Bush and Obama: Side by Side at Ground Zero
By MARK LANDLER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: September 11, 2011
Amid all the dignitaries who gather Sunday on the site of the World Trade Center to pay tribute to those who died there 10 years ago, two will inevitably stand out: President Obama and former President George W. Bush, whose terms in office are bookends for considering how America has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, particularly in its response to terrorism.
The two men have never stood together at ground zero. Mr. Bush declined Mr. Obama’s invitation to join him last spring, days after Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in a raid in Pakistan.
So the tableau will be striking: the president who spent years hunting Bin Laden next to the one who finally got him. The president defined by his response to Sept. 11 standing alongside the one who has tried to take America beyond the lingering, complicated legacy of that day.
For Mr. Obama, Sept. 11 underpins what has become one of the great paradoxes of his presidency. A Democratic leader who opposed the Iraq war and is pulling troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan has, at the same time, notched up a record as a lethal, relentless hunter of terrorists.
Mr. Obama, a president who banned torture in the interrogation of suspected terrorists and pledged (unsuccessfully, so far) to close the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, carried out more drone strikes in Pakistan in his first year in office than Mr. Bush did in his eight years.
In the process, the White House said, it has killed more Al Qaeda officials in the last two-and-a-half years than were eliminated by the Bush administration in all the preceding years. Among the big names: two top Qaeda managers, Sheik Saeed al-Masri and Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, and one of its most feared field commanders, Ilyas Kashmiri.
“We have taken the fight to Al Qaeda like never before,” Mr. Obama said Saturday in his weekly address.
The administration points to this success as validation of the different counterterrorism strategy it put in place in January 2009. And there is no question that in its intense use of drones and its laser focus on Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups, Mr. Obama did depart from the Bush administration’s broader “global war on terrorism.”
But there has been as much continuity as change in the Obama method, according to terrorism experts.
Mr. Obama, for example, has continued the whole-of-government response to terrorism that the Bush administration eventually adopted. This approach — with the C.I.A. and F.B.I. working more collaboratively with agencies like the Treasury and State departments, especially in the field — culminated in the raid that killed Bin Laden.
“What you’ve seen from the Obama administration is fundamental continuity in the counterterrorism policies handed over in 2009, while sharpening the campaign to eliminate core Al Qaeda leadership and disrupt safe havens in Western Pakistan and Yemen,” said Juan Zarate, a top counterterrorism adviser in the Bush administration.
To be sure, Mr. Obama made important refinements and changes. Most notably, and perhaps most surprising to his supporters, he has dramatically increased the use of covert and clandestine operations by C.I.A. paramilitary and Special Operations forces from the United States military.
In Mr. Obama’s first year in office, the Central Intelligence Agency carried out 53 drone strikes in Pakistan. The next year, it more than doubled that figure, to 117, according to The Long War Journal, a Web site that follows the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The pace is off a bit this year — 49 through late August — but the drone campaign is spreading to other countries.
The C.I.A. now plans to carry out armed drone missions against Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen, and the military has conducted drone strikes to kill insurgents in Somalia.
“Stepping up the drone strikes has been a game changer,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “It is frustrating Al Qaeda’s movements enormously.”
Still, while Mr. Hoffman said that Al Qaeda’s core network had been crippled, its offshoots in Yemen and North Africa continue to put down roots, posing a potentially greater threat to the United States than Bin Laden’s surviving lieutenants.
“We can say we turned a corner with Al Qaeda, but we can’t say we turned a corner in the war on terrorism,” he said.
And this is where the administration’s wide-ranging counterterrorism strategy — relying on often-unreliable allies, sometimes sketchy intelligence and a clandestine American force already strained by a decade of secretive wars — runs into its limitations.
The administration is working with countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia to help build up their counterterrorism units so that they do not require United States intervention. But these countries have proved so erratic in going after militants that the administration has often had to resort to unilateral operations, as with the Bin Laden raid, which opened a rift with the Pakistanis that has only recently begun to heal.
More worrying, some experts say, the administration has yet to figure out how to effectively counter Al Qaeda’s propaganda. It has failed to prevent a small but growing number of Americans from becoming radicalized, often by listening to online videos by militants like the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, now in hiding in Yemen.
“Our weakest area is combating Al Qaeda’s ideology,” Michael E. Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center in both the Bush and Obama administrations, said last week.
For all its achievements, the administration has also been lucky. A Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, almost blew up a Northwest Airlines jet on Christmas Day in 2009 with explosives sewn into his underwear. A Pakistani-American man, Faisal Shahzad, parked an S.U.V. with a bomb that failed to detonate near Times Square.
“Obama is rightly proud of his counterterrorism record, but had Umar Abdulmutallab not lost his cool on that plane, he wouldn’t have had much of a record to point to,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former intelligence officer who has advised the White House. “His presidency would have been transformed that Christmas.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/us/12obama.html?hp
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