Afghanistan, not Iraq, offers the best blueprint to strike al-Qaeda
The right model for a Waziristan campaign is the CIA-led operation in Afghanistan, not the invasion of Iraq.
The July 17 National Intelligence Estimate put the problem plainly enough: Al-Qaeda has "regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability" using a new safe haven in the lawless frontier area of northwest Pakistan known as Waziristan. The question is: What is the United States going to do about it?
For those who might have forgotten in the six years since Sept. 11, 2001, what a reconstituted al-Qaeda could do, the intelligence analysts explained that the terrorist group has "the goal of producing mass casualties, visually dramatic destruction, significant economic aftershocks and/or fear among the U.S. population." They noted that al-Qaeda continues to seek biological, radiological and nuclear weapons "and would not hesitate to use them."
Perhaps it's human nature not to see threats clearly until a disaster actually happens -- even if it's the second time around. How else to explain the limited public response to this clear and emphatic warning? Maybe the Bush administration has cried wolf about terrorism so often that people have stopped believing anything the government says. Or that the whole subject is now obscured by the choking fog of Iraq, as in the president's mind-numbing formulation of the threat: "They are al-Qaeda ... in ... Iraq."
But the question remains: What should the U.S. do about al-Qaeda's new safe haven, from which it may already be plotting attacks that could kill thousands of Americans? The administration will attack "actionable targets anywhere in the world, putting aside whether it was Pakistan or anyplace else," warned Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser.
That drew the predictable indignant response from the Pakistani government, which doesn't want to go after al-Qaeda in Waziristan, but doesn't want anyone else to do it, either. So again, what should the U.S. do? The best answer I've heard comes from Henry Crumpton, a former CIA officer who was one of the heroes of the agency's campaign to destroy al-Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Now a fellow at the EastWest Institute and a private consultant, he argues the U.S. must take preventive action, but that it should do so carefully, through proxies wherever possible. The right model for a Waziristan campaign is the CIA-led operation in Afghanistan, not the invasion of Iraq.
Teams of CIA officers and Special Forces soldiers are best suited to work with tribal leaders, providing them weapons and money to fight an al-Qaeda network that has implanted itself brutally through the assassination of more than 100 tribal leaders during the past 6 years. It would be better to conduct such operations jointly with Pakistan, but if Gen. Pervez Musharraf's government can't or won't cooperate, then the U.S. should be prepared to go it alone, he argues.
Crupmton proposed a detailed plan last year for rolling up these sanctuaries -- the "Regional Strategic Initiative" -- combining economic assistance and paramilitary operations in a broad counterinsurgency campaign. In Waziristan, U.S. and Pakistani operatives would give tribal warlords guns and money, to be sure, but they would coordinate this covert action with economic aid to help tribal leaders operate their local stone quarries more efficiently, say, or install windmills and solar panels to generate electric power for their remote mountain villages.
Intervening in another Muslim country is risky, to put it mildly. That's why a successful counterinsurgency program would need Pakistani support, and why its economic and social development components would be critical.
The U.S. can begin to take action now against al-Qaeda's new safe haven. Or we can wait, and hope that we don't get hit again. The biggest danger of waiting? If retaliation proves necessary later, it could be ill-planned and heavy-handed -- precisely what got us in trouble in Iraq.
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