U.S. Aborted Raid on Qaeda Chiefs in Pakistan in ’05
Rushlimbo
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/washington/08intel.html?_r=1&hp&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.”
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.”
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
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Comments
hahahaahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
this from the guy who defended not giving even adequate protection and equipment to troops w/ "you go to war w/ the army you have, not the army you'd like to have"????
yeah, right
i could believe he thought it became too big an operation but not that it put american life in danger
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
I mean, Christ, they used an AlQaeda/Iraq link that was thinner that the paper Doug Feith wrote it on as justification for a full scale ground invaison.
We all know now that all the tough talk about harboring terrorists and with us or against us were all just bluster to provide pretext for an Iraq Invasion.
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan both harbor, explicity support, and train Al Qaeda members (including those involved in 9.11), and fund terrorist groups worldwide - yet they are our allies.
Iraq did neither - and we invaded connect the dots.
great sig
exactly!!!! those 2 countries do faaaaaaar more to support terrorists (like wiring mohammed atta $100,000 a week or so before 9/11) than iraq ever did
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Hail, Hail!!!
Kat?
Because the administration is incompetent.
:(
i disagree... the same excuse has been used for every "failure" or fuck up... katrina, iraq, bin laden, etc, etc, etc
i truly believe the incompetence has been purposeful to fullfil their real agenda. every thing they say is a lie, every thing they do has an alter agenda that is hidden from the masses... and the old "bush is dumb and icompetent" doesnt fly with me at all. they know exactly what they are doing.
you dont graduate from yale and harvard, become governor of Texas, and serve 2 terams as president of the untied states by being dumb or incompetent... it is all an act, and i personally think the act is blatantly obvious, and has worked :(
can't say it better than this.
Yes...but would you agree that when people are doing something instead of what they *should* be doing, it isn't competence?
Love and Peace,
Kat
P.S. And if someone would like to begin a thread with the topic of Pakistan so we can keep up to date on what's happening there...please feel free.
i have to disagree again...
i see competence as the ability to complete a task... their foreign task is oil/energy resources, profit, and hegemony through military and economic dominance. they have no interests in freedom or democracy, history (recent as well) shows it is actually the complete opposite. as of right now it appears as though they are moving right along completing the task they want to complete.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_kathlyn__070221_iraq_labor_vs__exxon.htm
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/48/17344
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/37371/
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/08/19/major_arms_soar_to_twice_pre_911_cost/
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/66/23592
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/47/17453/printer
"The Project for the New American Century seeks to establish what they call 'Pax Americana' across the globe. Essentially, their goal is to transform America, the sole remaining superpower, into a planetary empire by force of arms."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNAC
the sign may have been correct when it stated "mission accomplished"
if this is true, it just shows the incompetence. Worried about relations with Pakistan? We invaded two sovereign countries so far in the name of fighting terrorism, WTF? It's another aspect of Vietnam all over again, the inability to make the tough decisions. You can't fight half ass, I'm against the Iraqi war, but we are there and we need to be strong. This goes for fighting against terrorism everywhere.
Also, who the hell believe's Iraqis will allow Al Qaeda to take over their country like the Bush administration loves to insinuate.
Stop by:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=14678777351&ref=mf
...
If NOT... then, I guess it's okay to shovel money and weapons into their already nuclear capable arsenal, right? And I'm just being a worry wart.
Hail, Hail!!!
I agree 100% with you. I read the story that Kat posted and if Musharraf gets knocked off the States will be in there in a blink of an eye to "help out". They (states) wouldn't and couldn't stand around waiting to see what would happen after their boy is gone. Musharraf is just hanging on by a thread there anyway. If his military turns on him he is toast. And you can't tell me that there is no Muslims making up his military in a Muslim county.
And i don't know if people know this... but, remember who backed the installation of the Taliban in Afghanistan after the Soviets figured out that place was too fucked up to deal with?
Yes... Pakistan.
...
How many hints do Americans need to figure this shit out?
Hint: In a country where the most popular name for their son is Usama... then, there's a good probablility that they are not your ally.
Hail, Hail!!!
-my dad after hearing Not for You for the first time on SNL .
The US needs to eventually be in a position where the Middle East is isolated to the point where they have to deal with their own problems. Not in a position where people can - rightly or wrongly - blame the West for every problem in the area. This won't happen until oil is not the driving force of the world's economy.
What's that?
That's why we should adapt a policy in the region of just buying the fucking opil and saying, "Thanx... mother fuckers."
...
and Israel is a big boy, now. They are tough fighters.... they got nukes... they can take care of themselves. Let THEM figure out a way to co-exist in the region.
Hail, Hail!!!
What is particularly bothersome about Israel to me is the infatuation of evangelical Christians with maintaining it. As a Christian, I find it disturbing that many believe in biblical charge to defend Israel as it exists today. (Not that I necessarily believe in cutting all ties with it.)
I drove by a Baptist church yesterday with an Israeli flag next to the American flag, in fact. One preacher in particular that I've seen on tv, John Hagee, is always preaching how the end is coming soon and trying to connect the apocalyptic dots with Saddam Hussein, bin Laden, China, etc. Disgusting and scary.
There are some... note, I said "Some"... Christians that actually believe that the U.S. should destroy the Temple Mount in Jeruselem so the Jews can reuild the Temple, thus, fulfilling the Phrophecy of Jesus and harken in His return.
...
My guess... this would make Jesus pissed off... death and destruction done in His name... and He'd be coming back to kick some ass. And it's not going to be Heathen non-believer ass... it's going to be death and destruction in Jesus name ass.
Hail, Hail!!!
How funny you mentioned that.
Im Christian as well and lately Ive noticed in political converstions with fam and friends who share the faith, that there is a very strong undercurrent of "pro-Israel".
Which I find stupid and hypocritical for anyone who claims to be a student of the Bible.
So subtly is the fume of life designed
to clarify the pulse and cloud the mind
and leave us once again, undone.. possessed.
...
Be yourself- those who mind dont matter
and those who matter dont mind.
People like this misapply the message of Jesus, purposely or not, to promote their own agendas. They put themselves in an advantageous position politically and religiously while ignoring the message of Christ.
The "kingdom" Jesus preached was by in large spiritual in basis. The idea was that the physical kingdom of the Jews was no longer needed, all are welcome, and the material standards of this world mean nothing in comparison. The last thing Jesus promoted was some sort of call to action to establish a physical kingdom/nation so he could return.