This is from todays Sydney Morning Herald... It is an excellent article...especially as it comes from a neutral perspective...it looks at what has gone wrong pretty objectively... Reading it...it really strikes me just how tough a job taking on opponenst like these people is. How do you hit a ghost? How do you combat an enemy that uses tactics (suicide + attacks on civilians) that we (as civilised people) won't, and should never, use? smh.com.au There were subtle warnings a big terrorist attack on the US was imminent, writes Paul McGeough. This week the United States stands before the world wounded in body and soul. Shell-shocked by brilliantly executed terrorist assaults on New York and Washington, President George Bush is struggling to assure 275 million Americans he will deal with the enemy. On Tuesday thousands died. The symbolism of this loss is a huge victory for the terrorists. Then came some of the darkest hours as Americans, transfixed by the real-life horror on their TV screens, wondered about their sense of security and confidence at the top of the world. For almost a day terrified citizens were unsure of just where their president and commander-in-chief was. His words were relayed on TV, but he had gone to ground. The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was in South America. This week the US seemed so fragile, so vulnerable as it braced itself for retaliation, dubbed by The Washington Post as the US's first war of the new century. The military superiority of the US is not in doubt. But the attacks were a devastating confirmation of the critics' warnings that the US has failed to position itself to confront one of the greatest security threats of the post-Cold War era. Analysts single out three areas of failure by US governments and agencies, which they say have badly hampered any attempt to deal with the rise and risk of a new brand of terrorism. First, the political, defence and intelligence establishments are too squeamish. They will not tolerate any risky operation - such as the pursuit of Osama bin Laden - unless there is a guarantee that US lives will not be put at risk. Second, there has not been enough money. Since the end of the Cold War, military and intelligence chiefs have been fascinated with satellite and other high-tech forms of surveillance and eavesdropping, all of which have been funded at the expense of the traditional and well-tested - but out of fashion - spy-craft of people behind the wire. The last - and newest - criticism centres on Bush and his near-obsession with a high-tech national defence system to guard against missile attacks on the US mainland by rogue states. The critics say it comes at a huge cost; that it has limited accuracy; and that inevitably it will soak up funds that otherwise would go to critical areas of the defence and intelligence programs. Increasingly, today's terrorists do not make demands. Much of the terrorism in the 1970s and early 1980s was about winning world attention or sympathy for a cause. But today the attack is often the cause - designed to inflict a punishment so fearful that the US will retreat from the Middle East. And the rise of the suicide bomber as a cornerstone in the new terrorism makes the plotting easier - these hit men do not need an escape route. In the jargon of the 21st century the contest has been dubbed asymmetric warfare. It means David can kill or maim Goliath. The terrorists use suicide bombers to inflict maximum hurt and pain on civilians - a battering ram to weaken government resolve. By contrast, the Western military ethos of countries such as the US usually calls for precision strikes on military targets that are intended to cause minimal collateral damage. Up to the mid-'80s, American people and installations abroad were regular targets for terrorists. But the attack that signalled a big change, the switch from propaganda to punishment, was the most sensational act of airline terrorism before the events of this week - the death of 270 people when Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. That bombing was organised from Libya. But the dubious honour of being accused of masterminding the first foreign terrorist act against the US on American soil goes to bin Laden. The year was 1993 and the target the World Trade Centre, the building bin Laden's operatives, it is assumed, finally managed to demolish this week. The attack seven years ago took six lives and did only relatively minor damage to the building. But it was not until after the simultaneous bombing in 1998 of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, when 224 people died and more than 5,500 were injured, that the US decided to pursue bin Laden into the mountains of Afghanistan. The political distaste for images of flag-draped coffins forced a decision to pursue him only with Cruise missiles - long-range and remotely fired. It was an attack that failed. Similarly, fear for American lives made the US look like it was running away from bin Laden earlier this year. As a result of listening in on mobile phone conversations between bin Laden associates, the US withdrew an FBI team that was investigating last year's attack on USS Cole in Yemen, also believed to be the work of bin Laden; it withdrew US Marines units from a training exercise in Jordan; and it pulled the ships of the US Fifth Fleet out of the port of Bahrain and stationed them in the Persian Gulf. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in February, Edward Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, accused the US Joint Chiefs of Staff of a predisposition to block virtually any combat role in counter-terrorism. Lamenting the military chiefs' refusal to sanction an attempt to capture two men accused of some of the worst war crimes in the Bosnian war, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, Luttwak said: "US intelligence agencies have no great incentive to precisely locate bin Laden or his henchmen, because even if they can find them, the terrorists are bound to disappear again long before the Joint Chiefs of Staff approve even a feasibility study [on going after them]. Action entails the risk of failure and casualty. If only zero-defect, zero-casualty operations are authorised, none will be." But Joseph Cirincione, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, senses this week's attacks may generate a realisation in the Bush Administration that it needs to use overwhelming force against terrorist targets. "After Tuesday's events I think the fear of US casualties will be less of a constraint." It is too soon after Tuesday's attacks to talk about formal investigations of the intelligence agencies' performance. But in Congress the anger is palpable. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, said: "It's probably the biggest intelligence blunder in any of our lifetimes. The people that we have given billions of dollars to, to protect us, have left us at the mercy of this type of major terrorist operation." Human intelligence - called humint in the spy trade - is a vital part of the process. But while the US spy effort is highly rated for its technical gathering of information, satellite photos and communications intercepts, it has been unable to infiltrate the terrorist cells. And a former CIA operative went some way towards explaining why in the latest Atlantic Monthly: "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist and who would volunteer to spend years of his life with ****ty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." Since the 1970s the US has been decreasing its network of intelligence agents around the world. And it was not until May this year that there was a call for a complete review of counter-terrorism policy. CIA and FBI numbers matter as much as the background and training of staff. But analysts like Bruce Hoffman, of the Rand Corporation, argue that the capacity of US counter-terrorism agencies to pre-empt or respond to attacks is rudimentary and unfocused. "The fundamental architecture was created more than 50 years ago to counter the communist threat. The question is whether this structure, which has remained largely unchanged since the post-World War II era, and is primarily oriented towards military threats, is relevant to contemporary security challenges posed by trans-national, non-state adversaries." Robert Gates, director of the CIA when George Bush snr was president, complained earlier this year that for 15 years the agencies had been under-funded, they had been doing more work with fewer people and there was no centralised control of more than a dozen budgets. This year's counter-terrorism budget is about $A24 billion, almost double that of 1995. But despite the increased spending and tighter security at government buildings, the perpetrators of this week's attacks revealed extraordinary failures in the national security. As debate raged this week about the US having prepared itself for the wrong kind of attack, Bruce Hoffman identified one of the strategic openings used by the terrorists this week. "We focus on the low end - the car-bomb and the truck-bomb - and more exotic high-end threats (like biological warfare). But we neglect the middle." Arguably, this week's terrorists came through the middle of that equation. A string of intelligence spokesmen openly admitted they had no advance warning of the attacks, that they had totally failed to detect any of the activity that might have alerted them. And yet there were warnings. This northern summer, bin Laden himself circulated a videotape in the Middle East and in parts of Central Asia, where the gap between the globalised rich of the West and the unending poverty of Muslims in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt and Jordan drives young men to queue up in droves to be taken in to his desert training camps. On the tape he talks of preparing attacks on US targets that would dwarf those he had perpetrated in the past. Perhaps showing how well he understood his enemy, he said: "With small capabilities, and with our faith, we can defeat the greatest military power of modern times." Bin Laden issued a similar tape before the attack last year on USS Cole as it refuelled at Aden, in Yemen, killing 17 US sailors. Three weeks ago his associates were warning the staff of an Arabic-language newspaper in London that a big attack was imminent. And earlier this year there was even a warning from within the US. It was a high-level report on the threats to US national security by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, and it was disturbingly prescient: "A direct attack against American citizens on American soil is likely over the next quarter-century. The risk is not only death and destruction, but also a demoralisation that could undermine US global leadership. In the face of this threat, our nation has no coherent or integrated governmental structures." The terrorists who attacked New York and Washington showed they were able to wreak havoc using weapons that were easily acquired, rather than going through the difficult process of acquiring missiles. Hoffman said: "The most salient threat to US citizens and interests comes not from exotic biological and chemical weapons, but from explosives, including homemade bombs assembled from ordinary, commercially available materials. The bomb used at the World Trade Centre [in 1993] cost about $400 to fabricate, yet the cost of the damage done and revenue lost by that attack exceeded $1,100 million." In the same vein, it could be said that the bombs used this week - hijacked aircraft that came at no cost to the terrorists - cost even less than that. Dominique Moïsi, deputy director of the French Institute of International Relations, asks: "Has the East-West competition of the Cold War era been replaced not by a North-South conflict, but by the ideological struggle between the west - represented above all by the US - and the most radical elements of Islam? "We have entered a new world. It's not the Third World War, [but] it's a war of a new type, in which the war is between the representatives of the Western world and the terrorists."
