By JOHN ROUGHAN
When George W. Bush laid out the "war on terror" to the joint houses of Congress 10 days after September 11, it sounded like an apocalyptic new projection of American power.
"We will direct every resource at our command," he said, "every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence and every necessary weapon of war to the destruction and to the defeat of the global terror network."
The war, he continued, "will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion.
"It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat ... "
Americans, he said, should expect a lengthy campaign "unlike any we have ever seen".
But a year on it looks like every United States military campaign since Vietnam. Same heavy bombing from a safe distance, same use of overwhelming force to rout an ugly regime.
Same reluctance to put American soldiers in danger, same untidy result. The Taleban have been expelled and Afghanistan left largely to the warlords that held sway before.
Who would have believed, hearing the presidential address, that a year from then Osama bin Laden would still be at large, his organisation, al Qaeda, still capable of raising regular alarm in the US and other Western capitals?
And who would have imagined that none of the masterminds of the attack would have been caught and brought to trial?
When the moment of truth came in December, and the US was fairly certain it had the al Qaeda leaders, even bin Laden, within their grasp, they sent in Afghani brigands to fight the decisive battle.
And the Afghans, probably bribed by the bin Laden organisation, let its leading forces escape into Pakistan - a country which might well provide the untold story of the war on terror.
Pakistan bred the Taleban. The fundamentalist Muslim forces who came to power amid the post-Soviet disorder of Afghanistan were led by products of madrassas (mosque schools) of Pakistan.
It was in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province, that Osama bin Laden became the financier and logistics man for an organisation recruiting volunteers, mainly Arab, for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
After the Russians were defeated bin Laden turned the organisation into a clandestine, anti-Western jihad force called al Qaeda, "the Base", and the base was Peshawar.
Even when the Taleban came to power in Kabul, Peshawar remained a hive of al Qaeda activity and a Taleban power base.
The city was crawling with news crews late last year as the war on terror began. They pointed their cameras at the Khyber Pass and the empty sky over Afghanistan and sometimes at the demonstrators with their posters of Osama on the Peshawar streets.
The war on terror could not be won in the air and on the ground in Afghanistan. It was, and is, more than anything an intelligence war and it has to be fought in places such as Peshawar.
A telling comment on the failure of US counter-terrorist intelligence appeared just before the cataclysm, in the Atlantic Monthly of July-August last year.
It was written by a former CIA specialist in the Middle East, Reuel Marc Gerecht. He scorned the agency's claim that it had been steadily "picking apart" the bin Laden organisation since the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and the suicide attack on the USS Cole at Aden in October 2000.
According to his Afghan contacts, bin Laden's men regularly moved through Peshawar and used it as a hub for phone, fax and email communications.
"Knowing the city's ins and out would be indispensable to any US effort to capture or kill bin Laden and his closest associates," he wrote.
But it was impossible, he said, for any Westerner to penetrate the Afghan communities in Peshawar and hope to gather information in radical Islamic groups, let alone recruit agents.
A former senior Near East Division operative told him: "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist [and] who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan."
A case officer told him: "Operations that include diarrhoea as a way of life don't happen."
Throughout the 10-year Soviet-Afghan war, Gerecht says, the CIA never developed cadres of Afghan specialists.
"Afghanistan has since become the brain centre and training ground for Islamic terrorism against the United States," he wrote (a month or two before September 11), "yet the CIA's clandestine service still usually keeps officers on the Afghan account no more than two or three years."
Incredibly, he says the agency's counter-terrorism centre was not much interested in penetrating suspicious groups.
"Unless one of bin Laden's foot soldiers walks through the door of a US consulate, the odds that a CIA counter-terrorist officer will ever see one are extremely poor."
In his nine years in the CIA, Gerecht says he "never once heard case officers discuss a recruitment operation against any Middle Eastern target that took a case officer far off the diplomatic and business conference circuits".
In March, CIA and FBI agents, with Pakistani police, seized a 30-year-old Saudi-born Palestinian, Abu Zubaydah, said to be fourth in the al Qaeda hierarchy and its key point man for terrorist operations.
In June, US investigators identified one of Zubaydah's associates, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a Kuwaiti, as the mastermind of September 11.
He was believed to be hiding in Afghanistan or Pakistan and still active.
He appears to have been behind the bombing of a Tunisian synagogue in April.
In the US the intelligence committees of the houses of Congress began a joint investigation into the failure of federal agencies to thwart the September 11 attacks.
In response to a spate of reports of signs unnoticed and warnings unheeded, President Bush announced plans to create a new super-agency, a 170,000-strong department of homeland security as part of what he now called "the titanic struggle against terror".
While he "did not believe anyone could have prevented the horror of September 11", he added, "we are now learning that ... the suspicions and insights of some of our front-line agents did not get enough attention".
But then sifting second-hand intelligence has been likened to taking a metal detector to a city dump - lots of chatter and most of it trash.
When the report of the congressional inquiry emerged in July it echoed the criticisms made by Gerecht more than a year ago.
The CIA was found to have fallen short on traditional human intelligence, reflected in its failure to penetrate groups such as al Qaeda.
The FBI was found to have concentrated too much on catching the criminals after the fact rather than acting on warnings that could prevent the crimes being committed.
And the National Security Agency's electronic eavesdropping technology needed to be sharpened to crack the increasing sophistication of terrorist communications.
But the lack of first-hand human intelligence was the key, and it seems unlikely to improve while the CIA maintains its stance against recruitment of unsavoury foreign agents.
Back in December, despite the escape of al Qaeda from the Tora Bora and the Shah-i-Kot valley of Afghanistan, the US was proclaiming victory in the war on terror.
Bin Laden was on the run and his organisation thought to be in disarray.
Since December there have been suicide bombings in Karachi - as New Zealand cricketers well know - plots uncovered in Morocco, a "dirty bomb" in the US itself, as well as the Tunis attack connected to the suspected planner of September 11.
Deprived of its Afghanistan training camps, al Qaeda is thought to have become a more dispersed network.
It may be composed of a wider range of units sharing only a hatred of the US and the West that will have been invigorated by September 11 and its aftermath.
The base now seems to be back in Pakistan. A diplomat in Islamabad told Newsweek in June: "We smashed a wasp nest and that was an achievement. The problem now is that the wasps are all over the place and they are angry".
Story archives:
Links: War against terrorism
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
Uncle Sam losing spy wars
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