More Bad Advice: Meddle in More Countries' Affairs

US must take preventive action in Pak, but carefully: Ex-CIA officer Washington, July 31: A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer has urged the Bush Administration to take careful preventive action to neutralise the terrorist threat in Pakistan's volatile Waziristan area.

Henry Crumpton, who served with the U.S. State Department after retiring from the CIA in 2005, has said that the right model for a Waziristan campaign is the CIA-led operation in Afghanistan, not the U.S. military invasion of Iraq.

He says that teams of CIA officers and Special Forces soldiers are best suited to work with tribal leaders, providing them weapons and money to fight an al-Qaeda network that has implanted itself brutally in Waziristan through the assassination of more than 100 tribal leaders during the past six years.

"It would be better to conduct such operations jointly with Pakistan, but if the government of General Pervez Musharraf can't or won't cooperate, the United States should be prepared to go it alone," Crumpton argues.

"The United States has an obligation to defend itself and its citizens. We either do it now, or we do it after the next attack," he added.

Crumpton says that he proposed a detailed plan last year for the rolling up these sanctuaries, which he called the Regional Strategic Initiative. It would combine economic assistance and paramilitary operations in a broad counter-insurgency campaign.

In Waziristan, it would involve U.S. and Pakistani operatives giving tribal warlords guns and money, to be sure, but they would coordinate this covert action with economic aid to help tribal leaders operate their local stone quarries more efficiently, say, or install windmills and solar panels to generate electricity for their remote mountain villages.

A successful counter-insurgency program would need Pakistani support, he said.

Original article posted here.