Security

Why Pakistan is Qaeda's Best Base

Adam Rawnsley is a research associate at the Center for National Policy. This is his first post for Danger Room. On Capitol Hill, General David Petraeus testified yesterday that al-Qaeda is more likely to launch attacks against America from Pakistan’s tribal areas than from Iraq. Iraq is geographically closer to the United States and Europe, […]

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Adam Rawnsley is a research associate at the Center for National Policy. This is his first post for Danger Room.

On Capitol Hill, General
David Petraeus testified yesterday that al-Qaeda is more likely to launch attacks against America from Pakistan’s tribal areas than from Iraq.

Iraq is geographically closer to the United States and Europe, looms larger in al-Qaeda’s rhetoric and has already provided hundreds of foreign recruits with on-the-job training in state of the art urban terrorism. How so how could Pakistan be Osama's new launching pad?

West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center may have already provided the answer. In a May 2007 report, “Al-Qaeda’s
(mis)Adventures in the Horn of Africa,”
CTC analysts looked into the terrorist group’s early experiences in
East Africa and found that, somewhat counter to conventional wisdom, poorly governed regions of sovereign countries can be better terrorist safe havens than the usual suspects of failed states.

Somalia, far from being a playground for al-Qaeda, was largely a headache for the terror group, CTC explains.

They were prone to extortion and betrayal, found themselves trapped in the middle of incomprehensible
(to them) clan conflicts, faced suspicion from the indigenous population, had to overcome significant logistical constraints and were subject to the constant risk of Western military interdiction.

In contrast, territory in western-oriented
Kenya was quite useful for orchestrating attacks.

*…the state’s poor governance, combined with relative stability and basic infrastructure, created a potential base area from which to support operations in more unstable regions like Somalia and a favorable operational environment to attack lucrative targets within Kenya. More importantly, outside military forces could not conduct operations because of Kenyan sovereignty, yet the state had little ability to interdict the terror group’s actions or effectively police its activities. *

This tracks closely with al-Qaeda’s experiences in Iraq and Pakistan. In Iraq, a state which many have considered failing (at least, until the prime minister started asserting his authority), the
United States enjoys a free hand to use force. Local allies have been unreliable. And the whack-a-mole nature of al-Qaeda’s movement in Iraq from Fallujah to Ramadi to Mosul are less than stable environments to stash the prized Western passport holders useful for an attack inside the US.

Pakistan’s better infrastructure, weak counterterrorism capacity, ambivalent counterterrorism policy, and increasingly prickly sovereignty issues gives al-Qaeda a more stable platform to train, shield and export personnel—everything a terrorist group needs to organize an attack against targets in the
West, as a string of plots now seem to show.

-- Adam Rawnsley

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