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Rumsfeld Suggests Fighting Madrassas with “Ideas”

DEBKAfile Special Analysis

October 26, 2003, 4:43 PM (GMT+02:00)





The guerrilla rockets that pierced the fortifications surrounding Baghdad’s
landmark al Rashid hotel early Sunday, October 26, missed their presumed
target, US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Nonetheless, the attack
makes the thought-provoking memo penned by his boss Donald Rumsfeld ten
days earlier look like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The rockets slammed into this major US personnel center, hours after the
decision to lift the curfew over Baghdad in view of “the improved security
situation.” The day before, a US Black Hawk helicopter was shot down near
Tikrit shortly after Wolfowitz left Saddam’s home town.

Both times, Iraqi guerrillas knew where to find the deputy defense
secretary and he had a lucky escape.

The memo – described as “leaked” - was addressed to Wolfowitz and Gen.
Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff. Its
two pages contained questions loaded enough to be rhetorical. The points
Rumsfeld made include these: The US has no way to measure whether it is
winning or losing the global war on terror; we have not made truly “bold
moves” to fight terrorists and we are in for “a long, hard slog” in Iraq
and Afghanistan.

Pointing to Iraq’s al Qaeda-linked Ansar al Islam, Rumsfeld asked: “Are we
capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day
than the madrassas and the clerics are recruiting, training and deploying?”

Later, in a briefing to Washington Times staff, he called for a new agency
to help fight “a war of ideas” against international terrorism. He
suggested a “21st –century information agency in the government” to help in
the international battle of ideas, to limit the teaching of terrorism and
extremism and to provide better education.”

However, in his memo, he said private organizations could counter
Islamist “radical madrassas.”

Clearly, the defense secretary is convinced that the war on terror cannot
be won by military victories alone and wants more emphasis on the struggle
for hearts and minds. Fighters and defense officials, says Rumsfeld, must
start asking themselves: “Are there things we aren’t doing that we might be
doing?”

Two other key points made in the memo: “I think it is pretty clear that
current (weapons control) regimes aren’t working.” President Bush is in the
early stages of a “new approach” to deal with weapons proliferation that
will call for greater international cooperation.

In the other, the defense secretary stressed that US intelligence
capabilities have been “compromised through spies and through trading of
information among rogue nations and terrorist networks.”

This intelligence contest, the most sensitive aspect of the global war on
terror, bears directly on the degree of precision manifested by anti-US
Iraqi guerrillas – and ultimately in Sunday’s rocket strike against the
Baghdad hotel. The point took years to appreciate. It was not immediately
accepted that, without hostile spies planted inside America, information
trading among terrorist groups and electronic espionage capabilities, the
traumatic 9/11 terrorist assault on America could not have been carried
out - any more than Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein could have managed
to elude American pursuit for so long. Intelligence capabilities are also
the key to Yasser Arafat’s sustained long-running terror campaign against
Israel.

Many months before September 11, 2001, DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly
pointed to serious penetrations of the American intelligence community by
terrorist operatives who are actuated not merely by blind hate but by
classified information enabling them to pinpoint their attacks.

The fact that Palestinian terror attacks were confined for nine days to
targeting military and security personnel – three US CIA security men and
six Israeli troops – was no coincidence. It was the outcome of well-
informed, pointed decision-making – in this case by Arafat, Syrian
president Bashar Assad and Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah. It is a fact
that no civilians died in this period.

Similarly, the disastrous August 19 bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad,
in which 22 people were killed and 150 injured, was no random outrage
committed by a suicidal bomber looking for a target at the wheel of an
explosive-packed truck. Vital inside intelligence enabled the assailant to
be sure of murdering Sergio de Mello, the UN secretary’s personal
representative in Baghdad and mainstay of US administrator Paul Bremer’s
projects for putting Iraq on its feet. Precise information on de Mello’s
movements would not have been available in Baghdad’s bazaars – only in
Washington, the UN Center in New York, the US command center in Iraq or the
targeted official’s own office at UN Headquarters in the Iraqi capital. The
terrorists’ successful assassination testifies to this level of inside
penetration – and is an example of the sort of “compromised” US
intelligence capabilities troubling Rumsfeld.

Were the US defense secretary to assess the main theatres of counter-terror
war according to his own yardstick - “Are we capturing etc. more terrorists
than the madrassas… are recruiting…?” he would have to admit that enemy
resources, recruitment, intelligence and logistical assistance from sponsor-
states and cash flow have not diminished. To the contrary, all these
resources have expanded.

Afghanistan.

In a well-planned gambit, al Qaeda removed itself and its central command
from Afghanistan leaving the war terrain to its ally the Taliban under the
command of Mulla Omar. After spending a year in the Pakistan-Afghan border
districts rebuilding its military strength and regrouping, the Taliban has
begun retaking lost terrain. A UN report describes the Taliban as having
established de facto control over border districts near Kandahar and
Paktika. Some of its units are within 75 miles of Kabul, others in the
process of seizing main highways in the country. Coalition control is
limited mainly to Kabul some key cities where too the Taliban have planted
subversive cells.

Pakistan.

Banned fundamentalist Islamic terror groups, including the Taliban and al
Qaeda, are back in action. They have re-established their old operational
and intelligence ties with Pakistan’s Inter-service intelligence agency,
the SIS, which they maintained before America’s October 2001 campaign in
Afghanistan.

India – Kashmir.

The Vajpayee government in New Delhi is alone in calling a spade a spade,
declaring India is fighting Islamic extremists. Spurning well-intentioned
advice on how to go about their war, the Indians say terrorism must be
fought unrelentingly and blame their partial victory on restraints from
Washington preventing their taking the war into terrorist strongholds in
Pakistan.

Saudi Arabia.

Domestic social and political unrest hampers Riyadh’s belated crackdown on
al Qaeda and its supporters. Despite massive security operations launched
after the oil kingdom was shocked by the May 12 suicide bomb attacks
against Western compounds in Riyadh, the Saudis are fighting a losing
battle. More and more terrorist networks and covert cells are being planted
in their cities and tribal regions. The authorities have failed in their
quiet efforts to encourage Saudi al Qaeda members to head out of the
kingdom to other Middle East countries, including Iraq. Bin Laden and his
aides have decided that the overthrow of Saudi throne in Riyadh is just as
important as fighting Americans in Iraq.

Syria.

Bashar Asad has made his capital the largest command center in the world
for assorted terrorist organizations, which he terms “freedom movements” -
notably the Palestinian Hamas and Jihad Islami. Damascus, whose suburbs
house the most important chain of madrassas in the Middle East, also serves
as mainline transit route for Muslim terrorists destined for arenas of
confrontation with the West such as Iraq, Chechnya and the Balkans, as well
those making for Palestinian-controlled areas.

Lebanon.

This country remains the territorial base of the violent Hizballah which
runs a uniquely efficient intelligence organ in the service of
international terrorism. The Shiite group’s partners-in-terror are
contingents of Iranian Revolutionary Guard which serve alongside them, as
well as al Qaeda units in the south.

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the suicide bombing attack on the
US Marines barracks in Beirut that killed more than 240 Americans and led
to the United States decision to depart Lebanon. The attack was
masterminded by Imad Mughniyeh, the terrorist ace who was never captured
though long on America’s wanted list. He is still in Lebanon under
Hizballah protection.

In an article run in the Washington Post on October 26, Rumsfeld
stresses: “if the world does not deal with the emerging nexus between
terrorist networks, terrorist states and weapons of mass murder, terrorism
could one day kill not more than 240 people… but tens of thousands – or
more.”

Iran.

At the instigation of extremist factions of the Revolutionary Guards, the
Islamic Republic has grown into a primary logistic and rear base center for
al Qaeda and its affiliates, including the Iraqi Ansar al-Islam.

Chechnya.

The rebels fighting the Russian army continue to be fortified with a flow
of manpower, weapons and money from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Syria. Fighters also come in from Central Asia.

The Balkans.

Al Qaeda continues to mass terrorist cells in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo and
Albania – both for action in the Balkans and as convenient jumping off
bases against central and West Europe.

Al Qaeda and its subsidiaries have also established a solid presence in
Africa, the Far East and the republics of Central Asia.

Palestinian Authority.

Notwithstanding three and-a-half years of Israeli military action against
Palestinian terrorists – neither can claim victory. Most of Arafat’s terror
cells remain operational and quick to execute increasingly violent suicide
and shooting attacks at his command.

The Palestinian terror machine led by Arafat defies Rumsfeld’s attempt to
put radical Muslim terrorism into neat boxes. Arafat’s Fatah and its
offshoots are not essentially religious movements although in the last two
years he has endeavored to harness Islamic radical sentiment to the
Palestinian cause. He has been able to build up his army of suicides
without religious madrassas; his Fatah schools impart a different, more
racially-oriented form of indoctrination. Saddam Hussein’s Baath movement
dissociated itself from al Qaeda fundamentalists – until the organization’s
recruitment to the pro-Saddam guerrilla war proved otherwise. Bashar Assad
has demonstrated like Arafat that terrorism is an effective binder between
secular ruling bodies and Islamic regimes – especially in the Arab world.

This might be a useful place for Rumsfeld to launch his daunting quest for
definitions to clothe fresh tactics in the global war on terror.



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