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‘US didn’t strike in Pakistan for fear of toppling Musharraf’

* Terror expert says Rumsfeld nixed proposed attack on Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan

By Khalid Hasan

Washington: The United States decided against striking Al Qaeda locations in Pakistan in 2006 because it was afraid the strike would destabilise General Pervez Musharraf and his government.

According to Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation, who is also the CNN’s terrorism expert, “America has handed $10 billion to the Pakistani government since September 11, 2001. Yet the Taliban and Al Qaeda remain headquartered in Pakistan. A US military official in Afghanistan with access to intelligence information told me this spring that Taliban leader Mullah Omar ‘is still in Quetta,’ ... And a Western official based in Pakistan told me that ‘target folders’ about the locations of high-value Taliban and Al Qaeda targets were provided by the US government to Pakistan in late 2006 – but never acted upon. Moreover, the Bush administration has, at least on one occasion, refused to do what Pakistan will not.”

Rumsfeld nixed attack: “This July, the New York Times reported that Donald Rumsfeld nixed a proposed 2005 attack on a meeting of Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan - a meeting thought to include Zawahiri - in part because the operation, which would have involved several hundred special forces and CIA personnel, could have destabilised Musharraf,” he added.

After Tora Bora, Bergen writes in the current issue of New Republic, Al Qaeda’s leaders fled into the tribal areas of western Pakistan, where they began the long process of rebuilding their devastated organisation. That process has gone far better than they could possibly have imagined as they slipped out of Afghanistan in late 2001. With the Bush administration’s attention in Iraq, Al Qaeda took the opportunity to reassert itself along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Art Keller, a CIA officer stationed in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 2006, told Bergen, “People are going from the Afghan-Pakistan border to Iraq to learn the tactics and then come back. Seems like the reverse of the way the war on terror was supposed to work.”

Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent who obtained un-coerced confessions from Ramzi Yousef and Mir Aimal Kansi, told Bergen, “Duped by the myth of Musharraf’s indispensability, Bush officials are now overly reluctant to push the Pakistani leader too hard on confronting Al Qaeda - for fear he will be seen as an American stooge, eventually toppled, and replaced by someone far worse. This situation has been compounded by the fact that, for much of the last six years, few American spies were operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas.”

Keller, the CIA officer, ran a spy network in one of the tribal regions in early 2006. While he noted that more agents have since been deployed, he said that, at the time, he was one of only a “handful” of CIA officers doing this kind of work in the Tribal Areas. Six years after September 11, writes Bergen, the Bush administration has yet to receive the cooperation it needs from Pakistan.

Bergen also writes that Omar Bin Laden, the son of the Osama Bin Laden, has heaped abuse on his father for the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 attacks had driven a permanent wedge between father and son. In the years since 9/11, Omar appears to have had no contact with his father.

Bergen writes that five years later, Al Qaeda has revived itself. The group’s leadership has reconstituted itself and now operates rather comfortably along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Last year, it came close to downing 10 US airplanes using liquid explosives - an attack that would have rivalled September 11 in magnitude. The largest Al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership provided direction to its British followers “on an extensive and growing scale”.

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