Read Online Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda by Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker - Free Book Online Page A

update on missile defense, which was a passion of the president. But nestled among the handful of sensitive themes for Bush’s consideration that day was a radical new concept for counterterrorism. The secret briefing by Rumsfeld bore the prosaic title “A Concept for Deterring and Dissuading Terrorist Networks.” But its half-dozen pages, distilled from a thirty-one-page master briefing, contained radical new thinking. The briefing laid out a truly new strategy that would apply the lessons of Cold War–era deterrence to a wholly new effort to counter shadowy, stateless terrorist networks.
    For two years, Rumsfeld had been demanding answers to the blunt question he had put to his top aides in his October 2003 memo: “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” And as Al Qaeda grew stronger and new affiliates sprang up, his grim-faced lieutenants had but one reply: “No.” But now, from a completely unexpected quarter, came the kind of creative, even counterintuitive thinking that Rumsfeld had all but given up eliciting. As he prepared for the flight to Crawford and his crucial meeting with the president, Rumsfeld was convinced that he now possessed something that offered the new answers the United States needed in its “long war” against global terrorism, and his usual supreme confidence was mixed with a certain apprehension.
    Rumsfeld’s brief grew out of work by Douglas Feith, a champion of thinking about what had come to be described as “the new deterrence” in his role as the Pentagon’s top policy official. Feith had told confidants that, with unusual brashness, he had politely, respectfully, scolded Bush in May 2004, saying that while senior administration officials met frequently on Afghanistan or Iraq or outreach to the Muslim world or terrorist financing, there had been absolutely no meetings to look systematically at the administration’s marquee national security issue: the “global war on terror.” No National Security Council meeting of the president, his cabinet, and his top-level advisers to assess the broader strategy of combating Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
    “I said, ‘Mr. President, you never have a meeting on the war on terrorism,’” Feith recalled. “If we’re serious about the war on terrorism being a war with multiple elements and campaigns, one would think that at some point, you’d ask how we’re doing in the larger effort.”
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    The briefing Rumsfeld gave President Bush on August 11, 2005, might not have happened were it not for a veteran Cold Warrior toiling deep inside the Pentagon’s policy bureaucracy who mentored a young Ph.D. candidate from the University of California at Berkeley assigned to the Defense Department as a summer fellow in June 2005. As was often the case with the impatient defense secretary known for his “wire-brush treatment” of subordinates, even four-star officers, it was an angry Rumsfeld outburst that spawned an important internal debate. That discussion yielded results that were eventually condensed into the PowerPoint briefing for President Bush, a forecast of what has since become a pillar of the new counterterrorism strategy.
    The veteran Cold Warrior was Barry Pavel, one of those highly respected, long-serving civilian policy planners who can spend an entire career moving around from one place to another—the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the State Department, and the intelligence community—without their names ever surfacing in the media. That’s how they like it. The idea for applying principles of deterrence to terrorists? “It came from my head because I am a longtime nuclear deterrence/nuclear arms control guy,” he said. “Everybody was saying it can’t be done, it can’t be done. I just thought about it—and, well, terrorists are human beings and they