The New Yorker: Fact: "if they had not gone to Iraq they would have found Osama by now. The best people were moved away from this operation. The best minds were moved to Iraq. It’s a great shame. It’s the biggest military failure in the war on terrorism so far.
Many intelligence insiders, however, shared Gunaratna’s concerns. Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. official, said that the effort to find bin Laden had “lost at least half of its original strength.” He added, “Arabic speakers are in short supply. You still have some intelligence-collection assets in Afghanistan, but mostly it’s just small teams looking for signals. That’s because of Iraq.”
...on the eve of the bombing of Baghdad, the Bush Administration peremptorily drafted an announcement declaring that in Afghanistan the military was moving to “stability operations,” a euphemism for military deescalation. “They wanted to make it sound as if there were just a few more stitches needed in the quilt,” he said. At the time, in fact, Beers believed that the security situation in Afghanistan was so unstable that Al Qaeda might reconstitute itself there. For instance, a recent U.N. report found that the average number of attacks per month on coalition forces rose from around nine last year to more than thirty since the beginning of 2003.
The Administration, Beers said, ignored such concerns. “They didn’t want to call attention to the fact that Osama was still at large and living along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, because they wanted it to look like the only front was Iraq,” he said. “Otherwise, the question becomes: If Afghanistan is that bad, why start another war?”"
- posted by geoff @ #