Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde wrote a depressing article for the New York Times. It seems that Al Qaeda leaders, who are hiding in Pakistan are regaining power of their terrorist network and that they have set up training camps for terrorists “in the tribal regions near the Afghan border”.
As the authors of the article point out, the Bush administration has said for a number of years now that Osama Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri lost control over their terrorist organization, that they were “detached from their followers and cut off from operational control of Al Qaeda.”
Things seem to have changed.
The United States has also identified several new Qaeda compounds in North Waziristan, including one that officials said might be training operatives for strikes against targets beyond Afghanistan.
American analysts said recent intelligence showed that the compounds functioned under a loose command structure and were operated by groups of Arab, Pakistani and Afghan militants allied with Al Qaeda. They receive guidance from their commanders and Mr. Zawahri, the analysts said. Mr. bin Laden, who has long played less of an operational role, appears to have little direct involvement.
Officials said the training camps had yet to reach the size and level of sophistication of the Qaeda camps established in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. But groups of 10 to 20 men are being trained at the camps, the officials said, and the Qaeda infrastructure in the region is gradually becoming more mature.
Al Qaeda’s leaders fled to Pakistan. Musharraf isn’t doing much against them anymore (he even agreed to leave them alone)… Al Qaeda used the ‘rest’ in Pakistan to reorganize and … we now see that it’s building new ‘training camps’, that it’s preparing terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and, so the intelligence suggest, beyond…
When will something be done against this? And what? The war in Afghanistan was the initial response to 9/11. This war, the most important one regarding the global war on terrorism, has become the forgotten war.
Al Qaeda is responsible for 9/11. Al Qaeda should be destroyed. Al Qaeda had a safe haven in Afghanistan, it now has a new safe haven in Pakistan. Musharraf is offically America’s ‘ally’, but in the meantime he’s not doing anything to prevent Al Qaeda from regaining strength. Should the U.S., then, destroy the camps in Pakistan?
Should the U.S. go into Pakistan?
Obviously doing so will create a whole lot of different / new problems.
On the other hand, not doing anything isn’t exactly an option either. Not only is Al Qaeda active in Afghanistan, it’s also planning terrorist attacks against the West again. Bruce Hoffman, terrorism expert at Georgetown University, even said that Al Qaeda “is now functioning exactly as its founder and leader, Osama bin Laden, envisioned it.”
If nothing is done, Al Qaeda will carry out more terrorist attacks against Western targets. If something is done the U.S. faces the risk of losing even more support, creating more chaos, more deaths, etc.
Hot Air on this:
We might have enough troops to invade and occupy the tribal areas if Musharraf was willing to cut a deal on that, but (a) what could we possibly offer him to get him to effectively cede territory, (b) how could he hope to survive the irredentist backlash among Pakistanis, and (c) if you think 3,000 dead in Iraq is bad, what would the numbers look like with U.S. troops fighting Iwo-style cave-clearing warfare in the mountains of Waziristan with jihadis from every shinolahole in the Middle East streaming in as reinforcements?
Exit question: What now?
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross explains that the so-called Waziristan accord was destined to fail:
In the October 2 issue of the Weekly Standard, less than a month after the Waziristan Accord was signed, Bill Roggio and I provided the following analysis:
The agreement is, to put it mildly, a boon to the terrorists and a humiliation for the Pakistani government. . . . The accord provides that the Pakistani army will abandon outposts and border crossings throughout Waziristan. Pakistan’s military agreed that it will no longer operate in North Waziristan or monitor actions in the region. Pakistan will return weapons and other equipment seized during Pakistani army operations. And the Pakistani government essentially paid a tribute to end the fighting when it agreed to pay compensation for property destroyed during combat — an unusual move since most of the property that was destroyed belonged to factions that had consciously decided to harbor terrorists. Of particular concern is the provision allowing non-Pakistani militants to continue to reside in Waziristan as long as they promise to “keep the peace.” Keeping the peace will, in practice, be defined as refraining from attacks on the Pakistani military. Meanwhile, since the military won’t be monitoring the militants’ activities, they can plan and train for terrorist attacks or work to bolster the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan without being seen to violate the treaty.
It is unsurprising that the Waziristan Accord has failed: the truly astonishing news is that so many analysts waited until now to declare it a failure.
Daveed adds the following:
I spoke with a senior military intelligence officer about the Times article. He reports that the Times’s description that camps in Pakistan have “yet to reach the size and level of sophistication of the Qaeda camps established in Afghanistan under Taliban rule” and its mention of “groups of 10 to 20 men” being trained is only a partial picture of the training camps in Pakistan. The Times article focuses on al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan, camps where militants receive the kind of training that could enable them to carry out terrorist attacks in the West. But there are also larger military training camps — the kind that are used to train Taliban fighters to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan, or to train Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, or other Kashmiri separatist groups. The training required to carry out a terrorist attack in the West is different than what is needed to fight in Afghanistan or Kashmir.
That senior intelligence officer also said that Al Qaeda’s leadership wasn’t “fragmented” at all in 2005. “Such assessments were essentially intelligence failures. Al-Qaeda’s senior leadership was regrouping and gathering force during this period, and Western intelligence wasn’t aware of it. The reason we realize it now, he says, is because the strength of al-Qaeda’s central leadership has become blatantly obvious.”
Read Daveed’s entire post over at the Counterterrorism Blog.
Joe in D.C. concludes at AMERICAblog:
How George Bush let the people who attacked this country get away with it is really beyond explanation. How the Republicans in Congress let this happen defies explanation. Thanks to Bush and his GOP allies, the world is a much more dangerous place.
Al Qaeda is back. Bin Laden has reasserted his authority. It’s really almost unbelievable.
This once again highlights the need to deal with failed states and lawless regions. Al Qaeda takes advantage of the anarchy in these areas to regain its footing and one can bet that they’re going to use this time and space to prepare for yet more terror attacks, including the potential of attacks against the continental United States.
more reason to lean on the Paks to get serious about Waziristan.
Ron Beas wonders at Middle Earth Journal
Do you feel safer with commander codpiece in charge of keeping you safe?
And lastly, Ron Chusid at Liberal Values:
If only George Bush hadn’t gotten confused over who was responsible for 9/11. If only we really were waging a war on terrorists, as opposed to invading the wrong country.
If only, indeed.
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