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| Terror Networks |
| Al-Qaeda is dwindling in Afghanistan and Iraq |
| 2008-05-03 |
| The most interesting discovery during a visit to Jalalabad, where Osama bin Laden planted his flag in 1996, is that Al-Qaeda seems to have all but disappeared. The group is on the run, too, in Iraq, and that raises some interesting questions about how to pursue this terrorist enemy in the future. "Al-Qaeda is not a topic of conversation here," says Colonel Mark Johnstone, the deputy commander of Task Force Bayonet, which oversees four provinces surrounding Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. Lieutenant Colonel Pete Benchoff agrees: "We're not seeing a lot of Al-Qaeda fighters. They've shifted here to facilitation and support." You hear the same story farther north from the officers who oversee the provinces along the Pakistan border. A survey conducted last November and December in Nuristan, once an Al-Qaeda stronghold, found that the group barely registered as a security concern among the population. The enemy in these eastern provinces is a loose amalgam of insurgent groups, mostly linked to traditional warlords. It's not the Taliban, much less Al-Qaeda. "I don't use the word 'Taliban,'" says Alison Blosser, a State Department political adviser to the military commanders in Jalalabad, in the sector known as Regional Command East. "In RC East we have a number of disparate groups. Command and control are not linked up. The young men will fight for whoever is paying the highest rate." The picture appears much the same in RC South, where British and Canadian troops have faced some of the toughest battles of the war. Members of the British-led Provincial Reconstruction Team in Helmand Province describe an insurgency that is tied to the opium mafia - hardly a bastion of Islamic fundamentalism. Traveling to the British headquarters in Lashkar Gah in a low-flying Lynx helicopter, you pass mile after mile of poppy fields - and hundreds of Afghan men in turbans and baggy trousers out harvesting the resin that will be turned into opium. British military officers and diplomats describe the core problems in their sector as bad governance, corruption and lack of economic development, not a resurgent Al-Qaeda or Taliban. Terrorist attacks such as the recent assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai demonstrate that insurgents are still able to create havoc. Indeed, the statistics gathered by the NATO-led coalition show that civilian and military casualties are up this year. That instability undermines the good work of the development projects. But commanders say it's spasmodic violence, rather than a sustained and coordinated campaign by a tightly knit Al-Qaeda. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 Killing does tend to dwindle those killed. |
| Posted by: George Smiley 2008-05-03 07:09 |