My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  The core was a bureaucracy. Bin Laden led from the top as emir, consulted with an advisery council, and directed the group. Beneath him were committees in charge of religious authorization, military affairs, finance, the group’s security, and propaganda. From here, bin Laden exerted command and control and distributed resources. Still building its brand, Al Qaeda needed its attacks to be spectacular and successful. Through what an Al Qaeda defector called “centralization of decision and decentralization of execution,” the leadership selected targets and approved proposals that came from below. The bulk of the planning, equipping, and execution was delegated to the local parts of the network, which received guidance and funds as necessary from the professionals in the top-level Military Affairs Committee.

  As they planned and executed the attacks, local cells adopted a more traditional terrorist “blind” cell model, whereby the links among its members were limited. Single intermediaries—cutouts—connected different clusters, so arresting one or a number of members only made a limited dent in the organization. If a detainee could resist questioning long enough, the people he knew could scramble and reposition, maintaining the integrity of the cell. The night before the attack on the embassy in Nairobi in 1998, all members of Al Qaeda left East Africa except those preparing to kill themselves in the trucks and those staying to clean their tracks.

  The auxiliary support for the group included the networks that funneled donations from sympathetic patrons in the Gulf, in Europe, and elsewhere. Al Qaeda had unofficial partnerships with at least twenty other groups, some of which bin Laden attempted to bring under his control.

  Attraction to the brand during the late 1990s was most noticeable in the robust training camps Al Qaeda established, primarily in Afghanistan. These camps trained and indoctrinated between ten thousand and twenty thousand (estimates ranged as high as seventy thousand) young Muslim men in the way of modern jihad. Some of those trainees came from hard, poor lives. Many were well-to-do men who had science and engineering degrees but had never fired a gun. Al Qaeda adopted the pedagogy of bin Laden’s influential high-school gym teacher, who had mixed Koranic study with soccer—running violent, macho physical training alongside indoctrination classes that fed a narrow but potent ideology.

  To spur innovation, the leadership invited attendees to brainstorm and share their own macabre ideas about how to kill a lot of Americans and Jews. At the same time, the organization enforced some strict tenets of its own. For example, it ensured that suicide bombing became an Al Qaeda trademark by belaboring the prestige of such “martyrdom operations.”

  Like a spinneret, these camps spit out the threads that would compose the web of the growing network. While a small portion of these trainees remained in the core—staying to fight the Northern Alliance or graduating to advanced training—the camps ensured that the organization had supporters and agents of varying commitment worldwide. As the men returned to their corners of the world, including western Europe, they did so with strong links to fellow jihadists. At times, those global relationships crossed social strata or cultural divides they wouldn’t have crossed before the camps. Even as these men dispersed, they did so bonded by a shared consciousness. They saw the same “problem” and endorsed the same strategy for redress: to restore Muslim pride and dignity by demonstrating moral and political strength, largely through violence. By 1999, their increasingly thick network stretched across sixty countries.

  Those durable relationships made the movement difficult to target, as its dynamics were often known only to the people who shared those bonds. We tried to think of it less as an organization easily defined by a hierarchical chart and talked instead of associations and a network of relationships: Who communicated with whom? Who was married to whose sister or daughter? Who, ultimately, influenced whom?

  September 11 represented the high-water mark of Al Qaeda’s triumph. Even a dedicated enemy of Osama bin Laden could acknowledge the impressive operational feat of simultaneously hijacking four airliners and crashing three into different buildings. The attacks also established Al Qaeda as a brand. Thenceforth, no group was more recognizable as the credible, effective Islamic resistance to America. Its appeal swelled beyond the confines of the jihadist community. But the swift response by the United States quickly forced the organization to adapt.

  By 2004, a number of trends were making the group more effective but also more vulnerable. Bin Laden and his core group were increasingly isolated and on the run, and he was less able to maintain meaningful control over the disparate network. For the survival of the brand, the group needed to remain active. As a result, power and authority devolved from the center to the outer parts of the network, which would thenceforth make decisions that central committees had previously made.

  Beginning in 2003, this decentralization forced Al Qaeda to rely on what became known as its “franchises”—in Algeria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq. The first of these had appeared the previous spring in Saudi Arabia, when in May 2003 a new group operating under the name Al Qaeda in the Land of Two Holy Places set off car bombs in three Western housing compounds in Riyadh. Their cells comprised core Al Qaeda members operating under orders from bin Laden, though most of the country-based franchises would not be created through large transplants from central Al Qaeda. Veteran Al Qaeda cadres would offer guidance, but the franchises were increasingly jihadist groups that had existed or started somewhat independently. As they grew in prominence and ambition, they joined Al Qaeda by taking its name and benefited from its image as the global resistance to the United States. What had been a weakness of the Al Qaeda brand—its narrowly extreme but global ambitions—now reinforced it. We would soon learn much more about how these groups functioned through our close-quarters battle with what became the most violent and most powerful of the franchises—that which was led by Zarqawi in Iraq.

  As Al Qaeda increasingly decentralized, the core’s practical role changed. It did not act as a central hub of funding or logistical support. If anything, funds flowed from local groups back to Al Qaeda central, though the network was not designed to distribute resources. Rather, each of the local elements became self-resourcing and self-reinforcing, drawing recruits and money on its own. Cut off from central support, these elements rapidly adapted to local conditions.

  But Al Qaeda’s core still mattered as more than a symbol of the organization’s survival. Foreign volunteers increasingly went directly to a battlefield, not through training camps, though directing this flow by endorsing certain fronts remained one lever Al Qaeda’s senior leadership retained over the outer network. Moreover, it was still a resource pool, only now it offered men who had a decade or two of experience and specialized training. As jihadists, they had risen to the top of the organization and survived hot conflicts and Western intelligence efforts. They were vulnerable when they circulated battlefields, but less so when they mentored and guided through communiqués. So while decentralization made the core less relevant in day-to-day operations, it made the top leadership in some ways even more valuable, as it sought to preserve the brand and maintain disciplined messaging while often relying on less experienced, less loyal affiliates. But interactions with the center were slow, as CDs or letters literally had to be carried across countries, and leaders could only make some decisions in rare meetings. The jihadists knew communicating by cell phone or e-mail was dangerous.

  I concluded there was no single person or place we could strike that would cause Al Qaeda to collapse; there was no coup de main option. But TF 714 could target two of the enemy’s surfaces. We had to attack the organization head on as it sprouted up locally while also targeting its upper echelons of leadership. Doing so would deplete the organization of its entrenched expertise and institutional wisdom, although such skills and know-how existed in the increasingly powerful local elements. If onlookers saw that the organization was losing—fleeing territory, hemorrhaging people—its brand would
suffer.

  While we had some tactical advantages, we were, in some ways, years behind the enemy. Defeating Al Qaeda would be a protracted campaign.

  * * *

  Early on, counterproductive infighting among the CIA, State Department, Department of Defense, and others back in Washington threatened that campaign. No one had less patience for this than did John Abizaid, so he chose his Tampa headquarters to hold the January 2004 conference in which he convened and focused key organizations for the war on terror. The United States was fighting most of the war in General Abizaid’s theater, and he was not satisfied with the way it was going. At this meeting, which we later called Tampa I, Abizaid brought together the key intelligence officials and military commanders assigned to hunt Al Qaeda’s senior leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I was TF 714’s senior representative; General Doug Brown and then–Vice Admiral Eric Olson came from SOCOM; the National Security Agency sent representatives; and my friend for two decades, Dave Rodriguez, then a brigadier, represented the Joint Staff. But the attendee who mattered most for Abizaid’s purposes—to free the war on terror from the pettiness of D.C. so we could redouble our focus and cooperation—was CIA director George Tenet.

  At the circular table, Abizaid explained his conviction that, two years after 9/11, the United States had lost focus against Al Qaeda. The fight would be longer and more difficult than the initial decimation of Al Qaeda in the opening salvo of the Afghan war might suggest. Our focus, durable commitment, and ingenuity needed to be extraordinary.

  “We need a new Manhattan Project,” he said, referring to the American effort during the Second World War to beat the Axis powers in the race for an atom bomb.

  It was important, then, when Tenet struck the same chord of renewed commitment and teamwork. “Okay, everybody, let’s dedicate ourselves to getting UBL this year,” he said, tapping the table with his two forefingers as he said these last two words. His appeal seemed feasible, and the room nodded. I was impressed with Tenet’s obvious desire to increase partnership. With that, Tampa I set the precedent for organizing our effort. Abizaid convened the group and ran the meeting, and the CIA sent its top man. It was an important first step toward moving cooperation from gestures to action.

  At the end of the meeting, I proposed translating this enthusiasm into military gains by bringing to bear all of the potential intelligence resources of the U.S. government. “In no class of warfare,” C. E. Callwell had written a hundred years earlier, about the “small wars” of the nineteenth century, “is a well organized and well served intelligence department more essential than in that against guerrillas.” The same qualities that made intelligence so important when countering guerrillas then—the difficulty of finding the enemy, of striking him, and of predicting his next move and defending against it—were increased a hundredfold when trying to counter terrorists in the age of electronic communication and car bombs. I began to see that in addition to rewiring our own force, we had to make our relationship with the intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, deeper and broader. Based on an assumption that we could not be a SOF-only task force, or even a military-only task force, I had earlier accepted Bill McRaven’s recommendation that we seek to form a true joint interagency task force (JIATF). While the concept of a JIATF was not new, it would prove a transformative step for TF 714.

  I explained to the group that this JIATF would be a way to fuse the various intelligence agencies’ specialties in order to better understand the enemy. It would leverage the CIA’s “human intelligence” from spies and sources; the National Security Agency’s intercepted signals; the FBI’s forensic and investigative expertise; the Defense Intelligence Agency’s military reach; and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s (NGA) dazzling mapping ability.

  Previous attempts at this fusion had existed before and after 9/11 with varying success. But for counterterrorism efforts, while the intelligence was collected in theater, it was typically consolidated in the United States. This allowed for centralized analysis by the limited community of experienced counterterrorism (CT) professionals and senior-level decision making for the sensitive, high-risk operations periodically required. But proximity to Washington also had costs. The Beltway culture compelled, or allowed, the agencies to be less collaborative. Valuable information that might slide across a table downrange had to cross miles and clear bureaucratic hurdles back in the States. In Washington, the myriad essential but competing priorities, from bureaucracy to family life, always slowed action.

  For this reason, the JIATF would bring analysts from each agency into the same literal tent—and that tent would be on a base in Afghanistan or Iraq. Obviously, this would enable intelligence to be analyzed downrange, close to the fight, making the process faster and the information potentially more relevant. Less obvious but more important, having the analysts live and operate forward, teamed with counterparts from other agencies, decreased the gravitational pull of their headquarters back in D.C. and dramatically increased the sense of shared mission and purpose. It was extraordinarily powerful for analysts to share information, to brief operators on their assessments, to hear the rotors of an assault force launching on their information, and then to debrief together after the operation.

  Very quickly after the conference, the JIATF took its place at Bagram in a tent next to others originally erected for Operation Winter Strike but now permanent fixtures at the old Soviet air base. The goodwill and camaraderie that brimmed in the room in Tampa undersold just how big a challenge it would be to get the agencies—through their representatives in that tent—to work together. And while the day-to-day leadership inside the JIATF tent fell to our most deft TF 714 members, much of my next four and a half years was consumed with shoring up support at the top levels by keeping participation in the JIATF and our wider task force a top priority.

  No alliance could be as infuriating or as productive as my relationship with the CIA. We worked more closely with it than with any other agency, and the effort tried the patience of both sides. Some of my closest friendships at the end of the fight were with CIA partners. In a frame on my wall at home I have a note, written on a page torn from a small notebook while in the back of a helicopter flying over Kunar in 2005. The man who scratched the note was a CIA officer who became a close comrade and friend. The note reads: “I don’t know the Ranger Creed. But you can bet your sweet ass I won’t leave you!”

  And yet more than once, my most trusted subordinates had to stop me, in moments of utter frustration, from severing all ties with our “Agency brothers,” repeating back to me my own guidance to preserve our relationships through specific conflicts. I knew my Agency partners had equally mixed sentiments about me, and I admired them for their tolerance. On my initial October tour, I had visited the CIA headquarters at Langley, as well as the posts downrange where we had liaisons. Depending on the locale and the personalities, special operations and the CIA worked together only marginally better than they had during Operation Eagle Claw in 1980. At best, we were fighting parallel, fractured campaigns against Al Qaeda; ours had to be a unified fight.

  Not everyone in the CIA agreed. For those people, the relationship with us was good because it was limited. Their hesitance was understandable. Many of them were skittish as the military—led by TF 714—began to take a more active role in the counterterror effort. The entire CIA had about as many people as a single military division, and some feared that when the Department of Defense directed its immense resources toward counterterrorism, it would overwhelm the CIA, reducing their role. Some maintained a legitimate concern that our proposal ran contrary to how the Agency operated, as Langley had been the furnace of their intelligence work, while security concerns meant that they maintained a light footprint forward. Others had a more instinctive cultural aversion that fueled their intense professional territoriality. As the junior varsity, thundering in loud and large, TF 714 was liable to muck up their careful spy work
, and we would have leaks. I had to clench my teeth at one meeting when a not particularly impressive ex-military CIA officer smugly said, “Welcome to the war on terror.” Building a durable relationship was an exercise of persistence and patience more than brilliance.

  Government agencies signaled their feeling toward TF 714’s expanding presence in their community through the caliber of representatives they sent to the JIATF and the orders they gave them. Some sent their best talent; others deployed people they wouldn’t miss. They deployed some talented people with instructions to be polite, but narrowly limited their cooperation; a few others came fully committed to the team.

  With this mixed influx of people, the JIATF was an early step in expanding TF 714 beyond its traditional core elements, and the diversity brought its ups and its downs. Participants came with fascinating stories or created them by their actions. A young navy lieutenant told me of her Afghan birth and how she’d fled the Soviet invasion with her family as a young child, riding on the back of a donkey through the Khyber Pass. Now an American citizen, she was back, and her determination carried a buzz felt by those she worked alongside. Another officer, gifted in intelligence analysis but less so in weapons, accidentally discharged his M16 rifle inside the JIATF tent. No one was hurt, but the bullet pierced a fire extinguisher, and out of the gaping “wound” white foam spewed into the NGA’s computer servers, which stored all of the map data for the task force, ruining one of our key databases of information. Although it became a much-loved anecdote within the command, it wasn’t funny at the time.

  For many, the JIATF was an entirely new experience, in some ways an adventure. Whether fresh out of school and only weeks out of their host agency’s training, or nearing retirement, few were accustomed to the demanding rhythm and spare living of deployments. Away from the ties, traffic, and fluorescent-lit cubicle pens of D.C., they found themselves living crudely and briefing broad-shouldered operators who, often in a matter of hours, and sometimes in minutes, would launch on missions using the intelligence the JIATF provided. For most of the twenty-five to thirty-five people working there, this was the most exhausting, frustrating, but deeply rewarding work of their career.