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January 20, 2002, Sunday, Final Edition

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HEADLINE: A Strategy's Cautious Evolution; Before Sept. 11, the Bush Anti-Terror Effort Was Mostly
Ambition

BYLINE: Barton Gellman, Washington Post Staff Writer

BODY:

On a closed patch of desert in the first week of June, the U.S. government built a house for Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden would have recognized the four-room villa. He lived in one just like it outside Kandahar,
Afghanistan, whenever he spent a night among the recruits at his Tarnak Qila training camp. The stone-for-
stone replica, in Nevada, was a prop in the rehearsal of his death.

From a Predator drone flying two miles high and four miles away, Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency
ground controllers loosed a missile. It carried true with a prototype warhead, one of about 100 made, for killing
men inside buildings. According to people briefed on the experiment, careful analysis after the missile pierced
the villa wall showed blast effects that would have slain anyone in the target room. The Bush administration
now had in its hands what one participant called "the holy grail" of a three-year quest by the U.S. government —
a tool that could kill bin Laden within minutes of finding him. The CIA planned and practiced the operation.
But for the next three months, before the catastrophe of Sept. 11, President Bush and his advisers held back.

The new national security team awaited results of a broad policy review toward the al Qaeda network and
Afghanistan's Taliban regime, still underway in a working group two and three levels below the president. Bush
and his top aides had higher priorities — above all, ballistic missile defense. As they turned their attention to
terrorism, they were moving toward more far-reaching goals than the death of bin Laden alone.

Bush's engagement with terrorism in the first eight months of his term, described in interviews with advisers
and contemporary records, tells a story of burgeoning ambition without the commitment of comparably
ambitious means. In deliberations and successive drafts of a National Security Presidential Directive approved
by Bush's second-ranking advisers on Aug. 13, the declared objective evolved from "rolling back" to
"permanently eroding" and eventually to "eliminating" bin Laden's al Qaeda organization.

Cabinet-rank policymakers, or principals, took up the new strategy for the first time on Sept. 4. It called for
phased escalation of pressure against Taliban leaders to present them with an unavoidable choice — disgorge al
Qaeda or face removal from power.

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"After 9/llf the glovescome off"A
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INVESTIGATIVE
America's frontline agents in the
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ices. They have assassinated al Qaeda leaders, spirited pris-
oners to nations with brutal human-rights records, and
amassed files equal to a thousand encyclopedias.
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But the war is far from over. Last week, Osama bin
11 .(' Laden's top deputy exhorted the faithful to strike at west-
ern embassies and businesses. The injunction, from
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' * Ayman al-Zawahiri, came on the heels of bombings in
Morocco and Saudi Arabia and caused the United States
to close diplomatic posts overseas and increase the
homeland security warning level from yellow to orange.
Al Qaeda, one FBI veteran explained, "has one more 9/11
inthem."
With all the headlines about the latest attacks and
warnings, however, it is easy to miss the amount of dam-
age America's terrorist hunters have inflicted on bin
Laden's ragtag army. U.S. News has retraced the war on
terror, starting in the very first weeks after 9/11, to ex-
amine in detail how Washington and its allies launched
an unprecedented drive, led by the Central Intelligence
Agency, to disrupt and destroy bin Laden's operation.
Interviews were conducted with over three dozen past
and current counterterrorism officials in a half-dozen

GURU. Bin Laden's followers, like these in Gaza, rally to the leader.

KENT KUO+-MACNUM U.S.NEWS & WORLD REPORT, JUNE 2, 2003 19

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THE NATIONAL INTEREST

Number 72 • Summer 2003

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CHAIRMAN OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD Cmrad Black CO-CHAIRMAN OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD Henry A. Kissinger
PUBLISHER James R. Schlesmge?- CO-PUBLISHER Dimitri K. Simes EDITOR EMERITUS Owen Harries
EDITORIAL BOARD Zbignie-w Brzezinski • Eliot A. Cohen • Midge Decter • Martin Feldstein • Francis Fukuyama • Samuel P. Huntington
Josef Joffe • Charles Krauthammer • Michael Mandelbaum • Richard Perle • Daniel Pipes • Alexey K. Pushkov • Stephen Sestanovich • Robert W. Tucker
 From Current History vol. 101, no. 659 (December 2002), pp. 409-413.
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Hard Choices:
National Security and the War on Terrorism
Ivo H. DAALDER, JAMES M. LINDSAY, AND JAMES B. STEINBERG
P resident George W. Bush's National Security
Strategy, which the White House released in
mid-September, presents his vision of a "dis-
tinctly American internationalism."1 Media reports
focused on the strategy's support for preempting
emerging threats militarily, but the 31-page docu-
ment covers a far broader set of issues. At its core,
the National Security Strategy calls for the United
States to use its "unparalleled military strength and
great economic and political influence" to establish
a "balance of power that favors human freedom"
and to defeat the threat posed by "terrorists and
tyrants." These themes will likely resonate with the
American people, who believe that the United
States should play a leading role in making the
world a safer and better place.
Although the strategy's overarching goals make
sense, its proposals on how to achieve them raise
important questions. First, the National Security
Strategy sets as a goal promoting global freedom but
gives priority to a counterterrorism policy that relies
heavily on the help of countries that in many cases
do not share America's basic values. Second, the
strategy fails to recognize the limitations of pre-
emption as a policy tool for rogue states or to spec-
ify when it should be used. Third, the strategy
emphasizes ad hoc coalitions as the preferred means
for addressing threats to international security and
Ivo H. DAALDER and JAMES M. LINDSAY are senior fellows in,
and JAMES B. STEINBERG is director and vice president of, the for-
eign policy program at the Brookings Institution.
iThe full text of The National Security Strategy of the United States
of America may be found at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/
nsc/nss.html>.
409
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underestimates the contribution that broad-based
alliances and institutions make to furthering United
States interests over the long term. Finally, the strat-
egy warns that failed states threaten American secu-
rity, but proposes economic and political assistance
programs ill suited to alleviating the danger.
DEFENDING, PRESERVING, AND EXTENDING PEACE
The cover letter President Bush submitted along
with the National Security Strategy identifies its
main objectives: "We will defend the peace by fight-
ing terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the
peace by building good relations among the great
powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging
free and open societies on every continent." Curi-
ously, the strategy is not organized around these
themes, but this three-pronged approach captures
the thrust of its recommendations.
The first duty of government is to provide for the
common defense. This, the Bush strategy maintains,
requires defeating America's enemies—which it
identifies as a mix of terrorists, tyrants, and tech-
nology. September 11 established beyond doubt that
"shadowy networks of individuals can bring great
chaos and suffering to our shores." Tyrants in a few
countries have turned their states into rogues. They
"brutalize their own people," "display no regard for
international law," "are determined to acquire
weapons of rriass destruction," "sponsor terrorism
around the globe," and "reject basic human values
and hate the United States." The diffusion of mod-
ern technology makes these terrorists and tyrants
ever more dangerous. It could give them a "catas-
trophic power to strike great nations," enabling
them "to blackmail us, or to harm us, or to harm
our friends."