Into Thin Air

Al Qaeda did not hesitate to assert itself. Jihadists paraded brazenly in Waziristan, dragging "criminals" through the streets. American satellite photos soon showed single files of foreign jihadists, their feet sometimes wrapped in plastic bags against the snow, crossing the Pakistani border into Afghanistan. An Algerian man known as "the Bombmaker," a seasoned veteran of Iraq, set up shop to teach jihadists how to build IEDs. Local militants ruled through assassination and intimidation. The experienced Western military official interviewed by NEWSWEEK described how militants killed a petty merchant and his entire family simply for selling watermelons to the local constabulary. "Imagine what they'd do to the guy who sells out Osama," said the officer.

In late 2006 and early 2007, anxious top American policymakers, including Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, traveled to Pakistan to persuade Musharraf to renew his military operations along the frontier. "There is no question the peace agreement failed Pakistan and it failed us," said Townsend, the White House counterterror chief. The Pakistani president was in a difficult position, risking his unpopular and shaky regime if he cracked down on the jihadists and risking it if he didn't. Once more, Sisyphus began to roll the stone up the hill: Musharraf ordered 20,000 soldiers to march into the territories, to reinforce the 80,000 who were already there. But "I don't think the Pakistani military is going to move wholeheartedly against Al Qaeda," a knowledgeable Pakistani military source told NEWSWEEK. "I don't think their hearts are in it." The tough talk by American politicians calling for unilateral action is not helping matters, says retired Pakistani Army Lt. Gen. Talat Masood, a well-regarded moderate. "It's very humiliating for civilians and the military alike," he says. (Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, insisted that Pakistan is doing more than the United States to attack Al Qaeda. "The threat to us is far greater," he said.)

U.S. Special Operations Forces have had considerable practice by now chasing jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan. The JSOC headquarters at Baghram is so full of high-tech listening and tracking equipment that it resembles "something out of 'Star Wars'," says a Pentagon official who has seen the place. In recent months, says John Arquilla, a Special Ops expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., the U.S. military has achieved a 100-to-1 kill ratio (100 dead guerrillas to every American). But by calling in airstrikes, the Americans also kill a lot of civilians, which breeds more jihadists. And according to Thomas Johnson, also at the Naval Postgraduate School, the military's continued fixation on body counts and kill ratios is irrelevant and even counterproductive. "When you kill a person it's a multiplication factor. It demands that all the male relatives join the fight."

The Americans will not find top Qaeda leaders unless they can win the trust of local tribesmen who may know their whereabouts. Johnson, an Afghan expert, spent last February at Forward Operating Base Salerno near the Pakistan border, briefing commanders on the tribal custom of Pashtunwali. He says only about 5 percent of American troops in Afghanistan ever leave their bases—a statistic, he believes, that explains better than any other why Americans are struggling in the battle for intelligence. He says most soldiers in Afghanistan don't know simple phrases like "stop," "go," or "put your hands up." Americans continually make cultural blunders, like using canine units to search people's homes (dogs are considered unclean in Muslim culture). Meanwhile the Taliban works at winning the trust and confidence of villagers—or intimidating them. "They go into villages and say, 'The Americans have the watches but we have the time. We might not come back in a week or a year, but you bet your britches we'll eventually come back'," says Johnson.

The American military, understandably, puts a high priority on "force protection," but as a practical matter that means staying behind armor and barricades. Rice, the A-Team sergeant stuck in his safe house near Kandahar, recalls that his team's frustration peaked when a memo came down from the brass at Baghram, ordering men not to initiate fire fights and even not to use words like "death" and "destruction" in their CONOPS. Among Rice's men, it became known as the "limp dick memo." (The Defense Department declined to comment specifically on Rice's memories.)

The American military is forever caught in a dilemma. During the early days of the cold war, the old boys who ran the CIA began to reason that when it came to fighting against an underhanded foe in a battle for global survival, the rules of fair play they had learned as schoolboys no longer applied. If the communists fight dirty, we must, too, they rationalized—or freedom would perish. This ends-justifying-the-means rationale led to foolish and ultimately unsuccessful assassination plots and other dirty tricks that disgraced and demoralized the CIA when the agency's so-called Crown Jewels were revealed during Watergate. After 9/11, Bush administration officials, particularly Vice President Cheney, vowed to take the gloves off against Al Qaeda. But in the aftermath of allegations of torture in secret prisons, there has been a strong push back, particularly among administration lawyers disturbed by the abuse of constitutional rights. According to knowledgeable sources, Rumsfeld's deputy for intelligence, Steve Cambone, engaged in an angry debate with the Pentagon's top lawyer, William Haynes, over the activities of U.S. Special Forces—who in the minds of some government lawyers and lawmakers have been given too much, not too little, license to roam.