On Al Qaeda's vulnerabilities

The bad news for Al Qaeda - that is if what James Clapper, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence testified before the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committee has any basis in reality. Here are some excerpts from his written statement.

First, something of a preamble:

A war is not an engineering project, in which all the tasks and challenges can be laid out ahead of time and accomplished according to a pre-determined schedule. As the troops say, “the enemy gets a vote.”

Then a defense of Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff and his apparent lack of ability or interest in controlling the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border - that is, the area where Al Qaeda is supposed to be hiding:

This is a wild and remote area over which the government of Pakistan (and the British before them) has never fully gained control. President Musharraf has tried various approaches to dealing with this problem, and has lost about 500 personnel in the process of trying to establish law and order in the FATA. Musharraf has also tried political measures to eliminate al Qaeda and the Taliban from the FATA, including making a deal with the local tribal leaders in one of the agencies under which they prevent the use of their territory as a launching pad for attacks into Afghanistan. This agreement, the North Waziristan Agreement, has not been successful, as the Pakistani government admits. While one could debate the wisdom of trying to conclude such agreements, I don’t think it is fair to charge Musharraf with being ignorant of the problem or being unwilling to deal with it. If only because of their various attempts to assassinate him, and the loss of hundreds of his soldiers, he clearly understands the extremist threat.

The news, Clapper says, isn't all bad in Pakistan:

The recent Red Mosque crisis has heightened the extremist Islamist threat in Pakistan, and brought the struggle between extremists and the mainstream to the fore.

At the same time, there are signs of a reaction against the extremists. On April 17, 2007, a convention attended by over 2,000 Pakistani religious figures in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's ethnically Pashtun North-West Frontier Province (which includes the FATA), proclaimed that suicide bombings were against Islam and condemned the forcible implementation and enforcement of Shari’a (Islamic Law). Also, internal disputes in Pakistan's tribal agency of South Waziristan recently erupted into conflict between Taliban-allied local tribes and al Qaeda-allied Central Asian groups, mostly Uzbeks. Uzbek forces offended local Pashtun groups by their criminal activity and insensitivity to local tribal customs, resulting in open warfare between locals and Central Asian fighters.

Clapper says that while Al Qaeda might be resourceful as the NIE recently suggested, it's also stupid (I'm paraphrasing here, Clapper actually said it has "weaknesses and vulnerabilities"). As he writes:

At the strategic level, I think his greatest weakness is his tendency to overreach; perhaps not surprisingly, a movement that fosters a cult of violence and death has difficulty restraining itself when violence is not in its best interests.

In Iraq, for example, al Qaeda in Iraq’s excessive violence – directed not only against Shi’a civilians but against fellow Sunnis, including insurgents, who failed to toe the al Qaeda line -- has resulted in a backlash. Iraqis in Anbar province made common cause with U.S. and Iraqi security forces against al Qaeda’s attempt to convince Iraq’s Sunni Arabs that its objective of an Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) is the only alternative to the Shia-dominated Iraqi Government. Even insurgent groups such as the Islamic Army in Iraq openly rejected the ISI and criticized them as a foreign terrorist group that has divided Iraqi society. Inspired by successes in the Anbar province, other provinces such as Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, mobilized against the ISI, who by then were on the run in Anbar.