Senior CIA official says war on terror will go on indefinitely

Paul Pillar is one of the government's senior anti-terrorism experts. He joined the CIA in 1977 and rose to become deputy chief of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, an office created in 1986 to assess and combat threats to Americans from Middle Eastern terrorists. The center, staffed by representatives from several government agencies, gives the White House a daily threat assessment of possible terrorist actions.

In 1999, Pillar left the center on sabbatical to write Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, which was published before September 11 by the Brookings Institution Press. In his book, Pillar outlines the failures-and successes-in U.S. anti-terrorism policy. He concludes that fighting terrorism has to be viewed as a long-term struggle, much like protecting the public health from communicable disease, and that there will be both victories and defeats.

Pillar is now the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia in the CIA. Steve Hirsch, editor in chief of Global Security Newswire, interviewed Pillar on a range of terrorism-related subjects.

National Journal: Is this really a war on terrorism?

Pillar: There are some unfortunate aspects of the "war" terminology and analogy, the most unfortunate one being that this isn't going to have a clear beginning and clear end, like World War II did, or the Cold War, for the most part, did. [Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld has said the right things in reminding us that this is not going to end with a surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri, but I'm not certain that we have all, as Americans, absorbed the implications of what the Secretary said.

I am disturbed by how often I hear references to "as long as the emergency lasts" or "as long as the war on terrorism is going on." I think that's the wrong frame of mind. What we are doing has an indefinite run.

National Journal: How has terrorism changed in recent years, in terms of who is conducting it, and the spectrum of international activity?

Pillar: I think the main trend I would highlight is the trend away from state involvement and state sponsorship. If you compare international terrorism today versus what it was like, say 15 years ago, the role of states is much less, even though some of the states that are much less active today, such as Libya, are still listed as state sponsors.

Another major dimension I would point out is the increasing lethality of terrorism, and the fact that more major terrorist incidents today than 15 or 20 years ago are designed to kill a lot of people, as opposed to being aimed at more-specific political objectives, or practical objectives, like freeing comrades from prison.

And the third trend I would highlight is the extension of the geographic reach of terrorist groups, and the fact that their infrastructures have grown literally worldwide; so you have Middle Eastern and South Asian groups that are quite capable of conducting major operations in the Western Hemisphere, like September 11.

National Journal: The United States, up until now, has pretty much been free of terrorism, but now we're not. What has changed that has increased the danger to the United States?

Pillar: First of all, I'd put my finger on the earlier attack on the World Trade Center, the 1993 bombing, as a real wake-up call in that regard. That was the first major act of international terrorism on U.S. soil. What has changed? The main thing that has changed has been that extension of the geographic reach of terrorist groups, which means infrastructures that have grown, and cells that have been set up on multiple continents, as well as the increased movement of international terrorist operatives.

That all has to do with globalization-the greater quantity and ease of movement of people and ideas and money-which legitimate businessmen have been the larger part of, but which terrorists have made use of as well.

It also has to do, once the World Trade Center attack in 1993 broke the ice, with demonstration effects. I think that attack, as well as the bombing in Oklahoma City two years later-even though that was the work of domestic perpetrators-showed foreign terrorists that it wasn't really quite as hard to pull off a major operation in the United States as they probably thought before that.

National Journal: One of the things that people talk about frequently with regard to terrorism is the potential for the use of weapons of mass destruction. Is there a likelihood of jumping to that level of danger?

Pillar: There is a risk, and I would expect to see more attacks along the lines of the anthrax letters that we've seen in the past few months. That said, I believe that the specter of terrorists, especially international terrorists, using chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear means has been overhyped, in the sense that it has diverted our attention from what, in my view, will continue to be the main threat, which is the infliction of loss of life through conventional means.

This, in fact, is what I would identify as one of the things that affected our thinking in this country, that caused us-the collective "us," Americans in general-to be so surprised by September 11. There had been so much attention to chemical and biological mass-casualty scenarios that we had tended to equate terrorism against the U.S. homeland with chemical or biological terrorism, and just about every domestic preparedness exercise revolved around some chemical or biological scenario.

We also tended to equate chemical or biological terrorism with mass-casualty terrorism, which disregards the fact that, just like the anthrax letters and previous use by terrorists of chemical or biological agents, we are far more likely to see incidents with a few casualties rather than many casualties.

So here we've had, last autumn, two attacks on the United States. The one that used box cutters and aircraft hijacking is the one that killed almost 4,000 people; the one that used the biological agent, anthrax spores, has so far killed five. We ought to reflect on that; I can assure you the terrorists will reflect on that.

National Journal: Where is the main, proper venue for U.S. action in the fight against terrorism?

Pillar: The main venue for fighting international terrorism is behind countless closed doors in scores of foreign countries where individual terrorists and cells and branches of groups do their business of recruiting and raising money and making plans. The biggest form of support we need is the cooperation of foreign police and intelligence and internal security services, and what they can do in those scores of foreign countries by way of arresting, investigating, reporting, confiscating, and all those other steps that I would put under the heading of "disruption of terrorist infrastructure." It is the main front on which this war on terrorism has to be waged. It will not be a front that you and I can read about in the newspapers as we look at maps of Afghanistan or similar measures of progress.

National Journal: On the executive branch side, you are fairly critical in your book of centralization of counter-terrorism functions. What are your doubts about it?

Pillar: At a time of crisis like this, there are a couple of natural tendencies that you hear all the time. One is that we've got to reorganize somehow-that the old organization failed us, so we've got to make a change for the sake of making a change. That's a natural reaction, but it's not necessarily the most useful reaction.

Two, there's always this issue, whether it's on terrorism or something else, about whether information is being "stovepiped," whether it's being shared, whether there are conflicts between different agencies. This is the stuff of which dramatic congressional hearings are held. I don't want to belittle the subject and imply that we don't actually have some real problems along those lines, but most of what we hear on this subject are just natural reactions to the felt need to do something about a major problem.

With regard to counter-terrorism, the fact is, many things we have to do get to the core missions of a number of different government departments and agencies-law enforcement; intelligence; regulatory bodies; the State Department, which conducts foreign policy; and so on. There is no perfect way to rearrange this particular bureaucratic map in a more centralized sort of way than what we have now that would not do certain forms of violence to the necessary intradepartmental coordination.

If, for example, you were to somehow combine everything that the FBI does and the CIA does on counter-terrorism, that would mean ripping one or the other or both out of its parent agency in a way that would work to the detriment of law enforcement or intelligence, or both.

National Journal: In your book, you said that you felt that the claims of what can be accomplished by going after terrorists' money have been oversold. What did you mean by that?

Pillar: There is a contribution, to be sure, to be made in attempting to freeze or interdict terrorist funds. But sometimes-and this is what's oversold-one hears somebody speak about the lifeblood of terrorism being money, and if we can only dry that up, we'll dry up terrorism. That's an overstatement of the contribution to be made. It's an important front in the war on terrorism, but one where we have to realize the limitations-the main limitation being that terrorists are very adept at hiding the money trail, using multiple channels, using false names for accounts, and using informal methods like the so-called hawala system you've read about, which is an informal means of transferring funds that don't go through the banking system at all. Also, there is the fact that for most terrorism, you don't need a whole lot of money. The September 11 hijackers evidently used, according to some estimates, as much as half a million [dollars], but the great majority of the terrorism we face costs far, far less than that, and so even if you dry up most of the funds, it won't stop most of it from happening.

National Journal: Newspapers have been talking about "after Afghanistan"-Yemen, Sudan, Colombia. You and others say this is more than Afghanistan, this is more than Osama bin Laden. Are these likely places where we are also going to have to be?

Pillar: If you're talking not necessarily about military action, all of those countries you mentioned, and many more, will be fronts in this war on terrorism, mainly the less visible kinds of front that we talked about before, in which the people on the front line are police and security agents, and not armed forces. Afghanistan, with particular reference to the use of armed force, really is sui generis. There isn't any other place that has played, over the last several years, the role that Afghanistan has played as the premier safe haven for international terrorists, with the Taliban being the regime that has been more closely allied with terrorists than any other regime. Our use of military force there now is also unique. It is going beyond our previous uses of military force, such as against Libya in 1986, or Iraq in 1993, or even against the bin Laden targets in 1998, in which we were making retaliatory strikes with some hope of causing some damage.

What's going on with U.S. and British forces in Afghanistan today is no less than the overthrow of a regime and the wholesale cleaning out of the world's premier safe haven for terrorists. So, to the extent that we're successful in Afghanistan, that will make a far-greater difference than any other previous application of military force. But I don't see any other place right now where military force could-or, in my view, should-be used in a comparable way.