The Liberty Papers

According to a report in the New York Times, the Bush Administration passed on an opportunity to strike at the senior leadership of al Qaeda because they considered the mission “too risky”:

WASHINGTON, July 7 — A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

Quite frankly, this is exactly the type of thing that conservatives have criticized Bill Clinton for in the years leading up to 9/11. There was an opportunity back then to strike a bin Laden and the Clinton Administration called it off because it was, allegedly, too risky. The price of that of course, was 3,000 people dead and a big hole in the at the tip of Manhattan Island. You’d think that we would’ve learned our lesson, but apparently we haven’t.

And the primary reason for calling off the raid appears to have been fear that we’d piss off the government of Pakistan, our supposed ally in the War on Terror:

Officials said one reason Mr. Rumsfeld called off the 2005 operation was that the number of troops involved in the mission had grown to several hundred, including Army Rangers, members of the Navy Seals and C.I.A. operatives, and he determined that the United States could no longer carry out the mission without General Musharraf’s permission. It is unlikely that the Pakistani president would have approved an operation of that size, officials said.

Some outside experts said American counterterrorism operations had been hamstrung because of concerns about General Musharraf’s shaky government.

“The reluctance to take risk or jeopardize our political relationship with Musharraf may well account for the fact that five and half years after 9/11 we are still trying to run bin Laden and Zawahri to ground,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.

And thanks to that, bin Laden and al Qaeda essentially have a safe haven in Pakistan.

Originally posted at Below The Beltway