Different, yet so similar

Eric SchmittMark Landler

Obama's lethal record against the al-Qaeda reflects continuity with Bush's counterterrorism push, albeit with a different strategy.

On Sunday, for the first time, U.S. President Barack Obama and the former President, George W. Bush, stood together at the site of the September 11 attacks, listening as family members read the names of lost love ones and bowing their heads in silence to mark the moment the planes hit.

In May, Mr. Bush declined Mr. Obama's invitation to join him at Ground Zero after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But on this morning, they stood shoulder to shoulder — Commanders-in-Chief whose terms in office are bookends for exploring how the United States has changed since September 11, 2001, particularly in its response to terrorism.

The tableau was striking: The President who spent years hunting bin Laden next to the one who finally got him. The President defined by his response to September 11 standing alongside the one who has tried to take America beyond the lingering, complicated legacy of that day.

Mr. Obama read from Psalm 46: “God is our refuge and strength,” which an aide said he chose because it spoke of perseverance. Mr. Bush, the wartime leader, read a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to a widow who was believed to have lost sons in the Civil War.

Unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush drew a cheer from those who remembered him shouting through a bullhorn atop the smouldering rubble. For Mr. Obama, September 11 is perhaps a less wrenching experience, though it underpins what has become one of the great paradoxes of his presidency.

He is a Democratic leader who opposed the Iraq war and is pulling troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan but has, at the same time, notched up a record as a lethal, relentless hunter of terrorists.

He is a President who banned torture in the interrogation of suspected terrorists and pledged unsuccessfully, so far to close the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but 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 officials of the al-Qaeda in the last two-and-a-half years than were eliminated during the entire Bush administration. Among the big names: two top al-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 in his weekly address.

On Sunday, Mr. Obama moved quietly through the rituals of remembrance, laying a wreath at a memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania., where a United Airlines plane crashed after passengers fought with the hijackers, and later another wreath at the 9/11 Memorial at the Pentagon.

When the President finally spoke, at a concert in Washington on Sunday evening, he celebrated a nation that had not “succumbed to suspicion.” But he also signalled that the September 11 decade one of endless war in Afghanistan and Iraq was drawing to a close.

“Our strength is not measured in our ability to stay in these places,” Mr. Obama declared.

In counterterrorism as well, there is no question that in his intense use of drones and his laser focus on al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups, Mr. Obama departed 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 full government response to terrorism that the Bush administration eventually adopted. This approach with the CIA and FBI 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 who has nevertheless criticised the Obama White House for its muddled detention policies.

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 CIA paramilitary and Special Operations forces from the U.S. military.

In Mr. Obama's first year in office, the CIA 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 website 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 CIA 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,” Mr. Hoffman said.

And this is where the administration's wide-ranging counterterrorism strategy relying on often-unreliable allies, sometimes sketchy intelligence and a clandestine U.S. force already strained by a decade of secretive wars runs into its limitations.

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. Six months later, a Pakistani-American, Faisal Shahzad, parked an SUV loaded 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.” — New York Times News Service