The U.S. government, joined by other governments around the world, is working
through intelligence, law enforcement, military, financial, and diplomatic
channels to identify, disrupt, capture, or kill individual terrorists. This
effort was going on before 9/11 and it continues on a vastly enlarged scale. But
to catch terrorists, a U.S. or foreign agency needs to be able to find and reach
them.
No Sanctuaries
The 9/11 attack was a complex international operation, the product of years of
planning. Bombings like those in Bali in 2003 or Madrid in 2004, while able to
take hundreds of lives, can be mounted locally. Their requirements are far more
modest in size and complexity. They are more difficult to thwart. But the
U.S. government must build the capacities to prevent a 9/11-scale plot from
succeeding, and those capabilities will help greatly to cope with lesser but
still devastating attacks.
A complex international terrorist operation aimed at launching a catastrophic
attack cannot be mounted by just anyone in any place. Such operations appear to
require
- time, space, and ability to perform competent planning and staff
work;
- a command structure able to make necessary decisions and possessing
the authority and contacts to assemble needed people, money, and materials;
- opportunity and space to recruit, train, and select operatives with
the needed skills and dedication, providing the time and structure required
to socialize them into the terrorist cause, judge their trustworthiness, and
hone their skills;
- a logistics network able to securely manage the travel of
operatives, move money, and transport resources (like explosives) where they
need to go;
- access, in the case of certain weapons, to the special materials
needed for a nuclear, chemical, radiological, or biological attack;
- reliable communications between coordinators and operatives; and o
opportunity to test the workability of the plan.
Many details in chapters 2, 5, and 7 illustrate the direct and indirect value
of the Afghan sanctuary to al Qaeda in preparing the 9/11 attack and other
operations. The organization cemented personal ties among veteran jihadists
working together there for years. It had the operational space to gather and
sift recruits, indoctrinating them in isolated, desert camps. It built up
logistical networks, running through Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.
Al Qaeda also exploited relatively lax internal security environments in
Western countries, especially Germany. It considered the environment in the
United States so hospitable that the 9/11 operatives used America as their
staging area for further training and exercises-traveling into, out of, and
around the country and complacently using their real names with little fear of
capture.
To find sanctuary, terrorist organizations have fled to some of the least
governed, most lawless places in the world. The intelligence community has
prepared a world map that highlights possible terrorist havens, using no secret
intelligence-just indicating areas that combine rugged terrain, weak governance,
room to hide or receive supplies, and low population density with a town or city
near enough to allow necessary interaction with the outside world. Large areas
scattered around the world meet these criteria.5
In talking with American and foreign government officials and military
officers on the front lines fighting terrorists today, we asked them: If you
were a terrorist leader today, where would you locate your base? Some of the
same places come up again and again on their lists:
- western Pakistan and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region
- southern or western Afghanistan
- the Arabian Peninsula, especially Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and the nearby
Horn of Africa, including Somalia and extending southwest into Kenya
- Southeast Asia, from Thailand to the southern Philippines to Indonesia
- West Africa, including Nigeria and Mali
- European cities with expatriate Muslim communities, especially cities in
central and eastern Europe where security forces and border controls are
less effective
In the twentieth century, strategists focused on the world's great industrial
heartlands. In the twenty-first, the focus is in the opposite direction, toward
remote regions and failing states. The United States has had to find ways to
extend its reach, straining the limits of its influence.
Every policy decision we make needs to be seen through this lens. If, for
example, Iraq becomes a failed state, it will go to the top of the list of
places that are breeding grounds for attacks against Americans at home.
Similarly, if we are paying insufficient attention to Afghanistan, the rule of
the Taliban or warlords and narcotraffickers may reemerge and its countryside
could once again offer refuge to al Qaeda, or its successor.
Recommendation:The U.S. government must identify and prioritize
actual or potential terrorist sanctuaries. For each, it should have a realistic
strategy to keep possible terrorists insecure and on the run, using all elements
of national power. We should reach out, listen to, and work with other countries
that can help.
We offer three illustrations that are particularly applicable today, in 2004:
Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia.
