Terror Turf Wars: Bush's Secret Blueprint, Stalled By Infighting

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, April 16, 2006; B02

Four years and seven months after al-Qaeda's attack on the American homeland, more is missing than Osama bin Laden. The Bush administration still struggles to agree on how to carry out its secret blueprint to fight the global war on terrorism.

The blueprint -- whose broad outline was approved in private last month at the White House -- commits the administration to concentrating its national security powers on defeating jihadist terrorism at home and abroad. But a series of internal battles that have been kept more secret than the classified document itself has delayed final agreement on who has the authority to carry out its most demanding responsibilities.

Resolving those divergences still preoccupies interagency drafting committees and the National Counterterrorism Center, even though President Bush originally asked his aides to move urgently to stage a revolution in the government's methods and structures for fighting a new kind of long war.

The story of the making of National Security Presidential Directive 46 is at one level a familiar tale of a Washington turf battle that pits diplomats, soldiers, spooks and new legions of terrorism experts in a scramble for resources and glory. The document is co-titled Homeland Security Presidential Directive 15 because it holds the newest Cabinet department responsible for preventing attacks on U.S. territory.

But the tale also suggests, more disturbingly, that the weak interagency coordination that contributed so greatly to the nation's lack of preparedness for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks continues to hamper the worldwide battle against al-Qaeda, its allies and offshoots. Bush's habit of setting grand designs and leaving overwhelmed subordinates to work out the details is exacting a large cost in this exercise.

Some officials involved in drafting the blueprint think it has the potential to shape national strategy as successfully as did NSC 68, the planning document that set the parameters for American action in the Cold War. Bush hinted last week in a speech that he takes that view. Others fear, however, that unless it mandates decisive action and clearly establishes responsibility for it, the new directive could come to resemble the quickly discredited counterinsurgency plans that Washington's best and brightest put forward in the Vietnam War era.

The outcome is still uncertain. But conversations over the past year with several participants in the review reveal that one iron law of the Washington bureaucracy holds firm: The devil is always in the details.

The quest for a master plan for counterterrorism originated in the need to update or change pre-9/11 laws, presidential policy documents and bureaucratic structures that treated international terrorism directed at Americans primarily as a law enforcement problem, not as a global struggle to be won on foreign battlefields with arms and ideas.

That review stretched over two years in one form or another and appeared to have been completed when NSPD 46 was formally adopted behind closed doors by the Bush national security team one week before the public release on March 16 of the administration's National Security Strategy. In fact, some crucial unresolved disagreements were simply passed over in the interests of a show of consensus on "a statement of aspirations," in the words of one participant.

The most contentious issues -- particularly how far the Defense Department should go in carrying out Bush's direct order to "disrupt and destroy" jihadist terrorist networks, even if they operate in friendly or neutral countries -- were left to be dealt with in annexes that are being negotiated by the departments of State and Defense and the CIA. An NSC spokesman declined to comment on the contents of the document or on any ongoing differences about implementation.

The struggle for control was absent in the emergency days after 9/11, when Bush gave the "disrupt and destroy" order to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. That was followed by an "AQSL Ex. Ord." -- a directive that bin Laden and 10 other members of al-Qaeda's senior leadership be brought to justice by all necessary means, "dead or alive," as Bush said.

That was the seed from which grew a broader plan of attack against al-Qaeda's networks, other jihadist bands and the jihadist ideology that loosely unites them. But as the extremist Islamic movement metastasized through the Middle East, Asia and Europe, Rumsfeld is said to have pushed for a presidential directive that would contain clearer definitions and authority for the Pentagon to carry out its "kinetic" missions abroad.

"This war erases that old bright line between conventional warfare and diplomacy," one official told me. "It has moved soldiers and foreign policy experts alike up a ladder of escalation, from trying to bring in bin Laden dead or alive to today's mission of destroying the entire jihadist movement and its ideology. We can't use old thinking and win. We can't wait and win."

A State Department official put it differently: "We have been through the immediate responses we can make and are now in a moment of looking around, of focusing on the long term. It is important to assign the right roles and responsibilities to the government agencies that will lead the war on terror."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated her department's concerns much more bluntly during a videoconference linking Bush's top aides in mid-January. Letting the Pentagon operate outside the U.S. ambassador's control to roll up extremist networks in foreign countries would make U.S. policy "almost exclusively kinetic" -- that is, warlike -- she argued, to Rumsfeld's discomfort, according to a briefing given to colleagues by one official involved in the meeting.

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on April 4, Henry A. Crumpton, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, made an oblique public reference to the State Department's continuing desire to change relatively little. "Our best means of countering the multilayered terrorist threat is to engage coordinated networks of interagency Country Teams operating under the ambassador" in "an intimately connected whole-of-government approach. We are not there yet, but we have made progress," he noted.

They are not there yet, in large part because far-reaching proposals from the Pentagon to find and deal with Islamic extremists in a systematic way -- "so that we are not chasing rabbits," said one official -- have stirred opposition from the State Department and the CIA, which fear losing primacy abroad through the militarization of foreign policy and intelligence operations.

The New York Times lifted a corner of the veil surrounding the larger conceptual battles by reporting in March on State and CIA opposition to the Pentagon's use of Military Liaison Elements, small teams of Special Operations forces charged with finding and countering jihadist networks. They work with local security forces or on their own in countries where central authority is weak or nonexistent, such as Somalia.

"At this point, this would probably amount to maybe 60 guys in 20 countries," said one official. Added another, "It works in the field in most cases, but creates more hierarchal trouble than it should back here."

Resolving this and other disputes has not been helped by the White House's underpowered and relatively inexperienced staff at the National Security Council, which has tried to smooth over conflicts with abstract proposals to rotate responsibilities among departments.

Without specifically mentioning them, Bush suggested the importance that he attaches to the crafting of the NSPD and its annexes when he appeared at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington last Monday to discuss Iraq and the war on terrorism.

The president noted that Nitze, who advised six presidents on national security policy, was "the principal author of NSC 68 -- the strategic blueprint for America's victory in the Cold War." Nitze's work was essential in convincing "some who wanted to wish away the Soviet threat" that the Cold War was "a real war" that had to be won by building up conventional forces and retaining a nuclear arsenal, he said.

This was a clear signal that Bush has rejected advice that surfaced in the long debate that he rename the GWOT -- the Global War on Terrorism -- to give it a more comprehensive label, such as the struggle against violent extremism. The president, apparently believing that he, too, must overcome skepticism that Americans are engaged in "a real war," has ordered that GWOT will not go, his aides suggest.

Finishing those annexes to NSPD 46 and other counterterrorist implementation plans so that they reflect the needs of this new kind of war would show that all of his Cabinet sees it that way -- and that urgently -- as well.