AL QAEDA AND THE TALIBAN ARE DEAD WITHOUT PAKISTAN

Mark Siegel is scrambling to keep the dysfunctional couple together, but the shotgun marriage of a decade ago is doomed.

Mr. Siegel parlayed service with President Jimmy Carter and several Democrats in Congress into a partnership at Lord Locke Strategies, the lobbying firm the government of Pakistan pays $75,000 a month.

That’s been a bargain for Pakistan, which since 9/11 has received more than $20 billion in U.S. aid.  President Obama plans to send them another $3 billion next year.

Pakistan needs the money desperately.  But foreign aid for Pakistan has become a harder sell.

"To enable (Osama bin Laden) to live in Pakistan in a military community for six years, I just don’t believe it was done without some form of complicity," said Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-CA, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.  "The relationship makes less and less sense to me."

Sen. Feinstein understates.  Pakistan‘s Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) is a terrorist organization, say interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, according to a 2007 document made public by Wikileaks last month.  A British intelligence report leaked in 2006 reached the same conclusion.

The ISI created the Taliban in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, and planned the terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008 in which 166 people — six of them Americans — were killed.

The ISI runs Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terror group that attacked Mumbai, Indian intelligence thinks.  Does the ISI run al Qaeda too?

Every major international terror group is sponsored by a state, because it needs things only a state can provide: sanctuaries in which to rest and train, travel documents, intelligence, weapons and explosives which are not available commercially.

This obvious truth was, well, obvious into the mid-1990s, at which point some "experts" in think tanks declared that private transnational groups — as al Qaeda was said then to be — were the wave of the future in terrorism.

This nonsense was spouted chiefly to provide President Bill Clinton with an excuse for not confronting the terror supporting states of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.  Captured documents indicate that long before 9/11, bin Laden had contacts with the ISI, and with Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service.

Al Qaeda "is a symptom, not a cause," says Ralph Peters, who knows Pakistan well, in TTP column this week.  "Without Saudi money and Pakistani protection, al Qaeda would be just as relevant as VHS cassettes."

In his excellent 2009 book, "Deadly Connections," Daniel Byman of the Saban Center for Middle East Studies argues that the role states play in terrorism has actually been increased by the technological developments those think tank "experts" said make independent transnational terror groups possible.  

Mr. Byman shows how al Qaeda was involved first with the Islamist regime in Sudan, then with the Taliban in Afghanistan.  States offer different levels of support to terror groups, for different reasons.  Mr. Byman identified six categories of state support, ranging from "strong support" to "unwilling hosts."  Pakistan — through the ISI — is a strong supporter of terrorism.

Al Qaeda may have begun as an independent organization, and most who affiliate with it today may think it still is.  Dependency grows over time, and state control is exercised behind the scenes.  But the al-Qaeda Osama bin Laden created was dead by 2005, said former CIA analyst Larry Johnson. That’s about the time bin Laden moved into the mansion in Abbottabad, which has been described as an ISI safe house.

"There is no al-Qaeda," Mr. Johnson wrote on his blog. "At its height, just prior to the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda had at most 600 adherents, and a majority of those were killed or captured (mostly in Afghanistan and Iraq)."

Johnson noted there have been no major terror attacks attributed to al Qaeda since 2005. The organization has existed primarily in the audio and videotapes Osama bin Laden released periodically.  

It is, however, much to the ISI’s advantage to maintain the myths that al Qaeda is both independent and powerful, to assist in recruitment of terrorist cannon fodder, and to give Pakistan plausible deniability for terror attacks for which the ISI was responsible.

Nineteen current and former Taliban leaders told him the ISI "orchestrates, sustains and strongly influences" the movement, and sometimes directs attacks on U.S. soldiers, Harvard researcher Matt Waldman said in a report last year.  That support for the Taliban is official Pakistani policy "is as clear as the sun in the sky," he said.

Washington ignored the Waldman report.  In the wake of the bin Laden revelations, it will be harder to do so.  LtCol. Peters thinks Pakistan is America‘s foremost enemy.

Despite massive evidence of Pakistani duplicity, many in Washington still claim cutting U.S. aid will have dire consequences.  Among them are Sens. John Kerry, D-MA, and Richard Lugar, R-IN, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

This is partly because of the money Mr. Siegel and others spread around.  But it’s mostly because there once was a rationale for pretending Pakistan was an ally, and Washington is resistant to change.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the only way to strike at al Qaeda in Afghanistan was through Pakistan.  Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage made him an offer he couldn’t refuse:  Grant the U.S. overflight rights and a ground supply route, and we’ll give you billions in aid.  Refuse, and we’ll bomb you back into the Stone Age.  (Mr. Armitage denied making threats.)

Circumstances have changed radically since 2001.  We have nothing further to gain, and much to lose, by pretending an enemy is a friend.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.