This month’s Economist announces the Terrorism Index for 2008, in which Pakistan is mentioned a few times. According to the report results, Pakistan is considered one the top nations to potential engage in the nuclear trade with terrorists, tied with North Korea, and the hands down winner on where the next al Qaeda stronghold will be.

Interesting when looking at it in the light of the Asia Times Online headline, Bush had no plan to catch Osama. Gareth Porter, an investigative journalists specializing in US national security policy, provides a very deep and disturbing look into the decision making process of the Bush administration and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

According to the Asia Times Online story:

Top administration officials instead gave priority to planning for war with Iraq, leaving the United States with not nearly enough troops or strategic airlift capacity to close the large number of possible exit routes through the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area where Bin Laden escaped in late 2001.

Because it had not been directed to plan for that contingency, the US military was also forced to turn down an offer from then Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in late November 2001 to send 60,000 troops to intercept the al-Qaeda leaders. As Northern Alliance troops marched on Kabul with little resistance in November 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency had intelligence that Bin Laden was headed for a cave complex in the Tora Bora Mountains close to the Pakistani border.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a National Security Council meeting that Franks “wants the [Pakistanis] to close the transit points between Afghanistan and Pakistan to seal what’s going in and out”, according to the National Security Council meeting transcript in Bob Woodward’s book Bush at War.

Bush responded that they would need to “press Musharraf to do that”.

Then after realizing that the US military wasn’t up to the task of stopping bin Laden from getting into Pakistan, General Franks ended up in Islamabad:

A deputy to Franks, Lieutenant General Mike DeLong, later claimed that Musharraf had refused Franks’s request for regular Pakistani troops to be repositioned from the north to the border near the Tora Bora area. DeLong wrote in his 2004 book “Inside Centcom” that Musharraf had said he “couldn’t do that”, because it would spark a “civil war” with a hostile tribal population.

By the way, that civil war has started in Pakistan’s tribal areas and is spreading to our cities, did we say thank you for that?

But US ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, who accompanied Franks to the  meeting with Musharraf, provided an account of the meeting to this writer that contradicts DeLong’s claim.

Chamberlin, now president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, recalled that the Pakistani president told Franks that CENTCOM had vastly underestimated what was required to block bin Laden’s exit from Afghanistan. Musharraf said, “Look you are missing the point: there are 150 valleys through which al-Qaeda are going to stream into Pakistan,” according to Chamberlin.

Although Musharraf admitted that the Pakistani government had never exercised control over the border area, the former diplomat recalled, he said this was “a good time to begin”. The Pakistani president offered to redeploy 60,000 troops to the area from the border with India but said his army would need airlift assistance from the United States.

But the Pakistani redeployment never happened, according to Lamm, because it wasn’t logistically feasible. Lamm recalled that it would have required an entire aviation brigade, including hundreds of helicopters, and hundreds of support troops to deliver that many combat troops to the border region – far more than was available.

So, now wait, I’m confused… you’re telling me that the US military doesn’t have the resources to assist the Pakistan Army in shifting forces from the India border to the Afghanistan border, and it’s our fault that America is losing the War on Terror? Pakistan is the most dangerous place in the world, not Iraq, I recall an international publication putting it.

When you are not serious about your accomplishing your mission, then can you really say “Mission Accomplished?”

Franks did get 1,200 marines inserted into the area, but they would not be enough to patrol the 1,500 kilometer border. The American military also realized, at this point, that local tribal leaders wouldn’t be willing to assist them either because bin Laden had given them “millions of dollars.”

The article damns the Bush administration:

Had the Bush administration’s priority been to capture or kill the al-Qaeda leadership, it would have deployed the necessary ground troops and airlift resources in the theater over a period of months before the offensive in Afghanistan began.

“You could have moved American troops along the Pakistani border before you went into Afghanistan,” said Lamm. But that would have meant waiting until spring 2002 to take the offensive against the Taliban, according to Lamm.

The views of Bush’s key advisers, however, ruled out any such plan from the start. During the summer of 2001 Rumsfeld refused to develop contingency plans for military action against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, despite a National Security Presidential Directive that called for such planning, according to the 9-11 Commission report.

Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz resisted such planning for Afghanistan because they were hoping that the White House would move quickly on military intervention in Iraq. According to the 9-11 Commission, at four deputies’ meetings on Iraq between May 31 and July 26, 2001, Wolfowitz pushed his idea to have US troops seize all the oil fields in southern Iraq.

Even after September 11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney continued to resist any military engagement in Afghanistan, because they were hoping for war against Iraq instead.

….Lost in the eagerness to wrap up the Taliban and get on with the Iraq War was any possibility of preventing Bin Laden’s escape to Pakistan.

So let’s get this clear, the US military abandoned Afghanistan to chase Iraq’s petro-dollars. In the process, the Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were able to escape into Pakistan, because “we weren’t doing enough” over and over again.

Now, as the US presidential election nears, we are learning that it’s not Pakistan’s fault that the War on Terror has failed. It’s America, George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

Guess this wasn’t the October Surprise that McCain was looking for…