|
CATO Institute Nearly three years after
9/11, after spending tens of billions of dollars, and after fighting two
major wars, there is a sense among Americans that insufficient progress
has been made in securing the nation.
According to a recent poll, 60 percent of
Americans believe that the United States is not winning the war on
terrorism.
They have good reason to think
that
way. As pointed out recently in an International Institute of Strategic
Studies
report and in Jane's Intelligence Digest, the U.S. invasion and
heavy-handed
occupation of Iraq have resulted in a global anti-American backlash,
playing
into the hands of Al Qaeda and related groups, which continue to collect
funds and expand their terrorist networks.
But there's much more to the story. U.S.
actions in Iraq are only part of what has gone wrong in the war on terror.
In fact, the Bush administration
started pulling the rug out from under this war even as early victories
were
being won over the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the months after September 11.
For instance, following the 9/11 attacks, a large number of
Saudi
nationals, many of them relatives of Osama bin Laden, were allowed to
leave
the United States without any investigation before regular U.S. flights
resumed.
Soon thereafter, the chief of the Pakistani intelligence agency,
Lt.
Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, was allowed to go quietly into retirement without a word of
protest from the United States.
This happened even though Ahmed was
suspected of
having advised the Taliban on how to prepare for the impending U.S.
attack, and
of having links to the financing of the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta.
Other decisions inimical to U.S. security followed over the
next couple
of months. In November 2001, with a large contingent of Taliban and Al Qaeda
forces surrounded in the northern Afghanistan town of Kunduz, U.S.
authorities
mysteriously allowed the Pakistani air force to carry out nightly
evacuation
flights, with no control over who was being evacuated.
A month later, in
the
border town of Tora Bora, the U.S. military again let Al Qaeda terrorists
off the hook, including possibly bin Laden himself.
While the Bush administration relied on
questionable intelligence to build its case for invading Iraq, it did
nothing about the well-documented nuclear proliferation from Pakistan.
In December 2001, as reports emerged about the
links of Pakistani nuclear scientists to bin Laden, the administration,
already on its one-way street to Iraq, looked the other way.
Absent public pressure from the United States,
Pakistan's nuclear proliferation activities persisted.
Nearly a year after the 9/11 attacks,
Pakistani military planes were observed transporting nuclear weapon
components to North Korea.
Such proliferation continued until at least
December 2003, when a comprehensive global nuclear arms network centered
in Pakistan was discovered.
The Bush administration acquiesced in
Pakistan's claim that the proliferation was an internal affair,
undermining efforts to understand the extent and ramifications of the
network's activities.
Even as the Bush administration touts Pakistan as a key
anti-terror
ally, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, and the pro-Taliban Hamid Gul are now part of
an
oligarchy of ex-military officials that control Pakistan's policies behind
the scenes.
The influence of such people in Pakistan's
top ruling circles may explain the spotty aid Pakistan provides in the
war on terror, the fact that it is quietly working to get members of the
Taliban (and the equally anti-American Hizb-e-Islami) into power in
Afghanistan, and the continued activities of Al Qaeda-related terrorist
groups
within
Pakistan.
Apart from the combustible nuclear-jihadi mix in Pakistan,
there are
other serious threats that have been put on the U.S. foreign policy
backburner
in
the last three years.
With the United States preoccupied in Iraq, North
Korea's unpredictable regime, which has a thriving global rade in
missiles, has
continued its nuclear program and poses a far greater risk of
proliferation than
Saddam Hussein ever did.
In addition, too little attention has been paid
to
securing Russia's Soviet-era nuclear materials, presenting yet another
potential
store of deadly weapons for anti-U.S. terrorists.
Regardless of whether or not U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq
are
successful, this will have no bearing on, for example, one of the myriad
Al Qaeda-related terrorist groups getting its hands on nuclear materials.
In putting all its eggs in the "democratizing"
Iraq basket while neglecting tangible and urgent threats, the Bush
administration has left America perilously exposed.
Such dangers threaten to converge with the new
menace of expanding terrorist networks and funding inspired by damaging
images of U.S. actions in Iraq.
Only a serious effort to disentangle from the Iraq
mess
and
refocus national energies on real security threats will result in getting
back on track in the war on terror.
Subodh Atal is a foreign affairs analyst and a contributor to
the Cato
Institute Special Task Force report "Exiting Iraq: Why the U.S. Must End
the
Military Occupation and Renew the War Against Al Qaeda."
|
