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Ex-CIA Official: Al-Qaida Fully Operational

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The United States and our allies "are not experiencing a resurgence of al-Qaida and Taliban action, with the suggestion of spontaneous, unplanned attacks that designation carries,” writes Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran with the CIA, who created and served as the chief of the agency's Osama bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center.

Writing in the May 21 issue of American Conservative magazine, the author of "Imperial Hubris” says that we are seeing "the early to early-middle phases of a long-planned campaign to reclaim Afghanistan for Islam. America’s opponents are not swinging wildly at us,” he insists, but "are progressing along a path they have delineated with patience, common sense, and professionalism.”

That "patience, common sense and professionalism" was evident, he writes, when knowing that 9/11 was due to happen, "al-Qaida was able to move important operatives, archives, materiel, and other assets out of Afghanistan in advance."

According to Scheuer, those al-Qaida fighters who remained behind to fight the U.S.-led coalition "came from the organization’s insurgent arm — which is al-Qaida’s largest component — and, according to the U.S. military, they turned in an excellent combat performance before withdrawing to Pakistan and elsewhere."

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  As a result, U.S.-led forces were never fighting mere remnants, but a professional insurgent force that had no intention of standing and dying in the face of overwhelming American power. Al-Qaida commanders, he explained "applied to the letter Mao’s guerrilla-war lessons and their own experience fighting the Red Army."

Al-Qaida emerged from Afghanistan in good shape, Scheuer wrote, and had "little need to regroup, if regrouping is defined, as it has been by U.S. officials, as a thoroughly defeated military force trying to pull its fractured pieces back together."

Instead, "al-Qaida simply moved from one safe haven to another—from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s Pashtun-dominated border provinces. From there, with the Taliban, it began to plot the re-conquest of Afghanistan." He quotes Sayf al-Adl, al-Qaida’s then-military commander as writing that bin Laden, Mullah Omar, the Taliban's one-eyed leader, and their associates concluded that it would take about seven years to re-establish Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

Says Scheuer, "Al-Qaida made its plans on that timetable and sent many of its insurgent fighters home to rest until they were needed. Far from regrouping, al-Qaida decided to disperse and wait. Al-Adl adds that many of these fighters were in tears when they learned they would not immediately fight the U.S. military. Presumably their tears have now turned to grins."

Having failed to defeat or even permanently impair al-Qaida Central — the forces commanded by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri — Scheuer explains that "we now confront a substantial number of al-Qaida franchises, 29 of whom have publicly declared their presence in such places as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt."

Terrorism experts, Scheuer wrote, "typically describe these franchises as replacing the al-Qaida threat that the military claims to have mopped up. This is incorrect."

Instead, he writes: "Al-Qaida Central remains in business and able to attack the United States. The franchises form a second tier of threats in their local areas. In other words, where there was once one threat, there are now many. The proliferation of these franchises also underscores bin Laden’s startling ability to continue inspiring and instigating Islamists to jihad despite his infrequent media appearances."

As a result we are now witnessing a full scale, long-planned campaign to bring Afghanistan back into the radical Islamic fold, and not merely a rebirth of long quiessant al-Qaida and Taliban activity.

Scheuer sharply delineates the insurgent forces the U.S. and its allies are facing in Iraq and Afghanistan from what he calls al-Qaida's "special forces" who plan and execute terror plots such as 9/11 and the London subway bombing attacks.

"Our political and military leaders have swallowed the theory that al-Qaida is a 'terrorist group,' so they believe, and have told Americans, that by fighting al-Qaida on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are preventing attacks in the United States." Nothing, he says, "could be farther from the truth, and quotes Thomas Jefferson as saying 'The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits that favor that theory.'"

The fact is that the al-Qaida forces we are fighting in those two countries are the group’s insurgent forces, not its "special forces," who he defines as those who attacked Washington and New York on 9/11.

"As noted, those forces left Afghanistan before the U.S. Marines landed and have been planning new attacks since then in Pakistan’s border provinces, Saudi Arabia, Britain, and other secure locations in Europe, across the Muslim world, and perhaps even in the United States and Canada."

Among his other chilling points: