The increasing success and pace of airstrikes this year indicates that American spy agencies and their allies have made progress in infiltrating Al Qaeda in Pakistan, said Louis Caprioli, a former anti-terrorism chief of France's DST intelligence agency.
"You have to have good intelligence on the ground to hit a target like that," Caprioli said. "It requires human as well as technical intelligence. I think the money that the Americans are spreading around is having an effect.
"Also, there are troops in Afghanistan, prisoners being interrogated. This is a long-term effort that is paying off."
This is interesting in light of this recent post where I wondered if we were planning a post-Westphalian campaign in the frontier areas that bypasses Pakistan's government which has been unable to focus on defeating the jihadis in the tribal areas:
If we can't get Islamabad to control the frontier area, it is time to bypass Islamabad and deal directly with the tribes who don't recognize the control of Islamabad in the first place. We cannot allow the fictions of sovereignty to keep us from defending ourselves from fanatics who straddle the gray boundary that lies between reality and international law.
Using limited military assets such as special forces and drones to back civilian armed assets such as the CIA or contract personnel (with either former or seconded special forces from Western countries, or perhaps even hiring security companies to provide the personnel) or even Arab special forces that would live and work inside the frontier areas, we may be able to turn the frontier tribes against the jihadis who target us.
It would take time to implement such a strategy of working on the tribes directly. It seems that we have been taking that time for a while now.
If Pakistan won't control what they claim to be sovereign over, I don't know why we must let legal sovereignty stop us from penetrating this uncontrolled space.
My main question is whether the Pakistani government is cooperating. After all, the central government complained about our limited operations in the frontier area because the frontier tribes complained. If we gain the alliance of these tribes, will Islamabad care if we impose some sort of order in the area? I'd think not since the jihadis have pointed their bombs to the Pakistan lowlands and not just across the border into Afghanistan.
While it is nice to get some target data from this operation, the real success will come from allying with these tribes to control territory and deny that space to bin Laden, driving him into a smaller and smaller space until that target data leads to a JDAM on his location.
We've been at this a while, apparently. How long for the pay off? And is Petraeus the one who will lead us in this campaign?
