Al-Qaeda Outwitted Bush, Neocons

By Robert Parry
October 29, 2009

As security worsens in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is clear that al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies outwitted President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers by tying down U.S. forces in Iraq for five years while the Islamic militants rebuilt their forces for the war on their “central front.”

The growing U.S. casualty list in Afghanistan and the Taliban advances in nuclear-armed Pakistan also underscore the significance of a late 2005 message from a top al-Qaeda operative, known as Atiyah, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was then leading al-Qaeda’s faction in Iraq.

“Prolonging the war is in our interest,” Atiyah said in a letter that upbraided Zarqawi for his reckless and hasty actions. Atiyah, who is believed to be a Libyan named Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, emphasized the need for Zarqawi to operate more deliberately in order to build political strength and drag out the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

(The Atiyah letter was discovered by the U.S. military after Zarqawi was killed by an airstrike in June 2006. To view the “prolonging the war” excerpt in a translation published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, click here. To read the entire letter, click here.)

It's easy to see the logic behind Atiyah's advice. In 2002 and 2003, as Bush redirected U.S. military and intelligence resources to Iraq, al-Qaeda and the Taliban gained a valuable respite. After the U.S. invasion, Bush got bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, giving al-Qaeda and the Taliban more time to revamp and re-arm their forces.

Now, as the Obama administration moves to wind down U.S. involvement in Iraq and shift attention to the Afghan-Pakistan region, that belated interest may be too late to achieve American goals at anything approaching an acceptable cost.


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