Political Skullduggery

There is a new classified Presidential Directive spelling out the strategy for fighting the "Global War on Terror."

As can be expected, there is institutional fighting over who gets the sexy assignments and spooky missions in "The Long War."

The story of the making of National Security Presidential Directive 46 is at one level a familiar tale of a Washington turf battle that pits diplomats, soldiers, spooks and new legions of terrorism experts in a scramble for resources and glory. The document is co-titled Homeland Security Presidential Directive 15 because it holds the newest Cabinet department responsible for preventing attacks on U.S. territory...

The most contentious issues -- particularly how far the Defense Department should go in carrying out Bush's direct order to "disrupt and destroy" jihadist terrorist networks, even if they operate in friendly or neutral countries -- were left to be dealt with in annexes that are being negotiated by the departments of State and Defense and the CIA. An NSC spokesman declined to comment on the contents of the document or on any ongoing differences about implementation.

The newest Washington buzzword gets a workout today:

Rumsfeld is said to have pushed for a presidential directive that would contain clearer definitions and authority for the Pentagon to carry out its "kinetic" missions abroad.

"This war erases that old bright line between conventional warfare and diplomacy," one official told me. "It has moved soldiers and foreign policy experts alike up a ladder of escalation, from trying to bring in bin Laden dead or alive to today's mission of destroying the entire jihadist movement and its ideology. We can't use old thinking and win. We can't wait and win."...

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated her department's concerns much more bluntly during a videoconference linking Bush's top aides in mid-January. Letting the Pentagon operate outside the U.S. ambassador's control to roll up extremist networks in foreign countries would make U.S. policy "almost exclusively kinetic" -- that is, warlike -- she argued, to Rumsfeld's discomfort, according to a briefing given to colleagues by one official involved in the meeting.

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on April 4, Henry A. Crumpton, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, made an oblique public reference to the State Department's continuing desire to change relatively little. "Our best means of countering the multilayered terrorist threat is to engage coordinated networks of interagency Country Teams operating under the ambassador" in "an intimately connected whole-of-government approach. We are not there yet, but we have made progress," he noted...

The New York Times lifted a corner of the veil surrounding the larger conceptual battles by reporting in March on State and CIA opposition to the Pentagon's use of Military Liaison Elements, small teams of Special Operations forces charged with finding and countering jihadist networks. They work with local security forces or on their own in countries where central authority is weak or nonexistent, such as Somalia.

We certainly wouldn't want anyone mistakenly thinking that U.S. policy is "almost exclusively kinetic."