You got to read this and think about it before the depth of the doo doo we're in hits you.
Latest Tape Reveals Lack Of US Information On Enemy Number 1
On Thursday afternoon, I met with 'a senior intelligence official' directly involved in the intelligence used to track down terrorists. It was a long-scheduled meeting, but the timing was good, since I would have a chance to ask him about the attempt to kill Ayman al Zawahiri and a new Osama bin Laden tape which had been aired just that morning. He had been out of the office all morning and did not know about the bin Laden tape, and before I could ask him about it he started telling me that it had been so long since there’d been so much as a peep from bin Laden that he was becoming increasingly convinced the leader of al Qaida was dead. I interrupted to tell him about the new tape and that ended the discussion about whether bin Laden was dead.
Only afterwards did the significance of what he was saying strike me. This is a person who sees all the intelligence on bin Laden, and he was telling me that for over a year – bin Laden’s last tape appeared in December 2004 – there has not been a shred of evidence to indicate he is even alive, much less where he might be hiding. In other words, the vast $40 billion a year intelligence apparatus of the United States has not turned up a single credible report about bin Laden in over a year – despite an offer of a $25 million reward for information leading to his death or capture. During that year, the U.S. has captured and interrogated al Qaida’s number three man and tracked the number two man, Zawahiri, with enough precision to launch an air strike. But nothing on the number one man – until an audio tape is broadcast by an Arab satellite network.
Part of the problem is that we're expending moneys to expand the theatre of the war on terror to include a (formerly) uninvolved populace (and source of future recruits). But the big thing here is that even our top experts just don't understand the region and the players in the northern Pakistan/Afghanistan area. We're just "lobbing missiles at camel's butts" as Bush once vowed not to do, and not really getting anything done... except of course training terrorists for the day that they'll bring the fight back to our shores.
The saddest part is that two or three years ago we actually had Afghanistan mostly won. There were still Talibanis holed up in the mountains, but the mass of the country was pacified and moving toward finding a working relationship with the government we'd installed there. It was Iraq that turned Afghanistan back around, with the violence and public support for Islamist radicals resurging, by showing the Muslim world that the Great Satan really was just out to emaculate them.
God what a mess.
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