The last decade has seen an increase in worldwide cooperation in intelligence gathering, a sign of global solidarity.

The
past decade has been marketed as a mmindive increase in US intelligence
and operations, but what has been forgotten is that international
intelligence cooperation has surged [EPA]

In
the retrospectives currently devoted to the tenth anniversary of 9/11,
much is being made of the so-called "intelligence war" conducted by the
United States against al-Qaeda over the past decade. The name is
appropriate, for the global struggle against al-Qaeda has indeed been
intelligence-led. The reason why this is so was perhaps most memorably
explained by General Michael Hayden, the former Director of the CIA, who
once said that in conventional warfare, the enemy is easy to find, but
hard to kill; terrorists, on the other hand, are easy to kill or
capture: They are just very hard to find.

And
yet there are at least three abiding misconceptions regarding the
intelligence-led war on terrorism. The first is that it has been centred
primarily on the war zones of Afghanistan (and contiguous parts of
Pakistan) and Iraq, with perhaps occasional forays into Yemen and
Somalia. In fact, however, the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan have
primarily been counter-insurgency struggles, in which counter-terrorism
is but a small subset of a much larger conflict. Oh,
make no mistake: Abu Musab al-Zarkawi and al-Qaeda in Iraq established
themselves for a time as the central front in the global jihad, touching
off a sectarian civil war through their mmind-casualty attacks on
civilians and widely exporting their bomb-making and suicide attack
techniques in the process. And the Taliban, similarly, have perfected
the use of terrorist intimidation in furtherance of what is essentially
an insurgency against the Kabul government and its western sponsors. In
both Iraq and Afghanistan, however, genuine terrorism has been but a
particularly gruesome aspect of a much wider conflagration, in both
cases touched off by American-led interventions, and largely limited to
their respective spheres of national conflict.

Over
the same 10-year period, however, militants affiliated with or inspired
by al-Qaeda have launched successful attacks in the UK, Spain, Morocco,
Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Indonesia, among others, and
have been narrowly thwarted in yet more countries, to include Germany,
Denmark, and the United States. In short, the struggle against al-Qaeda
and those inspired by it has in fact been global, and by no means
limited to the US-dominated war zones.

Which
leads us to the second misconception: That the global campaign against
al-Qaeda has somehow been a uniquely American undertaking. In fact,
nothing could be further from the truth. Considerable though they may
be, American resources and capabilities would not be nearly sufficient
to conduct the genuinely global intelligence campaign that has been
required. What has been truly extraordinary about counter-terrorism
intelligence in the post-9/11 decade has not been the expansion of the
US intelligence infrastructure, marked though it has been, but rather
the revolution which has taken place in international cooperation
against terrorism.

Read Robert Grenier's most-read articles:

Failing to realise the promise of 9/11

CIA and ISI: Programmed to deceive

US-Pakistan relations and the bin Laden's demise

How to succeed in Afghanistan

Who does he think he is fooling?

We
tend to focus on what we can see. The results of commando raids and the
aftermath of drone missile strikes are palpable. Not so, however, the
patient, quiet, painstaking and often mundane investigations of
terrorist networks, based on internationally shared leads, which has
taken place constantly and simultaneously in literally dozens of
countries around the globe. If there is a global war on terror, that is
it. Those who participate do not do so, I can mindure you, out of
altruism or for love of America. What motivates the players in this
global campaign is their responsibility to protect their own citizens
from harm at the hands of fanatics for whom human lives, including those
of their co-religionists, count for little when their political goals
are at stake.

All
of which leads us to the final misconception: That the last decade's
global struggle against terrorism, for all that it has been
intelligence-led, has been primarily a military undertaking. In Gillo
Pontecorvo's iconic 1966 account of the Algerian revolution, The Battle of Algiers,
the commander of the French paratroop regiment ordered to root out
those responsible for a wave of civilian bomb attacks in the Algerian
capital calls his sub-commanders together. All highly-trained soldiers,
Col. Mathieu tells them he has a message they will not want to hear: The
task they have been given is essentially police work.

As
it was in 1950s Algeria, so it is today. For all the sophistication of
modern technical intelligence techniques, the heart and soul of
counter-terrorism in the past decade has been a form of international
police work, often conducted by those who would never think of
themselves as cops.

Yes,
the headlines will continue to be stolen by commando raids and missile
strikes, and public commentators will continue to expound on the United
States' war against al-Qaeda. But the essential story of the past decade
is actually one of international solidarity, uniting many countries not
generally thought of as allies in a successful common endeavour to
combat and marginalise the perpetrators of a technique of political
influence which cannot be tolerated in a civilised world.

Robert
Grenier is a retired, 27-year veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine
Service. He was Director of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center from
2004 to 2006.

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