"We Will Make No Distinction Between Terrorists and The Countries Who Harbor Them"

One thing is clear from reading the key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate on global terrorism released yesterday; our current strategy of fighting the "war on terror" is a failure. Al Qaeda's strength is surging for a fundamental reason; they've been given safe harbor in the mountainous region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so all of the fuel from American intervention in Mesopotamia has been given a safe place to take root and spread.

For years, the Bush administration has lived in fear of this moment. The formal consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community is that Pakistan's federally administrated tribal areas ("FATA" is the new jargon-y acronym, natch) is al-Qaeda's new "safehaven," where the al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (similarly, AQSL) is reconstituting its "Homeland attack capability." Now comes the hard question: what to do about it? [...]

When considering a global, decentralized network (or movement, if you prefer), it's misleading to suggest that there's a single, fixed "center" that would mean the destruction of the network if defeated. But the effort to avoid affixing special significance on Pakistan arises for a simple reason: neither the administration nor its critics is prepared to invade Pakistan. Even the infiltration of special forces and intelligence assets into the area is potentially destabilizing. Bush once said before 9/11, when casting doubt on a Richard Clarke-authored plan to go after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, that he didn't want to "swat at flies." In Pakistan, fly-swatting is the most anyone has proposed against a well-entrenched AQSL. Welcome back to 2001, when the most robust option against a looming al-Qaeda threat is exactly the one that remains unthinkable.

That leaves the U.S. with just one choice: backing Pervez Musharraf. Townsend attempted to shift away from the conclusion that Musharraf is the central figure in the South Asian theater of the war on terrorism, but it could hardly be otherwise. Until the U.S. is prepared to risk the destabilization of Pakistan by moving U.S. and allied troops into the FATA, there's little other option except getting Musharraf, already on shaky political ground, to clamp down on the area. This is where we are after six years, two wars, 4,000 U.S. troop deaths and around half a trillion dollars -- except with exhausted military resources and far more recruits for al-Qaeda.

It may have caused just as much of an uproar in the Muslim world in late 2001 if the United States entered the FATA and dismantled the Al Qaeda and Taliban networks. Musharraf may have been swallowed up by elements within his country, and we may be as "bogged down" in Pakistan as we are in Iraq. But it would have been the right thing to do. And it would have offered the best opportunity and the strongest argument to rid the world of fundamentalist Islam while respecting the greater majority of moderate Islam worldwide. Instead we have relied on Pakistan, which has done as little as humanly possible to prevent Al Qaeda safe harbor.

President Bush’s top counterterrorism advisers acknowledged Tuesday that the strategy for fighting Osama bin Laden’s leadership of Al Qaeda in Pakistan had failed, as the White House released a grim new intelligence assessment that has forced the administration to consider more aggressive measures inside Pakistan [...]

In identifying the main reasons for Al Qaeda’s resurgence, intelligence officials and White House aides pointed the finger squarely at a hands-off approach toward the tribal areas by Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who last year brokered a cease-fire with tribal leaders in an effort to drain support for Islamic extremism in the region.

“It hasn’t worked for Pakistan,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, who heads the Homeland Security Council at the White House. “It hasn’t worked for the United States.”

This would have been an excellent thing to have figured out six years ago, but now Al Qaeda is dug into the foothills, and they are quite capable of spectacular attacks throughout the nation, while Musharraf is incapable of stopping them in the tribal region. More aggressive measures are bound to be deadly and not guaranteed to work. They had a chance, way back when, before we left the area and turned our attention to Iraq. We can talk about the fiftieth iteration of top Al Qaeda in Iraq leaders being captured, but until we refocus the effort and try to come up with the least-bad option to deal with Al Qaeda where they are regrouping, nothing will improve in our failed war on terror. And certainly not if we continue to keep our troops in a civil war in Iraq, the rationale for which grows more bogus by the day:

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush has been able to deflect criticism of his counterterrorism policy by repeatedly noting the absence of any new domestic attacks and by citing the continuing threat that terrorists in Iraq pose to U.S. interests.

But this line of defense seemed to unravel a bit yesterday with the release of a new National Intelligence Estimate that concludes that al-Qaeda "has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability" by reestablishing a haven in Pakistan and reconstituting its top leadership. The report also notes that al-Qaeda has been able "to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks," by associating itself with an Iraqi subsidiary.

These disclosures triggered a new round of criticism from Democrats and others who say that the administration took its eye off the ball by invading Iraq without first destroying Osama bin Laden's organization in Afghanistan.

Bush tried to blame the whole thing on Al Qaeda in Iraq yesterday, but that argument is wearing thin. It is Al Qaeda - the original elements, reformed and ready for action in Pakistan - that seeks to sow terror among the people of the United States. And yet our government continues to ignore this reality.