[House Hearing, 110 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
ASSESSING THE FIGHT AGAINST AL QAEDA
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
PERMANENT SELECT
COMMITTEE
ON INTELLIGENCE
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
Hearing held in Washington, DC, April 9, 2008
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee
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44-478 WASHINGTON DC: 2008
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PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas, Chairman
LEONARD L. BOSWELL, Iowa PETER HOEKSTRA, Michigan
ROBERT E. (BUD) CRAMER, Alabama TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
ANNA G. ESHOO, California ELTON GALLEGLY, California
RUSH D. HOLT, New Jersey HEATHER WILSON, New Mexico
C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts JOHN M. McHUGH, Texas
MIKE THOMPSON, California TODD TIAHRT, Kansas
JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois MIKE ROGERS, Michigan
JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island DARRELL E. ISSA, California
PATRICK J. MURPHY, Pennsylvania
ADAM B. SCHIFF, California
Nancy Pelosi, California, Speaker, Ex Officio Member
John A. Boehner, Ohio, Minority Leader, Ex Officio Member
Michael Delaney, Staff Director
ASSESSING THE FIGHT AGAINST AL QAEDA
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WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 2008
House of Representatives,
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 12:05 p.m., in Room
210, Cannon House Office Building, the Honorable Silvestre
Reyes (chairman of the committee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Reyes, Boswell, Eshoo, Holt,
Ruppersberger, Tierney, Thompson, Schakowsky, Langevin, Schiff,
Hoekstra, Gallegly, McHugh, Rogers and Issa.
The Chairman. The committee will please come to order.
Good afternoon. Today we will focus on an issue at the top
of this committee's agenda, the threat from al Qaeda in
Afghanistan and in Pakistan. We believe that Osama bin Laden
and his most senior deputies use the largely ungoverned border
region between Afghanistan and Pakistan as a safe haven to plan
terrorist attacks against the United States and our allies. I
think that today's open session is an important companion to
the committee's classified work on this very important subject
to our country. This is one of the biggest threats that we
face, and the American people deserve to know about it. The
committee plans to hold additional hearings on al Qaeda, both
open and closed, in the coming months in order to focus on this
threat and on our progress in countering it.
Today we will receive testimony from three experts on al
Qaeda. The first is Mr. Peter Bergen, a senior fellow at the
New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., an Adjunct Lecturer
at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He
is also a research fellow at New York University's Center on
Law and Security. He is also the author of numerous books on al
Qaeda. Mr. Bergen is both a widely recognized expert on al
Qaeda and is one of the few Westerners to have actually met and
interviewed Osama bin Laden.
Second, we will hear from Mr. Robert Grenier, who, during
his 27-year career at CIA, served as the Chief of the
Counterterrorism Center, as the Deputy National Intelligence
Officer for Near East and South Asia on the National
Intelligence Council, and also as Special Assistant for Near
East and South Asia to the Under Secretary of State for
Political Affairs. Mr. Grenier is as accomplished as an
intelligence officer can be. We are fortunate to have him here
today to offer his insights to our committee.
Finally, we will receive testimony from Steven Emerson, the
Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
Mr. Emerson is also a well-known commentator on terrorism-
related matters, and we look forward to his testimony.
Thank you all for coming this afternoon. Welcome.
On September 11th, 2001, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda
attacked this nation. Immediately following the attacks, we
knew that Osama bin Laden was responsible; we knew where he
was; and we had the support of the entire civilized world in
our efforts to pursue him and to pursue his organization. Yet,
7 years later, bin Laden remains free, and al Qaeda, incredibly
enough, remains a threat.
Most disturbing to me is that, while bin Laden continues to
plot and to inspire extremism and hatred for the United States,
the bulk of our troops is bogged down in Iraq, pursuing a war
of choice against an enemy that did not attack us on 9/11.
While over 4,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq and
hundreds more in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden remains alive,
apparently comfortable enough to continue issuing statements
from, of all places, what is believed to be a safe haven in
Pakistan.
As Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, I am
anxious to hear from our experts on how we got here and what we
should do about it.
In 2003, President Bush told the American people that al
Qaeda was ``not a problem anymore.'' He was wrong.
As the National Intelligence Estimate released last summer
states, al Qaeda--and I quote--``has protected or regenerated
key elements of its homeland attack capability, including a
safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas,
operational lieutenants and its top leadership,'' end quote.
In other words, al Qaeda has the freedom to recruit, the
freedom to train and the freedom to plot new attacks against
the United States.
Clearly the threat from al Qaeda in the Afghanistan-
Pakistan border region is real. Frankly, I am not confident
that the United States has a winning plan to defeat the al
Qaeda threat despite the efforts of our men and women in the
Intelligence Community as well as those in our military and
diplomatic corps. I look forward to hearing the panel's expert
views on why we have not eliminated this threat.
Further, the committee appreciates the panel's assistance
in helping us understand the operational relationship between
al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the
effect that the war in Iraq has had on our efforts to
neutralize al Qaeda, and a reevaluation of our strategy in our
conflict with al Qaeda.
Thank you all again for joining us here today.
Mr. Reyes. I will recognize the Ranking Member of our
committee Mr. Hoekstra for any statement that he may wish to
make.
Mr. Hoekstra. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to the witnesses for appearing with us today.
This hearing today gives us a chance to discuss before the
American people the continuing threat our nation faces not only
from al Qaeda, but, from my perspective, the larger threat from
radical Jihadist terrorism.
I believe it is beneficial for the American people to hear
more about the al Qaeda threat. I believe the committee will
benefit from having this open hearing, but it is very positive,
Mr. Chairman, to hear you state that we are going to have a
series of hearings to evaluate the al Qaeda threat, both closed
and open hearings. Obviously, these individuals may have
information that may be classified or may have gotten access to
classified information or whatever, but in this forum, they do
not have the latitude to talk about it, so much of what we will
be discussing today will be an incomplete recognition of what
is actually on the record.
More than 6 years after 9/11, our nation still seems to
be--or we now seem to be at a crossroads. On the one hand, it
is clear that our homeland has not been attacked since that
tragic, fateful day. This cannot be called anything other than
a success, and it is a testament to the hard work and
dedication of the men and women of our Intelligence Community
and of our military.
On the other hand, there is a clear tendency by some in
America and in this Congress to look at our success over the
past several years as a cause or as an excuse to let down our
guard. They have confused al Qaeda's failure to successfully
carry out an attack on our homeland as a lack of intent or as a
lack of capability on the part of al Qaeda.
The reality, from my perspective, is that al Qaeda has well
expressed its intent and, I believe, has the capability to
carry out an attack on our soil. What they have lacked over the
past several years is the free rein to plod in the shadows and
to do so without fear of a U.S. response.
With our nation and freedom under attack, the smoke and the
dust still billowing from the ruins of the World Trade Center,
President Bush huddled with his national security team to
discuss what needed to be done to protect our nation from
another catastrophic attack. The President's advisors told him
the tools and the methods the U.S. intelligence agencies needed
to track and to combat radical Jihadist groups like al Qaeda.
Thus were born many of the highly effective antiterrorist tools
that have helped keep this Nation safe: the Terrorist
Surveillance Program, the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program,
the High-Value Terrorist Detainee Program. These programs were
all briefed to congressional leaders, including to the Speaker.
In fact, not a concern was raised until these programs were
leaked to the press, unfortunately, turning them into political
fodder instead of the valuable, clandestine counterterrorist
tools that they were designed to be.
I have to mention the fact that, as we are having this
hearing, our intelligence capability to protect the American
people, our embassies, our embassy personnel, troops overseas,
and our allies continues to erode. As Senate Intelligence
Chairman Jay Rockefeller declared on the Senate floor in
February, the quality of the intelligence that we are going to
be receiving is going to be degraded. It is not enough to
discuss al Qaeda and the Jihadist terrorism and to ignore the
erosion and the tools that the Intelligence Community says it
needs, the very same tools that have kept our homeland safe for
more than 6 years since 9/11. We need to strengthen our
Nation's terrorist surveillance capabilities by fixing the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Some have asked, why does the United States need to employ
tough counterterrorism programs? The answer is because the
radical Jihadist threat did not end with the 9/11 attacks, nor
did the responsibility of the President and Congress to protect
our nation. If you listen to the statements of Osama bin Laden
and of his deputy Zawahiri, it is easy to understand the
seriousness of this threat, its global implications and the
determination of radical Jihadists to strike America's
homeland.
Osama bin Laden declared war against the United States with
little fanfare in 1996 when he issued a fatwa titled
Declaration of War against the Americans' Occupying the Land of
the Two Holy Places. He acted on this so-called ``declaration
of war'' with al Qaeda attacks against the U.S. embassies in
Africa in 1998, against the U.S. Cole in 2000.
Bin Laden claims parallels between the American presence in
Iraq and the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. For example,
according to a strategy document posted to a Jihadist Web site
in 2003, with guerilla warfare, the Americans were defeated in
Vietnam, and the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan. This is
the method that expelled the direct crusader colonialism for
most of the Muslim lands.
The purpose of al Qaeda's terrorist campaign is supposedly
to establish Osama bin Laden's brand of radical Islam over what
he calls the Caliphate, a region that, in bin Laden's mind,
constitutes historic Muslim lands expanding from Iraq to
Indonesia. He said in 1998 that the pious Caliphate will start
from Afghanistan.
Zawahiri made a similar statement in October of 2005 in a
letter when he wrote the goal in this age is the establishment
of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet. In 2006, Zawahiri
said the reinstatement of Islamic rule is the individual duty
of every Muslim with every land occupied by infidels.
Some have asserted--and I expect we will hear this a lot
from the other side--that the radical Jihadist threat in Iraq
is very limited or unreal, and that the U.S. should withdraw to
focus on the so-called ``real war on terror,'' which some claim
is confined to Afghanistan and the FATA in Pakistan. I cannot
help but wonder if those who are focused on forcing our
withdrawal from Iraq would be more comfortable with our
invading a sovereign, nuclear-armed nation.
As challenging as our relationship with Pakistan has been
at times, it is also true that Pakistan has helped us capture
more al Qaeda terrorists than any other nation. Others here
today will say that the only reason al Qaeda is in Iraq is
because we are there, but this ignores the fact that al Qaeda,
like a moth drawn to a flame, will attack America and our
people anywhere they can. I refer you again to the al Qaeda-led
attacks against our embassies in Africa and against the Cole.
This point of view also ignores bin Laden's unequivocal 2004
statement that Baghdad is the capital of the Caliphate.
In July 2005, Zawahiri gave this detailed four-stage plan
for Iraq in a letter to Zarqawi, the now deceased head of al
Qaeda in Iraq: The first stage, expel the Americans from Iraq;
the second stage, establish an Islamic authority or emirate,
then develop and support it until it achieves the level of the
Caliphate over as much territory as you can to spread its power
in Iraq; the third stage, extend the Jihad wave to the secular
countries neighboring Iraq; the fourth stage--it may coincide
with what came before--the clash with Israel, because Israel
was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.
We have seen the world over that the threat from radical
Jihadists is a global threat. It is a sophisticated threat that
has spread its message; that has recruited followers; and that
has planned terrorist attacks using the Internet, satellite
television, and even computer games. Al Qaeda activity has been
reported in dozens of countries, including China, Canada,
Sweden, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Serbia, and Yemen. In
the past month alone, al Qaeda allegedly has attempted two
unsuccessful mortar attacks against our embassy and embassy
personnel in Yemen.
Our Nation, indeed, stands at a crossroad, and the choices
we make in the days and months ahead are more than about this
administration or even the next. They are about the future of
our great nation and the security of her people.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for having this hearing. I look
forward to the hearings that we will be scheduling in the
coming weeks. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Hoekstra.
Thank you for putting at least some of the things in
perspective, because you are absolutely right. The next
administration and future generations are going to have to deal
with the mess that has been created over the course of the last
6, 7 years. The greater challenge, I think, is the one that
calls on all of us to work collectively together to make sure
that we have given the professionals charged with our national
security the tools to keep us safe, at the same time balancing
the rights that we all enjoy as Americans, because if we
somehow do not have a balanced effort, then the terrorists will
have won. So I think all of us are pledged to do that.
I think all of us are pledged to continue to work jointly
together, both with this administration with the time that
remains for it and also with the new administration, to make
sure that future generations are proud of the efforts that all
of us are making to keep this country safe and the world safer
for everyone.
With that, I will now----
Mr. Issa. Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Mr. Issa.
Mr. Issa. I would ask unanimous consent that all of our
opening statements be placed in the record.
The Chairman. Without objection.
Mr. Issa. Thank you.
The Chairman. With that now, Mr. Bergen, you are recognized
for your opening statement.
STATEMENT OF PETER BERGEN, SCHWARTZ SENIOR FELLOW, NEW AMERICA
FOUNDATION
Mr. Bergen. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you,
Ranking Member, and thank you for this invitation and to the
other members of the committee.
We were asked to address three questions. One is: How is
the hunt for Osama bin Laden and senior leaders of al Qaeda
going? Two: What is the status of al Qaeda today? What might it
be in the future? Three: What policy responses? We have 10
minutes each, so I will be brief.
One: How is the hunt against Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-
Zawahiri going? I think it is fair to say that it is going very
poorly. There are all sorts of reasons for that, not the least
of which is that bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are not making
the kinds of mistakes that fugitives normally make. They are
not talking on cell phones. They are not talking on satellite
phones. The people in their immediate circles are not motivated
by cash rewards. So the hunt is going poorly.
Does it really matter if it is going poorly? My answer to
that is very simple. To suggest that bin Laden is not in charge
of the al Qaeda global jihadi network is to ignore the global
communications revolution of the last 10 years. Bin Laden does
not need to call somebody and ask for something to be done. He
just releases a videotape or an audiotape. These are placed on
the Internet. These are some of the most widely distributed
political statements in history. Millions of people read about
them, hear about them, see about them. Now, to everybody in
this room, those statements probably seem very repetitive: Kill
the Jews. Kill Americans. Kill Muslims who disagree with us, et
cetera. In fact, many of these statements have specific
instructions, and I will give you two or three examples.
Bin Laden has made it official al Qaeda policy to attack
the Saudi oil industry because he has a narrative about the
United States that we can be bankrupted by the actions of al
Qaeda. That is one of the reasons that we had an attack in 2006
on the most important oil facility in the world, the Abqaiq oil
facility in Saudi Arabia. Luckily, it was unsuccessful. If it
had been taken off line, that is 10 percent of the world's oil
supply.
There is a direct relationship between what the jihadi
network will do and what bin Laden says. Similarly, both Ayman
al-Zawahiri and bin Laden have called for attacks in Pakistan
in the last several months. Pakistan is now suffering the
largest epidemic of suicide attacks in Pakistani history in the
past year. There are many other examples.
So finding bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri is orders of
magnitude more important than finding the other al Qaeda
leaders we have found so far. It was great to find Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed, but he has no ideas. It is people with ideas
that change history, and both Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin
Laden have a readily coherent set of ideas, which unfortunately
quite a lot of people have signed up for.
So now for the status of the al Qaeda organization. As you
know from the NIE, it is resurgent. What is the evidence for
the resurgence? One, the July 7, 2005 terrorist attack in Great
Britain, in London. This was the largest terrorist attack in
British history. It was poorly understood by both the British
press and by the British Government at the beginning as a bunch
of self-starting radicalized guys who got together and launched
the attack. We now know more about the attack, two of the lead
suicide attackers trained with al Qaeda in Pakistan. Two of
them released videotapes with al Qaeda's video production arm.
It was an al Qaeda-directed attack.
What is interesting about the London attack is it looks a
lot like the Cole attack of October 2000. It took them about a
year to plan. It showed al Qaeda's ability to stretch out
thousands of miles from its base on the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border.
Then more broadly what is going on in Britain right now.
You know from the public statements of John Evans, the head of
MI-5, that there are 2,000 people in Britain they regard as
serious national security threats, many of whom have links to
al Qaeda in Pakistan. Four hundred thousand British citizens
visit Pakistan every year on completely legitimate trips
because they are British Pakistanis; if 0.01 percent of them
hook up with a Kashmiri militant group or al Qaeda. That is 40
people with training.
The other aspect of al Qaeda's resurgence is what is going
on in Afghanistan. In my view, the senior leadership of the
Taliban and al Qaeda have morphed together ideologically and
tactically. If you look at the suicide attacks in Afghanistan,
they only really took off after they saw how effective they
were in Iraq. There were almost no suicide attacks in
Afghanistan in 2001, 2002, 2003; 27 in 2005; and 139 in 2006,
geometrically progressing in number. That is because al Qaeda
has learned from Iraq, and the Taliban have learned from the
playbook in Iraq. IED attacks have doubled. Suicide attacks
have quintupled. Attacks on international forces have tripled
in the last year in Afghanistan.
Another indicator of al Qaeda's resurgence is, of course,
what is going on in Pakistan, where we are seeing 60 suicide
attacks last year compared to 5 the year before. Another
indicator of al Qaeda's resurgence is that other militant
groups are joining al Qaeda: the GSPC, which is the largest
Algerian group. The Libyan Fighting Group in the last several
months, which is the largest Libyan Islamic group, has also
joined al Qaeda.
Then, of course, there is al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Qaeda in
Iraq did not exist before the invasion. It has had a
disproportionately large effect on what is going on in Iraq. It
got the U.N. to pull out. It attacked the Jordanian Embassy,
which got Middle Eastern countries to pull out their diplomatic
representatives. By attacking in Najaf and Samarra, it sparked
a civil war.
There have been 900 suicide attacks in Iraq, which is more
suicide attacks in one country, in one place than there have
been suicide attacks in history. Eighty to ninety percent of
them are by al Qaeda in Iraq.
Al Qaeda in Iraq is obviously taking some hits right now,
but declarations of their being over, I think, would be
premature, because whatever happens with United States policy
in Iraq, we are obviously going to draw down. Drawing down will
help al Qaeda in two ways. One is it will help their narrative
that we are a paper tiger. That narrative is based on Vietnam,
Beirut and Mogadishu. Two, it helps their strategy, much more
importantly. They want to regroup and to get in a safe haven.
So whatever drawdowns we do must take this into account.
Other elements of al Qaeda's regrouping, of course, include
its video production arm, which has produced more videotapes
last year than it did in its history previously, 90 videotapes.
Videotapes imply cameramen. It implies editors. It implies
distribution systems. This is a group that takes its
information operations very seriously, probably more seriously
than we do.
So that is a snapshot of where al Qaeda is today. Given
that snapshot, what can they do in the future? I am not going
to discuss Chicken Little scenarios like nuclear weapons, but I
think there are two things they can do in the next 5 years that
are very plausible. One, they can bring down a commercial jet--
it does not have to be American, it can be anywhere in the
world--with a rocket-propelled grenade or a surface-to-air
missile. They tried to do this in Mombasa, Kenya, with an
Israeli charter jet. It almost succeeded. This is something
that they have the ability to do, and this is something they
have a strong interest in doing, and it is something that we
have seen them try to do before.
Another thing they can pull off plausibly is an attack on a
major European city with a radiological weapon. Such an attack
would have a nasty effect on global investor confidence. It
would not be a weapon of mass destruction, it would be a weapon
of mass disruption. Nonetheless, it would seem to be a 9/11-
style event. Likewise, bringing down a commercial jet would
have a very nasty effect on global tourism and aviation.
I believe that al Qaeda's ability to attack the United
States is extremely constrained looking at it in the next 5
years. The reason I say that is look at the plane plot of the
summer of 2006. This was al Qaeda's fifth anniversary
celebration, as it were, of 9/11. The plane plot was very
interesting, the plan to bring down as many as six American
airliners. It was interesting for two reasons. First of all,
they selected the hardest target imaginable, commercial
aviation. They are not interested in attacking Des Moines
malls. They are interested in attacking New York, Los Angeles
and D.C. and commercial aviation. Two, they decided to do it in
Britain. Why did they decide to do it in Britain? Because they
have got people there. If they could have done it in the United
States, they would have done it. There have been attacks by
jihadi terrorists in the past, the World Trade Center attack in
1993, the attempt to blow up Los Angeles International Airport
in 1999, and the 9/11 attacks. All of these attacks were
conducted by people coming from outside.
It is a lot harder to get into the United States right now.
The Government has made it safer in a number of ways. The
American public is more vigilant. Al Qaeda, while it is
resurging, it is still not at the point it was on September
11th, 2001. So, while it is plausible that people acting in the
name of al Qaeda might produce small-bore terror attacks
domestically, in my view, a major al Qaeda attack is not so
likely.
The impact of the Iraq war was touched upon in the opening
statements. Donald Rumsfeld famously complained: What are the
metrics for losing or winning the war on terrorism in 2003?
Well, one metric that I thought was relevant is terrorism
figures. A colleague of mine at NYU used a very conservative
methodology in a RAND database, and we found that if you
compare the period between September 11th and the beginning of
the Iraq war and the period from after the invasion up to
September 2006, you find that the rate of jihadi terrorist
attacks went up sevenfold around the world.
When I say jihadi terrorist attacks, they are attacks that
kill at least one person or more. Of course, a lot of that
happened in Iraq. A good deal of it happened in Afghanistan
because of copycatting or learning on the job in Iraq by
Afghans, mujahedin and Pakistanis. Also, a good deal of it
happened in Europe--the London attacks, Madrid, the Glasgow
attempts--and, of course, around the Arab world.
Now, when I mention this, I am not making the absurd
statement that the Iraq war caused all of these attacks, but it
certainly energized the jihadi terrorist movement around the
world in a way that, if you do the thought experiment where if
the Iraq war had not happened, we might be in a slightly
different place.
Am I running out of time, by the way?
The Chairman. You have got about 50 seconds.
Mr. Bergen. Okay. Some quick ideas about what we should do
about this.
I think one of the most critical things we can do is to
create a universal database shared across all elements of the
U.S. Government which looks at all insurgents, all terrorists,
all of their clerics, and all of their friends and family.
Friends and family are how you get into the jihad. I know that
we are looking at the Iraqi insurgency in Iraq, and we are
looking at the Afghan insurgency in Afghanistan, but we need to
think about this globally. We need to look at the
interconnections. We need to find who are the clerics who are
disproportionately inciting young men to go to the jihad. This
would be useful not only from an intelligence point of view,
but also from a policy point of view. With such a study, we
could say to the Governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia,
where so many of these suicide attackers are coming from, it is
this particular cleric and this particular mosque that are
producing a disproportionate number of the suicide attackers.
We are not saying this just because it is in our best interest,
but that it is also in yours, because when these conflicts are
over, this will blow back in your face as much as anywhere
else.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
[The statement of Mr. Bergen follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. Mr. Grenier, you are recognized for 10
minutes.
STATEMENT OF ROBERT GRENIER, MANAGING DIRECTOR, KROLL, INC.
Mr. Grenier. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Mr. Hoekstra. I
want to thank you and the other members of the committee for
inviting me here today. This is a privilege for me.
I should begin by reminding you of something that you
already know, and that is that I am almost 2 years now out of
government, and there is much that I do not know now in terms
of current privileged information beyond that which is openly
available, nor do I have particular insight into the
methodologies that are currently being employed. So I have not
come here today to provide you with new information.
What I hope I can do is to provide you with certain
judgment and perspective based on many years as a partitioner
in this area, and I hope that that will be of use to you in
your very important oversight role in questioning and in
testing assumptions and in challenging current practice in
countering terrorism.
I should point out further that I am a very strong personal
believer in vigorous oversight, and all the more so now that I
am no longer directly subject to it.
With regard to Osama bin Laden, here we are 6-plus years
after 9/11, and the man remains at large. As Peter has pointed
out, that is a very serious state of affairs. It is important
that we effect his capture, although, I think we may differ on
the degree to which it is important.
I will tell you, quite frankly, that I am not terribly
surprised that he is still at large. Tracking down bin Laden is
going to be very, very difficult. Most of us who claim some
expertise in this area, as Peter has already pointed out,
believe that he is most likely hiding out in Pakistan in the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas, I suspect somewhere north
of the Khyber Pass and south of Chitral. It is a very, very
difficult area. It is mountainous. It is fractured both
demographically and anthropologically. It is a very hostile
area not only to us as outsiders, but even to other Pakistanis
who are not from that area. His location in that area actually
is a guess. I mean, for all we know, he may be hiding in an
apartment in Karachi certainly, for all that I know.
What I think is almost certain is that, wherever he is, he
is keeping a very low profile. I doubt that he is moving at
all. The number of individuals who are directly knowledgeable
of his whereabouts, I suspect, is extremely small. As Peter has
already pointed out, it is certain that he and his confederates
are using very careful and very disciplined tradecraft in
controlling his communication, whether it is by videotape,
audiotape or otherwise.
I would point out that Eric Rudolph, the American terrorist
responsible for the attack on the Olympics in Atlanta and for a
number of other bombing attacks in the United States, managed
to remain at large for over 5 years in the mountains of North
Carolina despite the fact that he was at the top of the FBI's
most wanted list, that there was a $1 million bounty on his
head, and that there were very active efforts, both official
and nonofficial, to effect his capture.
Bin Laden has a great many advantages over Eric Rudolph
given where he is, given where he is hiding, and given the
capabilities that are at his disposal. So, again, I am not
terribly surprised at all that he has not been captured. Quite
frankly, I think that it is quite likely that he is going to
remain at large for an indefinite period of time.
In terms of methodologies that one might employ to effect
his capture, well, there are a great many things that have been
done that could presumably be done, but I think that they fall
in two broad categories. One I would call a network-based
approach. Since bin Laden does communicate at least to some
degree, the theory is that there is some sort of a human chain
that extends from him to others outside the immediate area
where he is hiding, and that if you were to capture an
individual somewhere in that chain and interrogate that
individual, you could then trace the chain back to bin Laden.
There are two very obvious problems with this. The first is
that you have got to capture someone in that chain alive. It is
most likely that the individuals who have even indirect
knowledge of the network that is being employed by bin Laden in
order to communicate are in the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas. We have not captured anyone alive in the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas for quite some time. There have been
a number of terrorists who have met their demise there, but
they have all been the victims of lethal strikes. They have not
been captured. Those close to them have not been captured, and
we have not been able to recover their material, either
documents or electronic media. So that is a real problem.
Secondly, even if we were to capture one of these
individuals, as Peter has said, the tradecraft that is being
employed, I suspect, is probably not terribly sophisticated. In
fact, its great merit, I would imagine, is in its simplicity,
but our ability to follow the trail, as it were, the human
trail, back to bin Laden would be reliant on mistakes on their
part, because it is quite easy and it is quite simple to effect
what we would call nonpersonal communications so that there are
firebreaks in that human chain leading back to bin Laden.
Again, it would require a mistake, a breakdown in discipline on
their part, in order for us to unravel that.
A second broad approach that we might employ would be what
I would call a local informant-based approach. That assumes
that wherever bin Laden is hiding, there must be some resultant
anomaly. If he is hiding in a compound somewhere in a remote
area of northern Pakistan, presumably, there are outsiders who
occasionally travel into that area in order to effect
communications with bin Laden. There may well be an unused
guesthouse on a compound which historically has been used and
no longer is being used, and nobody knows why. There may be
anomalies in terms of the amount of food that is being provided
to a particular location that is not consistent with the number
of people who are known to be there.
None of those indicators would be in any way definitive,
but if you had one or more of those indicators, that would be
an indication that you ought to follow up vigorously with some
sort of a local investigation. In order to do that, however,
given the atomized nature of the areas in which bin Laden is
most likely hiding, you would have to have a great number, a
great many informants, any one of which would only be able to
cover a very small, localized area.
You cannot do that for all of northern Pakistan. What you
can, perhaps, do is to set some priorities of areas that you
would particularly want to look at. I think that there are some
criteria that you could set for which are the areas that you
particularly want to look at hard. Then you would have to move
about very vigorously and systematically to identify and to
recruit informants in each of those areas. It is a very, very
difficult, time-intensive, manpower-intensive effort. I do not
say that it cannot be done, but even if you did everything
right, you would also have to be very lucky, I think, to
succeed in the end.
Particularly when we are talking about a local-informant
and investigation-based approach, that has the further problem
associated with it that it would largely be unrelated to the
larger effort to kill, to capture or to otherwise neutralize
senior members of al Qaeda who are hiding in the safe haven in
the Northwest Frontier. I might differ a little bit from Peter
in that as important as I concede the effort to locate, to
capture or to otherwise eliminate bin Laden and Zawahiri, I
think it is actually much more important in the near term that
we continue the effort to kill or to capture senior lieutenants
who, unlike bin Laden and probably unlike Zawahiri, are
directly involved in the effort to launch terrorist attacks
across the border in Afghanistan, in Western Europe and,
perhaps, much farther afield. That is a very broad topic, and
perhaps we will get into it in the Q&A portion.
I will just make two broad points here. One is that what we
are trying to do in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas are
two broad things, two broad objectives, and they work in direct
conflict with one another. The first is that we are trying to
kill or to capture senior terrorists who are engaged in
plotting against us. At the same time, we are trying to deny
them safe haven in that area. Progress against one of those
objectives works directly against our efforts in the other
respect, and vice versa.
The second broad point that I would make is that the only
way that we are really going to get an arm around this problem,
and the only way that we are going to make anything like
permanent progress, is to deny the FATA as a safe haven for bin
Laden, for al Qaeda and for related extremists. I believe that
the only way that we are going to do that is through a long-
term counterinsurgency effort that will be multifaceted and
that will be as much economic- and political- as it will be
military- and intelligence-based. It will be something that can
really only effectively be done by the Pakistanis, but once we
have convinced them that they must do it, then it will require
a great deal of vigorous support on the part of the United
States in a very long-term commitment to sustain that effort.
With regard to the much broader, literally global struggle
against al Qaeda, again, that is a very, very broad topic. I
would just like to stress three points there. The first is that
I agree with Peter that it is absolutely vital that we sustain
the progress that has been made and, in fact, make further
improvement in the situation with regard to al Qaeda in Iraq.
It would be tremendously dangerous for us if al Qaeda were able
to establish an effective safe haven in the Sunni-dominated
areas of Iraq.
Secondly, one of the things that is often overlooked, I
think, is the fact that we rely absolutely on the effectiveness
of our allies in the war on terror. We do not tend to think so
much about it in terms of resources. We do not tend to focus on
it nearly as much, but we would be essentially dead in the
water were it not for the vigorous efforts of our allies. I
think that, therefore, capacity-building is an extremely
important part of our international program that is often
relatively overlooked.
The third has to do with the war of ideas, this whole issue
of whether we are creating more terrorists than, in fact, we
are killing and capturing. I believe that currently we are, and
that unless there is effective engagement in the so-called
``war of ideas,'' we are not going to turn a corner on that. I
do not think that we have engaged in that battle at all. I
think to the extent that we have thought about it, our thoughts
have been confused. However, I think that the keys to progress
in that area are in two areas that, frankly, should be great
national strengths of ours. The first is a commitment to
justice. The second is a commitment to democracy.
With that, I will end my statement. Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Grenier.
[The statement of Mr. Grenier follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. We have got less than 8 minutes left in the
vote. We have got three votes. I want to recess the committee
and then come back with Mr. Emerson's opening statement.
Thank you. The committee is in recess.
[Recess.]
The Chairman. The hearing will please come to order.
With that, Mr. Emerson, you are recognized for 10 minutes.
STATEMENT OF STEVEN EMERSON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE
INVESTIGATIVE PROJECT ON TERRORISM
Mr. Emerson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the
opportunity here, and I thank you and your fellow Members for
holding this hearing.
I would like to say that I was very impressed with my
colleagues' testimony. They leave me very little to say, of
course, but I will try. I apologize for the length of my
testimony. It was designed to relieve any of you of the need to
take any Ambien.
So I would say, first of all, that the first problem we
face right now is the new government in Pakistan. As you know,
Musharraf had attempted to broker peace with the tribes and
militia, and it culminated in a counterproductive deal between
the tribal and militant leaders in northern Waziristan.
According to the deal, foreign fighters were to leave north
Waziristan, and then tribal leaders were to clean house. It did
not happen. The insurgency in the FATA area grew emboldened by
what could be seen as an official government sanction of these
illegal armed groups. Regardless, the deal ended when Pakistani
forces crushed militants who seized control of the infamous Red
Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007. Since then, tribal and
militant leaders have denounced Musharraf and have even carried
out 36 suicide bombings against military targets alone.
Now, with the new recent elections, there is a lot of
uncertainty. Musharraf played both sides of the house, but
largely it was a 51-49 deal in working with the U.S., but also
in knowing that his flow of new fighter jets and lots of
billions of dollars depended upon the ability to keep finding
new al Qaeda leaders. Miraculously, one leader after another
was captured almost on a regular basis, on a yearly basis, but
the new Pakistani Government lead by the People's Party will
likely seek, unfortunately, a Northwest Frontier policy and a
Federally Administered Tribal Area policy that differs markedly
from Musharraf's policy.
I think one of the basic recommendations that I would come
out with is that we need to make sure that the new Government
of Pakistan sees that it is in its own best interest to be as
aggressive as possible in the Taliban areas of Waziristan and
in the FATA area in the Northwest Frontier Province, and to
allow the United States the latitude to unilaterally conduct
cross-border strikes and Predator strikes at high-value targets
as had been done just several weeks ago.
As far as the hunt for bin Laden, my belief is that, if we
look at bin Laden, he was certainly the pinnacle of his
organization that was reached on September 10th, 2001. Since
then, it has been dispersed. It has been largely incapacitated
as an organization, although it has reconstituted itself with
new leaders taking part in replacing two-thirds of the
leadership that had been taken out, either killed or captured,
since 9/11.
There is some good news as to a high-ranking leader that we
identified in the testimony, Abu Obaidah al-Masri. Today, it
was revealed that he was found dead. I do not know the
circumstances of his death, but at least that is one more major
leader who has been taken out.
Now, having said that, al Qaeda is both an organization,
again, really constituting lots of miniorganizations or other
organizations like the Islamic Movement of the Maghreb, GSPC,
the Egyptian Islamic Vanguards, the al-Zawahiri acquisition
back in 1995.
It is also a movement. I think, as a movement, frankly, it
is almost more dangerous than as an organization. In that
respect, we see what is happening in Europe in terms of the
plots that have occurred in Denmark, in the U.K., in Madrid,
and most recently in Germany. Germany was quite interesting
because this converges directly with what the Director of the
CIA said 2 weeks ago, that we are about to see a new type of
profile of Islamic militants come through our borders, one that
will not be as detectable as the other proverbial types,
meaning that the two major members of this cell in Germany that
were about to attack Ramstein Air Force Base as well as
nightclubs and American bars frequented by Americans were
Germans who had converted to Islam. Their arrests have resulted
in some incredible interrogations and confessions that have
revealed how they transited to al Qaeda-affiliated camps in
Pakistan on their own volition. As a result of going there,
they hooked up and got trained in how to carry out bombings.
The same can be said for the Danish plot. The same can be
said for the July 2005 bombing of the trains in London. Then in
other countries such as Italy and Belgium, we find also other
plots. Some of them do not show a linkage directly to al Qaeda.
For example, the Hofstede Group carried out the killing of
Teddy van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker who had made a film called
``Submission.'' It was particularly horrifying when it was
carried out several years ago because it was simply a group of
young Muslims based in Belgium--not in Belgium, but in the
Netherlands--who basically said, we are going to kill anybody
who insults the Prophet or who insults Islam. They stabbed him,
and they shot him multiple times, as a result of which
colleagues of his--eight colleagues of his and members of the
Parliament had to go into hiding. Today there are at least
seven members of Parliament there who are still members or who
are former members who are in hiding as a result, including
Geert Wilders, who just made a film called ``Fitna.''
Even though the film can be considered anti-Islamic, I
would refer you to the very good article written by the Ranking
Republican Mr. Hoekstra, who wrote a piece in the March 27
issue of The Wall Street Journal in which he stated, reasonable
men in free societies regard Geert Wilders' anti-Muslim
rhetoric and films like ``Fitna'' as disrespectful of the
religious sensitivities of members of the Islamic faith, but
free societies also hold freedom of speech to be a fundamental
human right. We do not silence, jail or kill people with whom
we disagree because their ideas are offensive or disturbing. We
believe that when such ideas are openly debated, they sink on
their own weight and attract few followers.
The fact of the matter is that there has been a
reconstitution. When we look at the larger picture, what are we
facing? This hearing is supposed to focus on al Qaeda, but my
contention and my testimony, half of my 50 pages--and I
apologize for the length--focuses on al Qaeda or on al Qaeda-
linked plots in Europe, on the use of the FATA area and the
Northwest Frontier Province to launch attacks, on the use of
self-anointed franchises in Europe, and then on homegrown
franchises in the United States or in Canada or in London that
attach themselves to al Qaeda's ideology.
It is my basic contention that we cannot decouple al Qaeda
from the larger battle against radical Islamic etiology from
which it stems. If we do, we are guaranteed to lose the war
against al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was born out of an organization, as
are almost all other Sunni movements, called the Muslim
Brotherhood. That is what drives al Qaeda. It also drives
Hamas. It drives Islamic Jihad. Their etiology--it is the
etiology of al Qaeda as well--is intrinsically hostile to
secular democracies that value pluralism, the separation of
church and state, free speech, minority rights, and freedom of
religion.
A former member of the Clinton administration, who I worked
with in combating terrorism back in the 1990s, Richard Clarke,
stated in testimony in 2003 that the issue of terrorist
financing in the U.S. is a fundamental example of the shared
infrastructure levered by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda,
all of which enjoy a significant degree of cooperation and
coordination within our borders that commonly carries the
extremist Muslim Brotherhood. All of these organizations are
descendants of the membership and etiology of the Muslim
Brotherhood. So, therefore, I think that it is imperative that
we look at the larger problem of radical Islamic etiology of
which al Qaeda exploits and propagates, but that also is
propagated by a host of other organizations that were derived
from the same parent, parental organization, the Muslim
Brotherhood.
As you probably are aware, in the Holy Land Foundation
trial that was held last fall in Texas, more than 100,000
documents were released that were probably the most important
national security documents released in the last 30 years. In
those documents they revealed the extent to which the Muslim
Brotherhood itself had implanted itself within American borders
with the same intent as al Qaeda, but to do it internally; that
is, to carry out an internal jihad from within--a
``civilizational jihad'' they called it--to sabotage and to
subvert U.S. democracy from within.
I call this almost the stealth jihad. On one hand, you have
open attacks which we recognize as terrorist attacks. Then you
have infiltration. That is as dangerous an attack as well,
because that undermines our whole basis of democracy.
The fact that a Hezbollah member was able to infiltrate the
CIA and FBI recently, and the fact that a member of the
Hofstede Group infiltrated AIVD shows that these Islamic
radical groups are trying to penetrate Western intelligence,
and they have already penetrated Middle Eastern and Southeast
Asian intelligence organizations. One only has to look at ISI
in Pakistan to see how much they have been compromised
historically and how they are still compromised and are
unwilling to admit that they have far more knowledge about
where bin Laden's likely whereabouts are or al Zawahiri's than
they have admitted publicly.
So I believe that we cannot afford to basically isolate the
problem only as al Qaeda. One only has to look at what happened
after the Danish cartoons, which resulted in 24-hour protection
for Hirsi Ali, who is a member of the Dutch Parliament, and for
other parliamentarians.
Now, in the United States itself, I am submitting for the
record an actual wanted poster, printed in an Arabic newspaper,
of a woman named Wafa Sultan, who resides in the United States.
She emigrated from Syria. She was a Syrian Muslim. She has
spoken out against radical Islam on television, on al-Jazeera
of all places, and has debated even the spiritual leader of the
Muslim Brotherhood's use of al-Qaradawi, who has himself issued
fatwas calling for the killing of Americans in Iraq and for the
killing of Jews. Well, he declared that Ms. Sultan insulted
Islam. Then this poster came out that said that she was a
vilifier of Islam; it said ``Wanted for Justice.'' That poster,
which I am holding up here, is clearly the first time, I
believe, that an American--she is an American now--has gone
into hiding on her own volition, without the protection of the
FBI, because of the threats stemming from the larger
etiological confrontation spawned by radical Islam.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Emerson.
[The statement of Mr. Emerson follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. Without objection, all of your statements in
their entirety will be part of the record. We really appreciate
your being here.
Let me start the questioning.
First, we know that al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11. As some
of you have indicated, we know we have made some significant
progress, but Osama bin Laden in particular and al Qaeda in
general continue to be an issue for us. Whether it is al Qaeda-
specific or al Qaeda as the cause that other organizations or
other groups choose to align themselves with in order to carry
out terrorist action globally against Western countries,
nonetheless, 7 years later, al Qaeda is still able to recruit;
they are still able to train; and in particular, Osama bin
Laden is still able to send out his messages, as well as al-
Zawahiri. Whether or not they are coded messages or just
messages of encouragement, they are still problematic to all of
us.
My first question is: How is it that al Qaeda has been able
to regain strength? With Osama bin Laden still at large, what
does this specifically mean for al Qaeda? I will ask each of
you to comment.
Mr. Bergen. How is it that al Qaeda has regained strength?
The Chairman. Yes. How is it that he has been able to
regain strength? Secondly, what is the role that Osama bin
Laden plays to that end?
Mr. Bergen. We know in 2002, Mr. Chairman, that the
documents that were picked up on the battlefield after the fall
of the Taliban revealed that al Qaeda internally felt under
great pressure, and there was a fair amount of criticism for
months within al Qaeda for attacking the United States. These
documents say we have got an 800-pound gorilla coming after us,
the United States. The attack was a dumb idea.
In 2002, al Qaeda, by its own account, not by our account,
was on the ropes. A critical component in al Qaeda's resurgence
was the Iraq war, because, A, it confirmed bin Laden's large
narrative about the United States; B, it increased
radicalization around the Muslim world; and it increased anti-
Americanism. So al Qaeda was able to take the Iraq war and
basically use it as a life raft, and of course they kept their
safe haven on the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Safe havens are very important because without safe havens,
you cannot train. Without training, you cannot be an effective
terrorist. We do not train the American Army on the Internet.
It turns out that you do not train effective terrorists on the
Internet; you train them in training camps. So they kept their
safe haven on the Afghan-Pakistan border, and they have this
important new development in Iraq. Both the Democrats and the
Republicans tend to say that the central front is either in
Iraq or in Pakistan. The problem is the central fronts are in
both countries right now. So those are, I think, some of the
factors of the resurgence.
How important is bin Laden to the movement? I believe that
if von Stauffenberg had killed Hitler with a bomb under the
conference room table in 1944, World War II would have finished
much quicker. Bin Laden and Hitler are very different people,
but certain people influence history very directly. As for
Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden, it was their idea for 9/11
largely. Al Qaeda is their creature. If you took them away from
the scene, the organization itself would be very wounded. We
weren't attacked by a set of ideas on 9/11, we weren't attacked
by an ideological movement. We were attacked by an
organization. Organizations have leaders. Bin Laden is the most
important leader. If we capture or kill Ayman al-Zawahiri, that
would be useful, but it would not be as important as capturing
bin Laden. Ayman al-Zawahiri is somebody who, even within the
organization, is not regarded with great love. People love bin
Laden. That is a very strong word.
Mr. Grenier. Well, I would support what most people have
just said. I think when we talk about al Qaeda as narrowly
defined, that organization that was responsible for the attacks
on 9/11, it has been able to reconstitute itself in the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas. I was there in Pakistan when
members of al Qaeda were fleeing out of Afghanistan. At that
point they were intent on making their way through Pakistan to
Iran and to the gulf. It was as a result of that, their sort of
moving through these ratlines, if you will, through Pakistan,
that we were able with our Pakistani allies to wrap up a very
large number not only of senior al Qaeda cadres, but also of
simple fighters who were coming out of Afghanistan.
At a certain point they realized that there was an
opportunity for them to gain safe haven in the tribal areas.
The first great concentration of them we saw was in South
Waziristan. We really sort of tumbled into that in the spring
of 2004. I will not recount all of the agonized history, but
there were effective actions that were taken by ourselves and
by the Pakistanis there. There was a migration up into North
Waziristan and into the Bajor Agency, and that is really still
where the center, if you will, of safe haven activity on the
part of al Qaeda still exists.
Because of some of the history that Steve just mentioned,
particularly the agreement that was reached by General
Musharraf with the extremists in North Waziristan in September
of 2006, unfortunately they have been able to establish
themselves quite firmly in that area, and that is the situation
as it still persists here today.
With regard to al Qaeda in Iraq, that is a very significant
phenomenon. It is somewhat different, however, I think, from
the narrative that I have just described. Al Qaeda in Iraq was
a creature, a creation, of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi was
sort of, roughly, affiliated with al Qaeda. He was not sort of
a bayat-swearing member of al Qaeda, but he was able, if you
will, to establish a franchise.
And he saw a great benefit to himself and his organization
in assuming, if you will, the al Qaeda brand. And as Peter has
pointed out, we see the same thing replicating itself
elsewhere, organizations which heretofore have seen themselves
as part of a national struggle, whether in Morocco
particularly, in Algeria, in Libya, and elsewhere. Now as they
have been stymied in their efforts to take over their native
countries they have, if you will, rebranded themselves as al
Qaeda, in this case al Qaeda in the Arab Maghreb, and also are
beginning to think of themselves and their mission in very
different terms. The former GSPC, now a major part of al Qaeda
in the Arab Maghreb, whereas before saw its mission as
Islamizing, liberating their country Algeria, now they see
themselves quite self-consciously as part of a global jihad.
And I think that is significant. We are seeing the same thing
now with hitherto independent movements in Pakistan and
Afghanistan. We now see members of the Taliban who before,
although they were providing assistance and safe haven to al
Qaeda, now they see themselves much more so than before as part
of the same global movement.
The same is true of the collection of the extremist groups
within Pakistan, the rise of Pakistanis who now refer to
themselves loosely as Tehrik-e-Taliban. They now again see
themselves, rather than people who were locked in the highly
particular goals and aspirations, they now see themselves as
part of a much wider movement.
So, on the one hand, al Qaeda as narrowly defined I think
is a phenomenon largely of the Pakistan-Afghanistan tribal
areas, but the influence of bin Laden has been one to spread
the brand around the world.
I disagree a little bit with Peter in that my belief is
that if bin Laden were to die tomorrow it would not mean the
end of al Qaeda. I think that he is a great symbol for the
movement. I think the fact that he is still alive and remains
at large is greatly encouraging to those within al Qaeda and to
members of that much broader movement. But I think that they
would find a way to carry on both as a movement and as an
organization if he were to meet his demise.
The Chairman. Mr. Emerson.
Mr. Emerson. You raise a great question. How is it that al
Qaeda could reconstitute itself in such an incredible way 6\1/
2\ years later after all of the efforts we have gone through,
cutting the money, arresting, killing, targeting people,
killing top leaders, interrogating, getting our intelligence?
How could they still do this.
I think my response would be, one, there was almost a
perfect storm that developed right after 9/11, and one was the
incredible fast-paced developments of information technology
that allowed al Qaeda to transmit propaganda as well as
communicate internally without being detected by U.S.
technology. We were not fast enough to figure out how they were
getting their tapes, how they were communicating among
themselves. In the 1990s we picked up their cell phones and we
picked up their satellite cell phones, but they have gone
beyond that, way beyond that. So they figured out a way to
communicate without us detecting what they were saying. We used
to hear the word ``chatter.'' Well, you know what the word
``chatter'' means; it is disparate words and doesn't mean
anything to us. It is nonstructured data.
Number two, there are a lot of demobilized Jihadists from
after the Afghanistan invasion.
Number three, there was the liberation of territory
essentially established by the Taliban and al Qaeda supporters
in Waziristan and parts of Afghanistan and certainly in the
FATA and the North-West Frontier Province.
Four is European laws had not come to grips yet with the
fact that a lot of the extremist Muslim immigrants had an
easy--there were no laws restricting the flow back and forth
between Europe and Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other countries
who had supported terrorism. So there was a large migration, I
shouldn't say massive, but a large flow of people who went into
Pakistan, got training, then came out and went back to Europe.
So bases in Europe got established.
And then, of course, you had self-anointed franchises.
So al Qaeda sort of grew again by virtue of its children in
the Maghreb, in Algeria, in Lebanon, in Gaza.
You know, when you asked the question of the reconstitution
of al Qaeda, you could ask the same question of Hamas, which
was on its legs when it was blockaded entirely and it is still
surviving very well. You could have asked the question about
Islamic jihad, you could have asked it about GSPS.
All of these groups show one thing in common: The
transcendence of radical Islamic theology over self-interest,
over civil interests, over any national interests, over any
economic interests. 15 of the 9/11 hijackers came from families
that had wealth considered to be evaluated more than $10
million in value. So it shows that wealthy families produced
kids who carried out the 9/11 attacks.
So that transcendence of radical Islamic theology is what
we were dealing with, and I think we have failed, honestly, as
a government to come to terms with this.
And I give you one great example. When Karen Hughes, who
was Under Secretary of State, was in charge of this outreach
program, and to use the market of ideas, she thought that 60-
second commercials and radio stations were going to basically
convert people who believed in jihad and suicide bombings into
rational, democratic, secular, pluralist folks. It didn't work.
It wouldn't work. She ended up meeting with the Muslim
Brotherhood thinking that, if we are rational, they are
rational. We view others the same way we view ourselves. Well,
it wasn't the case. They lied to her. In fact, we ended up
empowering the Muslim Brotherhood and empowering radical
Islamic groups around the world, including groups in the United
States, into believing somehow that we are a weak tiger and
very weak and naive in believing that somehow talking to people
was the only way we were going to convince them that the free
market would produce a rational response.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Emerson.
Mr. Hoekstra.
Mr. Hoekstra. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thanks to the
witnesses. I appreciate your time and your knowledge on this
background. And with all that we have studied on the committee
over the last number of years, I think we start and have an
appreciation for how complex that issue is and how difficult it
is to get your hands around it. And I think in this last
question, in your opening testimony, you talked about one thing
that I agree with you on, is their ability to use new
technology, use the Information Age, and use it to their
benefit to drive their message to perhaps provide some
direction to where they want these disparate organizations to
move and to get things done.
I think the other thing that I believe about al Qaeda is
that it is a learning organization. It adapts as its reality
changes, it adapts very, very quickly. They have used various
things to promote their brand identity, whether it was the
occupation of the two holy places or the holy cities.
A while back the popular line was to say, well, you know
you need to deal with the Palestinian issue, because that is
what is fueling al Qaeda and radical jihadism. Then it is Iraq.
Then it is the Danish cartoons. Now it may be builders sometime
over the next couple months as that evolves and takes on a life
of its own. Then it was 9/11. But they have been very, very
effective in driving their message through technology.
I was in Libya last week, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco. I have
been to Algeria. And it is interesting, as they have evolved,
it is very interesting to be able to go and meet with Muammar
Khadafi, and find out that Khadafi is now an ally with us in a
certain context against radical Jihadists, as are the
governments in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. So as radical
Jihadists morph, so do we. And I think we can make a very good
argument that we need to do more, but we need to do more of it
quicker.
The thing that I would be interested in is your perception
of the ability of al Qaeda, al Qaeda Central as we have
referred to it out of Pakistan, the Pak-Afghan border, to
extend its reach and influence into Western Europe, into the
United States, to coordinate, direct, plan, train attacks
against these. How good is it?
During the break I think we were talking about the book,
there was a book that came out, Leadership Jihad. And in that
book, he makes the argument that al Qaeda Central isn't that
important anymore, that radical Islam has taken a life of its
own, and that eliminating bin Laden, taking care of Zawahiri,
it is not that big of a deal anymore. I think the panel here
may disagree with it. But I would be interested in your ability
or your perception of al Qaeda to be able, from al Qaeda
Central, to project into Western Europe and into the United
States through homegrown terrorism. And we will go through the
list.
Mr. Bergen. Thank you very much, Mr. Hoekstra. Al Qaeda's
ability to expand influence into Western Europe is obviously
pretty high. I mean, the statement by John Evans, the head of
MI5, that there were 2,000 people that they consider serious
security risks sort of speaks for itself. Britain of course is
particularly problematic because so many British Muslims visit
Pakistan every year; 70 percent of British Muslims are
Pakistani, and a disproportionate number of those are Kashmiri.
The problem is also true in many European countries, but we
are somewhat insulated by several factors in the United States.
First of all, there is something called the American Dream. I
grew up in Britain; I am not aware of a British dream or an EU
dream certainly. And a country built on immigration like the
United States is able to integrate its American Muslims much
better. American Muslims are better educated than the average
American, they have higher incomes, et cetera, et cetera.
It is very hard to prove negatives, but I don't think al
Qaeda sleeper cells exist in this country. If they exist, they
are either comatose or dead. They have done nothing in the last
several years. We have seen people particularly with al Qaeda
living in the United States, but they are very small in number
compared to the numbers we are seeing in Europe. And I can give
you the names, but the names, you can count them on a few
hands.
So I think al Qaeda's ability to extend its influence into
the United States is very small. But that has never been a
problem anyway. When being attacked by jihadi terrorists, they
are people coming from outside: Ramzi Yousef, Ahmad Ressam, the
9/11 hijackers. So luckily we are somewhat insulated. In terms
of Europe it is a very different picture.
Now, of course you could have a mass casualty attack on a
group of Americans in Europe quite easily. If the plane bomb
plot in the summer of 2006 had succeeded, that is six American
airliners, do the math; it is what, almost 2,000 people. It
would have been a 9/11 style event. So that is really where the
problem is, and that problem is going to get worse rather than
better because for demographic reasons Europeans are not having
children anymore. When you visit Florence in the future, it
will be like the neutron bomb has gone off, where there are
buildings but no Italians because Italians are simply not
having kids. These countries face existential choices, which is
we are either going to have a country without people or we are
going to have to import a lot of people from somewhere else.
And where will those people come from? In most European
countries, the Middle East or North Africa. And, through a
combination of European racism, a certain amount of alienation,
a certain amount of homesickness, a number of those immigrants
will turn to the al Qaeda ideology. Think about 9/11. 9/11
wasn't incubated really in Afghanistan; it was as much
incubated in Hamburg as it was in Afghanistan.
So that is the problem going forward. And in some ways
there is some optimism there, because it is harder to get in
the United States. European countries also are realizing
belatedly that they have this domestic problem.
Mr. Grenier. I would very much agree with what Peter has
just said. One of the things that I would point to as we look
at the number of actual terrorist attacks, such as what
occurred in London in July of 2005 and a number of others, to
include some potentially catastrophic attacks that have been
hatched in Western Europe and fortunately have not come to
fruition. For the most part, if I am not mistaken, the would-be
perpetrators and/or perpetrators of those acts have been self-
motivated and self-organized. These were not individuals who
were recruited out of the tribal areas in Pakistan and then
dispatched into Western Europe in order to mount these attacks.
For the most part, these are people who came together sort of
self-consciously, if you will, as part of a community nursing
resentments and deciding to do something about it locally.
Where the link with al Qaeda has occurred is they have
reached back from a place where they could get support, either
it is ideological support, religious instruction, technical
support, financial support, back into the Afghan-Pakistan
tribal areas. And I think that is significant; where the
impetus, where the initiative has come from is significant. And
the fact that the impetus came from areas far removed from the
safe haven is very significant.
As Peter has pointed out, the chances of that sort of a
plot being hatched in a place like Western Europe are far
greater than a similar thing taking place in the United States.
Number one, there is a much larger Muslim population in many of
the Western European countries, much less integration, much
more perceived cause for resentment and hatred of the West
than, fortunately, is the case here in the United States. It
doesn't mean that it couldn't happen here in the United States,
but I think that the chances for it are much greater in Western
Europe.
One of the great concerns that I have is the relative ease
of transport between Western Europe and the United States; the
fact that we have a very permissive visa regime between Western
European countries and the United States which would enable
those who would do us harm who are not indigenous to the United
States to travel into the United States. That is not an
argument for somehow raising much higher visa barriers, but it
is a fact that, given the nature of our society, given the open
society that we want to foster and maintain, it necessarily
carries with it a much greater risk and vulnerability.
Mr. Emerson. I would say that, first of all, there is a
common narrative in al Qaeda's mantra with all of the
defendants arrested in every single plot since 9/11. That
mantra is that there is a war against Islam, it has been
carried out by the West or the U.S. or--by the West since the
crusade in 1095 and therefore we have to avenge it. And that
was the mantra of the Danish suspects arrested in September,
that was the mantra of the German suspects arrested earlier
this year, that was the mantra of the British suspects arrested
in the second plot and in the videos released in the first
attack in July of 2005. And, by the way, that is also the
mantra of the averted attacks in the United States. And I guess
I would disagree with Peter, who I, by the way, used to work
with very closely many years ago, and I would disagree with him
on one point: That I think that the radicalism in the United
States has not manifested itself because we have done a much
better job of intelligence gathering in terms of preventing
attacks. But I think the radicalism is pervasive here because
of the groups that exist here. One can see they all were
derived--not all of them, but some of the mainstream, quote,
groups were derived from the Muslim Brotherhood as revealed in
the Holy Land documents. And their mantra is, and you can hear
it and we hear it all the time when we attend their
conferences, is that there is a war against Islam. And a
Canadian intelligence official testified last year that that is
the one single motivating factor in inducing young Muslim men
to carry out attacks, that type of anger.
And so we averted an attack at Fort Dix, only because of a
Circuit City clerk who saw--he was copying videos and he saw
something suspicious. We averted an attack in Ohio in Peoria.
We averted an attack in Lodi. And people make fun of these
arrests because people are arrested at a very early stage of
the plots, and the FBI becomes a victim of becoming too
aggressive. Had these plots matured more and the public had
seen much more of the evidence, then I think the public would
be convinced that we have a serious radical Islamic danger in
the United States. It doesn't mean that the vast majority of
Muslims support it. They don't. But there is a radicalization
process going on here largely induced by some of the mainstream
groups that, unfortunately, have been considered to be partners
with the FBI when they should be considered outcasts.
Mr. Hoekstra. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Hoekstra.
Mr. Holt.
Mr. Holt. I yield to Ms. Eshoo.
The Chairman. Ms. Eshoo.
Ms. Eshoo. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you for your
testimony today. I have four questions.
My first question is, what do you estimate the number of al
Qaeda in Iraq today, and what did you estimate al Qaeda to be
when we invaded? That is my first question.
My second question is on training. Can you describe where
al Qaeda's training is today, the quality of it, the number of
graduates, so to speak, that they produce? Give us some
indication of what you know about that. And to what extent do
you think al Qaeda is responsible for the acts of murder,
kidnapping, terror against Iraqi Christians?
Mr. Bergen. Thank you for those very excellent questions.
The first one, al Qaeda in Iraq today, the size. Al Qaeda in
Iraq is 80 to 90 percent an Iraqi organization. That has
changed over time. When it started of course it was largely
foreigners. Al Qaeda in Iraq, even though it is a relatively
small part of the insurgency, perhaps 3,000 would be the
minimal number, maybe 5,000 would be the maximal, who is
conducting 80 to 90 percent of the suicide attacks and
therefore has had a disproportionate effect on the course of
the war.
The size of al Qaeda in Iraq when we invaded was zero.
There was no--Zarqawi was in Kurdish Iraq, northern Iraq, which
of course was an area more under our control than under Saddam.
So there was no al Qaeda presence in Iraq. Unfortunately, as a
result of our invasion, there is now.
The second question, training al Qaeda today, where is it
happening, how good are the graduates, what are they getting.
Let's look at the London attack of July 7, 2005 as a sort of
model of this training. Two of the guides, two of the leaders
trained in an al Qaeda training camp on the North-West Frontier
Province.
What are they learning? They are learning how to make a
bomb with hydrogen peroxide. And one of my proposals is we need
to be very careful henceforth about the way we control
industrial strength hydrogen peroxide in this country. A bomb
made out of hydrogen peroxide, and I have seen this being
demonstrated in Britain, a relatively small amount would
basically blow out the entire--everybody in this room would be
dead. This is not the sort of thing you get at your
hairdresser, industrial strength hydrogen peroxide.
That is what is being taught. That was also the material
that was going to be used in the summer plot to bring down the
American airliners, that was also the material that was going
to be used in the Ramstein Air Force Base. The numbers of
people who are being trained are relatively small, but they
are, unfortunately, enough to create these plots.
Under the Taliban in Afghanistan, you are talking about
hundreds of people going through training camps at any given
moment. Here, you are talking about 10, 20 guys, all guys of
course, in a small compound not amenable to overhead imagery,
not amenable to bombing, disguised, able to get the bomb-
making, how to run a cell, enough to basically be an effective
terrorist. So I hope that answers that question.
And then the final question, al Qaeda's attacks on Iraqi
Christians, I really don't know the answer to.
Ms. Eshoo. Thank you. Does anyone want to add to what was
just said in answering these questions?
Mr. Grenier. I think I would add a little bit with regard
to the situation in Iraq. As Peter has pointed out, al Qaeda in
Iraq is primarily an Iraqi phenomenon. Perhaps 90 percent of
its numbers have been Iraqis. And so, yes, while I would agree
that there really was no al Qaeda in Iraq before the invasion,
part of the reason that we suddenly had this flowering, if you
will, of al Qaeda in Iraq was that although there was very
little visible sign of an Islamic radicalization among some
elements of the Iraqi population that we saw elsewhere in the
Arab and Islamic world, we didn't see it in Iraq largely
because of the climate of repression that existed there. Once a
vacuum was created, the Ba'ath Party was removed, the Iraqi
Army was removed, it suddenly became possible for this broad
cultural phenomenon to manifest itself inside Iraq. It was
precipitated I think by outsiders, foreigners who came into
Iraq. But very quickly, again, in the absence of the further
discrediting of the Ba'ath Party, radical Islamism became the
primary ideology through which Iraqi nationalism expressed
itself.
Mr. Eshoo. It is a tragedy is what it is. That is just one
word to describe it.
Let me ask this. In moving forward, in January of 2009 we
are going to have new leadership in the White House. And if
two--either one of the Democrats are elected, they are
promising a change of policy in Iraq. Can you fast forward and
tell us what you think Iraq would look like with a drawdown of
American troops and what it would look like, what Iraq would
look like and al Qaeda?
The Chairman. And if you can do it briefly, because we want
to get all members to ask their questions.
Mr. Bergen. Briefly. Al Qaeda has a narrative about the
United States as a paper tiger narrative. Any drawdown from
Iraq will inform that narrative. Vietnam, Beirut, Mogadishu.
We are on the horns of a dilemma. We are going to confirm
their narrative and we will help their strategy the less we are
there. On the other hand, the fact we are there increases
radicalization and gives energy to the jihadi movement around
the world.
So my short answer is, it is a very difficult problem,
because you have got to balance the fact that you are
increasing radicalization by us being there, and yet at the
same time if we simply abandon the field to al Qaeda they have
a strategy as well, which is to regroup, get a place for a safe
haven in Iraq. Right now they are not doing well, but we know
that the Iraqi Army is not going to do better than the U.S.
military against this group. And as it is more of an Iraqi
problem, we can guarantee that al Qaeda--if it is more of an
Iraqi military approach to al Qaeda, that is less strong than a
U.S. military approach.
Mr. Grenier. I guess my short answer to the question is
that it very much would depend on how a drawdown occurred.
Right now al Qaeda in Iraq has been knocked back on its heels.
It is on the run. And the reason for it is because they were
able to show themselves for who and what they are to the mass
of the Sunni population in western Iraq. Living under al Qaeda
in a place where they actually hold sway is not a pleasant
experience, and that is the reason why we have had the Sunni
Awakening, why the Sons of Iraq have organized themselves, and
why they have accepted support from the United States.
So I guess I would say that in the context of any sort of
drawdown from Iraq, it would be very important for us to
maintain the U.S. connection with the Sunni Awakening and to
continue to support that. I think that we could do that with
far fewer troops in Iraq. Quite frankly, as someone who spent
2\1/2\ years devoted to Iraq since just before the invasion,
why we are enmeshing ourselves in intra-Sunni fighting in Iraq
is somewhat of a mystery to me. But I think that we could
maintain what we need to do in the terrorism fight against al
Qaeda with much smaller numbers of troops in Iraq.
Mr. Emerson. I would just say, I agree with Bob's comments
that essentially it is how you withdraw. And if it is a
precipitous withdrawal, I think that al Qaeda would fill that
void. I mean, al Qaeda had its ebbs and flows, and it is really
now at its nadir because of the opposition that it instilled
and the resentment that is so popular in the Sunni areas.
The issue of al Qaeda seeing the United States on the run,
vacating, running away, like bin Laden has said we ran from
Beirut, we ran from Somalia, we ran from Vietnam, this would
fuel their sense of emboldenment and I think empower them
further. So it is how we draw down, and it is how you conduct
the policies, as Bob just said, of continuing certain policies
that have been very successful in terms of fueling a popular
resentment against al Qaeda in Iraq, which really has resulted
in a dramatic reduction of support for al Qaeda in Iraq in the
last 2 years.
You had asked a question before about to what extent is al
Qaeda responsible for killing Iraqi Christians. We have worked
with some Christians in certain Muslim countries, including
Iraq. At least I have been in contact with them. And in Iraq,
as you know, the Christian community has been decimated. A
large exodus, about 50 percent have actually left the country,
and the other 50 percent have had to almost relocate themselves
because of being forced out of areas. They have been forced out
of areas because of a coalition. First it started off by al
Qaeda, but now it has been picked up by radical Shiites who
essentially had joined forces with the Sunnis at one point but
now they have picked up the radicalized movement to push the
Christians out of Iraq and to deny them. As you know, a major
church leader was just assassinated just the other day, and
that has been a regular occurrence almost every month now.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Issa.
Mr. Issa. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Following up on that, Mr. Emerson. If we leave, will the
Chaldeans be better off in Iraq? Any chance at all that they
would be better off?
Mr. Emerson. You know, it is a good question, Mr. Issa. I
don't know. The Chaldeans have been particularly oppressed.
Mr. Issa. But likely--just, you know, limited time here.
But likely, if we were to leave today, they would be worse off?
Mr. Emerson. They would not be protected as much. Right.
Mr. Issa. Mr. Grenier, if we were to leave Iraq today, with
the current Shia government and their mixed history on how they
treat the Sunni, would it be reasonable to assume that al Qaeda
would have an advantage by simply playing the Shia government
and any failures of their fairness in order to gain a foothold
of support back in the Sunni community?
In other words--all my questions are very straightforward.
A lot of people would have you believe a whole bunch of things
about Iraq. The only thing that I am concerned about today with
Iraq is if we leave are we better off? Some people have tried
to say that if we get out of Iraq now things will be better.
Specifically, the current government, as you see it, and that
has been a public thing, today is not a government that Sunnis
trust or that Sunnis believe they get fairness from.
Realistically, the strides we have made in the Sunni community
to get Sunni to fight this Sunni insurgency of al Qaeda,
wouldn't that take a tremendous step backwards if we were to
precipitously leave or if we were simply not there today, so to
speak?
Mr. Grenier. If there was a total U.S. withdrawal? Is that
what you----
Mr. Issa. That is what I am saying.
Mr. Grenier. I think that the short answer to your question
is, yes, the situation I think would be far worse. The Sunni
dominated government does not now nor do I think in the near
term they are likely----
Mr. Issa. The Shia dominated government.
Mr. Grenier. The Shia dominated government, is not likely
to provide institutional support to the Sunni Awakening. Quite
frankly, they see it as a threat to themselves.
Mr. Issa. And I can understand that with the historic past
it is going to take time to heal those wounds.
Mr. Bergen, when we look at the rest of the areas in which
there has been radical jihadist activity over the years, the
Hamas, funded by Iran, are Sunni; they in fact have conducted
with Shia money for a long time a war, an insurgency against
Israel. Isn't that correct?
Mr. Bergen. Yes.
Mr. Issa. The United States hasn't been there, and we
failed, all of us have failed to stop it, as I see it, because
in fact the United States has not been able to get the buy-in
and the actual combating of Hamas by the Palestinians. No
matter how we look at good efforts, bad efforts, the bottom
line is the Palestinian Authority has never been able to
effectively attack Hamas and Israel has been effective only in
attacking them, but in fact ultimately not eliminating the
radicalism.
Is that a fair assessment of what we deal with in the
Palestinian territories today, in Gaza particularly?
Mr. Bergen. I am not an expert in this area, but it seems
so.
Mr. Issa. Okay. In Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood had
its roots and continues to this day, would you say that the
Egyptian Government, whether we approve or don't approve of
their tactics, have for the most part been able to contain the
activities of the Muslim Brotherhood, their growth, their
exports, and their terrorist activities, recognizing there have
been some stellar attacks over the years? But would you
generally say that Egypt has, at its own expense in its own
way, with limited help from the outside world, been able to
contain the Muslim Brotherhood?
Mr. Bergen. Well, yes and no. Because you can make the
argument that much of al Qaeda's violence stems from the
treatment of people like Ayman al-Zawahiri in Egyptian prisons.
That is where he got more radicalized. And of course, the
Muslim Brotherhood has done quite well in the elections; I
would disagree with Steve on this point. I mean, al Qaeda hates
the Muslim Brotherhood precisely because it participates in
elections. So these are apples and oranges in many ways.
Mr. Issa. The reason that I am going through this line of
questioning, recognizing that each one of these has a pitfall
in some way, is as we as the intelligence community in a public
hearing versus our often private, we are here to talk in a term
of policy. Realistically, when we look at all the countries,
and I only went through a smattering of them, I could have
gotten into Lebanon and Hezbollah. Isn't our only choice,
whether it is in Iraq or anywhere else in the Muslim world, our
only choice to find a government that will work with us, arm
them, equip them, assist them in not radicalizing further, and
fight jihadism in each and every one of those countries? And we
could obviously go to Germany and other countries that are not
Muslim countries and deal with theirs. But isn't that
ultimately our only choice, that whether we have troops in Iraq
or not, we are going to have to be side-by-side with some Iraqi
Government stopping this and stemming the flow of jihadism from
that country? Isn't that ultimately the only choice America has
in not one or two but in dozens of countries?
Mr. Bergen. Not really. Because it depends on what form of
government you are talking about. It is not an accident that so
many members of al Qaeda develop in countries with
authoritarian regimes.
Mr. Issa. Like Germany?
Mr. Bergen. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen. I
mean, look at the vast disproportionate numbers within al Qaeda
are these kinds of--emerge out of these kinds of societies.
Mr. Issa. I appreciate that. Mr. Chairman, I might just
note that what the American President and this Congress have
been attempting to do in Iraq is to make sure that Iraq is not
an oppressive, totalitarian government such as the ones cited
by the gentleman.
I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Issa.
Mr. Thompson.
Mr. Thompson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you,
witnesses, for being here. I was out at another hearing; I
don't know if this has been said already, but I don't think you
can say it enough. With the discussion today about how the al
Qaeda has become stronger over the recent time and in light of
the hearings yesterday in the Senate and probably what is
happening today in the House, where General Petraeus has stated
that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, we haven't
turned the corner, and we have moved the champagne to the back
of the refrigerator, I think it is important to note that none
of these problems are the fault of the very brave and heroic
U.S. military people who are serving abroad. They are doing an
outstanding job, and I just don't want anybody to come away
with the feeling that they have let us down.
Al Qaeda has used the situation with the Palestinians to
generate a lot of anti-Western outrage throughout the Muslim
community, and the administration has just recently--this
administration has just recently engaged in trying to figure
out a peace process for that situation. Has the
administration's reluctance to encourage a resolution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict heightened al Qaeda's ability to
build popular support and recruit new members?
Mr. Emerson. If I could respond and just add something to
what Mr. Issa----
Mr. Thompson. No. You can do that later. This is my time.
Mr. Emerson. Okay. I won't take your time away. I think
that the bottom line is you can't make peace unless somebody
will make peace with you. And Israel faces a problem that it
lives in a bad neighborhood and it can't move. And Mr. Abbas
may have good intentions, but he can't basically even tie his
shoelaces without getting permission.
Mr. Thompson. So you don't think that waiting 7 years to
engage has been a problem?
Mr. Emerson. I think in fact engagement is not the answer.
I think that the notion even that an Arab-Israeli solution is
going to tamp down al Qaeda is absolutely erroneous. And I
think that if Israel was eradicated tomorrow you would still
have the same degree of Islamic radicalism.
Mr. Thompson. I understand. Thank you.
Mr. Bergen. We are interested in swing voters in the Muslim
world. We are not going to influence bin Laden. He is
irreconcilable. What we are interested in is basically getting
the Muslim world to change its opinion about the United States.
And there is no single issue that is more important than the
Israeli-Palestinian process. And I would add to that that the
Kashmiri peau process is something the United States hasn't
really engaged in, but that is something the United States
should take a much stronger role in because there are some good
movements there. We have done very little to help that process.
And that is how al Qaeda often recruits people, through the
Kashmiri militant process.
Mr. Grenier. If I could just add to that. I strongly
disagree with Mr. Emerson. I think that our failure to use our
influence in a way that would ameliorate the situation in
Israel and Palestine has very much helped to improve the
climate in which al Qaeda is able to recruit elements to its
cause. But, as I think Peter is pointing out, even more so I
think that it affects the climate within which terrorists
operate. The vast majority of the Islamic world are moderate,
they are not inclined or not susceptible themselves to becoming
terrorists. However, I think that many of them are ambivalent.
Many who don't have to live under the deprivations of al Qaeda
themselves feel fundamentally ambivalent about the fact that al
Qaeda is among the few elements in the Islamic world who are
confronting what they perceive broadly in the Islamic world as
an enemy.
The only way that we are going to eliminate al Qaeda is to
isolate them and to turn the mass of the Islamic population
actively against them. I don't think you do that in the context
of a much broader narrative in which Muslims are being seen as
oppressed.
Mr. Thompson. Thank you. There are about 500,000 Pakistanis
living in the United Kingdom, and the planners of Britain's
most serious terrorist plots, the 2005 London underground
bombings and the 2006 plot to bomb British airliners en route
to the United States came about because of folks who are
trained, terrorists who are trained in al Qaeda camps in
Pakistan before they return to Britain. Do you think that the
connection between Britain's Pakistani population and al Qaeda
safe havens in the FATA is a problem? Is there a connection
there, and is that a problem for us?
Mr. Bergen. The short answer is yes.
Mr. Thompson. In light of what the CIA Director said the
other day about training Westerners, we would have a hard time
distinguishing if they tried to come into this country?
Mr. Emerson. In fact, he was referring to the German plot,
where the two Westerners had gone to Pakistan together with a
Pakistani immigrant to Germany, and who subsequently just blew
himself up in a suicide attack. But the two Germans had been to
Pakistan to train.
Mr. Thompson. Are they training any Americans there? Do you
have any knowledge?
Mr. Emerson. I do not know of any specific knowledge of
Americans being trained. I have talked to people in the
intelligence community who say that there are Americans of--
American immigrants here who have gone back to Pakistan, as we
saw in the Lodi connection, to carry out attacks back here when
they come back here.
Mr. Thompson. Anybody else?
Mr. Bergen. The only American I can think of is Adam
Gadahn. He is an exception that proves the rule. This is quite
unusual.
Mr. Thompson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Thompson.
Mr. Rogers.
Mr. Rogers. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know, sometimes
the difficulty of these kinds of hearing is that in a short
time people are trying to make their points about where we are
and either what we did wrong or right. But one thing I found
that is completely missing today is putting in context. I am
going read a couple things, if I can, quickly.
One, Mr. Emerson, you talked about the fact that they talk
often about Beirut, and then we left; the USS Cole, and how we
left Yemen. All of those things, not only they talk about, but
they use them in recruiting materials. We have recruiting
materials where they recruited people around the world. So we
need to put all of this in--that all happened before 9/11, that
they were actively recruiting based on their successes and the
fact that they chased us out of places I think is unbelievable.
They also use the African embassy bombings. Somalia. They list
them all. The 1993 World Trade Center, they consider that a
successful attack. And they use them in recruiting materials.
So this notion that all of a sudden now they are recruiting
based on Iraq does not put it in the proper context, I don't
think. And I think that if we are going to make a knowledgeable
assessment here we need to set all the facts on the table. And
I just want to--a couple of things. This notion, or at least
the image that has been given out today is that, gee, there is
no terrorism existed in Iraq before we got there. That is
clearly not true. It is clearly not true. And it wasn't al
Qaeda sponsored, but it was very interesting the parallels. I
am just going to read a few that we know since the invasion.
According to correspondence between two Iraqi entities, 79
regime directed attacks were successful against ``saboteurs,
Kurdish factions, U.N. Operations, and various international
NGOs. A routine example is found in a Fedayeen staff officer
responding to Uday Hussein's authorization of a series of bomb
attacks against foreigners staying in hotels in the northern
region. Documents indicate that the regime's use of terrorism
was standard practice, although not always successful. From
1991 through 2003, the Saddam regime regarded inspiring,
sponsoring, directing, and executing acts of terrorism as an
element of state power. Under Saddam, the Iraqi regime used its
paramilitary Fedayeen-Saddam training camps to train terrorists
for use inside and outside of Iraq.
These are things that we know and are factual.
In 1999, the top 10 graduates of each class Fedayeen-Saddam
class were specifically chosen for assignment to London, where
they were to be ready to conduct operations anywhere in Europe.
A memo specifically states that these trainees are designated
for suicide operations.
One more memo from Saddam to the Revolutionary Council in
the Iraqi Intelligence Service directed Saddam's decision to
form a group to start, quote, hunting Americans present on Arab
soil, especially Somalia. A separate memo indicates Saddam
ordering the Iraqi Intelligence Service Director to set up
operations inside Somalia. The overlap between bin Laden's and
Saddam's interests in Somalia provides a tactical example of
the parallel between Iraq and radical Islam.
Obviously, they weren't working in cahoots, but their
mission was identical. At the same time Saddam was ordering
action in Somalia aimed at the American presence, Osama bin
Laden was doing exactly the same.
And I guess my point being, and I hope you can flush this
out a little bit, that not only at the time I think, Mr.
Bergen, you mentioned that they were saying they are down and
out and, gee, we shouldn't have done it, there are also many
who argue in al Qaeda at the time they weren't doing enough.
They needed to be more aggressive. They needed to get more
successes like the ones that they had had where they had the
great successes, Beirut, Somalia. And the list goes on. They
were trying to promote more of that.
So I don't think it is fair to say, well, they were down on
the ropes and they weren't doing any recruiting, and this
breathes new life and taught them how to recruit. None of that
is really true. There is a long history of these relationships.
I mean, Abu Abbas of the PLF was found giving safe haven, who
was the chief sponsor of the Achille Lauro event, in Baghdad in
2003. There is a long connection, and this guy was a Stalinist
to the hilt. I think he had the largest collection of Stalinist
works because he believed in the Stalinist method of cutouts
and operatives to do his dirty work around the world. That is
where he learned it. At least that is what he said he did, he
learned it from those folks.
So I think we have to be careful about this. Iraq can't be
handled from an intelligence perspective in isolation. It
cannot. When you loaded up 130,000 troops in Afghanistan, to
expect that he wasn't going to do the same kind of things that
he was already doing against us in other places around the
world is ludicrous. The fact that Iran wouldn't do it because
somehow it was a nice war in Afghanistan and not a nice war in
Iraq really doesn't make any intelligence sense. And the notion
that you said, well, gee, if we were to put 130,000 troops on
the Afghan border, I would be really curious to know how you
believe that would have in any way impacted operations in the
tribal areas.
And, Mr. Grenier, I would like you to respond to that as
well, knowing the Pakistani Constitution clearly separated
those areas out of their own country, which has added to their
own difficulty there. And I would appreciate any response.
Again, I am just looking for--it has been very focused today.
We should put this in the proper context so we understand that
terrorism didn't just reinvent itself and automatically appear
in Iraq the day we set foot on their soil.
Mr. Bergen. Of course that is correct. But the Iraq war
amplified the energy in the jihadi movement. And without
detaining you with the details, that is simply an objective
fact. There is a great deal of evidence for this.
The documents you quoted from are--the overall assessment
of those documents is there is no operational link between al
Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. That is the document you were
quoting from earlier. We are presumably talking about al Qaeda;
we are not talking about Abu Abbas or others in this hearing;
we are talking about people who can actually attack the United
States. Abu Abbas killed of course Leon Klinghoffer, but that
is one person, that is not a national security problem. So you
asked about Pakistan.
Mr. Rogers. Would Italy agree with your assessment? How do
you take terrorism in isolation and say the only group capable
of attacking the United States is al Qaeda? I would be curious
to your answer to that. Is the only group we should be worried
about al Qaeda?
Mr. Bergen. I am not worried about radical vegetarians
attacking the United States right now, but maybe at some point
in the future. But al Qaeda----
Mr. Rogers. Your cynicism is a bit offensive when you list
the organizations, and the al Qaeda in the Maghreb is a great
example. They migrated there for the financing, but they were
still a threat, killed 150,000 people. I don't know how you
would dismiss that with a glib comment. That is a serious
terrorist organization, took the lives of 150,000 people in the
1990s in Algeria. That is just to be dismissed?
Mr. Bergen. As to your question on Pakistan, there is a
tremendous opportunity on Pakistan.
Mr. Rogers. I would understand why you wouldn't answer the
question, sir.
Mr. Bergen. As to your question on Pakistan, support for
suicide bombing has dropped from 33 percent to 9 percent in the
last several years. Support for bin Laden personally has
dropped from 70 percent to 4 percent in the last 9 months in
the Northwest Frontier Province where he lives.
There is a tremendous opportunity in Pakistan, but also a
tremendous potential trap. Nothing has discredited Pakistani
officials more than the claim that they are stooges of the
United States, one of the reasons Musharraf is such an
unpopular guy. So we have to be very careful in our responses
in Pakistan.
I think Pakistanis are beginning to dimly realize that this
is a problem that is blowing back on themselves. Benazir Bhutto
after all was the most popular politician in the country. She
was killed by a Taliban cell. So I think that this year, if the
Pakistanis don't do what is required politically, the stars are
aligning perfectly both in terms of the public opinion and also
the politics at the higher level.
So, just to strike a note of optimism, this year could be
the year that Pakistan finally gets its act together, because
previously it has not been clear whether it is a lack of
willingness or a lack of capability or both that they haven't
gotten rid of the Taliban and the al Qaeda on their territory.
So, looking forward, this might be a moment of opportunity.
Mr. Emerson. If I could associate myself with your
comments. I think you are 100 percent correct that we can't
look at this in a vacuum. And the fact is that Saddam--I wrote
a book in 1991 about an Iraqi terrorist defector, and he
detailed all of the terrorist operations that he was involved
with or he was aware of that were supported by Saddam. And they
were massive. They were against the United States in terms of
planning or even carrying out operations.
And so I think you are 100 percent right that we overthrew
a regime that was a terrorist regime, that was carrying out
$25,000 bounties for suicide bombers in Israel, that was
carrying out operations in Europe against American embassies,
that was a haven for hoards of terrorists from the Palestinian
groups, secular Palestinian groups and the Marxist groups, and
also some of the jihadist groups. Even though there was no
linkage between 9/11 and Saddam, he still had linkages with
Hezbollah, and Hezbollah had trained with him and he had
provided weapons to Hezbollah. So you would think, how could
this be, a secular--a Sunni providing weapons to a Shiite
religious group. Well, this is the strange bedfellows that they
produced.
So I think you are 100 percent right to note that that is
the context in which we are dealing. And terrorism suddenly
didn't arise in Iraq just because we stepped in there in 2003;
it had long been there.
Mr. Grenier. Clearly, Saddam has attempted to use terrorism
for his own ends in the past and/or was supportive of terrorist
efforts elsewhere, as Steve has just pointed out. In 1991, I
have direct knowledge of the efforts on the part of Saddam
Hussein and regime to employ Iraqi operatives as terrorists to
attack American targets in the context of the first Gulf War.
Fortunately, their tradecraft was very bad and we and our
allies were able to wrap most of them up. I think probably the
most notable example of those attempts occurred in Manila, as I
recall.
With regard to efforts on the part of Saddam's operatives
to get engaged in Somalia, I am not personally aware of that. I
think, as Peter has pointed out, I am not aware of the
compelling body of evidence of Saddam's active support to
Islamically inspired terrorists. There has been some dabbling
on the margins, but I don't think there was a link that was
ever firmly made. But with regard to the fact that obviously he
played host to Abu Abbas, that is a matter of historical
record.
Mr. Rogers. But don't you think it is very clear by the
evidence and even what was uncovered since, that ideologically
he wasn't a radical Islam supporter, but for his own aims and
ends he certainly did use, operate, and attempt, like you said,
some successful, some not so successful, but he was certainly
engaged in the activity. The evidence proves it.
Mr. Grenier. He tends to employ terrorist methodologies.
Mr. Rogers. My point is, if you commit a crime, I am not
sure the motive of doing it for ideological reasons or for
personal reasons, you have still committed the crime.
The Chairman. But let's stop the spinning. And by the
rationale expressed here, then the ends justifies the means,
and we ought to be prepared to invade other areas of the world
that have similar conditions. And clearly that has not been the
policy of our government, and we need to recognize that we
are----
Mr. Rogers. I don't know where you are suggesting the
spinning necessarily. Presenting the facts as you know them,
you can take them for what you want. You can like the war or
not. But the problem is if you only hear one set of facts you
can't make a conclusion. I am offended that you would say that.
The Chairman. No. What I am trying to say is that we are
where we are today because decisions were made to abandon the
effort against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and make a hard charge
into Iraq.
Mr. Rogers. There has been no abandonment of that.
The Chairman. Well, we certainly have not--we did not put
the resources in there when we had bin Laden in Tora Bora. We
left, and in fact Mr. Bergen in an article that he wrote said
we pulled out the Fifth Special Forces which were the
specialists for the----
Mr. Rogers. And I would remind the chairman that the surge
happened there after the Taliban regrouped itself near Quetta,
not the al Qaeda. And then they have subsequently come in
through the strength of people like Mehsud and others who have
fostered that. That is a big difference than blaming the forces
on the ground----
The Chairman. Nobody is blaming the forces. What we are
saying is that policy decisions have brought us where we are
today, and that brings us back to the mess that we are in that
is going to be passed on to the next administration.
And, which brings me to a question that I want to ask you
three gentlemen: Do you have a recommendation for the
policymakers? Based on where we are today, based on the fact
that we are going to elect a new President with a new
administration that is going to have to I think refocus our
foreign policy, do each of you, because you are experts in your
respective fields that we want to hear from, do you have a
recommendation for policymakers? And we will start with Mr.
Bergen.
Mr. Bergen. Thank you. Let me just quickly say, Afghanistan
and Pakistan are part of the same problem. They are not two
distinct problems. Just as it would be completely absurd to
have a discussion about Palestine without a discussion of
Israel or vice versa, we have to consider both of these. So
these are regional problems.
We also have to say, as policymakers, that we are going to
be in Afghanistan for a very long time. Afghans remember we
closed our embassy there in 1989. They think we have a
narrative that we are going to leave. We are going to be there
for 15, 20 years. Let's just say that we are going to be there
for 15 to 20 years and effect the hedging strategies of the
Pakistani government and all the regional players.
We also need to help the Pakistanis with their
counterinsurgency. They have a counterinsurgency problem, but
they are set up to fight a land war with India. And some of our
military aid should be conditioned on the idea that they bring
people over here for counterinsurgency training; perhaps, with
their permission very importantly, we help them set up some
sort of counterinsurgency training in Pakistan.
I mentioned the universal database for insurgents,
terrorists, people joining the jihad, the clerics. I think this
is an important thing that should be shared across all
intelligence agencies. We need to redouble our efforts to find
bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar, but we need to
do it without any public fanfare so they don't derive a
propaganda victory.
We also need to create an office of metrics where we can
determine how are we doing. Because right now we have these
discussions without really saying, well, are jihadi Web sites--
are they declining in importance? Is support for suicide
bombing going down in the Muslim world? These sorts of
questions, which would indicate--we are never going to have a
surrender ceremony, but there are certain metrics we can have
which I detail in my testimony which would be helpful.
And, finally, just a small tactical thing. Industrial
strength hydrogen peroxide is a weapon of choice. We need to
make sure that people buying that kind of material in this
country are not doing so without the government being aware of
it if it is for nefarious purposes.
Mr. Grenier. I would say I would agree with Peter that we
need to have, to maintain, and to communicate a long-term
commitment to the Pakistan-Afghanistan region. I think that the
government in Pakistan, and Pakistani people in particular, as
well as the Afghans, are fully expecting that we are going to
leave. I think that they need to know that we are there for the
long term. I think that on the Pakistani side of the border
what we need to have is a long-term, sustained, committed
counterinsurgency effort, of which economic development is a
very important part. I think that the Federally Administered
Tribal Areas are a wonderful and romantic entity of the 19th
century that we can no longer afford. I think those areas have
to be incorporated into Pakistan proper. There needs to be a
commitment on the part of the government of Pakistan to do
that, and we need to be there for the long term to help them to
do that so they can fully incorporate those areas into Pakistan
and establish centralized government control over those areas
in the same way that they do in Karachi and Lahore.
With regard to Afghanistan, there too I think we need to
have a long-term commitment, but there is a big caution there.
I think that the major part of the fight against a resurgent
Taliban is being led by U.S. and NATO forces. I think that so
long as the effort is being led by foreign forces we may win a
series of tactical victories but we will not succeed
strategically.
The long-term answer in Afghanistan has to be Afghan led.
If that means building up and supporting local militias in
southern Afghanistan in the way that the U.S. has been
reluctant to do up until now, I would say so be it. But it has
to be an Afghan-led solution there.
Finally, with regard to Iraq, I think there are a lot of
different ways of skinning the cat, and the broader context of
the U.S. commitment to Iraq I think can be calibrated in
different ways, but I think that a necessary component of that
must be a continued commitment on the part of the United States
to support the Sunni Awakening in a way that a Shia led
government simply will not.
Mr. Emerson. I am just going to briefly add a couple of
points. One is, according to some people I have spoken to in
the intelligence community, the CIA has become risk averse in
HUMINT collection and covert operations in Afghanistan. And I
think Congress should encourage the CIA to be much more active
and aggressive in carrying out collection and covert operations
from disinformation to actual paramilitary operations in
Afghanistan.
Number two, I think that in Pakistan the U.S. really has to
apply the full pursuit of all of its means of pressure on the
new regime to cooperate with the U.S. and to give us latitude
to go after the high targets, high value targets, as well as
for them internally to understand that they cannot keep those
areas, the FATA and the North-West Frontier Province, a
liberation zone for the Taliban, because it is going to come
back to bite them.
Number three, I really do believe that overall we don't
teach our counterterrorism--there is no counterterrorism
doctrine that teaches what the fundamentals of the enemy is all
about. And that I think is essential. And unless we teach them
about the Muslim Brotherhood and teach them about radical
Islamic theology that envelopes all of these regimes and has
implanted itself in Europe and in the United States, after all,
we are here to talk primarily about protecting the U.S., then
we want to protect Europe, and then we want to protect our
interests overseas. Unless--and the thrust of the reported and
aborted attacks in the United States have not come from al
Qaeda, but from franchises or from self-activated cells
mobilized by just the radical Islamic theology that had
initially been propagated by the Muslim Brotherhood as early as
1928.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Hoekstra.
Mr. Hoekstra. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There has been a lot
of discussion about this administration, the mess, and these
kinds of things. I think where we need to move to, and I really
appreciate the testimony of this panel today because I think
what you have identified for us one more time is how complex
this problem is and potentially how deadly it is, how dangerous
it is, and how complicated it is going to be to develop the
right strategies and the right tactics to confront this threat
and ultimately defeat the threat.
You know, there were some of us who were very critical of
what we would say is the mess that President Bush inherited
when we looked back at 9/11 and at, you know, what happened to
the Intelligence Community in the 1990s, how al Qaeda and
radical Jihadists were treated, and that problem was dealt with
in the 1990s.
Obviously, there are strong views about how this
administration has dealt with the threat, the things that they
have done perhaps correctly, the things that maybe they could
have improved on.
I think the lesson that we need to walk away with from your
testimony, your identification of what the problem is, this
country needs to develop a long-term, bipartisan consensus on
how to defeat this threat. You know, we need Republicans and
Democrats, Congress and the administration to come together and
do that.
You know, there are all kinds of components to this. There
is a military component. There is a political component. There
is an economic component. Then, at the end of this whole
process, you recognize that if you are going to be successful
in Iraq or in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, it is going to have
to be very much driven by people in those countries.
You know, the U.S. cannot impose a solution in Iraq. We
cannot impose a solution in Afghanistan or in Pakistan or in
Northern Africa. You know, the only thing that we can do is to
help create conditions that will enable those governments to be
more successful against this threat.
I hope that what we learn through this process, where we go
through this year and where we end up in January is that we
embark on that process of getting a bipartisan, long-term
strategy, recognizing that we will continue to try more tactics
to confront and to defeat this threat. Some of them will be
successful. Some of them will be moderately successful. Others
may be just dismal failures. Because, as much as we know, there
is still a lot that we do not know about how to contain and to
defeat this kind of threat.
There is not a question in there. I just very much
appreciate your helping to enlighten this committee and to give
us your perspectives on where we are and where we need to go.
So thank you very much.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Hoekstra.
Mr. Rogers, do you have any closing?
Mr. Rogers. No, other than you look handsome today.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
I want to echo Mr. Hoekstra's comments.
First of all, we very much appreciate your willingness to
come in and to share your thoughts on this issue, and we hope
we can count on you again in the not-too-distant future.
Because we do have to work our way through these challenges,
and it has got to be done on a bipartisan basis, and it has got
to be done with the next administration in concert, I believe,
by making a case to our allies that it is in everyone's best
interests to help us in the region with the challenges that we
all face collectively there.
NATO has stepped up somewhat, not in the way that, perhaps,
a lot of us have discussed that they could be the most helpful
with the limitations that they have imposed. Certainly, as we
look at the long-term strategy and at the threat that al Qaeda
and that all of these types of organizations pose, including
the free-lancers--because I think all of you made reference to
the fact that bin Laden and al Qaeda have given an inspiration
to some of these people who are, for their own reasons, stuck
in a situation that foments that kind of resentment in whatever
country, whether it is in Europe, whether it is here or whether
it is in other parts of the world, and that is a very dangerous
situation.
So, collectively, we need to find a way to work together,
to understand that it is going to be a costly endeavor and
costly not just in the traditional sense of money but also in
resources and in effort that keeps the main focus on the goal,
which is to try to eliminate these very dangerous actors out
there. Because the threat has really dramatically changed from
the Cold War days.
So, again, thank you all for your testimony. There were
some members who wanted to be here, but they are in markups,
and they asked me if it would be possible for them to have some
questions for the record. If you will agree to indulge that, we
would very much appreciate it.
Again, thank you for your time and for sharing your
expertise.
With that, the hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 2:52 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]