Al Qaeda may be as strong as ever, and a top U.S. commander urges strikes at Taliban safe havens inside Pakistan. Dubya has signed an order allowing U.S. Special Ops strikes within Pakistan.
Seven years after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda has spread its violent tentacles across Pakistan, while its ally, the Taliban, have staged a bloody comeback in Afghanistan.
The radical Islamist group and its local partners have destabilized nuclear-armed Pakistan, and largely taken over its northwest fringe. Afghanistan has been sent into a tailspin of violence. While al-Qaeda was beaten back in Iraq after exacting a heavy toll on human life, its influence is now entrenched in Pakistan and Afghanistan, from where it is feared that terror strikes against the West are still being planned.
Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remain at large, probably moving between Pakistan's tribal area and adjacent regions of Afghanistan, and they continue to use the news media to spread their message of hate.
U.S. President George W. Bush's announcement this week that thousands more troops would be deployed to Afghanistan was an acknowledgment that the mission there is in peril. The south and east of the country are firmly in the grip of an insurrection that took hold over the past three years, reversing the initial coalition victory in Afghanistan soon after 9/11.
The article also made the following points:
- Al Qaeda has replaced most of the operatives captured or killed in the aftermath of 9/11
- Militant groups in Pakistan started attacking Pakistan's military, ISI and Frontier Force paramilitary troops after former president Pervez Musharraf signed on as a WOT ally.
- Al Qaeda has taken over Tehreek-i-Taliban and "colonized" other militant groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
- Al Qaeda hasn't carried out an attack similar to 9/11 on U.S. soil in the intervening seven years, although groups and individuals sympathetic to al Qaeda have committed murderous bombings in Madrid, London and Bali. Many other plots have been broken up.
“Al-Qaeda today is as dangerous a threat as ever. It has a secure safe haven in Pakistan, a revived ally in the Taliban and can operate on a global basis,” said former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, author of The Search for Al Qaeda. “I think it remains a strategic threat, and those who argue it is not are underestimating it.”
The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff has called for a new strategy in Afghanistan to deny militants bases across the border in Pakistan.
Speaking on the eve of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Admiral Mike Mullen called for a military strategy that covered both sides of the border.
The US must work closely with Pakistan to "eliminate [the enemy's] safe havens", he told Congress.
But Pakistan insists it will not allow foreign forces onto its territory.
"There is no question of any agreement or understanding with the coalition forces whereby they are allowed to conduct operations on our side of the border," Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff, Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, said.
President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials.
The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and after months of high-level stalemate about how to challenge the militants’ increasingly secure base in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
American officials say that they will notify Pakistan when they conduct limited ground attacks like the Special Operations raid last Wednesday in a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border, but that they will not ask for its permission.
“The situation in the tribal areas is not tolerable,” said a senior American official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the missions. “We have to be more assertive. Orders have been issued.”
The new orders reflect concern about safe havens for Al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan, as well as an American view that Pakistan lacks the will and ability to combat militants. They also illustrate lingering distrust of the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies and a belief that some American operations had been compromised once Pakistanis were advised of the details.
The Central Intelligence Agency has for several years fired missiles at militants inside Pakistan from remotely piloted Predator aircraft. But the new orders for the military’s Special Operations forces relax firm restrictions on conducting raids on the soil of an important ally without its permission.
Pakistan’s top army officer said Wednesday that his forces would not tolerate American incursions like the one that took place last week and that the army would defend the country’s sovereignty “at all costs.”