A senior US intelligence official is about
to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism
policy, arguing that the West is losing the war against
Al Qaeda and that an "avaricious, premeditated ,
unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin
Laden's hands.
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing
the War on Terror, due out next month, dismisses two of
the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that
Osama and Al Qaeda are "on the run" and that
the Iraq invasion has made America safer.
In an interview with the London-based
Guardian newspaper the official, who writes as "Anonymous",
described Al Qaeda as a much more proficient and focused
organization than it was in 2001, and predicted that it
would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction
and try to use them.
He said Osama was probably "comfortable"
commanding his organization from the mountainous tribal
lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Pakistani army claimed a big success in the "war
against terror" on Friday with the killing of a tribal
leader, Nek Mohamed, who was one of Al Qaeda's protectors
in Waziristan.
Imperial Hubris is the latest in a relentless
stream of books attacking the administration in election
year. Most of the earlier ones, however, were written
by embittered former officials.
This one is unprecedented in being the
work of a serving official with nearly 20 years experience
in counter-terrorism who is still part of the intelligence
establishment.
The fact that he has been allowed to publish,
albeit anonymously and without naming which agency he
works for, may reflect the increasing frustration of senior
intelligence officials at the course the administration
has taken.
Peter Bergen, the author of two books
on Osama and Al Qaeda, said: "His (Anonymous) views
represent an amped-up version of what is emerging as a
consensus among intelligence counter-terrorist professionals."
Anonymous does not try to veil his contempt
for the Bush White House and its policies. His book describes
the Iraq invasion as "an avaricious, premeditated,
unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat
but whose defeat did offer economic advantage.
"Our choice of timing, moreover,
shows an abject, even wilful failure to recognize the
ideological power, lethality and growth potential of the
threat personified by Osama bin Laden, as well as the
impetus that threat has been given by the US-led invasion
and occupation of Muslim Iraq."
In his view, the US missed its biggest
chance to capture the Al Qaeda leader at Tora Bora in
the Afghan mountains in December 2001. Instead of sending
large numbers of his own troops, General Tommy Franks
relied on surrogates who proved to be unreliable.
"For my money, the game was over
at Tora Bora," Anonymous said. On Friday President
Bush repeated his assertion that Osama was cornered and
that there was "no hole or cave deep enough to hide
from American justice".
Anonymous said: "I think we overestimate
significantly the stress (Osama's) under. Our media and
sometimes our policymakers suggest he's hiding from rock
to rock and hill to hill and cave to cave. My own hunch
is that he's fairly comfortable where he is."
The death and arrest of experienced operatives
might have set back Osama's plans to some degree but when
it came to his long- term capacity to threaten the US,
he said, "I don't think we've laid a glove on him".
"What I think we're seeing in Al
Qaeda is a change of generation," he said."
The people who are leading Al Qaeda now seem a lot more
professional group. "They are more bureaucratic,
more management competent, certainly more literate.
Certainly, this generation is more computer
literate, more comfortable with the tools of modernity.
I also think they're much less prone to being the Errol
Flynns of Al Qaeda.
They're just much more careful across
the board in the way they operate." As for weapons
of mass destruction, he thinks that if Al Qaeda does not
have them already, it will inevitably acquire them.
The most likely source of a nuclear device
would be the former Soviet Union, he believes. Dirty bombs,
chemical and biological weapons, could be home-made by
Al Qaeda's own experts, many of them trained in the US
and Britain.
Anonymous, who published an analysis of
Al Qaeda last year called Through Our Enemies' Eyes, thinks
it quite possible that another devastating strike against
the US could come during the election campaign, not with
the intention of changing the administration, as was the
case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one
in place.
"I'm very sure they can't have a
better administration for them than the one they have
now," he said. "One way to keep the Republicans
in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country
around the president."
The White House has yet to comment publicly
on Imperial Hubris, which is due to be published on July
4, but intelligence experts say it may try to portray
him as a professionally embittered maverick.
The tone of Imperial Hubris is certainly
angry and urgent, and the stridency of his warnings about
Al Qaeda led him to be moved from a highly sensitive job
in the late nineties.
But Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief
of operations at the CIA counter-terrorism centre, said
he had been vindicated by events. "He is very well
respected, and looked on as a serious student of the subject."
Anonymous believes Mr Bush is taking the
US in exactly the direction Osama wants, towards all-out
confrontation with Islam under the banner of spreading
democracy. He said: "It's going to take 10,000-15,000
dead Americans before we say to ourselves: 'What is going
on?'" -Dawn/The Guardian News Service
