For anybody interested in a little background on how Afghanistan got to be the way it is, and where we sit there, there are a couple articles of interest in the Atlantic online. The first one, theatlantic.com , is only a couple months old, and quite disturbing. The author is supposed to be a former CIA higher-up.
In other words, American intelligence has not gained and will not gain
Pakistan's assistance in its pursuit of bin Ladin. The only effective way
to run offensive counterterrorist operations against Islamic radicals in
more or less hostile territory is with "non-official-cover"
officers—operatives who are in no way openly attached to the U.S.
government. Imagine James Bond minus the gadgets, the women, the
Walther PPK, and the Aston Martin. But as of late 1999 no program to
insert NOCs into an Islamic fundamentalist organization abroad had
been implemented, according to one such officer who has served in the
Middle East. "NOCs haven't really changed at all since the Cold War,"
he told me recently. "We're still a group of fake businessmen who live
in big houses overseas. We don't go to mosques and pray."
A former senior Near East Division operative says, "The CIA probably
doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle
Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist
who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no
women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case
officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing."
A younger case officer boils the problem down even further:
"Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
Behind-the-lines counterterrorism operations are just too dangerous for
CIA officers to participate in directly. When I was in the Directorate of
Operations, the Agency would deploy a small army of officers for a
meeting with a possibly dangerous foreigner if he couldn't be met in
the safety of a U.S. embassy or consulate. Officers still in the
clandestine service say that the Agency's risk-averse, bureaucratic
nature—which mirrors, of course, the growing physical risk-aversion of
American society—has only gotten worse.
The other article is 5 years old. Some people could see what was coming, it seems, but they couldn't do much about it. theatlantic.com
For more than a decade some 25,000 Islamic militants, from
nearly thirty countries around the world, had streamed through
Peshawar on their way to the jihad. They came, without
passports and without names, from the Palestinian organization
Hamas, from Egypt's AlGama'a al-Islamiya and Al-Jihad, from
Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, and from the Philippines' Moro
Liberation Front. Five years after the jihad ended, a thousand or
so remained, some in Peshawar itself, others encamped in the
mountain passes of the ungovernable tribal areas bordering
Afghanistan, planning and executing what investigators now
believe were terrorist acts that have reached from Cairo to
Algiers, Manila to Bangkok -- and to the streets of Islamabad.
Riyadh, Peshawar, and New York.
"Even today you can sit at the Khyber Pass and see every color,
every creed, every nationality, pass," a Western diplomat told me
in Peshawar last spring. "These groups, in their wildest
imagination, never would have met if there had been no jihad.
For a Moro to get a Sting missile! To make contacts with
Islamists from North Africa! The United States created a
Moscow Central in Peshawar for these groups, and the
consequences for all of us are astronomical."
The diplomat went on to say that many veterans of the Afghan
jihad have set up an informal network of small, loosely organized
underground cells, with support centers scattered around the
world: in the United States, the Persian Gulf countries, Germany,
Switzerland, Scandinavia, Sudan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The
days of mule trains like the one Sheikh Omar joined en route to
Afghanistan are long gone; now E-mail and faxes drive the jihad.
The US military might be able to get us out of this mess. They better not count on much help from the CIA, which did quite the job getting us into it. |
