WASHINGTON, 1 June 2008 — CIA Director Michael Hayden has come under stiff challenge for portraying Al-Qaeda as on the defensive after global setbacks, even in its safe havens along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Jay Rockefeller, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, said on Friday that Hayden’s upbeat appraisal was not consistent with intelligence assessments provided to his committee over the past year.
“In fact, I have seen nothing, including classified intelligence reporting, that would lead me to this conclusion,” Rockefeller said in a scathing letter to the Central Intelligence Agency director.
Hayden’s assessment — one of the most positive since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — comes less than a year after US intelligence warnings that Al-Qaeda had regrouped in the border area and was plotting attacks against the West.
“On balance, we are doing pretty well,” Hayden told The Washington Post in an interview published on Friday, while warning that Al-Qaeda remains a serious threat.
The list of accomplishments, he said, includes: “Near strategic defeat of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for Al-Qaeda globally — and here I’m going to use the word ‘ideologically’ — as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam.”
But Rockefeller cited a litany of public statements by top intelligence officials over the past year that emphasized Al-Qaeda’s regeneration in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
Earlier this month, the acting director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, Michael Leiter, told lawmakers that US efforts had not succeeded in stopping “core Al-Qaeda plotting.”
“We’re better at disrupting it, but we have not disrupted the senior leadership that exists in the FATA, and we have also not stopped the organization from promulgating a message which has successfully gained them more recruits,” Rockefeller quoted him as saying.
In response, CIA spokesman George Little said that had the senator’s office waited for a response from the agency before publicly releasing its letter, the matter could have been handled with ease.
“The director simply said in his interview that progress has been made against Al-Qaeda, which remains a very dangerous foe,” Little pointed out. “That judgment should be no surprise to anyone familiar with the intelligence.”
Meanwhile, Bruce Riedel, a longtime former CIA analyst now with Brookings Institution, called Hayden’s remarks “a pretty large dish of wishful thinking.”
“I think that the administration very much wants to paint a picture of success, particularly as it gets close to the end of eight years,” he said. “So I’m not surprised we’re seeing an effort to portray it in the most optimistic possible way.”
Hayden said Osama Bin Laden is also losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Islamic world and has largely lost his ability to exploit the Iraq war to recruit new members.
Riedel said that while Al-Qaeda has suffered serious setbacks in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, there was a danger in “glossing over some of Al-Qaeda’s remarkable strengths.” “The safe haven that they have developed in Pakistan over the last two or three years is getting bigger, not smaller, and that safe haven is the most important thing for Al-Qaeda,” he said.
