If you checked out yesterday’s Worldwide Threat briefing, you could be forgiven for checking your calendar to see if it was still September 10, 2001. Discussing al-Qaeda, John McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, described a metastasizing threat coming from… the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
This year will be “pivotal” for Afghanistan, McConnell said. From the NYT:
Mr. McConnellâs assessment was grim: âLong-term prospects for eliminating the Taliban threat appear dim, so long as the sanctuary remains in Pakistan, and there are no encouraging signs that Pakistan is eliminating it. ââ
Thanks in large part to Pakistan’s toleration of al-Qaeda’s growing presence in North Waziristan, it’s questionable whether the western troops will be able to even arrest what McConnell called the “resurgence” of Taliban and allied (read: al-Qaeda) forces. Last month, the outgoing U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Lt. General Karl Eikenberry, said that cross-border Taliban raids for December were up a staggering 200 percent. And a new report from the Jamestown Foundation finds that, although their effectiveness is questionable, there were nearly as many suicide-bombing attacks in the first seven weeks of 2007 as in all of 2005.
The response from the White House? Earlier this month, President Bush announced plans to extend the tours of 3,200 troops in Afghanistan for four months. This makes the U.S.-Nato troop presence the largest it’s been since the 2001 war. But nearly all analysts consider Afghanistan to be an undermanned war — and, worse yet, a winnable war whose prospects are deteriorating in the face of compounding, unforced errors.
It’s surely too extreme to say that the system is blinking red, as it was in the fateful summer of 2001. But McConnell declared himself “very concerned” that al-Qaeda’s presence in Pakistan presents the “most likely” gestation of the next 9/11-style attack on America. In other words, after two wars, we’re in some sense right back where we were before 9/11 itself: unable to invade the territory where al-Qaeda possesses a stronghold and groping for alternatives, while the intelligence community puts out warnings about the urgency of the threat. Except this time, our entire national-security apparatus is overtaxed from the strains of two wars — wars that were supposed to significantly diminish, if not remove, the very threat that’s regaining strength.
