WHY ARE WE STILL CHASING SHADOWS IN AFGHANISTAN?

It is six years since President Bush promised to “smoke out” Osama Bin Laden the way he smoked out the bad guys when he was Governor of Texas. The reality, however, is that there are few signs the man responsible for the attacks of 9/11 is going to be caught soon, or for that matter the drug lords who have made Afghanistan a global hub for heroin and cocaine. So, why is it that given the hi-tech weaponry at our disposal, the vast array of surveillance equipment in the hands of our CIA and military, including spy satellites and drones, as well as the best trained special forces soldiers in the world, we still appear to be chasing shadows?
The reasons are many and complex. Some relate to 2002/2003 when the White House took its eye off Afghanistan and shifted intelligence and resources to Iraq to destroy the Saddam Hussein regime. Now, there is also the continuing debate within NATO about which tactics are best suited to dealing with the Afghan conflict. Some European nations are more concerned with marginalizing the Taliban than looking for Bin Laden and prefer not to adopt a USA policy of direct military action, involving the heavy use of air power. Others oppose allowing Special Forces to operate without permission on the Pakistan side of the Afghan border to deprive Al Qaeda and the Taliban of training sites and to interdict their drug and weapons’ supply routes. There is also the disturbing, even heated debate within NATO with the US warning that some NATO countries, like Germany, have lost their appetite for the fight in Afghanistan. That claim comes at a time when the US military is much too committed in Iraq to send any more ground troops to Afghanistan. To add to this complex tapestry, the Afghan government led by Hamid Karzai is not always been supportive of US policy, while across the border in Pakistan the government there is at best been lukewarm when asked to take control of tribal areas where Bin Laden and his followers are known to have sanctuary.
All of those issues do not, however, fully explain how the Al Qaeda leader and several of his closest advisers have been able to meet journalists and provide video, audio and written messages for television and radio networks. Many of the messages have more often than not found their way onto the worldwide Web. The fact is that terrorists have become smarter at communicating; making it difficult for the major intelligence services like the CIA to track them down using “sweeping devices” designed to intercept radio and telecommunications devices such as mobile phones. Terrorists know that a phone call can be picked out of the ether and can be fed through super computers that not only search for key words but can identify the geographical location of a call. In fact, every second of every hour across the globe there are millions of calls being scanned by giant computers within a secret network controlled by the US and Britain. In response, terrorists have found other ways of communicating to the world by falling back on the simplest of methods. One of those is using trusted couriers - men, women and children, who blend into the population. Then, there is the regular mail in which a simple package or envelope draws little attention. In Afghanistan it is not difficult to find other ways to transport messages. One of the most effective is to rely on “mules” working for drugs lords. They use trails and methods of illegal shipment that have been developed over centuries in Afghanistan. Drug lords need the protection of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and in return they are often prepared to hide messages in drugs being routed to Iran, China, Pakistan or some of the former Russian republics.
Osama Bin Laden and those closest to him have remained secure from detection by hiding out in tribal areas in Pakistan, close to the Afghan border, where the tradition is to guarantee protection to visitors. Luckily for him, the Pakistani military has shown no great desire to subdue those areas in order to capture him. Bin Laden is also well protected by his own internal security apparatus that is shaped like Saturn’s moons with the protective layers moving outwards from the center – those layers are comprised of mature fighters linked by family and tribal connections.
A major reason why it is hard to get to Bin Laden is that unless in intelligence parlance you can “put eyes” on him and his inner circle you cannot determine how the inner circle functions, or devise ways to penetrate it. As a rule, intelligence agencies recruit informants from within an insurgent population and turn them into agents. Those informants are often the most effective agents because they have local knowledge. They are also familiar with local customs and are accepted by their peer groupings. Recruiting and training such agents can take a great deal of time. To recruit them you have to study them, learn their weaknesses and identify how those weaknesses can be exploited through sexual blackmail, financial inducements or clever interrogation methods. In other conflicts, terrorist agents have proved to be highly effective weapons, though sometimes they have also been unreliable because of the very weaknesses that made them vulnerable to recruitment in the first place. Essentially, the use of such agents is the only sure way to break into the Al Qaeda network. Unfortunately, it has not been easy to recruit captured Al Qaeda members because many have gone through anti-interrogation training and would rather die than betray the organization. Some people will dispute that, pointing to the fact that Khaled Sheik Mohammed, the Al Qaeda mastermind, broke under pressure. But, he was subjected to extreme interrogation and we may never know if what he confessed to was the truth. Talking under torture does not mean a person will agree to become a spy or terrorist agent.
In the final analysis, Bin Laden will remain elusive until his inner circle is penetrated by a terrorist agent recruited by the CIA or Pakistani intelligence or until an Al-Qaeda courier is caught close to one of his many hideouts.
As for “smoking out” the drug lords who ship massive quantities of cocaine and heroin out of Afghanistan and share their profits with terrorists there seems little urgency within NATO to find them and bring them to justice. Yet, they present as big a threat as Bin Laden because they help bankroll organized crime across the globe and a nexus between organized crime and terrorism is not simply a fiction. Organized crime syndicates will willingly provide any item that will profit and that could include a canister of enriched uranium. The reasons for the failure of NATO to track down the drugs lords lie once again in the peculiar political tapestry that is Afghanistan. Like Al-Qaeda, drug lords use simple methods to move their drugs and it might not require complex tactics to identify those men, isolate them and arrest them. It would, however, require agreement and a united political will.