Decoding the threat

Orange alerts, old intelligence--sure, it's confusing, but here's why the war on terrorism may have just taken a big turn

Over the past few weeks, President George W. Bush has been traveling the country telling adoring crowds (and the very occasional heckler) that the American economy has "turned the corner." The recent spike in oil prices, weak job numbers, and some very obviously jittery financial markets cut some of the ground out from under the contention, but there is evidence to suggest that, by and large, the president just might be right. On the other big issue separating Bush and Sen. John Kerry, the war on terrorism, there is also some intriguing new evidence, and it seems to suggest, however tentatively, that America may have finally turned a corner there, as well. The problem, of course, with making any such pronouncement is that it could blow up in one's face if it were to be followed by another attack. Which accounts, in some measure, for the serious cognitive dissonance that characterized the bizarre series of events that unfolded here and around the globe in the first week of August. The sequence, because of its tangled nature, bears repeating: the elevation of the terrorist threat level to orange and the disclosure of al Qaeda plans to attack financial centers in New York, Washington, and Newark, N.J.; the disclosure, a day later, that the surveillance data on which the attack plans were premised were between three and four years old; the assertion, a day after that, that the old intelligence data had suddenly been supplemented by a new "separate, current stream of reporting" on possible terrorist attacks. On Wall Street and in Washington, once again, heavily armed soldiers patrolled subways and sidewalks. Traffic was a mess. Business owners railed. In many quarters, by week's end, anger and frustration were supplanted by a profound sense of confusion.


Which increased only further as news reports from around the globe tumbled in one on top of the other detailing the arrests of men almost no one besides the intelligence professional steeped in the arcana of al Qaeda fully understood. And even among the pros, there were doubt and debate about which of the arrested men were players and which were lackeys and factotums. There was the hulking computer geek who received $170 a month from al Qaeda to cover the rent on his house. There was the man who went by the name "Ahmed the Tanzanian," suspected of plotting the attack on two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. And there was the man described as a nephew of the 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and the cousin of the man who plotted the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, suggesting an al Qaeda subplot that seems like nothing so much as a demented version of All in the Family.

With all the story lines and subplots, the confusion is understandable. But underlying it all is a heretofore-quiet evolution on the part of a nation many senior military commanders refer to as America's most important partner in the war on terrorism: Pakistan. Back in early May, not long after two assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan stepped up its efforts against al Qaeda, deploying a unit of elite Special Forces to rout al Qaeda and its supporters out of the remote tribal lands that stretch for hundreds of miles along the Afghan border. Publicly, U.S. commanders crowed about their new "hammer and anvil" strategy, using the Pakistani hammer to drive al Qaeda elements across the border, where U.S. Special Forces in advanced "A camps" would capture or kill them. Privately, some commanders expressed reservations about the Pakistanis' determination. Many soldiers in the Pakistani 11th Corps, which worked with the elite 88th Brigade, had family members in the tribal lands, particularly in remote Waziristan, and word of many early raids leaked, the incursions producing nothing but resentment among Pashtun tribal members. Worse, the most ambitious raid on a suspected al Qaeda stronghold resulted in the deaths of nearly 50 Pakistani troops; eight of them, taken hostage, were shot at point-blank range. In Washington and at the upper levels of the U.S. Central Command, which was banking on the hammer-and-anvil strategy, doubts grew about the Pakistanis' resolve.