Counterterrorism in Retrospect

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Author Timothy Naftali.

Publisher Basic Books

Year 2005

Pages 399 pp.

ISBN 465092810

Price $26.00

In its final report last summer, the 9/11 Commission recounted the failures of the Clinton and Bush administrations to confront terrorist threats. Timothy Naftali's new book adds historical depth to that critique by tracing the development of U.S. counterterrorism policy since the end of World War II. Like the commission, Naftali -- a diplomatic historian at the University of Virginia who worked as a consultant to the panel -- focuses mainly on external threats to the United States and wonders whether the attacks of September 11, 2001, could have been prevented. But as an academic, he can more readily blame top policymakers and government agencies than the commissioners could. What others have termed failures of intelligence, he calls failures of policy.

Part of this admirably straightforward narrative was written, but not published, as a study for the commission. The author's involvement with the commission facilitated numerous interviews, and he obtained documents that earlier chroniclers of U.S. counterterrorism had not seen. The result is a rich chronological analysis that allows for comparisons across different administrations and demonstrates that the shortcomings of the country's counterterrorism policy are long standing. The book is not a simple story of Washington's persistent blindness to the threat. Naftali's survey shows how a more complicated pattern -- with some government officials stressing the dangers of terrorism and others then minimizing or ignoring them -- has hampered Washington's ability to develop an effective counterterrorism strategy.

STOP AND GO

Over the years, many analysts and influential U.S. policymakers, including presidents, have recognized the danger of terrorism, even if sporadically and incompletely. The fear that foreign terrorists might attack the United States dates back at least to the Ford administration. Ronald Reagan, who was determined to compensate for what he regarded as Jimmy Carter's weakness in defending U.S. interests during the Iran hostage crisis, came to office with terrorism at the top of his agenda -- the only president ever to do so. For both terms, he was preoccupied with securing the release of the hostages in Lebanon and, like his two secretaries of state, considered terrorism a major threat to U.S. power and prestige. By the mid-1990s, after the first attack on the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Aum Shinrikyo attack on a Tokyo subway, President Bill Clinton also took the threat of terrorism extremely seriously, worrying in particular about the prospect of a catastrophic attack with weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Unfortunately, concerted action did not always follow awareness. Even when top policymakers saw the danger, Naftali suggests, their interest almost never prompted consequential policy changes. Presidents were hard pressed to sustain their focus on the issue; when they did, their initiatives were not always implemented by the relevant bureaucracies. Little came of the 1981 call by then Vice President George H.W. Bush to create an intelligence clearinghouse. In 1984, the Reagan administration issued National Security Decision Directive 138, launching a campaign to "send a strong and vigorous message" that the United States "will not tolerate terrorist activity." But according to Naftali, the routine operations of the CIA and the FBI went largely unchanged. In 1986, the recommendations of a vice presidential task force, which prefigured those of the 9/11 Commission, were also issued as a directive; in the end, few were carried out. In June 1995, President Clinton issued a presidential directive and promoted an expansive legislative package, but it was not until the U.S.A. Patriot Act that many of its recommendations were adopted. Awareness of terrorism and the commitment to combat it have reached unprecedented levels since September 11, but it remains to be seen how long this focus will last.

POLITICAL FOOTBALL

Naftali has several explanations for the U.S. government's past reluctance to make terrorism a priority and pay it systematic attention, many of them now distressingly familiar. Presidents and their advisers saw terrorism as a no-win issue politically since working to prevent it is a difficult task traditionally unpopular both with the public and with bureaucrats. The intelligence community lacked expertise. Bureaucracies resisted sharing information and quarreled over jurisdiction. The projected costs of boosting domestic security or intervening abroad were considered unacceptably high.

One major problem, according to Naftali's account, was crippling disagreement over the nature of the threat. Some in Reagan's entourage believed that terrorism was an artifact of the Cold War and that the Soviet Union was the main culprit; others did not. Gerald Ford downplayed the threat of terrorism after Richard Nixon had highlighted it, as did George H.W. Bush after Reagan, Clinton at the beginning of his presidency, and George W. Bush after him.

The Clinton White House at first sought to distinguish itself from its predecessors by treating terrorism as only one of several deadly transnational threats. And its successor was relatively inactive before September 2001 because it refused to accept the Clinton administration's conclusion that al Qaeda was a new, more dangerous kind of terrorist group. In the end, each administration's excessive concern with setting a new course seems to have trumped the nation's interest in continuity.