Are We Sure Waziristan Has Much to Do With National Security?
By Jesse Singal - Nov 18th, 2008 at 11:17 amJuan Cole’s entire article on whether President-elect Obama should emphasize the hunt for Osama bin Laden is worth a read, but this paragraph, near the end, sticks out the most:
Terrorism experts differ on whether the remnants of al-Qaida in Pakistan’s tribal agencies pose a dire threat to the U.S. Even [Central Intelligence Agency head Michael] Hayden admitted last week, “The truth is, it’s not all that easy to build a worldwide terrorist network and manage a global fight from an isolated outpost in northwestern Pakistan.” It is not clear what exactly the few hundred Arab expatriates in places such as South Waziristan could do from there to the United States. The attacks on Sept. 11 were largely planned by European-trained engineers resident in Europe, and all they got from al-Qaida was ideological direction, training in camps in Afghanistan, money and some extra muscle. Despite Hayden’s fears that training camps are being reestablished in Waziristan, it is not plausible that nowadays well-educated fanatics based in the West could come to them for high-powered training, be provided with money and colleagues, and leave them to come attack the United States. The militants are besieged by the Pakistani, Afghan and NATO militaries. The old al-Qaida seems to have little or no command and control structure left (as Bush admitted already in 2002). Terrorism analyst Marc Sageman, who was a CIA field officer in Pakistan in the late 1980s, maintains that the old al-Qaida organization is gone. What is left is loose networks of wannabes and hobbyists around the Muslim world, mainly linked by the Internet. Sageman’s interpretation is challenged by Bruce Hoffman, who insists that al-Qaida survives as an organization that can make things happen. If Sageman is right, then a further siege of the FATA regions is a fool’s errand.
Why are we being told by Obama and so many others that Waziristan is the true, vital front in the war on terror when even the head of the C.I.A.–who has as much reason to overstate the threat as anyone–admits that the notion of besieged al Qaeda remnants striking at the United States from there doesn’t entirely make sense?
I obviously don’t have the expertise to evaluate our mission in Waziristan, to critique the scope or nature of our level of engagement there, or to say whether Sageman or Hoffman’s interpretation is closer to being correct. But what’s frustrating–and not frustrating in an abstract, intellectual sense, but frustrating in a visceral, people-will-die-because-of-this sense–is that we repeatedly let unchallenged national security claims that don’t jibe with expert opinion harden into the conventional wisdom, at which point they gain unearned rhetorical status, are repeated endlessly by our candidates for highest office, and gain the ability to dictate the terms of our policy debates without being questioned by anyone. Are we ever going to stop making this mistake?
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