UK Independent News -- With runners and whispers, al-Qa'ida outfoxes US forces

United States forces have not only failed to hunt down Osama bin Laden while they are preparing for war in Iraq: they are finding it almost impossible to crack the al-Qa'ida network because Bin Laden's men have resorted to primitive methods of communication that cut individual members of al-Qa'ida off from all information.

[In the interview with an American intelligence officer he] said there were originally "a lot of high-profile arrests". But the al-Qa'ida cells didn't know what other members were doing. "They were very adaptive and became much more decentralised. We caught a couple of really high-profile, serious al-Qa'ida leaders but they couldn't tell us what specific operations were going to take place. They would know that something big was being planned but they would have no idea what it was."

The officer, who spent at least six months in Afghanistan this year, was scathing in his denunciation of General Abdul Rashid Dostam, the Uzbek warlord implicated in the suffocation of up to a thousand Taliban prisoners in container trucks. "Dostam is totally culpable and the US believes he's guilty but he's our guy and so we won't say so."

Gen Dostam uses Turkish military intelligence men as bodyguards. "There was concern in the Isaf [International Security Assistance Force] that the Turks who run it would create ethnic problems, which is one reason the Turkish army does not share the Kabul Isaf compounds with other Isaf troops. But one of the things we failed to do was create a real government. We let the warlords firmly entrench themselves and now they can't be dislodged," he said.

The smart members of our military knew that they would decentralize and switch to low tech communication. In the wargaming of the invasion of Iraq, the general playing Saddam basicly defeated the US forces using guile and low tech means. Bush did not accept the European forces offered to pacify and rebuild Afghanistan and we are stuck with a central government supported by private US mercenaries controling 200 square miles while murderous warlords and drug runners control the countryside. I count this as a win for the terrorists and a lost war in Afghanistan.