Clake's Plan

How's this for a dumb idea:

"I think if we had taken that opportunity to wipe out the camps, and every time they rebuilt them to wipe them out again, we could have so thrown al Qaeda off that perhaps they wouldn't have been able to get up," Clarke said. "And we could have done that anytime over the course of several years."

The Clarke being quoted is Richard Clarke, the former National-Security Council paper pusher who chaired something called the Counter-Terrorism Security Group from 1992-2003. After 9/11, he covered his backside with a book entitled Against All Enemies which was notable for its criticism of the Bush Administration's eight months rather than the Clinton Administration's eight years of "fighting" terrorism.

Clarke, who for most of his career was a civil servant, is out of government now and is, among other things, an advisor to ABC News. (There's something crafty about being paid to spin what happened on your watch.)

Clarke's quote at the top of the post, came in response to a question posed by Brian Ross of ABC News during a special airing of Nightline last night -- an airing that occurred shortly after the end of the first part of The Path to 9/11.

In the movie (for those who were more interested in the Manning Bowl) -- the CIA had an opportunity, in conjunction with Afghan allies, pre-9/11 (in fact before the attack on the embassies in Africa and the USS Cole) to kill or capture Osama bin-Laden. However, Samuel Berger, the President's National Security Advisor, George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, and Richard Clarke all rejected the plan. (Tenet, for most of his career prior to joining the CIA, was a Senate staffer. Berger was a lawyer in private practice during the Reagan-Bush administrations.)

According to Clarke's most recent testimony:

"Bin laden had two tanks. He had machine gun nests. All of these people that CIA had hired would have been gunned down, and so higher levels in the CIA said that plan won't work, and I agreed with them, it wouldn't have worked..."

Two whole tanks, huh? Machine gun nests too?

Of course, Bin Laden had protection, but these Afghan allies were the same group who pushed the Red Army out of Afghanistan years earlier. The two tanks were probably immobile and would have little or no impact on a commando-type raid. As for the machine gun nests -- they could have been eliminated with a well-placed mortar (or other indirect fire) round. But then again, these decision makers didn't have any military experience in their backgrounds.

More than likely, these folks were simply risk-adverse and didn’t want failure to be seen as failing. (See Carter with “Desert One” and Kennedy with “Bay of Pigs”.)

Clarke, however, mentioned that -- "After the embassy bombings, we developed a very elaborate plan to go after bin laden and the al Qaeda network..." So what was the elaborate plan? It seems to be the repeated attack of the training camps.

If being a nuisance was the plan -- then Clarke has indeed succeeded.