq and in doing so, disrupted our own efforts against al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Iraq, we found no weapons of mass destruction and no relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida or 9/11. We did, however depose Saddam Hussein, a goal shared by al-Qaida, which would like to depose all secular Arab leaders.

In the process of conducting this war and in its aftermath, we have been unable to restore any order to Iraq. That chaos has strengthened Arab hatred of and armed resistance to our policy. Our laissez-faire approach toward the hostility in Fallujah and, to a lesser extent, Sadr City has recreated conditions that existed under Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where foreign fighters are sufficiently safe to train angry, disenfranchised Iraqi youth for insurgent operations against U.S. troops. If we are lucky in post-invasion Iraq, the inherent chaos there will lead to some sort of stability, probably through a theocracy like the Taliban – a situation that will likely favor Islamic extremists. If we are unlucky, we will see continued ethnic, confessional and political chaos.

The balance of outcomes since 9/11 would seem to favor al-Qaida. We have severely reduced our pursuit of terrorists in Afghanistan. In our effectively unilateral invasion of Iraq, we have completely disrupted our traditional alliances and alienated our important allies, relationships that will become increasingly critical in the coming struggle with terrorism. With the exception of a reluctant Britain, our major allies in Europe are gone, to be replaced by the “coalition of the willing” of former Soviet-dominated European, lesser European and Third World countries, and alliance of the unimportant. Through our invasion of Iraq, we have probably enhanced al-Qaida recruitment. We have deposed one of the secular Arab rulers they hate. We have effectively increased Arab and Muslim hatred of our policies. In their optimistic moments, al-Qaida could even say we are helping out by slowly creating the basis of a new holy war.

Finally, we have weakened ourselves by creating record national debt and sharply dividing our country through the implementation of a radical foreign policy that so far seems to be unsuccessful and has only increased our problems with radical terrorism..

The one thing that could mitigate all these disasters would be the emergence of a democratic, free-market Iraq. Iraq has never known democracy and is deeply divided religiously and ethnically. The country is physically large and has lived for the past 30 years under a dictatorial form of state socialism – hardly a blueprint for a successful transition to a republic. Besides that, Muslims think the Koran provides a perfectly good model for governance (which by our standards is hardly democratic). We might better have concerned ourselves with those tangible institutions of government and commerce that can ultimately lead to democracy. Democracy, unlike carpets, is not something to simply be installed.

We need to fight terrorism, but not this way.  The invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with radical Muslim terrorism.  We have implacable enemies who have done and are doing us tangible harm and who are planning more.  They are probably lurking in Afghanistan and Pakistan and we need to eliminate them, yet we have given them a bye.  We need to reestablish and strengthen our traditional alliances.

By any truly objective standard and despite all the campaign rhetoric, it does not appear that we are even leading in, let alone winning, this “War on Terrorism”.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Beirut and Tehran and as chief of the counterterrorism staff. He lives in Williston, Vt.

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[Originally published in the Valley News.]

It has been thirty months since the 9/11 disasters and virtually nothing of any real substance has changed in the counter-terrorism intelligence structure that failed to save us from that tragedy.  We still have two lead organizations dealing with the problem in the same old way – the FBI primarily with domestic responsibilities and the CIA with foreign responsibilities.  We are still riding the same old horse.

The FBI is a premier police organization.  It has the personnel, budget and technology to deal with just about any criminal matter.  It is staffed with highly qualified officers who are trained to ferret out criminals, arrest them and put them in the courts. It hires employees who want to do that. The entire culture of the FBI is directed toward busting criminals and their operations.  They are extremely competent in that task because it is consistent with their charter. Before 9/11, Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism operations, two disciplines that have major similarities, always were an FBI career graveyard, a backwater at best.  The action, recognition and promotions were better on the “criminal” side.

The problem with the FBI in intelligence operations, most emphatically including Counterterrorist operations, is that you can’t run such operations successfully with a statutory  “arrest ‘em and jail ‘em” mentality.  When the FBI learns that a given resident of the US is or may be a terrorist, they are bound by Federal law to open a case designed to arrest that suspect. The FBI’s charter, its professional management and its law enforcement mentality do not provide the right basis for successful and imaginative counterterrorism operations.

Since the onset of our concern with modern day international terrorism in the 1960s, Federal law enforcement organizations have considered terrorism a criminal matter.  As long as that view is held and represents the basis for our attempts to cope with terrorism, we will be in trouble.  Terrorism is an intelligence issue and approaching it as anything else, particularly as criminal activity, will fail.

Policemen do not make any better intelligence officers than intelligence officers make good policemen.  The mentalities and organizational cultures required for the work are completely different. Cops bust hoods.  A good case officer is a persuasive con man.  Understand that the FBI is a law enforcement organization that is most emphatically not an intelligence organization, and you will begin to see the problem.  It does no good to train people for a task if that task is alien to the culture of the organization projected to carry out the task.

The CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO) was and probably still is organizationally, statutorily and culturally capable of running successful operations against the terrorist target abroad.  However, because of past budgetary restraints, they appear now poorly equipped to do so.   The post-Cold War realities of no compellingly dangerous enemy and the DO’s inherently messy operations led to the decision in the early 1990’s to cut back severely on the budget and personnel of the DO.  This was the “peace bonus” designed to save us money and embarrassment  (The recruiting and running of spies always has had the potential for messy, embarrassing, noisy mistakes).

During the Cold War, the DO had a cadre of language- and area-qualified, experienced street case officers who could take on a clandestine task with minimal risk and maximum hope of success.  It was recently reported that the CIA station in Baghdad is now the largest in CIA history and that it is essentially unstaffable because of a lack of experienced, language- and area-qualified case officers and managers. In the long run, you can’t recruit and run agents through interpreters.  In addition, many of today’s CIA officers apparently are prone to turn down all but very short (30-60 day) tours in Iraq.  No intelligence organization can operate on such a basis.

Unfortunately, it will take a good 10 years to reestablish a DDO.  Spotting, assessing and hiring case officers is not the problem.  For that matter, training in clandestine operational techniques and foreign languages only adds a couple of years to the process.  What takes real time is getting that neophyte case officer to the point where his/her on-the-street experience turns him/her into a seasoned case officer capable of operating, as all such officers must, on his/her own with only indirect, minimal guidance. And all of this takes place in an intelligence organization that does not have sufficient qualified personnel, but that is charged with conducting major, successful clandestine operations right now against the very difficult terrorist target!

Even if after a decade the DO has reestablished its former competence, it seems unwise and unlikely that anyone would want it to operate domestically against terrorist targets.  That is not now legal and should remain illegal.  The CIA is designed to break other countries’ laws, not ours.  The FBI and the CIA as they are statutorily, culturally and historically constituted, are the wrong organizations to deal with terrorism on US soil and wishing will not change that.  If this Administration really wants to deal effectively with the terrorism at home, a threat it has itself defined, then it needs to break the mold and create an organization truly capable of doing that job.  Unfortunately, that will be no quick fix, but at least it would be moving in the right direction.

In Britain, MI 5, a domestic intelligence organization without police powers, handles their focus on terrorism and does it quite well.  However, MI 5 is a creation of British realities which are not necessarily applicable here in the United States.  We should probably create something more in tune with our own American experience.

The idea that this new counterterrorism organization should be imbedded in the FBI is self-defeating and terrifying.  We do not have the luxury of risking its success by lodging it in such an alien, culturally different, stultifying, and uncomprehending environment.  To succeed, and we desperately need it to succeed, it has to be guaranteed unequivocal autonomy, independence and freedom from any kind of Bureau influence or intrusion.    Without such a guarantee, it will never work.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief and former Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff who worked off and on from 1963 through 1980 in joint intelligence operations with the FBI in the United States against Soviet and Eastern European targets and lectured at FBI training courses at Quantico on Soviet recruitment operations.  He served abroad in Prague, Berlin, Beirut and Tehran and is retired in Williston, Vt.

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