Far more to fear from Pakistan than Iraq

Far more to fear from Pakistan than Iraq
Friday, July 20, 2007
So what do we do now -- invade Pakistan?
Star Ledger

http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/farmer/in....xml&coll=1

George Bush says Iraq is the central front in the war on al Qaeda -- if true, he made it so -- but the latest version of the National Intelligence Estimate contra dicts him. Pakistan is the real central front, according to the best judgment of the 16 agencies that make up the nation's intelligence community.

Al Qaeda, it turns out, is a moving target. And should the haven it has chosen this time, a nuclear- armed Pakistan, fall into radical Islamist hands, the menace it would pose to America and the West would vastly exceed any threat from Iraq.

The sanctuary that al Qaeda lost in Afghanistan it has regained in the mountainous tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, a kind of South Asian wild, wild west, where the writ of the government of President Pervez Musharraf, our ally of sorts, evidently does not run. There, protected by friendly Islamic tribal chiefs and Taliban die- hards, al Qaeda has regenerated it self -- planning, recruiting, training fighters, raising money and rekin dling contacts with like-minded "affiliate" terrorist groups, including al Qaeda in Iraq.

Six years after the 9/11 attacks and after almost five years of war in Iraq, Osama bin Laden's mob is back in business and securer than ever. And the American homeland remains at risk, the National Intelligence Estimate concludes.

It's not clear how the Bush administration will respond -- or if it will at all -- to this dire news. There are no easy options.

The preferred option at the White House is for Musharraf, who's also his country's military chief, to send the Pakistani army into the tribal areas to knock heads together in the Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds and reassert government control over the region. But that's not necessarily Mu sharraf's preferred option.

His regime is shaky. Opposition parties, both the militants and the moderates, have been gaining strength and threaten his hold on power. There's lots of anecdotal evidence of support in Pakistan proper for the Islamist extremists. How deep it runs is unclear, but analysts say it's growing. Which is why Musharraf struck a truce with the tribes and the Taliban in northern Warziristan 10 months ago -- over American protests that the region would become a new staging area for al Qaeda.

But the truce may be coming undone in a way that would force Musharraf's hand. Taliban fighters have ambushed and killed a number of Pakistani troops in recent days. They've renounced the truce and, apparently feeling they've got a weakened Musharraf on the run, rebuffed his efforts to patch things up.

Pakistani military sources have been quoted promising "a full-scale military action against Taliban hideouts in the entire tribal area." That remains to be seen. They've promised military action before to bring the Taliban and al Qaeda to heel and fallen short. Bush has to hope they mean it this time.

The alternative could involve some kind of American military intervention in Pakistan. But there's a limit to what Washington can do. Missile strikes against al Qaeda training and headquarters sites are a possibility.

But an invasion of the kind mounted against Afghanistan seems out of reach for two reasons. The U.S. military establishment is already taxed to the extreme in Iraq and Afghanistan. And any such effort could ignite a reaction within Pakistan that would strengthen the hand of Islamists, topple Musharraf and further fuel anti-Americanism and terrorist recruitment across the Muslim Middle East.

At the moment, Musharraf's modest anti-Taliban efforts are en joying equally modest American support, namely the use of pilotless drone planes for aerial surveillance of Taliban fighter movements and camp sites. Whether U.S. Special Operations forces, the type used so effectively in Afghanistan, are on the ground in Pakistan -- or will be in the future -- remains unknown.

Bush has pictured losing Iraq as an end-of-the-civilized-world kind of calamity. But it pales next to what losing Pakistan to Islamist terrorists would mean.

The president's worst-case scenario is that an al Qaeda-dominated Iraq might someday, somehow, acquire a nuclear bomb. But Pakistan already has the bomb. And even with Musharraf in charge, keeping the country's nuclear know-how under lock and key has proved difficult. Indeed, scientist A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's boasted "Islamic bomb," got caught a couple of years ago selling nuclear bomb-making data abroad, reportedly to North Korea, among others.

Every day, it seems, the fight against al Qaeda and Islamist terrorism, which Bush arrogantly insisted he'd handle alone, slips further from his control and into the hands of less-than-reliable surro gates. In Iraq, it's the slippery Nouri al-Maliki. Now it's a shaky Perez Musharraf in an even more dangerous Pakistan.



John Farmer may be reached at jfarmer@starledger.com.