By Michael Barone
As the Taliban flee from Kabul, it suddenly seems possible that our war against terrorism will achieve a victory in Afghanistan much sooner than expected. That is not guaranteed, of course. As this is written, there has been little discernible progress in the southern, Pushtun-inhabited part of the country. But the Pashtun, and their sympathizers in the government of Pakistan, who are dismayed at the specter of the non-Pashtun Northern Alliance in power in Kabul, now have an incentive to join the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban: To the victor goes the spoils, and if they want a share of the spoils they had better join the victors soon. So it is possible the Taliban will have to flee in the south as they have in the north. Hunting down Osama bin Laden may take still more time. But the part of the war in Afghanistan that requires a large commitment of U.S. military forces may be over soon.
The question then arises: Where to next? As President Bush told the Warsaw Conference on Combating Terrorism on November 6, "Afghanistan is the beginning of our efforts in the world. No group or nation should mistake America's intentions: We will not rest until terrorist groups of global reach have been found, have been stopped and have been defeated. And this goal will not be achieved until all the world's nations stop harboring and supporting such terrorists within their borders."
Which leads us to Iraq. Over the past two weeks, as journalists at first speculated that the war effort was becoming a "quagmire" then watched in almost stunned silence as the Northern Alliance poured into Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul and the Taliban fled, evidence has accumulated that Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government has aided al Qaeda.
The strongest evidence comes from Prague. On October 26 Czech Republic Interior Minister Stanislas Gross officially announced that September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with top-ranked Iraqi intelligence agent Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani in Prague in June 2000 and April 2001–immediately before traveling to the United States. Al-Ani was deported from the Czech Republic for spying later in April. Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman on November 9 confirmed the meetings; he added that the two men discussed an attack on Radio Free Europe's headquarters building in Prague's Wenceslas Square.
Other evidence comes from London, headquarters of the Iraqi National Congress. On November 2, the INC's leaders said that a 16-year veteran of Iraqi intelligence, recently escaped from an Iraqi prison, said that Iraq had controlled and funded al Qaeda since 1998.
On November 4, the Financial Times quoted a senior U.S. defense official as saying, "We now realize that there have been a lot of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda–it's more than a lot of people assume, but it doesn't take you all the way down the road to evidence of clear complicity."
On November 7, two defectors from the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukabarat, revealed that Islamic radicals were being trained as recently as from 1995 to at least 2000 at a secret camp in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. This confirmed an earlier report from Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, an Iraqi army captain who immigrated to Texas last May. Among the other features of the camp were a Boeing 707 fuselage and a compound where Iraqi scientists, led by a German, produced biological agents.
On November 11, the London Observer reported that senior U.S. intelligence officials said the CIA had "credible information" that two other September 11 hijackers had met with known Iraqi intelligence agents.
Still, many in the U.S. government and in the press downplay talk about Iraqi involvement in global terrorism. As the defense official told the Financial Times, "It doesn't take you all the way down the road to evidence of clear complicity." And Czech Republic Prime Minister Zeman said the target of Atta and al-Ani was Radio Free Europe, not the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Many in and outside the U.S. government don't want to take on Saddam Hussein. Others may not want to alert Saddam to the danger of attack.
In this context, it is interesting that Secretary of State Colin Powell, long assumed to be reluctant to target Iraq, said on November 7, "We will turn our attention to terrorism throughout the world. And nations such as Iraq, which have tried to possess weapons of mass destruction, should not think that we will not be concerned about those activities and will not turn our attention to them."
Still, some complain that there is not enough evidence of Iraqi involvement. What more could they want? The level of evidence required for justified action in international war is not as high as that required for conviction in an American criminal court. The meetings between September 11 hijackers and Iraqi intelligence agents–especially the meetings Atta went to such trouble to travel to attend–are enough, given Saddam Hussein's well-established history of support for terrorism and efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. Some may object that the Czech Prime Minister reported that Atta and al-Ani were only conferring about an attack on Radio Free Europe, not September 11. But, leaving aside the question of whether he knows what the two men said, Radio Free Europe is an organization supported and sponsored by the U.S. government. An attack on Radio Free Europe headquarters would be as much an attack on the United States as Al Qaeda's attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
It is possible that George W. Bush has already concluded that we must go into Iraq and end the regime of Saddam Hussein. The question in that case would be when. Until the Northern Alliance swept into Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, it was generally assumed that we would have to delay any action in Iraq until after we were finished with what seemed sure to be a lengthy campaign in Afghanistan. Now it is possible–not certain, but possible–that the part of our campaign in Afghanistan requiring large commitments of manpower and equipment may be relatively brief. The opportunity to act in Iraq may come sooner than expected. If winter is, as many have said, a bad time for war in Afghanistan, it is a good time for war in Iraq. Presumably, our military has long had contigency plans to fight Iraq and has been making plans for a campaign there since September 11.
Something that should be part of that plan–though may not be yet–is a role for the Iraqi National Congress and other anti-Saddam Hussein forces on the ground. In Afghanistan, we have seen that even the ragtag forces of the Northern Alliance, when aided by U.S. air power and few U.S. ground forces, have been able to make rapid advances and to prompt an enemy government deeply unpopular with its people. There are differences, obviously, between Afghanistan and Iraq. But we have every reason to believe that Saddam Hussein is deeply unpopular among Kurds in the north and Shias in the south, and, indeed, among Iraqis generally, and the United States has already established well-patrolled no-fly zones in the north and south. We tend to assume that Middle Eastern dictators and Islamic radicals are wildly popular among the people they purport to represent. But Saddam is surely widely unpopular in Iraq, pro-American riots have been breaking out in Iran after 22 years of Islamic radical rule, and Afghans in Mazar-e-Sharif rejoice at the flight of the Taliban. We have no assurance that the battles for southern Afghanistan will go as quickly and as well as the battle for the north. But we should be prepared to seize the advantage if it does.
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