Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, Jack Devine, former CIA deputy director of operations and chief of the CIA Afghan Task Force (1986-87), stated: «The US military will not achieve anything resembling victory in Afghanistan (…) It’s time to face this reality » So what? Are all the efforts to build a new Afghanistan doomed? Devine thinks that what did not work for the Soviets will not work for the US either.

Broadly speaking, the Democrats are attacked for their “weakness” or reluctance to lead a “tough” policy against radical Islamism. This might be true only if we recall that those who are in charge of briefing accurately the policy-makers do not always do their job. The presidents may even be victims of misinformation.

Clinton, for instance, had no clue on what Al Qaeda really represented before the attacks against the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, or even on what previous US governments have done, including  “helping” indirectly give rise to radical Islam whose primary mission was then intended to fight communism (particularly in Afghanistan). In any case, the reader of My Life (Clinton’s memoirs) realises that the US President was almost taken aback by the events.  “At first, he said, Bin Laden seemed to be a financier of terrorist operations, but over time we would learn that he was the head of highly sophisticated terrorist organisation, with access to large amounts of money beyond his own fortune,  and with operatives in several countries, including Chechnya, Bosnia and the Philippines.”

But it was not just the president who was misinformed.

In his impressive History of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner said: “At the start of 1993, terrorism was not an issue at the forefront of most minds at the agency.” Much better: “In 1992, there was serious talk about shutting down the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre.” Doesn’t this sound weird in a country that for a decade at least has armed and backed radical Islamists to fight communists in Afghanistan? Not at all, if we  tie this unawareness up to what we called in a previous article “American innocence,” (TGT, July 31, 2010) which is at the basis of the uncanny belief that whatever the US does abroad it is always intended for the “good and the right.” People are therefore expected to be grateful and no bad consequences would ensue.

Anyway, this seems to be the mindset in January 1993, when on the fifth day of Clinton’s era, a slaughter was committed at the gates of the CIA by a Pakistani armed with an AK-47 assault rifle. A month later (February 26), a bomb exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Centre. The head of Al Gama’a Al Islamiyya, Omar Abderrahman now resident of the USA, was charged of the plot. Some years ago, he had helped recruiting hundreds of Arab mujahedeen to fight in Afghanistan. Was that enough to accord him a visa for the USA? The question was never answered.  

Clinton was all the same aware of the fatwa issued by bin Laden in late February 1998,  calling for attacks on US civilian and military targets around the world. He also noted that in May bin Laden had said his militants will strike American targets in the Gulf and the war will be  transferred to  American territory. But nobody paid attention!  “In June, he added, in an interview with an American journalist, he had threatened to bring down US military aircraft with antiaircraft missiles.”

As you know,  Republicans – especially the neo-conservatives among the Bush team – criticised the Democratic administration on its handling of the problem of Islamic radicalism. But did they do better?

In his memoirs, talking about bin Laden, Clinton acknowledged: “Since we had been going after his organisation for several years, I had known for some time that he was a formidable adversary. After the African slaughter I became intently focused on capturing or killing him and with destroying Al Qaeda.”   That is pretty much the kind of message Bush tried to convey since September 11, 2001, seven years during. But when he left, bin Laden was still on the loose  and his organisation still active. Today, it is such an impasse in the Afghan war that all the Western governments (not only the US) are talking about concessions to the Taliban. So, what was the objective of war? To bring them down in order to offer them a part of the “new” Afghanistan? Only a part? What if they are still hungry?

True,  the Afghan Jihad was initialised by the Carter administration (Democrat). But it is no less true that twelve years of successive conservative administrations (Ronald Reagan followed by George H.W. Bush: 1981-1993) did not much better. So if there is a responsibility in this regard, it is probably shared by all of them. For it is a fact that US intelligence cannot escape: All the governments since Carter, had always had intelligence on the Islamist jihad in Afghanistan. Over the years, such data accumulated. But how  useful was it? Clinton acknowledged:  “We had been following bin Laden  for years.” He also recalled that Tony Lake and Dick Clarke had urged the CIA for additional intelligence about him, before pressing Hasan Turabi to expel him from Sudan.  At the CIA, a special unit monitors bin Laden and his network since January 1996. After the Taliban moved to Kabul, this unit had compiled “significant information” on Al Qaeda, according to Clinton.

So, what did they do of all that accumulated intelligence? Why was it useless for the capture of bin Laden and Zawahiri, and why does it seem even useless in the war against global terrorism, since suicide bombings and other operations by Taliban and radical Islamists from Pakistan to Iraq, continue to impede efforts of stabilisation and pacification?

As  former director of the CIA, John Deutch, put it: “The trouble is there’s too much to do,” which resounds much as a defeat acknowledgement, since even for the world most powerful intelligence agency, the “call for global coverage” sounds “impossible to fulfill.”