Pursuing Al Qaeda
According to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Al Qaeda is on the wane in both Afghanistan and in Iraq.
JALALABAD, Afghanistan — The most interesting discovery during a visit to this city where Osama bin Laden planted his flag in 1996 is that al-Qaeda seems to have all but disappeared. The group is on the run, too, in Iraq, and that raises some interesting questions about how to pursue this terrorist enemy in the future.
“Al-Qaeda is not a topic of conversation here,” says Col. Mark Johnstone, the deputy commander of Task Force Bayonet, which oversees four provinces surrounding Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. Lt. Col. Pete Benchoff agrees: “We’re not seeing a lot of al-Qaeda fighters. They’ve shifted here to facilitation and support.”
You hear the same story farther north from the officers who oversee the provinces along the Pakistan border. A survey conducted last November and December in Nuristan, once an al-Qaeda stronghold, found that the group barely registered as a security concern among the population.
A similar story is coming out of Iraq.
Traveling in Iraq this year, I’ve heard similar accounts of al-Qaeda’s demise there. That stems from two factors: the revolt by Sunni tribal leaders against al-Qaeda’s brutal intimidation; and the relentless hunt for its operatives by U.S. Special Forces. As the flow of human and technical intelligence improves and the U.S. learns to fuse it for quick use by soldiers on the ground, the anti-terrorist rollback accelerates.
So where are the rats running to? Pakistan.
The latest State Department terrorism report, issued last week, says the group “has reconstituted some of its pre-9/11 operational capabilities through the exploitation of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.”
Ignatius then gives what he believes are the best tactics to combat Al Qaeda in Pakistan - mostly Special Forces and the goodwill and support of the Pakistani government. A tall order, that last point.
This evidence from the field suggests two conclusions:
– First, al-Qaeda isn’t a permanent boogeyman; it’s losing ground in Iraq and Afghanistan because of U.S. counterinsurgency tactics, especially the alliances we have built with tribal leaders and the aggressive use of Special Forces to capture or kill its operatives. These anti-terrorist operations require special skills — but they shouldn’t require a big, semi-permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq or Afghanistan. Local security forces can handle a growing share of responsibility — perhaps ineptly, as in Basra a few weeks ago, or in Kabul last weekend, but that’s their problem.
– Second, the essential mission in combating al-Qaeda now is to adopt in Pakistan the tactics that are working in Iraq and Afghanistan. This means alliances with tribal warlords to bring economic development to the isolated mountain valleys of the FATA region, in exchange for their help in security. And it means joint operations involving U.S. and Pakistani special forces to chase al-Qaeda militants as they retreat deeper into the mountains.
The approval by the Pakistani government to allow U.S. forces to both enter and conduct operations throughout the above-mentioned areas is going to be the tricky part. For their part, the Pakistanis have been less than excited to allow any kind of U.S. incursion. Hell, there’s areas they won’t even go into.
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