Secret US plan for al-Qa'ida in Pakistan stymied

WASHINGTON: Top Bush administration officials drafted a secret plan late last year to make it easier for US special operations forces to operate inside Pakistan's tribal areas, but Washington turf battles and the diversion of resources to Iraq have held up the effort, reports said yesterday.

A senior US Defence Department official told The New York Times there was "mounting frustration" in the Pentagon at the continued delay in deployment of special operations teams into Pakistan's mountainous and lawless western tribal regions, where some senior al-Qa'ida operatives are thought to be hiding.

The thwarted plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was intended to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington's risk-averse attitude towards special operations missions inside Pakistan. US special forces argue that catching Osama bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive.

Yesterday's report detailing delays in the plan said al-Qa'ida's new safe haven in Pakistan was in part due to the Bush administration's accommodation of Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, whose advisers have long played down the terrorist threat.

But it was also a result of infighting between US intelligence agencies and a shifting in White House priorities from counter-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the war in Iraq.

The report quoted a retired CIA officer as estimating that al-Qa'ida training compounds in Pakistan host 2000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago.

Infighting within the CIA included battles between field officers in Kabul and Islamabad and the counter-terrorism centre at CIA headquarters in Virginia, whose preference for carrying out raids remotely, via Predator missiles strikes, was derided by field officers as the work of "boys with toys".

Turf battles between CIA officials in Afghanistan and others in Pakistan have also impeded progress, the report said. CIA officers in Kabul express alarm at what they see as a growing threat from the tribal areas, while CIA officers in Islamabad accept the Pakistani Government's argument that the tribal areas are beyond anyone's control.

The level of expertise among CIA officers in the region was also a drag on operations, the report said. "We had to put people out in the field who had less than ideal levels of experience," it quoted a former senior CIA official as saying.

One reason for that, two former intelligence officials said, was that the Iraq war had drained away most of the CIA officers with field experience in the Islamic world.

The Times said the Pentagon's top commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, ordered a dossier in late 2006 showing Pakistan's role in allowing militants to establish a safe haven in the tribal territories.

The general's order reflected a "broader feeling of outrage" within the Pentagon that the war on terror "had been outsourced to an unreliable ally, and at the grim fact that America's most deadly enemy had become stronger."

In response to the dossier, the White House sent Vice-President Dick Cheney to Islamabad in March last year to register US concern.

That visit was the beginning of a more aggressive effort by the administration to pressure Pakistan into stepping up the fight.

Last year's decision to draw up the Pentagon order authorising a special operations campaign in the tribal areas was part of that effort.

Reuters