International Herald Tribune
Amid policy disputes, Qa'eda grows in Pakistan
By Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde
Monday, June 30, 2008
WA****NGTON:
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 Qa'eda.
Intelligence re****ts 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 Wa****ngton 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 Wa****ngton'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 Wa****ngton 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 Qa'eda
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 Wa****ngton and
Pakistan's new government.
The story of how Al Qa'ida, 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
****fted 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 Qa'eda 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
make****ft 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 Qa'eda 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 Wa****ngton
and Pakistan tell another story. American intelligence
officials say that the Qa'eda 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
fa****on 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 re****t beginning
in the spring of 2002 that large numbers of foreigners
appeared to be hiding in South Waziristan and
neighbouring 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 re****ts 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 Qa'eda hunt.
Beginning shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Musharraf
had allowed American forces to use Pakistani bases to
sup****t 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 sup****ted the pullback in recognition of the political
risks that Musharraf had already taken. "We were
pu****ng 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 relation****ps 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 ****ous 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 duelling 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 sup****t of ****ter 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 Wa****ngton 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 op****tunity 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 Qa'eda. 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 Qa'eda 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 Qa'eda-affiliated groups
since the Sept. 11 attacks.
But Rodriguez believed that the Qa'eda hunt had lost
its focus on Bin Laden and the militant threat in
Pakistan.
So he appointed a new head of the Counterterrorism
Centre, 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 make****ft 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
Pearly 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 Qa'eda
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 Wa****ngton 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 "s**** oil salesman."
A rising terror threat
By the fall of 2006, the top American commander in Afghanistan had had
enough.
Intelligence re****ts 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 Wa****ngton'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 op****tunities 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 Dick 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 re****ts 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 op****tunity 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
Wa****ngton took its eye off the terror threat as it focused on Iraq
policy.
Some also question whether Bin Laden and Zawahri, Al Qa'eda'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 Qa'eda 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 leader****p 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 Qa'eda 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 Qa'eda 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 Cor****ation.
"The base of operations has moved only a short distance, roughly the
difference from New York to Philadelphia."
~~~~~~
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