Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey examines the NYPD’s fight against terrorism in his new book, “Securing the City”

By Genevieve Long

When the American public thinks of the United States fighting terrorism, the federal government naturally comes to mind. Yet for some in New York City, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the bureaucracy of the CIA, FBI, DHS, DIA and NSA proved too cumbersome to be effective in preventing attacks. Raymond Kelly was one of the people with this opinion, and after being reinstated as New York Police Department Commissioner in 2002, he created an elite force to go inside the world of potential terrorists—in cities throughout around the planet. The result, seven years later, is described in Christopher Dickey’s new book, “Securing the City”.

Dickey, who is Paris Bureau Chief and Middle East Regional Editor for Newsweek, is a veteran journalist, war correspondent, and author of several books. He has also written for a number of magazines, including Foreign Affairs, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and others.

Dickey’s book is already garnering accolades not only for its incisive look a rarely examined section of the NYPD, and for highlighting the dense amount of red tape that stands between the federal government and its ability to effectively fight terrorism.

Commissioner Kelly has focused on recruiting native-speakers of key languages needed to track activity in the world of terrorism—including Arabic, Farsi, and Dari. He has also seen to it that agents are stationed not just throughout New York’s five boroughs, but around the world. The NYPD’s counterterrorism network of about 600 agents is posted in major international cities, and the agents speak the languages and know the streets of the terrorist communities they are watching. Many of them, in a manner reflective of New York City’s general ethnic makeup, are foreign-born.

“They know the slang of the back streets of Karachi because they are from the back streets of Karachi,” said Kelly during a recent appearance at the Overseas Press Club in New York for a Q&A with Christopher Dickey. He cooperated closely with Dickey for the book.

In contrast, it would be almost impossible for foreign-born applicants to get a similar position with the federal government because of prohibitive laws.

Dickey’s level of extraordinary access to the NYPD’s counterterrorism force for his book is somewhat of an anomaly. That alone could make the book worth reading. As NYPD Deputy Commissioner recently said, “If we gave brought the media out to see us work, that’s all we would ever do.” According to Browne, Dickey was given special access because of his affiliation with Newsweek and the impending publication of his book.

Dickey will continue his book tour at the Houston Forum on February 23 and at the World Affairs Council in Dallas on February 24.

Coming Soon: Military Power at CUNY

by Genevieve Long

For students and observers of up-close foreign affairs analysis on Tuesday, March 10, the City University of New York (CUNY) will host a free evening event at one of their Great Issues Forums. Entitled, Military Power, the event will feature Alex de Waal, program director of the Social Science Research Council, General Barry McCaffrey, four-star general of the United States Army (retired), and Thomas Ricks, Special Military Correspondent for The Washington Post. Thomas Weiss, Presidential Professor of Political Science at The Graduate Center will moderate the event.

A couple of questions the forum will pose include: Does military intervention work? What is the role of non-military and multi-national groups in regime change and peace-keeping efforts?

Thomas Ricks’ presence will add an extra note to the event, as he has just published a new book, “The Gamble” about U.S. General David Petraeus and America’s war in Iraq. Ricks is also author of “Fiasco”, a #1 New York Times bestseller about the political dialogue on the war in Iraq.

Ricks is a veteran journalist and his books are based on hours of interviews with military officers and on the ground reporting in Iraq.

Military Power
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
7:00 pm, Proshansky Auditorium
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street
New York, NY 10016

By Genevieve Long

For the consumer of news seeking smart, informed opinions about the war on terror from an insider with world-class credentials and experience, take a look at Steve Coll’s blog for The New Yorker, Think Tank. Coll is President & CEO of the New America Foundation and a staff writer for The New Yorker. But it is his years of incisive reporting and writing about Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the bin Laden family that give his insights about current events in the region so much weight.

Coll is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a 20-year veteran foreign correspondent and senior editor for The Washington Post, where he was also managing editor from 1998 to 2004. He has authored six books on economics and foreign affairs, including The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (1986); The Taking of Getty Oil (1987); Eagle on the Street (based on reporting done with David A. Vise, 1991); On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994), Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004); and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008).

Coll’s most recent entry on the blog, Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, masterfully interprets the feasibility of Foreign Policy’s guess at bin Laden’s location using a so-called “biogeographic data” map, developed by UCLA geography professor, Thomas Gillespie. Part of Coll’s assessment of the map is obviously backed by his years of experience with and research on the region:

“Gillespie’s dot is likely in the right area, but the particular center of his concentric circles is not very convincing. First, his red dot is in Afghanistan, where U.S. troops and Special Forces hunting teams can operate freely, so that doesn’t make much sense. Second, although Kurram is near Tora Bora (which is why the dot is there) the area has been pretty unstable of late; local Shia and Sunni tribes have been shelling one another, and sectarian tensions run high. Not a good place to hunker down.”

While Think Tank is a worthy read for minds seriously curious about the war on terror, it also has some valuable insights on the economic crisis, including one entitled “Cleansing the Banks”. It’s worth checking out.

Dexter Filkins is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, and author of the new book, “The Forever War”. I caught up with him in December just days before he left to report from Afghanistan for nearly six weeks.

As interviewed by Genevieve Long

If you were reporting in Iraq today, what story/stories would you go after?

“I was just there in September [2008], and I wrote a number of stories. The one thing that struck me was just how much things have changed, and mostly for the better, I wrote about that. I think if I were to going to go back today, I guess there are two big questions: what’s likely to happen when the presence of American troops is reduced substantially? That’s a big story. Which is to say, how durable are some of these changes we’ve seen? The second one, which is kind of related to that—there is a lot of evidence to suggest that what the Americans would be leaving behind is a kind of Shiite-authoritarian state. The United States is helping to midwife that. I don’t know if that’s entirely true because I’m not there but it’s a question that I’d like to answer. By Shiite authoritarian state I mean a state that doesn’t share power very willingly and doesn’t share resources very willingly, doesn’t tolerate dissent very well, doesn’t share power. I don’t know the answer to that question, but I would try to answer it.”

How well informed does the general public seem to be about the war in Iraq?

“I think people are pretty well informed. I’ve just got done touring around the country on my book tour and went to 22 cities. I’ve found people are pretty well informed. The war is still a very polarizing thing and people have pretty much made up their minds about it. Having said that I think that people are pretty well informed about what’s going on there.”

What do you think about the impact of the surge in Iraq?

“It seems to me that the violence has come way down, and the reasons for that are complicated. The surge is one of the reasons—it’s one of the main reasons, but it’s not the only reason. I don’t want to give the impression that the United States came in and did the surge and the violence came way down. I think its way more complicated than that. I think the surge helped, and I think there are a number of other things. For example, the Sunni Awakening was instrumental in bringing the violence down and the exploitation of that by the U.S. The Iraqi army is much better than it used to be, exhaustion on the part of the people, overreaching by al Qaeda, there’s a whole bunch of different factors.”

Following the surge and security improvements in Iraq, do you think access for journalists has gotten worse?

“The situation on the ground—when I was there in August and September [2008] I could safely visit places that I had not been able to [between 2003 to 2006]. I think too many people have the impression that American journalists working in Iraq in 2005, 2006, 2007 weren’t able to go anywhere so they just sat in their hotel rooms and sent Iraqis out. I never did that, the New York Times never did that. I can’t really speak for other people. The idea that no one could move around the country or the capital was false, and it was always false. A lot of people say that and they usually have some other point they are trying to make.”

What kinds of places have you gone when reporting in Iraq?

“I went to Adamiyah in 2006, it was really dangerous. It was pretty much under the control of the insurgency. I still went there—it was just really, really dangerous. I able to go back in September [2008], and it was much, much safer. I was able to go at night, I was able to walk around, I saw a wedding, and there were restaurants open. It was a lot easier to work. I just want to emphasize that it was not impossible to work in 2005 and 2006.”

Why do you think journalists get fingers pointed at them for not going out to report the story themselves?

“My own sense is that when people say journalists can’t go anywhere, that’s usually followed by some political point that they make about the war. Which is—‘It’s much better than is being been reported, and the reason why you don’t know that is the journalists don’t go out’, or ‘It’s much worse than is being reported, and the reason why you don’t understand the point I’m trying to make is because the journalists sit in their hotel rooms’. Again, it’s usually a political point that people are trying to make. It’s much easier in this case to kind of attack the messenger and say that ‘You have the wrong impression because you’ve been mislead by these people in the press, and here’s the real truth’. The [accusation that] journalists sit around in hotel rooms and don’t leave is usually followed by some overarching political point about the situation.”

How did you get around when you were reporting in Iraq?

“Every situation was different. In 2006 when things were really, really bad, there were some neighborhoods that you couldn’t really go to, or if you went to them there were some cases when I took an armored car, there were some cases when I didn’t, there were some occasions when I took guards, there were some occasions when I took a chase car, there were some cases when I didn’t. There were some places I felt safe to go at night, there were other places that I didn’t. It’s not like Switzerland there now, so you don’t want to get the wrong impression. There was just a gigantic suicide bombing there the other day in Kirkuk, they killed a bunch of people. So the danger there is still very real, what calm there is still pretty fragile. It’s not like reporters are walking around there in shorts on the sidewalk advertising their presence.”

As the U.S. winds down its presence in Iraq, where do you think the most important stories will be—possibly in countries nearby?

“I think the press goes where the story is. Iraq has gotten a lot of attention because the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and Afghanistan in 2001, and there are Americans who are fighting and dying there. That’s the principal reason why people are interested in it—the American press. I don’t like to predict the future—not in Iraq and not in the Middle East. It’s not a good idea because it’s impossible to do. Are American troops going to be out in 2011? I wouldn’t hold your breath. There’s a very precarious situation, there’s still a war in Afghanistan and it’s deteriorated pretty remarkably. I think there will be a lot of attention in both places, as long as there are Americans are there.”

What is reporting in Afghanistan like?

“It’s very difficult. The terrain of the country is very forbidding, and there’s basically no infrastructure to speak of, so it’s like going back in time in a lot of places. It’s very hard to move around, even under the best of circumstances, and the circumstances are pretty bad in a lot of places given the resurgence of the Taliban. I think it’s really hard to work there. I think the combination of security and the geography make for a pretty difficult place to work.”

What motivated you to stay in Iraq for so long and do what you did?

“For all the dangers of the place, it’s an incredible story. It’s one of the biggest stories of our lives. Leaving the violence aside, it was a chance to see history being made and to see history unfold—really, really big history, and extraordinary human drama. That’s a rare thing. It’s pretty wonderful to be able to see it, even for all of the violence and the horror that I witnessed. It was endlessly interesting and thrilling, even as it was depressing at the same time.”

Read an excerpt from a recent interview with Dexter Filkins here

by Genevieve Long

If you read only one book about Iraq and Afghanistan this year, make it “The Forever War”, by New York Times foreign correspondent Dexter Filkins. It is full of insightful, lyrical vignettes about the war in Iraq from 2003 to 2006, when Filkins was living there and reporting for the Times. It also includes about forty pages about Afghanistan just prior to the beginning of the war in Iraq.

What Filkins’ book accomplishes, in the short term, is to make a war on the other side of the world come to vivid life. Sometimes it is done in a manner that is startling and unnerving. In fact, when I was reading “The Forever War” for a book review, it gave me nightmares. But it also gave me a deeper understanding about an incredibly complex situation.

Within its pages, the book manages to cover the vast expanse of human experiences encountered in the face of a war like that in Iraq. It moves seamlessly from being so accustomed to suicide car bombings that a human being’s spinal cord on the ground is easily recognizable, to recognizing frustrated indignation in an Iraqi woman’s eyes when she insists on voting day that democracy is “just talking”. You can read my full review of the book at The Epoch Times.

Filkins’ book has won acclaim from readers and reviews. One such review, by George Packer, author of “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq”, perfectly encapsulates the essence of why “The Forever War” is so timeless and a must-read for any American who wants to understand the impact that the war in Iraq has had.

Packer’s review reads, in part:

“The Forever War is already a classic—it has the timeless feel of all great war literature. A lot has been written about Iraq and Afghanistan, but no one has seen as much, survived as much, and registered the horror with such sad eloquence as Dexter Filkins. His combination of courage and sensitivity is so rare that books like his come along only once every major war. This one is ours.”

Filkins, who spent the fall of 2008 on tour as his newly-published book climbed the New York Times’ bestseller list, recently returned from spending about six weeks on assignment in Afghanistan. His articles from that trip are must-reads for understanding the deepening crisis there.

Not one to rest on his laurels, Filkins continues to travel and speak about both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his book. He recently drew a crowd of 900 people during a talk at Davidson College in North Carolina on Feb. 19. Filkins is becoming increasingly famous for his thoughtful and thought-provoking reporting on America’s wars in the Middle East and central Asia. Don’t let 2009 pass by without reading at least one of his articles, or even better—his book.