Amid policy disputes, Qaeda grows in Pakistan

Amid policy disputes, Qaeda grows in Pakistan
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/30/america/30tribal.php

WASHINGTON: Late last year, top Bush administration officials decided to
take a step they had long resisted. They drafted a secret plan to
authorize the Pentagon's Special Operations forces to launch missions
into the snow-capped mountains of Pakistan to capture or kill top
leaders of Al Qaeda.

Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about
Osama bin Laden's terror network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal
areas, a problem that had been exacerbated by years of missteps in
Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, sharp policy
disagreements, and turf battles between American counterterrorism agencies.

The new plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was
designed to eliminate some of those battles. And it was meant to pave an
easier path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years
have bristled at what they see as Washington's risk-averse attitude
toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan. They also argue that
catching Bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior
lieutenants alive.

But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still
waiting for the green light. The plan has been held up in Washington by
the very disagreements it was meant to eliminate. A senior Defense
Department official said there was "mounting frustration" in the
Pentagon at the continued delay.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush committed the
nation to a "war on terrorism" and made the destruction of Bin Laden's
network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear
that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having
successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan's tribal
areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the
region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.

A recent American airstrike killing Pakistani troops has only inflamed
tensions along the mountain border and added to tensions between
Washington and Pakistan's new government.

The story of how Al Qaeda, Arabic for "the base," has gained a new haven
is in part a story of American accommodation to President Pervez
Musharraf of Pakistan, whose advisers played down the terrorist threat.
It is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights, beginning
in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to
preparations for the war in Iraq.

Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terror
camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets,
including the United States. Officials say the new camps are smaller
than the ones the group used prior to 2001. However, despite dozens of
American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, one retired CIA officer
estimated that the makeshift training compounds now have as many as
2,000 Arab and Pakistani militants, up from several hundred three years ago.

Publicly, senior American and Pakistani officials have said that the
creation of a Qaeda haven in the tribal areas was in many ways
inevitable ? that the lawless badlands where ethnic Pashtun tribes have
resisted government control for centuries were a natural place for a
dispirited terror network to find refuge. The American and Pakistani
officials also blame a disastrous cease-fire brokered between the
Pakistani government and militants in 2006.

But more than four dozen interviews in Washington and Pakistan tell
another story. American intelligence officials say that the Qaeda hunt
in Pakistan, code-named Operation Cannonball by the CIA in 2006, was
often undermined by bitter disagreements within the Bush administration
and within the intelligence agency, including about whether American
commandos should launch ground raids inside the tribal areas.

Inside the CIA, the fights included clashes between the agency's
outposts in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Islamabad. There were also battles
between field officers and the counterterrorism center at CIA
headquarters, whose preference for carrying out raids remotely, via
Predator missile strikes, was derided by officers in the Islamabad
station as the work of "boys with toys."

An early arrangement that allowed American commandos to join Pakistani
units on raids inside the tribal areas was halted in 2003 after protests
in Pakistan. Another combat mission that came within hours of being
launched in 2005 was scuttled because some CIA officials in Pakistan
questioned the accuracy of the intelligence, and because aides to
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld believed that the mission force had
become too large.

Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war
in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from
the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials
requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they
were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.

Some former officials say Bush should have done more to confront
Musharraf, by aggressively demanding that he acknowledge the scale of
the militant threat.

Western military officials say Musharraf was instead often distracted by
his own political problems, and effectively allowed militants to regroup
by brokering peace agreements with them.

Even critics of the White House agree that there was no foolproof
solution to gaining control of the tribal areas. But by all accounts the
administration failed to develop a comprehensive plan to address the
militant problem there, and never resolved the disagreements between
warring agencies that undermined efforts to fashion any coherent strategy.

"We're just kind of drifting," said Richard Armitage, who as deputy
secretary of state from 2001 to 2005 was the administration's point
person for Pakistan.

Fleeing U.S. Air Power

In March 2002, several hundred bedraggled foreign fighters ? Uzbeks,
Pakistanis and a handful of Arabs ? fled the towering mountains of
eastern Afghanistan and crossed into Pakistan's South Waziristan tribal
area.

Savaged by American air power in the battles of Tora Bora and the
Shah-i-Kot valley, some were trying to make their way to the Arab states
in the Gulf. Some were simply looking for a haven.

They soon arrived at Shakai, a remote region in South Waziristan of
tree-covered mountains and valleys. Venturing into nearby farming
villages, they asked local tribesmen if they could rent some of the
area's walled family compounds, paying two to three times the
impoverished area's normal rates as the militants began to lay new roots.

"They slowly, steadily from the mountainside tried to establish
communication," recalled Mahmood Shah, the chief civilian administrator
of the tribal areas from 2001 to 2005.

In many ways, the foreigners were returning to their home base. In the
1980s, Bin Laden and hundreds of Arab and foreign fighters backed by the
United States and Pakistan used the tribal areas as a staging area for
cross-border attacks on Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

The militants' flight did not go unnoticed by American intelligence
agencies, who began to report beginning in the spring of 2002 that large
numbers of foreigners appeared to be hiding in South Waziristan and
neighboring North Waziristan.

But General Ali Mohammad Jan Aurakzai, the commander of Pakistani forces
in northwestern Pakistan, was skeptical.

In an interview earlier this year, Aurakzai recalled that he regarded
the warnings as "guesswork," and said his soldiers "found nothing," even
when they pushed into dozens of square miles of territory that neither
Pakistani nor British forces had ever entered.

The general, a tall, commanding figure who was born in the tribal areas,
was Musharraf's main adviser on the border areas, according to former
Pakistani officials. For years, he would argue that American officials
exaggerated the threat in the tribal areas and that the Pakistani Army
should avoid causing a tribal rebellion at all costs.

Former American intelligence officials said Aurakzai's sweeps were
slow-moving and easily avoided by militants. Robert L. Grenier, the CIA
station chief in Islamabad from 1999 to 2002, said that Aurakzai was
dismissive of the reports because he and other Pakistani officials
feared the kind of tribal uprising that could have been touched off by
more intrusive military operations. "Aurakzai and others didn't want to
believe it because it would have been an inconvenient fact," Grenier
recalled.

Signs of militants regrouping

Until recent elections pushed Musharraf off center stage in Pakistan,
senior Bush administration officials consistently praised his
cooperation in the Qaeda hunt.

Beginning shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Musharraf had allowed
American forces to use Pakistani bases to support the American invasion
of Afghanistan, while Pakistani intelligence services worked closely
with the CIA in tracking down Qaeda operatives. But from their vantage
point in Afghanistan, the picture looked different to American Special
Operations forces who saw signs that the militants whom the Americans
had driven out of Afghanistan were effectively regrouping on the
Pakistani side of the border.

When American military officials proposed in 2002 that Special
Operations forces be allowed to establish bases in the tribal areas,
Pakistan flatly refused. Instead, a small number of "black" Special
Operations forces ? Army Delta Force and Navy Seal units ? were allowed
to accompany Pakistani forces on raids in the tribal areas in 2002 and
early 2003.

That arrangement only angered both sides. American forces used to
operating on their own felt that the Pakistanis were limiting their
movements. And while Pakistani officials publicly denied the presence of
Americans, local tribesmen spotted the Americans and protested.

Under pressure from Pakistan, the Bush administration decided in 2003 to
end the American military presence on the ground. In a recent interview,
Armitage said he had supported the pullback in recognition of the
political risks that Musharraf had already taken. "We were pushing them
almost to the breaking point," Armitage said.

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 added another complicating factor,
by cementing a view among Pakistanis that American forces in the tribal
areas would be a prelude to an eventual American occupation.

To have insisted that American forces be allowed to cross from
Afghanistan into Pakistan, Armitage added, "might have been a bridge too
far."

Dealing with Musharraf

Bush's re-election in 2004 brought with it another problem once the
president overhauled his national security team. By early 2005,
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Armitage had resigned, joining
George Tenet, who had stepped down earlier as director of central
intelligence. Their departures left the administration with no senior
officials with close personal relationships with Musharraf.

In order to keep pressure on the Pakistanis about the tribal areas,
officials decided to have Bush raise the issue in personal phone calls
with Musharraf.

The conversations backfired. Two former United States government
officials say they were surprised and frustrated when instead of
demanding action from Musharraf, Bush instead repeatedly thanked him for
his contributions to the war on terror. "He never pounded his fist on
the table and said, 'Pervez you have to do this,' " said a former senior
intelligence official who saw transcripts of the phone conversations.
But another senior administration official defended the president,
saying that Bush had not gone easy on the Pakistani leader.

"I would say the president pushes quite hard," said the official, who
would speak about the confidential conversations only on condition of
anonymity. At the same time, the official said that Bush was keenly
aware of the "unique burden" that rested on any head of state, and had
the ability to determine "what the traffic will bear" when applying
pressure to foreign leaders.

Tensions within the CIA

As attacks into Afghanistan by militants based in the tribal areas
continued, tensions escalated between the CIA stations in Kabul and
Islamabad, whose lines of responsibility for battling terrorism were
blurred by the porous border that divides Afghanistan and Pakistan, and
whose disagreements reflected animosities between the two countries.

Along with the Afghan government, the CIA officers in Afghanistan
expressed alarm at what they saw as a growing threat from the tribal
areas. But the CIA officers in Pakistan played down the problem, to the
extent that some colleagues in Kabul said their colleagues in Islamabad
were "drinking the Kool-Aid," as one former officer put it, by accepting
Pakistani assurances that no one could control the tribal areas.

On several occasions, senior CIA officials at agency headquarters had to
intervene to dampen tensions between the dueling CIA outposts. Other
intragovernmental battles raged at higher altitudes, most notably over
the plan in early 2005 for a Special Operations mission intended to
capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Bin Laden's top deputy, in what would have
been the most aggressive use of American ground troops inside Pakistan.
The New York Times disclosed the aborted operation in a 2007 article,
but interviews since then have produced new details about the episode.

As described by current and former government officials, Zawahri was
believed by intelligence officials to be attending a meeting at a
compound in Bajaur, a tribal area, and the plan to send commandos to
capture him had the support of Porter Goss, the CIA director, and the
Special Operations commander, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal.

But even as Navy Seals and Army Rangers in parachute gear were boarding
C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan, there were frenzied exchanges between
officials at the Pentagon, Central Command and the CIA about whether the
mission was too risky. Some complained that the American commando force
was too large, numbering more than 100, while others argued that the
intelligence was from a single source and unreliable.

Goss urged the military to carry out the mission, and some CIA officials
in Washington even tried to give orders to execute the raid without
informing Ryan Crocker, then the American ambassador in Islamabad. But
other CIA officials were opposed to the raid, including a former officer
who said in an interview that he had "told the military guys that this
thing was going to be the biggest folly since the Bay of Pigs."

In the end, the mission was aborted after Rumsfeld refused to give his
approval for it. The decision remains controversial, with some former
officials seeing the episode as a squandered opportunity to capture a
figure who might have led the United States to Bin Laden, while others
dismiss its significance, saying that there had been previous false
alarms and that there remained no solid evidence that Zawahri was present.

Bin Laden hunt at dead end

By late 2005, many inside the CIA headquarters in Virginia had reached
the conclusion that their hunt for Bin Laden had reached a dead end.

Jose Rodriguez Jr., who at the time ran the CIA's clandestine operations
branch, decided in late 2005 to make a series of swift changes to the
agency's counterterrorism operations.

He fired Grenier, the former Islamabad station chief who in late 2004
took over as head of the agency's Counterterrorist Center. The two men
had barely spoken for months, as each saw the other as having a
misguided approach to the C.I.A's mission against Al Qaeda. Many inside
the agency believed this personality clash was beginning to affect CIA
operations.

Grenier had worked to expand the agency's counterterrorism focus,
reinforcing operations in places like the Horn of Africa, Southeast Asia
and North Africa. He also reorganized and renamed Alec Station, the
secret CIA unit formed in the 1990s to hunt Bin Laden at a time when Al
Qaeda was in its infancy.

Grenier believed that the unit, in addition to focusing on Bin Laden,
needed to act in other parts of the world, given the spread of
Qaeda-affiliated groups since the Sept. 11 attacks.

But Rodriguez believed that the Qaeda hunt had lost its focus on Bin
Laden and the militant threat in Pakistan.

So he appointed a new head of the Counterterrorism Center, who has not
been publicly identified, and sent dozens more CIA operatives to
Pakistan. The new push was dubbed Operation Cannonball, and Rodriguez
demanded urgency, but the response had a makeshift air.

There was nowhere to house an expanding headquarters staff, so giant
Quonset huts were erected outside the cafeteria on the CIA's leafy
Virginia campus, to house a new team assigned to the Bin Laden mission.
In Pakistan, the new operation was staffed not only with CIA operatives
drawn from around the world, but also with recent graduates of "The
Farm," the agency's training center at Camp Peary in Virginia.

"We had to put people out in the field who had less than ideal levels of
experience," one former senior CIA official said. "But there wasn't much
to choose from."

One reason for this, according to two former intelligence officials
directly involved in the Qaeda hunt, was that by 2006 the Iraq war had
drained away most of the CIA officers with field experience in the
Islamic world. "You had a very finite number" of experienced officers,
said one former senior intelligence official. "Those people all went to
Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq."

Surge in suicide bombings

Militants inside Pakistan only continued to gain strength. In the spring
of 2006, Taliban leaders based in Pakistan launched an offensive in
southern Afghanistan, increasing suicide bombings by sixfold and
American and NATO casualty rates by 45 percent. At the same time, they
assassinated tribal elders who were cooperating with the government.

Once again, Pakistani Army units launched a military campaign in the
tribal areas. Once again, they suffered heavy casualties.

And once again, Musharraf turned to Aurakzai to deal with the problem.
Having retired from the Pakistani Army, Aurakzai had become the governor
of North-West Frontier Province, and he immediately began negotiating
with the militants. On Sept. 5, 2006, Aurakzai signed a truce with
militants in North Waziristan, one in which the militants agreed to
surrender to local tribes and carry out no further attacks in Afghanistan.

To help sell Washington on the peace deal, Musharraf brought Aurakzai to
the Oval Office several weeks later.

In a presentation to Bush, Aurakzai advocated a strategy that would rely
even more heavily on cease-fires, and said striking deals with the
Taliban inside Afghanistan could allow American forces to withdraw from
Afghanistan within seven years.

But the cease-fire in Waziristan had disastrous consequences. In the
months after the agreement was signed, cross-border incursions from the
tribal areas into Afghanistan rose by 300 percent. Some American
officials began to refer to Aurakzai as a "snake oil salesman."

A rising terror threat

By the fall of 2006, the top American commander in Afghanistan had had
enough.

Intelligence reports were painting an increasingly dark picture of the
terror threat in the tribal areas. But with senior Bush administration
officials consumed for much of that year with the spiraling violence in
Iraq, the Qaeda threat in Pakistan was not at the top of the White House
agenda.

Bush had declared in a White House news conference that fall that Al
Qaeda was "on the run."

To get Washington's attention, the commander, Lieutenant General Karl
Eikenberry, ordered military officers, Special Operations forces and CIA
operatives to assemble a dossier showing Pakistan's role in allowing
militants to establish a haven.

Behind the general's order was a broader feeling of outrage within the
military ? at a terror war that had been outsourced to an unreliable
ally, and at the grim fact that America's most deadly enemy had become
stronger.

For months, military officers inside a walled-off compound at Bagram Air
Base in Afghanistan, where a branch of the military's classified Joint
Special Operations Command is based, had grown increasingly frustrated
at what they saw as missed opportunities in the tribal areas.

American commanders had been pressing for much of 2006 to get approval
from Rumsfeld for an operation to capture Sheik Saiid al-Masri, a top
Qaeda operator and paymaster whom American intelligence had been
tracking in the Pakistani mountains.

Rumsfeld and his staff were reluctant to approve the mission, worried
about possible American military casualties and a popular backlash in
Pakistan.

Finally, in November 2006, Rumsfeld approved operation of Navy Seals and
Army Delta Force commandos to move into Pakistan and capture Masri. But
the operation was put on hold days later, after Rumsfeld was pushed out
of the Pentagon, a casualty of the Democratic sweep of the 2006 election.

When Eikenberry presented his dossier to several members of Bush's
cabinet, some inside the State Department and CIA dismissed the briefing
as exaggerated and simplistic. But the White House took note of his
warnings, and decided to send Vice President *** Cheney to Islamabad in
March 2007, along with Stephen Kappes, the deputy CIA director, to
register American concern.

That visit was the beginning of a more aggressive effort by the
administration to pressure Pakistan's government into stepping up its
fight,. The decision last year to draw up the Pentagon order authorizing
for a Special Operations campaign in the tribal areas was part of that
effort.

But the fact that the order remains unsigned reflects the infighting
that persists. Administration lawyers and State Department officials are
concerned about any new authorities that would allow military missions
to be launched without the approval of the American ambassador in
Islamabad. With Qaeda operatives now described in intelligence reports
as deeply entrenched in the tribal areas and immersed in the civilian
population, there is also a view among some military and CIA officials
that the opportunity for decisive American action against the militants
may have been lost.

Pakistani military officials, meanwhile, express growing frustration
with the American pressure, and point out that Pakistan has lost more
than 1,000 members of its security forces in the tribal areas since
2001, nearly double the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan.

Some architects of America's efforts in Pakistan defend the Bush
administration's record in the tribal areas, and vigorously deny that
Washington took its eye off the terror threat as it focused on Iraq
policy. Some also question whether Bin Laden and Zawahri, Al Qaeda's top
two leaders, are really still able to orchestrate large-scale attacks.

"I do wonder if it's in fact the case that Al Qaeda has really
reconstituted itself to a pre-9/11 capability, and in fact I would say I
seriously doubt that," said Crocker, the American ambassador to Pakistan
between 2004 and 2006 and currently the ambassador to Iraq.

"Their top-level leadership is still out there, but they're not
communicating and they're not moving around. I think they're symbolic
more than operationally effective," Crocker said.

But while Bush vowed early on that Bin Laden would be captured "dead or
alive," the moment in late 2001 when Bin Laden and his followers escaped
at Tora Bora was almost certainly the last time the Qaeda leader was in
American sights, current and former intelligence officials say. Leading
terrorism experts have warned that it is only a matter of time before a
major terrorist attack planned in the mountains of Pakistan is carried
out on American soil.

"The United States faces a threat from Al Qaeda today that is comparable
to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001," said Seth Jones, a Pentagon
consultant and a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation.

"The base of operations has moved only a short distance, roughly the
difference from New York to Philadelphia."


--
Civis Romanus Sum
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