To combat the terrorists' ambitions, the Administration has tried to sort out the well-aired problems of coordination and analysis that dogged the counterterrorism operation last year. The effort has had mixed success. The Administration's belated proposal for a Department of Homeland Security remains bottled up in Congress. The FBI is just at the beginning of a mammoth reorganization to refocus its mission on counterterrorism. In June, a mere 10 months after Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, chose retired General Wayne Downing to head counterterrorism operations at the National Security Council, Downing abruptly resigned, frustrated by his lack of power. His successor, retired Air Force General John Gordon—a former deputy director of the cia—gets higher marks from insiders, though some complain that the Counter-Terrorism Security Group, of which he is chairman, is "too bulky." Meetings of Gordon's committee sometimes have representatives from 15 ag
encies, among them minor players. If there are 20 to 30 people in a room, some without the highest security clearance, the FBI and the CIA will not share sensitive intelligence, says a White House aide.
Still, in other respects, Bush's war on terror has made some progress lately—partly because there are just more terrorist hunters than there used to be. In addition to the 8,000 members of the armed forces in Afghanistan, there are now nearly 800 U.S. forces based in the East African nation of Djibouti, across the Red Sea from Yemen, and a Marine Corps amphibious assault ship, the Belleau Wood, has been in the area since August. Sources tell Time the U.S. is looking to use the port of Assab in Eritrea as a naval base to keep an eye on traffic between Yemen, Sudan and Somalia. At home, the cia's Counter-Terrorism Center (ctc) now has a staff of 1,100 analysts and covert operatives, almost triple the number it had a year ago. Technologists are working on new gadgets to track terrorists, as well as hardware to process the 75,000 cables that come into the ctc from field offices each month. A top-secret website called CT-Link, first established in 1994, has had its reach expande
d so that those with the right clearances in 75 government locations in the U.S. and overseas can access the latest intelligence on the fight against terrorism.
Cooperation with foreign-intelligence and law-enforcement authorities is key; since Sept 11, 2001, a total of 2,974 terror suspects have been detained in 98 countries. Americans have learned to use local assets, like the Filipino agents who disguise themselves as ice-cream vendors or beauticians, to track down terrorists. "The feeling here," says a senior French investigator, "is that the Americans are doing an excellent job in police and intelligence terms." Not everything goes according to plan. High-tech listening devices are of no use if nobody sends an electronic message. "The bad guys," says a Western diplomat in Islamabad, "have been taught that talking on cell phones or sat phones is a no-no. Now they are delivering messages on motorcycles." Raids on Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan aimed at finding al-Qaeda men have been compromised by leaks from local police and intelligence services. And—as happened earlier this month in an operation at the Shemshahtoi camp outsi
de Peshawar—even if the FBI and their local friends get into a camp, suspects can easily vanish among the maze of adobe huts, which teem with thousands of Afghans who hate the police. In a similar raid on the Jalousai camp, 12 miles from Peshawar, however, the feds were luckier, picking up four Afghans who were al-Qaeda suspects, plus a trove of sat phones and computer diskettes.
Still, a few phones and some computer files are not sufficient to stop a ruthless enemy whose reputation among its supporters soared after the destruction of the World Trade Center. With such a display of power, whether bin Laden is alive or not is beside the point. "For the militant groups in the Islamic world, it is the ideology that counts, not a specific leader," says Hala Mustafa of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "The roots of fanaticism will still be there."
Will those roots be watered by a war with Iraq? Optimists within the Bush Administration argue that the removal of Saddam Hussein would open a space for the development of true democracy across the Arab world, one that would offer for the first time a real choice between corrupt authoritarian regimes on the one hand and millennial Islamic extremists on the other. But many experts are skeptical. French officials otherwise wholly supportive of the U.S. are worried that, as one puts it, "some of the headway made against Islamists is lost by American diplomacy that has alienated most of the Muslim world." It is not that the extremists love Saddam. "Frankly," says a French source, "they don't give a s___ about Iraq, and they openly disdain Saddam as corrupt. But anything that happens in Iraq will just be used as further justification for terrorism." But if American soldiers are welcomed as warmly in Baghdad as they were by the people of Kabul, the effect of a war on the recruitme
nt of terrorists might be different.
Even if things turn out well in Iraq, Islamic terrorists will still be around, still able to kill and maim. Says Omar Bakri, who is based in London and is the leader of the radical Islamic Al-Muhajiroun youth movement, "The message was so clear in Bali—it is a war against the disbelievers' camp." A French investigator puts the terrorists' chilling beliefs in stark terms. "They really, truly don't care about which Westerner they murder," he says. "Just so long as an enemy is dead." In Bali, where a precise count of the charred bodies is not yet complete, more than 180 died. They will not be the last.
—Reported by Bruce Crumley/
Paris, Helen Gibson/London, Jeff Israely/Rome, Scott MacLeod/Cairo, Tim McGirk/Islamabad, Isabella Ng and Andrew Perrin/Bali, Douglas Waller/ Washington and Michael Ware/Paktia
