In an interview just released with Newsweek’s Michael Hirsch, Mahmud Ali Durrani, the Pakistani ambassador to the United States, denied that his country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas provide, as the National Intelligence Estimate put it (pdf), “safehaven” for al-Qaeda. And he used the WMD fiasco as a way of discrediting U.S. intelligence on Pakistan:
(M)any times [American] information is faulty. It’s not timely. It’s inaccurate. It’s the same intelligence you’ve been getting in Iraq. People here [in Washington] take it as the gospel truth. We challenge that very seriously.
Durrani expends a great deal of effort parsing the difference between a “safe haven” (none in Pakistan!), a “compound” (depends on your definition) and a “training camp” (ok, they’ve got a few of those).
And there’s more. At a hearing two weeks ago, defense and intelligence officials attributed the growth of al-Qaeda in Pakistan to a controversial 2006 peace accord in the tribal areas that moved the Pakistani military into a more reactive posture. A senior defense official, Mary Beth Long, said that despite fierce fighting over the last month, the Pakistanis might try to revive that accord. Sure enough, Durrani says that’s what’s happened:
Even today, there are tribal leaders who are literally begging the government not to destroy this agreement. So is the agreement still intact? I think so.
Somehow, this doesn’t seem like what counterterrorism officials mean when they talk about the importance of “denying safehavens.”