Al Qaeda's Diminished Role Stirs Afghan Troop Debate - WSJ.com

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG in Islamabad and SIOBHAN GORMAN in Washington

Since first invading Afghanistan nearly a decade ago, America set one primary goal: Eliminate al Qaeda's safe haven.

Today, intelligence and military officials say they've severely constrained al Qaeda's ability to operate there and in Pakistan -- and that's reshaping the debate over U.S. strategy in the region.

Hunted by U.S. drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al Qaeda is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistani and U.S. officials. Conversations intercepted by the U.S. show al Qaeda fighters complaining of shortages of weapons, clothing and, in some cases, food. The number of foreign fighters in Afghanistan appears to be declining, U.S. military officials say.

An Afghan army commander, left, with a U.S. Marine in Helmand province Sunday.

For Arab youths who are al Qaeda's primary recruits, "it's not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding," said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.

In Washington, the question of Al Qaeda's strength is at the heart of the debate over whether to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan. On Saturday, eight American troops and two Afghan soldiers were killed fighting Taliban forces -- one of the worst single-day battlefield losses for U.S. forces since the war began.

Opponents of sending more troops prefer a narrower campaign consisting of missile strikes and covert action inside Pakistan, rather than a broader war against the Taliban, the radical Islamist movement that ruled Afghanistan for years and provided a haven to al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden. Their reasoning: The larger threat to America remains al Qaeda, not the Taliban; so, best not to get embroiled in a local war that history suggests may be unwinnable.

Military commanders pressing for extra troops counter that sending more forces could help translate the gains against al Qaeda into a political settlement with less ideologically committed elements of the Taliban. And, they argue, that would improve the odds of stabilizing Afghanistan for the long run.

A key point of contention in President Barack Obama's review of war strategy is the ability of al Qaeda to reconstitute in Afghanistan. Some officials, including aides to Richard Holbrooke, the U.S.'s special representative to the region, have argued that the Taliban wouldn't allow al Qaeda to regain its footing inside Afghanistan, since it was the alliance between the two that cost the Taliban their control of the country after Sept. 11.

A senior military official, however, characterized this as a minority view within the debate. He noted that even if the Taliban sought to keep al Qaeda from returning, it would have little means to do so.

Retired Gen. James Jones, the president's National Security Adviser, acknowledged on CNN Sunday that the links between the two groups had become a "central issue" in the White House discussion. He said he believed the return of the Taliban "could" mean the return of al Qaeda.

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In the political debate, al Qaeda's diminished role has bolstered the argument of those advocating a narrower campaign. They say continuing the drone campaign is sufficient to keep al Qaeda at bay, said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor who has written extensively on al Qaeda. Mr. Hoffman believes that argument is misguided, however, and that if the U.S. pulls out, al Qaeda will return.

"Al Qaeda may be diminished, but it still poses a threat," he said. The debate will move to Capitol Hill Tuesday when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee holds a hearing on confronting al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Though there is emerging international consensus among counterterrorism officials that al Qaeda isn't the foe it used to be, U.S., Afghan and Pakistani officials caution that it doesn't mean the fight in Afghanistan or Pakistan is tilting America's way. "They're not defeated. They're not dismantled, but they are being disrupted," said a senior U.S. intelligence official in Washington.

Mr. Obama himself has argued that al Qaeda could strengthen if the U.S. eases up on the Taliban. "If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting," he said at a speech in Phoenix at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in August, before the current strategy debate heated up. "This is fundamental to the defense of our people."

Al Qaeda apparently retains a global reach, as suggested by the Sept. 19 arrest in Colorado of Najibullah Zazi, 24 years old. U.S. prosecutors allege Mr. Zazi is part of an al Qaeda cell who trained in Pakistan and was trying to make the same kind of explosives used in the 2005 London bombings.

U.S. officials also say al Qaeda remains tight with the network of Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son, Sirajuddin, one of the Afghan insurgency's top leaders. The late leader of the Pakistan Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, was similarly close with al Qaeda before being killed in August by a strike from a U.S. drone aircraft. U.S. officials say they hope his death will weaken al Qaeda's Taliban ties.

For years, the fortunes of al Qaeda and the Taliban moved in tandem. The Taliban hosted al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and Mr. bin Laden's network launched its 2001 attacks from there. After the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban continued to provide haven after retreating to the tribal areas of Pakistan, while al Qaeda trained Taliban fighters.

But in the past year, the fates of the two organizations have diverged. The Taliban insurgency has become increasingly violent and brazen and spread to areas of Afghanistan that only a year ago were considered solidly pro-government. Al Qaeda, in contrast, has seen its role shrink because it is struggling to raise money from its global network of financiers and attract recruits.

Today there are signs al Qaeda is relying more on affiliated groups to press its agenda world-wide, according to one official briefed on the matter. These groups include Pakistani movements such as Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiyah and the Islamic Jihad Union, whose roots are in Uzbekistan.

As affiliates like these "continue to develop and evolve," their threat to the U.S. has grown, Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in Senate hearings last week.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the presence of fewer foreign fighters -- Arabs, Chechens, Uzbeks and others -- potentially changes the dynamics of the fight there.

Foreign militants serve as a battlefield "accellerant," said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Afghanistan, in an interview. "When a foreign fighter comes into Afghanistan, he doesn't have anything else he's going to do -- he's going to fight until he dies or goes somewhere else," he said. By contrast, "an Afghan is fighting for something, and if he starts to get that, his motivation changes."

Right now, Gen. McChrystal said, "we don't see huge numbers of foreign fighters, which obviously makes you believe there's not nearly the presence there was of foreign fighters....I hope it's a trend, but I'm not prepared to confidently say that."

Even if Al Qaeda is struggling, it already has imparted dangerous knowledge -- how to build suicide car bombs, launch complex gunmen assaults and tap wealthy sympathizers in the Persian Gulf -- that made it a key asset to the Taliban several years ago.

Al Qaeda also remains allied with and protected by the Taliban. Allowing the insurgents to succeed would likely give al Qaeda the space it needs to regroup, rearm and, most importantly, reestablish itself as the premier global jihadi movement, U.S., Pakistani and Afghan officials say.

Al Qaeda's message of world-wide jihad, however, has lost much of its popularity amid the rise of militant groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere who tend to focus their ire locally. That, combined with a perception among would-be followers that the group has only paid lip-service to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, also has reduced its global credibility, officials say.

Support is even declining among some of al Qaeda's allies. It has lost support from a group of Saudi sheiks known as the Sahwa, or "Awakening," movement. (It's unrelated to a similar-sounding group in Iraq.) Some of the sheiks are now trying to persuade members of al Qaeda's North African branch to give up jihad, said Daniel Lav, director of the Middle East and North Africa Reform Project at the Middle East Media Research Institute in Washington.

Mr. bin Laden and al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri are believed to be hiding in Pakistan's tribal lands bordering Afghanistan. But a U.S. campaign of missile strikes by pilotless Predator aircraft has decimated al Qaeda's second- and third-tier leadership.

One example cited by U.S. and Pakistani officials: Usama al-Kini, a Kenyan citizen believed to have been al Qaeda's operations chief inside Pakistan and a key architect of the September 2008 truck bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed at least 50 people. He was slain along with his deputy, Sheik Ahmed Salim Swedan, a Kenyan, in a Jan. 1 missile strike, officials say.

Both men's history with al Qaeda stretched back to the group's first major strike, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Officials also pointed to Rashid Rauf, the alleged mastermind of a 2006 plot to blow up airliners over the Atlantic, who they say was slain in a drone attack last year, although Pakistani and British officials express uncertainty over whether he is actually dead.

But even if Mr. Rauf is still alive, the fact that he became such a primary target made it tough for him to fulfill his role as a communications link between Pakistan and Britain, says an officer from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency. Other operatives who have been detained by British authorizes have further eroded those communications links, an official familiar with the intelligence reports on al Qaeda added.

The drones, operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, have so far killed 11 of the men on the U.S.'s initial list of the top 20 al Qaeda targets, the official said. The U.S. has since drawn up a fresh list, including the nine holdovers from the first one. Four of the men on the new list are now dead, too. Those who remain are focused on finding sanctuary, possibly at the expense of operations and training, say officials and militants with links to al Qaeda.

"The Arabs stay out of sight now. They were always secretive. But now they are very secretive...They see spies everywhere," said a man named Walliullah, who Pakistani officials say is an aide to Afghan insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Mr. Hekmatyar is allied with the Afghan Taliban and loosely tied to al Qaeda.

At the same time, U.S. intelligence collection in Pakistan has vastly improved, officials say. Western intelligence services have had more success penetrating al Qaeda groups lately, according to Richard Barrett, the United Nations' coordinator for monitoring al Qaeda and the Taliban. "There's many more human sources being run into the groups," Mr. Barrett, a former official with Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, told an audience at a Washington think tank last week.

Similarly, the U.S. in the past was unable to comprehensively monitor communications in Pakistan; that has now been rectified, said an official briefed on U.S. operations. Through that monitoring, U.S., British and Pakistani intelligence officials have seen increasing evidence that al Qaeda is having difficulty raising money.

"Al Qaeda is in fund-raising mode, and they seem to be hurting for cash," said another U.S. official. Intercepts of conversations have caught al Qaeda militants complaining they lack cash and supplies, including weapons.

The new intelligence has provided fresh ways to try to undermine the foreign al Qaeda fighters. Pakistani authorities say they've started targeting food shipments believed to be headed for al Qaeda operatives, who prefer their own cuisine over local fare. "The Talibs, they're eating mutton, chicken, bread -- the food ordinary people eat," said an officer from Pakistan's ISI spy agency. "The Arabs want their own food."

—Rehmat Mehsud in Islamabad and Evan Perez and Peter Spiegel in Washington contributed to this report.

Write to Matthew Rosenberg at matthew.rosenberg@wsj.com and Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com