Wednesday, September 13, 2006
How Many Awakenings Until Bin Laden?
Dan Froomkin's online column for the Washington Post reports about "Bush and the 'Third Awakening'," but I'm more interested in the Pakistan stuff which Peter Baker briefly noted at the end of his Post article:
The White House did not release a transcript of Bush's remarks, but National Review posted highlights on its Web site. On another topic, Bush rejected sending more troops to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas to find Osama bin Laden. "One hundred thousand troops there in Pakistan is not the answer. It's someone saying 'Guess what' and then the kinetic action begins," he said, meaning an informer disclosing bin Laden's location.
This is the full excerpt from National Review's The Corner:
I'm going to tell you that it is essential that American Presidents get the information that was gathered, that we gathered, in order to protect this country. The way you win the war on terror is to find people and get them to give you information about what their buddies are fixing to do. You know, this thing about, well, let's put 100,000 of our special forces stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work. What works is somebody, somewhere, saying, oh, guess what — and then a kinetic action takes place.
How disingenuous of President Bush.
Rather than sending 100,000 troops to search for Osama bin Laden in Pakistan how about sending Task Force 121?
According to North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) Governor Jan Orakzai, "Pakistan does not need US-led coalition forces based in Afghanistan to help them capture Osama Bin Laden on home soil."
From Pakistan's Daily Times (hat tip to Bill Roggio for the link):
“If Osama’s presence is confirmed in any part of our area adjoining Afghanistan, or for that matter anywhere in Pakistan, we have these troops stationed there to carry out that job,” the governor told a press conference. “We have not deployed our 80,000 troops for nothing. They are there for a purpose,” he said. “We are guarding practically all the possible crossing routes.”
“We have our friends with electronic intelligence,” Mr Orakzai said. “We have our own means of electronic intelligence. And the political administration has its own intelligence system.”
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