It's a myth that Iraq is the "central front in the War on Terror." Iraq is the central training ground for al Qaeda. We're giving them the best practice they could ask for against our best weapons, technology, and (evolving) tactics. Al Qaeda doesn't care if this ideal "training session" helps destroy Iraq in the process. But we ought to care.
As soon as we leave Iraq, it will become uninteresting for al Qaeda. They'll take the knowledge and new ideas from Iraq and use them elsewhere.
As this article shows, U.S. intelligence now realizes that al Qaeda has found new leaders, has become even more decentralized (i.e. franchised), and is using Iraq as a training ground to harden a new generation of fighters.
A new generation of Al Qaeda leaders has emerged under Osama bin Laden
By Mark Mazzetti
Monday, April 2, 2007
The New York Times
WASHINGTON: As Al Qaeda rebuilds in Pakistan's tribal areas, a new generation of leaders has emerged under Osama bin Laden to cement control over its operations, U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials say.
The new leaders rose from within the organization after the death or capture of the operatives who built Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. This has led to surprise and dismay within U.S. intelligence agencies about the group's ability to rebound from an American-led offensive.
It has been known that U.S. officials were focusing on a band of Qaeda training camps in Pakistan's remote mountains, but a clearer picture is emerging about those who are running the camps and thought to be involved in plotting attacks.
The American, European and Pakistani authorities have for months been piecing together a picture of the new leadership, based in part on evidence-gathering during terrorism investigations in the last two years.
Particularly important have been interrogations of suspects and material evidence connected to a plot that British and American investigators said they averted last summer to destroy commercial airliners after takeoff from London.
Intelligence officials have also obtained new information about Al Qaeda's structure through intercepted communications between operatives in Pakistan's tribal areas, although officials said the group has a complex network of human couriers to evade electronic eavesdropping.
And the investigation into the airline plot has led officials to conclude that an Egyptian paramilitary commander called Abu Ubaidah al-Masri was the Qaeda operative in Pakistan orchestrating the attack, officials said.
Masri, a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan, is believed to travel frequently over the rugged border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was long thought to be in charge of militia operations in Kunar Province in Afghanistan, but he emerged as one of Al Qaeda's senior operatives after the death of Abu Hamza Rabia, another Egyptian, who was killed by a U.S. missile strike in Pakistan in 2005.
The evidence officials said was accumulating about Masri and a handful of other Qaeda figures has led to a reassessment within the U.S. intelligence community about the strength of the group's core in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and its role in some of the most significant terrorism plots of the last two years, including the airline plot and the suicide attacks in London in July 2005 that killed 56 people.
Although the core leadership was weakened in the counterterrorism campaign begun after the Sept. 11 attacks, intelligence officials now say it was not as crippled as they once thought.
The reassessment has brought new urgency to joint Pakistani-American operations in Pakistan and strengthened a belief among officials that dismantling Al Qaeda's infrastructure there could disrupt large-scale terrorist plots that may already be under way.
In February, the deputy director of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, accompanied Vice President Dick Cheney to Islamabad to present General Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, with intelligence on Al Qaeda's growing abilities and to develop a strategy to strike at training camps.
Officials from several American intelligence agencies interviewed for this article agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because the Qaeda assessments are classified.
U.S. officials have said in recent years that the roles of bin Laden and his lieutenants in Pakistan's remote mountains had diminished with the growing prominence of the branch in Iraq, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and the emergence of regional terrorism networks and so-called homegrown cells.
That view, in part, led the CIA in late 2005 to disband Alec Station, the unit that for a decade was devoted to hunting bin Laden and his closest advisers, and reassign analysts within the agency's Counterterrorist Center to focus on Al Qaeda's expanding reach.
Officials believe that, in contrast with the somewhat hierarchical structure of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, the group's leadership is now more diffuse, with several planning hubs working autonomously and not reliant on constant contact with bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his deputy.
Much is still not known about the backgrounds of the new Qaeda leaders; some have adopted noms de guerre. They are said to be mostly in their mid-30s and have years of battlefield experience fighting in places like Afghanistan and Chechnya.
Experts said that they still see Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as largely independent of the Qaeda hub in Pakistan but that they believe the fighting in Iraq will produce future Al Qaeda leaders.
"The jihadis returning from Iraq are far more capable than the mujahedeen who fought the Soviets ever were," said Robert Richer, who was associate director of operations in 2004 and 2005 for the CIA. "They have been fighting the best military in the world, with the best technology and tactics."
American officials said they still knew little about how operatives communicate with bin Laden and Zawahiri.
"There has to be some kind of communication up the line," one senior intelligence official said, "we just don't see it."
U.S. officials said they did not believe any one figure had taken over the role once held by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the operations chief who was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and is being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Top U.S. officials said that, despite the damage to Al Qaeda's structure since the Sept. 11 attacks, concern is still high that it is determined to attack globally.
"To say that Al Qaeda was out of business simply because they have not attacked in the U.S. is whistling past the graveyard," said Michael Scheuer, a former head of the bin Laden tracking unit at the CIA. "Al Qaeda is still humming along, and with a new generation of leaders."
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