Running In Circles

By Cernig

I see that CIA director Hayden is claiming that Al Qaida has been essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and is on the defensive throughout most of the rest of the world. I think he might have a point in Iraq, where AQI shot itself in the foot by violence against Iraqis and certainly we keep hearing welcome reports that AQ has likewise been its own worst enemy in the rest of the Islamic world, where its atrocities have gradually worked to alienate most Muslems. But I think he's relying on his American audience's ignorance of the central front when he claims that things are going just as well along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, where AQ's leadership has its safe havens.

The ability to kill and capture key members of al-Qaeda continues, and keeps them off balance -- even in their best safe haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border," Hayden said.

But terrorism experts note the lack of success in the U.S. effort to capture bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Intelligence officials say they think both are living in the Pakistan-Afghanistan tribal area in locations known only to a few top aides. Hayden said capturing or killing the pair remains a top priority, though he noted the difficulties in finding them in a rugged, remote region where the U.S. military is officially forbidden to operate.

The UK's Guardian quotes a couple of sceptical experts:

Mike Scheur, the former chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit, said it may be that Hayden's comments may be aimed at trying to exploit recent outbursts by Muslim clerics against al-Qaida.

He added that Hayden had a reputation within the agency for being frank and honest but these comments might put a dent in it.

"The stuff on the ground that you can measure does not look like a strategic defeat for al-Qaida. When you look on the ground, they are expanding in the Levant and across North Africa. They have fought the US to a standstill in Iraq and Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden has not been caught. They have the initiative in Afghanistan."

Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations and analysis at the CIA's counter-terrorist centre, said Hayden was going public about a consensus reached within the agency about six weeks ago that al-Qaida had been weakened.

"The question is whether it is permanent or not. There is no real agreement on that," he said.

I'm not surprised there's no agreement on that. Violence in both Iraq and Afghanistan has proven to be cyclic, with new outbreaks following closely upon lulls that have previously enticed administration officials and their supporters to claim last corners being turned. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have both proven persistent hydras, able to regenerate after continued decapitations. If the Taliban were a spent force, they wouldn't have been able to overrun an Afghan town yesterday, even if security forces managed to take it back today. They wouldn't still outright control several remote areas, especially in Helmand province.

On the Pakistan/Afghan border, I'll take the word of General Dan McNeill over that of Hayden, as the former has proven himself even more of a straight talker than Hayden has been until now.

The departing American commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeill, has raised concerns that Pakistan has not followed through on promises to tackle militancy on its side of the border, and in recent months has even stopped its cooperation with NATO and Afghan counterparts on border issues.

McNeill said Thursday that Pakistan's failure to act against militants in its tribal areas and its decision to hold talks with the militants without putting pressure on them had led to an increase in attacks against U.S. and NATO forces in eastern Afghanistan.

"We have not seen the actions that we had expected late last year; we have seen a different approach," he said before a news briefing in Kabul. "That is different from what most of us thought last year we were going to get."

Militancy rose last year in Pakistan, where officials indicated that tougher measures against the insurgents were planned. Instead, the government has sued for peace, a policy tried in 2005 and 2006 that led directly to a rise in attacks across the border, as is happening now.

"Over time, when there has been dialogue, or peace deals, the incidents have gone up," McNeill told journalists in Kabul and others in Brussels via videoconference. "What you see right now is the effects of no pressure on the extremists and insurgents on the other side of the border."

As if to underscore his point, a suicide car bomb exploded Thursday near a convoy of international forces on the eastern side of Kabul, killing four civilian bystanders and wounding 14 others, police officials said.

McNeill said that Pakistan had stopped the high-level meetings among Pakistani, Afghan and NATO counterparts that were the main conduit for resolving border issues and coordinating operations to combat cross-border infiltration.

The meetings are usually attended by the top generals on all sides, but Pakistan has postponed the last three, he said.

Perhaps McNeill, in his almost-forgotten posting, didn't get the White House memo that said everything must be painted rosy and punted down the road in the last five months of the Bush Years so that Republicans next year can point to how everything fouled up on Obama's watch.