July 25, 2007	Wednesday	Rajab 09, 1428

NEW YORK, July 24: Two former US counter-terrorism experts have advocated US action inside Pakistan against ‘Al Qaeda bases’, saying that a daring operation inside Pakistan was necessary to take out Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahri.

“We have failed in Pakistan, and are failing in Iraq, to achieve a primary aim of our counterterrorism policy: preventing Al Qaeda from acquiring safe havens,” former counterterrorism experts Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon told New York Times on Tuesday.

They also said that such an operation be handled by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as Pentagon had failed to deliver.

They said that an operation inside the tribal areas to eliminate the Al Qaeda leadership would be extremely difficult “but not impossible”

“An operation in Pakistan's tribal areas — setting aside the issue of whether this could politically upend President Pervez Musharraf — would be extremely difficult. But it is hard to believe it is impossible.”

They observed that “our military has shown itself to be a poor instrument for fighting terrorism, and there are now thousands of jihadists who weren’t in Iraq at the time of the 2003 invasion.”

They maintained that “with new leadership at both the CIA and the Defence Department, the Bush administration has a chance to fix this problem.

“The missing ingredient for success with the most important kind of counter-terrorism missions is not courage or technical capacity — our uniformed personnel are unsurpassed — but organizational culture. With a small fraction of the resources that Pentagon has for special operations, the CIA could develop the paramilitary capacity we profoundly need.

“When the inevitable American drawdown occurs, we will need a way to keep the terrorists off balance in Iraq and to disrupt the conveyor belt that is already moving fighters to places like Lebanon, North Africa and Europe,” they said.

“While the CIA doesn’t have an unblemished record, its counter-terrorism operations have shown more promise than the Pentagon’s,” they said.

They said that senior officers, trained to understand the American way of war to mean overwhelming force and superior firepower, viewed special operations outside a war zone as something to be avoided at all cost.

This has been true even in lower-risk efforts to capture war criminals in the Balkans. The record demonstrates that our military is simply incapable of adapting its culture to embrace such operations. The Pentagon should just stop planning for missions it won’t launch,” they observed.