Bush receives warning Al Qaeda preparing to attack, does nothing. Not August 2001, but April 2008.

Al-Qaeda Readies in Pakistan, While America Waits

Picture this: A terrifying new report is delivered to the U.S.
President. It states starkly that al-Qaeda is in the last stages of
preparing to attack the United States. But the response is…nothing.
The President takes no action, and the report goes basically
unreported in the media.

We’ve heard this story before. But this is not the infamous August,
2001 Presidential Daily Briefing entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to
Strike in U.S.” This happened just over a week ago, when the U.S.
Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a scathing report about
the mounting danger of a reconstituted al-Qaeda growing and plotting
in the tribal sections of Pakistan. The President’s reaction now, as
it was in 2001, was silence.

According to the report, “al-Qaeda’s central leadership, based in the
border area of Pakistan, is and will remain the most serious terrorist
threat to the United States…” In 2002, after the al-Qaeda-supported
Taliban was forced from power in neighboring Afghanistan, al-Qaeda
members and their Afghan extremist allies fled across the border into
the mountains of northwest Pakistan, known as the “Federally
Administered Tribal Areas” (FATA).

The FATA is desperately poor, undereducated and underdeveloped, with a
per-capita income of less than seventy cents per day, half the
Pakistani national average. It was in this region—where millions of
Afghan refugees fled during the Afghan civil and anti-Soviet wars of
the 1980s and 1990s—that the Taliban built the backbone of its army:
recruiting, indoctrinating and training a generation of “holy
warriors” in radical madrassas. The region’s literacy rate is 17%,
leaving a massive educational void to be filled by extremist
education. There are about 300 religious madrassas registered in the
FATA and potentially hundreds more unregistered Islamic schools.
Evidence indicates these schools foster public support for Islamist
extremism and terrorism. The Taliban succeeded by taking young
refugees who looked forward to no schooling, no jobs and no path in
the world, and giving them a religious education, a position in an
army and both a spiritual and social purpose.

al-Qaeda and the Taliban have built a new, safe home in the FATA from
which they can train and prepare to launch more terrorist attacks
across the world. This GAO report demonstrates clearly that they are
succeeding in this endeavor, in part because the White House has
failed to plan adequately, and act effectively, to defeat our primary
enemy.

I suspect that U.S. domestic politics is the primary reason the White
House has all but ignored this report, at least in public. Ironically,
while the administration has failed to seriously confront this
problem, the Republican Party has repeatedly won the presidency and
lower elections by banking on its macho image and playing the tough
guy, portraying their Democratic opponents as effeminate wimps. (Their
campaign has already begun to use the same smear campaign on Barack
Obama, pitting him against John McCain and his prisoner of war
record.) This Republican machismo translates into a governance love
affair with massive, explosive weapons systems like National Missile
Defense. It means belittling most international policies designed to
support development (economic, political and social) in the
underdeveloped regions of the world where terrorism is most easily
born. It means investing in large-scale military resources (useful to
fight the Nazis or the Soviets) at the expense of “soft-power” tools
proven more effective at defeating terrorist groups.

The vast majority of conservative, liberal and moderate national
security experts—including General David Petraeus and other
counterinsurgency gurus now gaining prominence in the U.S. military—
recognize that we can only close these safe havens and defeat al-Qaeda
through mostly non-military means. But as the GAO report states, that
current U.S. policy directs literally 99% of all funding for
Pakistan's FATA toward military and security efforts, and less than 1%
for development. Defeating al-Qaeda will require something more than a
1% solution.

This macho image plays well into the President’s Iraq policy as he and
his supporters brandish phrases such as, “Bring it on” to challenge
insurgents, and label their Iraq policy critics as cowardly “surrender
monkeys.” Again, while this is politically advantageous for their own
constituencies at home, it has locked the President and his would-be-
successor John McCain into a fixation on Iraq when the real threat to
the U.S. is in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The GAO report warned unambiguously, “al-Qaeda is now using the
Pakistani safe haven to put the last element necessary to launch
another attack against America into place.” But the administration and
Senator McCain stand to lose politically from acknowledging and
confronting this threat. Doing so would be tantamount to admitting
that they have endangered America’s security by continuing to invest
the bulk of our armed forces and resources in Iraq, when the true
danger resides elsewhere.

The President must do what General Petraeus has already done for Iraq,
which is to insist on a comprehensive plan for defeating al-Qaeda that
doesn’t limit itself only to military options. (The U.S. Senate did
its best to pass a law earlier this year that would have required such
a plan, but it was stymied by White House allies.) President Bush even
said so himself in his 2003 National Security Strategy: we must have
“comprehensive plans employing all elements of national power—
diplomatic, military, intelligence, development assistance, economic
and law enforcement support—to combat terrorism and close terrorist
safe havens” such as al-Qaeda’s in Pakistan. But five years later and
seven years after the prophetic 2001 briefing, President Bush still
isn't following his own advice.
.

Relevant Pages