Iraq: The Long Detour >From The War on Terror

By Subodh Atal

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 trade 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.