Key mistakes by the US in the war against terror were ignoring the al-Qaeda in Pakistan, invading Iraq after the 9/11 attacks and trusting that the then president Pervaiz Musharraf was fighting for them, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst said on Thursday.
“This was a war that should have ended years ago,” Bruce Riedel, now a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution wrote in an article. “The 9/11 attacks revealed a ruthless and agile enemy, one demanding unrelenting focus. Instead, we made major errors,” said the former CIA analyst, who helped formulate President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan policy. Among the strategic mistakes committed by the US, “The biggest was to ignore the al-Qaeda in Pakistan and to invade Iraq, which, at that point, posed no serious threat,” Riedel said.
“The Bush administration underestimated Osama bin Laden’s resilience, trusted the generals of Pakistan, and focused on the wrong battlefield,” he said. Trusting Musharraf “to fight on our side against Laden and the Taliban was another strategic failure,” Riedel wrote. “Our man in Islamabad turned out to be helping the Taliban regroup while Laden hid out in his front yard, living in plain sight of Pakistan’s most elite military academy for years,” he said.
Now the death of Laden and the revolutions sweeping the Middle East have provided the United States with an opportunity to correct what it had done wrong, he said. He, however, warned that “Pakistan remains the epicentre of the global jihad”.
“Our enemy is still formidable and the task isn’t easy. But this time we have to get it right to avoid spending yet another decade fighting,” Riedel said.
