[For more details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush Agrees Bin Laden Helped in "04"]
Intelligence Consensus
In April 2006, a National Intelligence Estimate, representing the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community, formalized some of the analysis about the benefit of the Iraq War to Islamic terrorism. The Iraq War had become a "cause celebre" that was "cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement," the NIE said.
Then, through 2006 and 2007, Iraq experienced a staggering level of civil strife, with Sunni and Shiite extremists forming death squads to go after their rival sects as well as the Americans.
However, several developments gradually tamped down the violence by late 2007, including the fact that beginning in 2006 some Sunnis militants, whohad grown disgusted with al-Qaeda's brutality, agreed to stop killing Americans in exchange for money. The de facto ethnic cleansing that had separated Sunnis from Shiites also reduced the opportunities for sectarian violence.
Still, the conventional wisdom of Washington significantly shaped by influential neoconservative commentators held that Bush's decision to "surge" U.S. forces by about 40,000 trops explained the decline in killings. The myth of the "successful surge" was born as the neocons scrambled to reclaim their status as the U.S. experts on the Middle East.
But another development may have had even a greater effect on the plummeting U.S. death toll in Iraq. American deaths declined into single digits per month when it became clear that the Americans would be forced into a military withdrawal, which became increasingly apparent to Iraqis in 2008 as a new "status of forces agreement" was hammered out.
By late 2008, however, even as the U.S. government finally acquiesced to a military departure from Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan had deteriorated badly. The hard-line Taliban, which had ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until the post-9/11 U.S. invasion, had reorganized with the help of old allies in Pakistani intelligence. Al-Qaeda also was gaining operational strength.
Just as Atiyah had envisioned, "prolonging the war" in Iraq had bought al-Qaeda and its allies precious time to regroup inside Pakistan, which had another appealing feature to bin Laden and friends, its nuclear bombs.
Dangers Mount
The worsening predicament for U.S. troops in Afghanistan is a reality that resonates through the larger narrative presented by the 75,000 reports published by Wikileaks, covering a six-year period from January 2004 to December 2009.
For instance, there are the dramatic electronic messages from Combat Outpost Keating, an isolated American base camp that was part of an undermanned Bush strategy for challenging the Taliban in remote eastern Afghanistan. The strategy had become increasingly untenable as the Taliban regained its fighting strength and began to surround these outposts.
As part of the Obama administration's early review of the Afghan War, the decision was made to begin abandoning these vulnerable outposts. However, before Keating could be closed down, it came under heavy attack on Oct. 3, 2009, with a concentrated force of militants storming the outpost and breaching its perimeter.
With helicopter gunships some 40 minutes away, the Keating defenders were largely on their own. The electronic messages to headquarters grew increasingly frantic with the base in danger of falling.
"Enemy in the wire at keating," one defender typed. "ENEMUY IN THE WIRE ENEMY IN THE WIRE!!!"
As the U.S. troops suffered growing casualties, American F-15s bombed several suspected insurgent positions. Eventually, helicopters arrived with U.S. reinforcements forcing the enemy to retreat, but not before eight Americans were killed and nearly two dozen were wounded.
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