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Obama got it right
Michael Ross, National Post
Published:Â Wednesday, August 08, 2007It's not every day that a leading Democratic presidential nominee talks like a post-9/11 neo-con Republican. But that's exactly what Barack Obama sounded like in a recent speech calling for unilateral action to hunt down al-Qaeda in Pakistan -- with or without Pakistani permission.
Many pundits --including the Post's own Colby Cosh -- have condemned Obama for reckless sabre-rattling. But Obama is right. Whether or not he becomes president, we should be thanking him for finally talking about the elephant in the room that everyone else seems determined to ignore.
Since 9/11, the West has been combating al-Qaeda and its affiliated transnational terrorist confederates in Afghanistan, Iraq, southeast Asia and the horn of Africa. And yet very little has been done at al-Qaeda's organizational epicentre in Pakistan's northwestern tribal badlands, where the group's leaders are allowed to operate in relative security. Every time that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, release their taped messages for the world's media outlets, it becomes readily apparent that neither man is living in a cave, unwashed, starved and on the run. They look well-fed, relaxed and in control of their environment. They also have access to studio-grade production equipment and advanced communication facilities. All this should tell us something about how reliable Pakistan has become as a partner in the war on terror.
True, Pakistan's military leader, Pervez Musharraf, walks a tightrope between maintaining a relatively stable pro-Western government and provoking his country's Islamists. But in recent years, his own government apparatus actually has become part of the problem: Extremists within his intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), are helping the country's Islamists expand their fiefdoms.
The ties between terrorist groups and Pakistan's ISI date back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The subsequent U.S.-backed insurgency against Moscow's puppet government in Kabul put Pakistan on the front line of the Cold War. It was during this period that Pakistan's ISI, supported by Washington, provided weapons and
training to the Afghan mujahedeen. It was from the ranks of these same mujahedeen that al-Qaeda's leadership emerged to attack the jihadis' original Western sponsors.
After the Soviets left in 1989, senior elements in Pakistan's ISI maintained their close relationship with Afghan-based mujahedeen. In 1998, for instance, when the United States hit al-Qaeda training camps in retaliation for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, several ISI members were among those killed. None other than Lieutenant General Mahmoud Ahmad, the ISI's head until October, 2001, was himself an al-Qaeda confederate and devoted Islamic fundamentalist at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
Whole swaths of Pakistan's "federally-administered tribal areas" are anything but federally administered, and have been taken over by an assortment of extremist groups -- such as Harakat-ul Ansar, Al Umar, Al Barq, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Toiba-- seeking to wage jihad. If Canadians and other NATO soldiers are being killed in Afghanistan at the hands of the Taliban, it is because the Taliban are allowed to train and equip themselves in Pakistan.
While I am not advocating a full-scale invasion of Pakistan, I do not think it is controversial to suggest -- as Obama has -- that Western nations should feel free to collect intelligence and conduct targeted military operations in Pakistan's wild west without first asking permission. If Pakistan won't police these areas, somebody has to.
Moreover, it is not as if the West hasn't tried "soft power" to solve this problem. Western intelligence services, and in particular the Central Intelligence Agency, have been trying valiantly to bring Pakistan's ISI into the fold for years. This would be a case of military action being used as a last resort.
The best case scenario, of course, would be if Pakistan reined in al-Qaeda on its own initiative. Perhaps Obama's musings might provide Musharraf with a little prodding in that regard, especially if other candidates from both Democratic and Republican ranks said the same thing. The unanimous message must be that if Pakistan's leader doesn't clean out the ISI and become a serious partner in the long war on terror, Western soldiers, spies and pilots will do the job themselves.
-Michael Ross is a former Israeli combat engineer and Mossad agent, now living in British Columbia. A memoir of his service to Israel, The Volunteer, was published in April by McClelland & Stewart.
mr.ross@shaw.ca
