-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 8, 2007 7:49:11 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Why Rumsfeld REFUSED to Capture Al Qaeda's #2 -- It "Might
Upset Musharraf"!
U.S. Aborted Raid on Qaeda Chiefs in Pakistan in ’05
By MARK MAZZETTI
July 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/washington/08intel.html?
_r=1&oref=slogin
WASHINGTON, July 7 — A secret military operation in early 2005 to
capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was
aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials
decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with
Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.
The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence
officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top
deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.
But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the
defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss,
then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials
said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already
boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was
canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in
the planning.
Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had ballooned from a
small number of military personnel and C.I.A. operatives to several
hundred, was cumbersome and put too many American lives at risk,
the current and former officials said. He was also concerned that
it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that
has barred the American military from operating in its tribal
areas, the officials said.
The decision to halt the planned “snatch and grab” operation
frustrated some top intelligence officials and members of the
military’s secret Special Operations units, who say the United
States missed a significant opportunity to try to capture senior
members of Al Qaeda.
Their frustration has only grown over the past two years, they
said, as Al Qaeda has improved its abilities to plan global attacks
and build new training compounds in Pakistan’s tribal areas, which
have become virtual havens for the terrorist network.
In recent months, the White House has become increasingly irritated
with Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, for his inaction
on the growing threat of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
About a dozen current and former military and intelligence
officials were interviewed for this article, all of whom requested
anonymity because the planned 2005 mission remained classified.
Spokesmen for the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and the White House declined
to comment. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed about
the planned operation.
The officials acknowledge that they are not certain that Mr.
Zawahri attended the 2005 meeting in North Waziristan, a
mountainous province just miles from the Afghan border. But they
said that the United States had communications intercepts that
tipped them off to the meeting, and that intelligence officials had
unusually high confidence that Mr. Zawahri was there.
Months later, in early May 2005, the C.I.A. launched a missile from
a remotely piloted Predator drone, killing Haitham al-Yemeni, a
senior Qaeda figure whom the C.I.A. had tracked since the meeting.
It has long been known that C.I.A. operatives conduct
counterterrorism missions in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Details of
the aborted 2005 operation provide a glimpse into the Bush
administration’s internal negotiations over whether to take
unilateral military action in Pakistan, where General Musharraf’s
fragile government is under pressure from dissidents who object to
any cooperation with the United States.
Pentagon officials familiar with covert operations said that
planners had to consider the political and human risks of
undertaking a military campaign in a sovereign country, even in an
area like Pakistan’s tribal lands, where the government has only
tenuous control. Even with its shortcomings, Pakistan has been a
vital American ally since the Sept. 11 attacks, and the militaries
of the two countries have close ties.
The Pentagon officials said tension was inherent in any decision to
approve such a mission: a smaller military footprint allows a
better chance of a mission going undetected, but it also exposes
the units to greater risk of being killed or captured.
Officials said one reason Mr. Rumsfeld called off the 2005
operation was that the number of troops involved in the mission had
grown to several hundred, including Army Rangers, members of the
Navy Seals and C.I.A. operatives, and he determined that the United
States could no longer carry out the mission without General
Musharraf’s permission. It is unlikely that the Pakistani president
would have approved an operation of that size, officials said.
Some outside experts said American counterterrorism operations had
been hamstrung because of concerns about General Musharraf’s shaky
government.
“The reluctance to take risk or jeopardize our political
relationship with Musharraf may well account for the fact that five
and half years after 9/11 we are still trying to run bin Laden and
Zawahri to ground,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at
Georgetown University.
Those political considerations have created resentment among some
members of the military’s Special Operations forces.
“The Special Operations guys are tearing their hair out at the
highest levels,” said a former Bush administration official with
close ties to those troops. While they have not received good
intelligence on the whereabouts of top Qaeda members recently, he
said, they say they believe they have sometimes had useful
information on lower-level figures.
“There is a degree of frustration that is off the charts, because
they are looking at targets on a daily basis and can’t move against
them,” he said.
In early 2005, after learning about the Qaeda meeting, the military
developed a plan for a small Navy Seals unit to parachute into
Pakistan to carry out a quick operation, former officials said.
But as the operation moved up the military chain of command,
officials said, various planners bulked up the force’s size to
provide security for the Special Operations forces.
“The whole thing turned into the invasion of Pakistan,” said the
former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.
Still, he said he thought the mission was worth the risk. “We were
frustrated because we wanted to take a shot,” he said.
Several former officials interviewed said the operation was not the
only occasion since the Sept. 11 attacks that plans were developed
to use a large American military force in Pakistan. It is unclear
whether any of those missions have been executed.
Some of the military and intelligence officials familiar with the
2005 events say it showed a rift between operators in the field and
a military bureaucracy that has still not effectively adapted to
hunt for global terrorists, moving too cautiously to use Special
Operations troops against terrorist targets.
That criticism has echoes of the risk aversion that the officials
said pervaded efforts against Al Qaeda during the Clinton
administration, when missions to use American troops to capture or
kill Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan were never executed because they
were considered too perilous, risked killing civilians or were
based on inadequate intelligence. Rather than sending in ground
troops, the Clinton White House instead chose to fire cruise
missiles in what became failed attempts to kill Mr. bin Laden and
his deputies — a tactic Mr. Bush criticized shortly after the Sept.
11 attacks.
Since then, the C.I.A. has launched missiles from Predator aircraft
in the tribal areas several times, with varying degrees of success.
Intelligence officials say they believe that in January 2006, an
airstrike narrowly missed killing Mr. Zawahri, who hours earlier
had attended a dinner in Damadola, a Pakistani village.
General Musharraf cast his lot with the Bush administration in the
hunt for Al Qaeda after the 2001 attacks, and he has periodically
ordered Pakistan’s military to conduct counterterrorism missions in
the tribal areas, provoking fierce resistance there. But in recent
months he has pulled back, prompting Mr. Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney to issue stern warnings in private that he risked
losing American aid if he did not step up efforts against Al Qaeda,
senior administration officials have said.
Officials said that mid-2005 was a period when they were gathering
good intelligence about Al Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan’s tribal
areas. By the next year, however, the White House had become
frustrated by the lack of progress in the hunt for Mr. bin Laden
and Mr. Zawahri.
In early 2006, President Bush ordered a “surge” of dozens of C.I.A.
agents to Pakistan, hoping that an influx of intelligence
operatives would lead to better information, officials said. But
that has brought the United States no closer to locating Al Qaeda’s
top two leaders. The latest message from them came this week, in a
new tape in which Mr. Zawahri urged Iraqis and Muslims around the
world to show more support for Islamist insurgents in Iraq.
In his recently published memoir, George J. Tenet, the former
C.I.A. director, said the intelligence about Mr. bin Laden’s
whereabouts during the Clinton years was similarly sparse. The
information was usually only at the “50-60% confidence level,” he
wrote, not sufficient to justify American military action.
“As much as we all wanted Bin Ladin dead, the use of force by a
superpower requires information, discipline, and time,” Mr. Tenet
wrote. “We rarely had the information in sufficient quantities or
the time to evaluate and act on it.”
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