Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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From the new Kerry/Edwards campaign book, "Our Plan for America: Stronger at Home, Respected in the World," Page 11:

"After allowing bin Laden to escape from our grasp at Tora Bora, he diverted crucial resources from the effort to destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan to fight the war in Iraq."

First, as Reuel Marc Gerecht has pointed out, if John Kerry actually believed back then that the Iraq war would imperil America's war on al-Qaeda, "then his vote for it was inexcusably reckless."

It's easy for Monday morning quarterbacks like Kerry, Edwards and Al Franken to suggest that had the U.S. put more troops on the ground during the first weeks of the war against the Taliban, that al-Qaeda's leadership would be captured or dead now. But Gerecht concludes, "With the possible exception of the deep jungles of the Amazon, the southeastern border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan is the worst area imaginable to play a lethal version of hide and seek. You could pour tens of thousands of troops into that terrain and only marginally improve the chances of finding your target."

The hunt for Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the rest of al-Qaeda's head honchos is complicated today by the terrain, the complications of finding individual persons over a large area, the loyalties of the local tribes, and cooperation from the Pakistanis, particularly how much their intelligence services can be trusted.

Is finding bin Laden just a matter of troop quantity? If we just piled the 130,000 or so U.S. troops currently in Iraq onto the Afghan-Pakistani border, would we find Osama and Ayman? Or would the whole region rebel against the U.S. troops and the Pakistani government? If we were facing a conventional mechanized army under the Taliban, with tanks and artillery and armored personnel carriers, more troops would make sense. But the remaining Taliban types and al-Qaeda in the region are bands of irregulars that look like something out of a Mad Max movie. Quick-hitting, mobile groups of special forces and airstrikes seem like the better tool.

It's also worth noting that bin Laden & company are believed to be on the Pakistani side of the border, and officially, that part of the hunt is supposed to be handled by the Pakistani military. If American special forces are hunting on Pakistani territory (pure speculation, but it doesn't seem unlikely), it makes sense to use these small, light, specially-trained troops who can blend in with the locals. If Kerry and Edwards sent large numbers of troops barrelling over the border into Pakistan, it would likely create an international incident that would embarrass Musharraf and create a huge confrontation in the Arab world. Perhaps Sen. Kerry doesn't grasp the finer nuances of international relations.

The argument that Iraq distracts from the war on terror is weakened by the fact that some of the biggest successes against al-Qaeda have occurred during the run-up to the war, during the war, and while U.S. troops have remained in Iraq stabilizing the country. The U.S. and its allies have captured Khalid Sheik Mohammed, (al-Qaeda's #3), Hambali (the Bali bombing mastermind), Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (East Africa embassy bomber) Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan (al-Qaeda's communications man and planner). Al-Qaeda's Saudi commander, Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin, and Abdullah al-Roshood, al-Qaeda's "spiritual leader" got whacked in Saudi Arabia not long ago. In Jordan, Azmi al-Jayousi, the alleged mastermind of the Jordan-based terror cell who was captured in April, confessed to military prosecutors about what would have been al-Qaida's first chemical attack targetting Americans in Amman. The British claim to have just arrested "a senior Al-Qaeda operative."

[Posted 08/04 05:36 PM]