Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This new book, Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda, tells the story of previously unknown activities within the U.S. military, together with the various spy agencies, and law enforcement, that are now at work and achieving great success in combating terrorism worldwide.

This is the first book (that I am aware of) to describe these efforts, and it does so in great detail, pulling together all of the bits and pieces of these efforts and presenting them in a fast paced and gripping story.

We are generally familiar with how our country uses unmanned drone aircraft to surveil our enemies and strike at them in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This book describes how complimentary efforts of the intelligence community have become even more important.

This work was led initially by individuals who recognized after 9/11 that there was a need for new ideas to transform these bureaucracies. There was recognition that tactics of deterrence, used successfully in the Cold War, could be adapted for the war against terrorism. Quietly and behind the scenes, they developed new techniques for our efforts against terrorism, which have had great impact.

Here are some samples of the stories given in the book to illustrate this:

- Information obtained from thumb drives captured in December, 2006, which outlined Al Qaeda strategy against the recently launched surge in Iraq. The Al Qaeda targets included bakeries, and garbagemen, because they wanted garbage to pile up to show that the U.S. was failing. Knowing this, the U.S. was able to anticipate the effort and head it off.

- Capture of an extensive Al Qaeda members listing, and the decision by the military to share the information throughout the intelligence and military communities, allowing far more use of this data by a variety of agencies and thus resulting in a significant reduction in the number of suicide bombers.

- How we are able to go on to jihadi websites and post information and orders that are indistinguishable from legitimate orders issued by Al Qaeda leadership, resulting in dissent and confusion among the terrorists.

This book is enjoyable and fast paced to read, and in contrast to many other books written about our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it may actually lead to some optimism as we ask ourselves whether or not the war on terrorism is winnable, or not.

One of democracy's most remarkable characteristics is the sheer volume of closely guarded information that can be reported and published without resulting in jail time or torture for the authors. Counterstrike, a remarkable bit of longitudinal reporting by two veterans of the New York Times, brings to light a host of insights and behind-the-scene details about America's decade-long campaign against Al Qaeda and its affiliates and imitators.

The principal theme of Counterstrike is how in the course of the past decade "the government's force of professional counterterrorism analysts has grown from a group small enough to know each other's phone numbers to a vast army linked by supercomputers processing thousands of bits of data in nanoseconds." And, by no means incidentally, spending tens of billions of dollars in the process.

Schmitt and Shanker reveal without editorial comment the strong contrast between the management styles of our last two Presidents: "While Bush showed an apetite for tactical and operational details -- [for example,] the number of spies working against Al Qaeda in Pakistan . . . -- Obama wanted to understand the strategic nature of the threat and demanded to know when his personal orders were required to break through resistance across the intelligence and security community to make things work at the tactical and operational level." The bureaucratic squabbles, most notably during the tenure of Secretary of Defense Runsfeld, are another theme that stands out.

However, the overarching theme of Counterstrike is the gradual maturation of American counter-terrorist policy in the opening decade of the 21st Century, shifting gradually from one bent simply on using brute force to kill or capture terrorists to a much more sophisticated and broad-based policy of deterrence drawn from the playbook of the Cold War. As Scmitt and Shanker report, "Deterrence -- updated, expanded, even redefined -- is now official American policy for countering Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist organizations."

At first blush, deterrence might seem futile against an enemy willing, even eager, to die for his beliefs. However, as Schmitt and Shanker reveal, there is a wide range of tactics available to delay or prevent terrorist attacks. Among these are multifaceted techniques such as cyber-warfare to disrupt the communications and financial transactions of the Al Qaeda network and creative actions by local CIA or military officers. (In the most amusing of the latter, American officers first set high bounty prices on Al Qaeda commanders, then lowered them to imply that the terrorists' importance had declined; soon, to prove their continuing importance, the terrorists revealed their locations by striking out against the Americans in impulsive and foolhardy ways. The result, of course, is that they were then either killed or captured.)

So, there is considerable substance in Counterstrike. The discussion of how deterrence policy evolved into the U.S. strategy against Al Qaeda is especially illuminating. Unfortunately, the structure and writing style don't enhance the reader's experience. The book is slow going, consisting largely of one long expository paragraph after another, relieved only by lengthy quotes from some of the hundreds of individuals the authors interviewed. Schmitt and Shanker might have benefited from a few lessons in nonfiction writing by a master of the craft such as Tracy Kidder, Erik Larson, or even Bob Woodward.

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Lots of anecdotes about this "new strategy" that is frankly non-existent. This book reports plans to influence al-Qaeda without having done the homework to determine if they were ever implemented or if al-Qaeda was indeed influenced. As a result, this book misses the big story of why these great plans never got out of DC -- which is a tale of inside the beltway interagency rivalry and indecision. I was involved in a number of the ops reported in this book from the military side. We developed literally hundreds of influence campaigns only to get objections from State, NSA, CyberCommand, Justice or CIA which prevented us from implementing them. The objections were usually that "the military shouldn't be doing that" or something was "in someone else's lane," not that they wouldn't be effective or that they were illegal -- everyone agreed they would be both effective and legal. The fear that someone else was in charge prevented agreement. When we offered to hand the plan to any other agency to implement, no one had the resources or will to pick it up.

Many of the unnamed sources reported they did things that flat did not happen -- for instance raising and lowering rewards on al-Qaeda operatives. I don't know how many plans I saw that included that as one facet of the ways to influence a target, but I don't know of even one in which it was really done. The story sounds like it was taken from a bunch of beltway interviews from guys who thought things were going on or wanted to brag about their role, but really weren't in a position to know how little was really happening as a result of their "planning meetings." The real story is that down on the ground in Afghanistan or Iraq things worked well because lives were on the line and the commander was willing to make a decision despite a lack of consensus. When things got back to DC, they stopped working. Doesn't matter how many memos go out from the WH, when they hit the bureaucracy they stop. Read this book if you want an outline of what we should be doing, but don't kid yourself it is actually happening.