TOP SECURITY officials of the Bush administration held a meeting Friday in the White House to discuss giving expanded authority to the CIA and special operations forces to conduct covert operations against Al Qaeda figures in the tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan. This would be a foolish undertaking, one that is almost certain to have calamitous unintended consequences.
The immediate reason for considering incursions into Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas is a mounting anxiety that Al Qaeda is increasingly targeting Pakistan. The assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, which President Pervez Musharraf blamed on an Islamist warlord linked to Al Qaeda, is the most publicized of several recent suicide bombings and attacks against Pakistani soldiers and politicians.
A secondary reason is a recent intelligence assessment that Al Qaeda has been able to reconstitute itself in Pakistan, and today poses a greater threat than at any time since the United States overthrew the Taliban regime in Afghanistan at the end of 2001.
Both these concerns must be taken seriously. But the understandable impulse to go after Al Qaeda with US operatives, rather than Pakistani troops or security services, has to be weighed against the likely outcome of American armed intervention in Pakistan.
Once it becomes known that America violated international law and Pakistan's sovereignty, nearly all the disparate groups across the Pakistani political spectrum will be united in anger aimed at the American interventionists. The domestic effect within Pakistan will be to strengthen Islamist currents, allowing the army and President Musharraf to be painted as stooges of an arrogant superpower.
If a concern for Pakistan's stability is a major factor for the contemplated strikes, policy makers ought to recognize that a decision to land US troops on the ground in the tribal areas is almost certain to make that nuclear-armed country more unstable, not less. Such actions will make it harder than ever for political parties and for individual democrats or human rights advocates in Pakistan to side with America. Conversely, the Pakistanis most vulnerable to the propaganda of Al Qaeda and its affiliates will turn more anti-American than ever.
Security officials in the Bush administration are not the only ones tempted to go after "high-value" Al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan. At various points presidential candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden have also yielded to that temptation. The more farsighted policy against Al Qaeda would be to enhance cooperation with the Pakistani military and intelligence services, who have strong reasons of their own to crush the head of that snake.
