Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (28 page)

Pakistan restricts the number of American trainers throughout the country to no more than about 120 Special Operations personnel, fearful of being identified too closely with the unpopular United States, even though the Americans reimburse Pakistan more than $1 billion a year for its military operations in the border areas. “We want to keep a low signature,” a senior Pakistani officer said. The deep suspicion with which every American move in Pakistan is regarded has become a fact of life that American officers must work through as they try to reverse the effects of the many years when the United States had cut Pakistan off from military aid because of its nuclear weapons program. That period of estrangement through the 1990s left the Pakistanis feeling scorned and abandoned by the United States, and its military disenchanted with America and seeded with officers and soldiers sympathetic to conservative Islam—and even at times to the very militants they vow to fight today. The training program at Warsak is one of the first steps the American military has taken to help soothe the rising anti-American sentiment, even among the Pakistani officer corps. “This is the most complex operating environment I’ve ever dealt with,” said Colonel Kurt Sonntag, the West Point graduate and Special Forces officer who handed out the graduation certificates.

The personnel training is just one part of what is now a multifaceted security relationship aimed at improving Pakistan’s security forces so they can combat a militancy that is spreading beyond the remote tribal areas to the more populated “settled” areas of Punjab and Sindh. To combat Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the United States provides Pakistan with a wide array of weapons from body armor to F-16 fighter jets, shares intelligence about the militants, and has given the country more than $10 billion toward the cost of deploying nearly 150,000 Pakistani troops in and around the border areas since 2001—with the promise of much more to come.

About a dozen American trainers were assigned in 2010 to yearlong duty at the training center in Warsak, for which the United States spent $23 million on construction, plus another $30 million on training and equipment. Much of the training at Warsak is aimed at building the confidence of the Frontier Corps scouts, some of whom have relatives in the Taliban and who speak the same language, Pashto, as many militants. One of the challenges is that the militants are often better armed and more handsomely paid than the scouts. Three basic skills were built into the course: how to shoot straight, how to administer battlefield first aid, and how to provide covering fire for advancing troops. Until a few years ago, the Frontier Corps was widely ridiculed as corrupt and incompetent, but under the leadership of Lieutenant General Tariq Khan, salaries quadrupled to about $200 a month, and new equipment is flowing in. The scouts are winning praise in combat and attracting young men who might otherwise fall prey to jihadist entreaties and ideology.

General Khan, a portly former tank commander who battled Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan, offered an early and qualified judgment on the effort. He said that the training was still “settling down and maturing.”

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One of the most violent terror networks that bloodied the people of Iraq, and the American and allied forces fighting to secure the country, was the diabolical genius of Al Qaeda in organizing attacks by female suicide bombers in markets, polling places, police stations, and theaters. It is all but impossible to detect an explosive vest hidden under a woman’s loose-fitting
abaya
; in a traditional Muslim society, women cannot be searched by men, and the all-male Iraqi Army is bound by tradition. There were never enough women in the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s police force for the task. This makes deterrence even more crucial.

Over the years, there had been specific, if tactical, successes against the female suicide bombing cells. Ahead of any elections in Iraq, for example, the military issued warnings that insurgents would try to slip bomb-laden suicide vests into polling places beneath the long gowns of Iraqi women or of men in women’s clothing. But a snap program first organized by Lieutenant General Thomas Metz in Iraq helped address the problem. He set up a system in which one of the first women to arrive at a large polling place for any vote would be searched and cleared. That woman would in turn be asked to search ten others. Each of those ten would then search ten others before voting and so on in a daisy chain throughout election day. The solution was a success but can hardly be replicated every day at every public gathering spot across Iraq.

Commanders were cognizant that there had to be a more permanent effort to take down the female suicide bombing network. Lieutenant General Mark P. Hertling, on his second tour in Iraq—this time in command of the 1st Armored Division—took up the challenge. Hertling, one of the Army’s new breed of “pentathlete commanders” to come out of the wars since 9/11, understands not only the role of physical combat in counterinsurgency but also that of economic and political development, programs to train local forces, and efforts to manage the information war inside the war. Hertling and his wife, Sue, also typify the military family that is sustaining the all-volunteer force, proof that while politicians may talk of America as a nation at war, it’s really just a tiny percentage of military families at war: The Hertlings have two sons and a daughter-in-law in uniform, all having completed multiple combat tours.

Hertling and his troops based in northern Iraq, who saw the rising chaos from Al Qaeda bombings, sought innovative ways to disrupt the larger female suicide network and, even more, to deter women from signing up. Part of their campaign was to find ways to counter the idea that the bombings were justified under religious tenets. The Americans wanted to get the word out that at least some of the women who carried out the attacks had been coerced, although some were widows of terrorists and some appeared driven by outrage over the deaths of brothers and fathers. Hertling sought the counsel of prominent Iraqi women, including politicians and cultural leaders. What he learned, he said, was that “the bombers often had been child brides of terrorists, and their husbands had been killed. The culture is such that there were a lot of young girls—even as young as twelve or thirteen years old—who were forced to marry these Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia guys that came into the country that were all strangers. [They] just came in and went around town grabbing women to satisfy their fighters. If you are forced to marry in a society like that, that’s one thing. But when your husband dies, and he was a terrorist, the related shame the women would then feel makes the shaving of collaborating French girls’ heads in World War II tame in comparison. Not only do they then become an outcast in society because they’ve been with these terrorists, but because of the religious-cultural norms, no one else is going marry them, or even take care of them. So they have no food or money, they are extremely poor, they are living in the outskirts of town because that is where they were hiding, and they can’t remarry or get any kind of job. So what else is there left other than to revert to the belief in religious propaganda: Blow yourself up, kill an infidel, and go to heaven? I went back to the staff and said, How do we get after this kind of thinking while going after these networks?”

Hertling ordered his division headquarters to organize a first-of-its-kind women’s conference, which they held in Erbil, a major city. The general and a senior colonel were the only American men present, and he recruited most of the female soldiers from within the division and the various brigades he commanded to help run the forum. Hertling’s wife spoke to the group via satellite TV link-up from the 1st Armored Division’s rear headquarters in Germany, sharing her thoughts with the “sisterhood” in Iraq. Hertling then challenged the participants to break with old ways and assist with security. A group of female political leaders from Diyala Province, where most of the female suicide-vest activity had taken place, drew Hertling into a closed discussion about how they could help. Their suggestion: Put Iraqi women into the police academies and make them a part of the security force. Hertling seized the opportunity. “If you can give me a list of two hundred women who will be good police officers,” he said, “I’ll see if I can work this.” By the next day, he had four hundred names. With this roster of volunteers in hand, he went to the police commander in Diyala Province. With great reluctance, the commander eventually agreed that women could enter training as an experiment. A first class of twenty-seven policewomen graduated within weeks, growing within a year to more than sixty women across Diyala, all assigned to markets and other public locations to search for female suicide bombers. This effort then expanded to Kirkuk Province and later Salah Ad Din Province, all hotbeds of female suicide activity.

An unexpected breakthrough in Hertling’s effort came when Rania, a fifteen-year-old girl, was captured in Diyala before her explosive vest could be detonated. She told interrogators that she had been given juice that made her queasy and dizzy and that she was wrapped in the vest before being pushed toward a checkpoint. Rania said that her mother was an Al Qaeda sympathizer. The debriefing enabled the Americans and the Iraqis to gain a better understanding of how at least some of these women were recruited, and her information led to the further capture of six other women in the same cell, all widows of Al Qaeda fighters who were primed as suicide bombers. American commanders wanted to spread the word that Rania and others appeared not to have been willing bombers and that the killing of innocent Iraqis could not be defended as an approved religious act. But that had to be done without American fingerprints, which would undermine the message. American officers convened sessions with Iraqi politicians, human rights activists, and journalists, and provided information about the suicide bombers, including specific and significant details of Rania’s debriefing. They wanted this information to promote a public debate, but unlike in the early years of the war—when the American military wrote and produced information campaigns and even paid off local reporters—the content of this discussion was left to the Iraqis.

The Iraqi news media leapt on the story. A young female radio host initiated a call-in show outside Baqubah, where Rania was captured, and called the program “Doves of Peace.” The discussions of Rania’s case became the most popular talk show on regional radio, and the host became an Iraqi wartime Oprah. By the time the 1st Armored Division turned over command of northern Iraq to Iraqi forces as part of the reduction of American troops across the country, instances of female suicide bombers in the region had dropped significantly, although the threat has not disappeared.

“We will never win the hearts and minds of those from Arab cultures, and that’s even a bad expression to use as we work with other cultures,” Hertling concluded. “Many in the Arab world don’t want to be like us. They have no desire to have their hearts and minds won. They have their own cultures, their own values, and they want to keep it that way.” If American policy wants Muslim populations to join the effort to counter militant networks, then the United States should strive for winning something different from hearts and minds. The most important goal, Hertling said, “is to win trust and confidence.”

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There is a grim aphorism cited in counterterrorism circles that describes America’s technological advantages but warns of a more compelling national deficit of patience required in tackling militant networks around the globe: America has all the watches, but the terrorists have all the time. Making the case for public commitment to a sustained national security agenda is the job for elected officials. The military and intelligence communities are atop the technology.

No tool has revolutionized the nation’s ability to take apart terror networks, or received less acclaim, than the computer or, more specifically, the vast array of supercomputers devoted to the mission. Driven by the NSA, the system can collect, analyze, sort, and store data from a range of communications, in particular cell phone conversations, e-mails, and Web sites, billions of times faster than humans can. It’s the same case with data from documents seized on raids or forensic analysis of bombs.

“It’s a brute-force effort, but done electronically, and quite elegant,” said a longtime member of America’s cyberwarfare community now working under General Alexander at the NSA and Cyber Command. This official described how their superclassified computer system can do in seconds the work that otherwise would require tens of thousands of human beings working hundreds of thousands of hours. Just as important, a secure communications system operated by the military and intelligence community offers immediate access to precise data on an entire militant network under review, from high-value terrorists to the lowliest courier, all available via data link to interrogators at remote detainee units in Iraq or Afghanistan and up to senior policy makers preparing for meetings in the corridors of Washington.

Tens of thousands of detainees have passed through American-run camps in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most were seized carrying cell phones, each of which had a dialing history. That raw information is entered into the American database. When recruits voluntarily walk in off the street to apply for a position with the Afghan or Iraqi security forces or a more mundane government job, they check their cell phones at the door. Same with local nationals entering an American compound in the war zones. Each of these cell phones can be copied or cloned in seconds, with the supercomputers scanning the calling history for matches to known terror network members. If there is a match, a team of “strategic debriefers” is called in to question the person about why his phone has been in contact with a targeted terror cell. “We can unravel that,” said one military officer who has worked in the program. “It opens the door to a whole command-and-control network. Now we know who we are dealing with.” Especially in Iraq, officials said, the cross-referencing of cell phones has led American and Iraqi investigators to government employees, even some serving senior Iraqi leaders, who were hiding direct ties to terror and insurgent networks. The other benefit of the huge archive of cell phone numbers is that the military can track the specific users. “Another major breakthrough: finding and fixing ‘bad actors’ through technology, in particular cell phones and geo-location,” said one official.