Talk Radio News Service: News, Politics, Media

By Ellen Ratner
The official Bush administration position on al-Qaida is that it has been badly damaged and that we have its leaders on the run. However, many experts believe al-Qaida is anything but ''on the run'' and that bin Laden has morphed his terrorist organization into smaller and more effective fighting forces. No less than a professor at the United States Military Academy, Bruce Hoffman, told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, ''Al-Qaida is still alive and kicking. It's just changed its modus operandi. We've often painted a picture of al-Qaida in retreat. I'm not sure it isn't Al Qaeda on the march.''

New York University's Barnett Newman, interviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer, said the Bush policy in Afghanistan has ''actually turned farmers in some areas against us and driven them into the arms of terrorists.'' We know the engine of bin Laden's terror program is money. He found safety and comfort in Afghanistan and now, after he has spent millions of his own money, he has found cash in Afghanistan by tapping into a lucrative Opium drug trade.

Well, guess what? Opium production in Afghanistan has grown 50 percent to a record 6,100 metric tons, which means that Afghanistan now provides 92 percent of the world's supply of heroin! The worth of this new trade to the Taliban and its friends in al-Qaida is a very large share of the four billion dollars the opium trade generates annuually. You can seed a lot of terror with that kind of non-taxable income. But, rather than do the job of cleaning out the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan with a total war concept a la former Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, we decided to ''do it on the cheap'' as one State Department official told me.

We paid warlords to execute our military operations – a new twist on outsourcing. Naturally, when the money stopped flowing from Uncle Sam, these same warlords, who have the loyalty of a mosquito, moved on to their next business opportunity – anyone but the United States of America. There is nothing like a lucrative drug trade to make strange bedfellows of warlords, the Taliban and those loyal to al-Qaida.

This money flow has increased the number of al-Qaida members. In a report released this week, the ''Third Way National Security Project'' found al-Qaida's membership has grown from 20,000 in 2001 to 50,000 today. Their terror attacks have increased from three in 2001 to 30 since September 11, 2001.

The Washington Post on Sunday reported that the trail leading to bin Laden has gotten cold. Despite the ABC docudrama that lays the blame at the feet of the Clinton administration, it is the Bush administration that under-funded the Afghanistan war and moved onto Iraq before Afghanistan was secure. It was also the Bush administration that disbanded the CIA unit responsible for finding bin Laden. They seek to minimize Bin Laden by issuing talking points this past week that included statements that bin Laden is only one man and they are focused on al-Qaida as a whole. One Bush administration official identified by talk-show host Todd Feinburg asked this weekend, ''How would anything be different if we captured Osama Bin Laden?''

Fortunately, there are others in government, not just the family members of the victims of Sept. 11, who disagree with the administration's minimizing of the need to find bin Laden. This week, Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota got an amendment to the defense bill passed. It adds $200 million to the bill for the sole purpose of finding bin Laden. It requires regular reports to Congress on the progress made in the hunt for bin Laden. Although the amendment passed 96-0, Republican Ted Stevens said it ''was a slap in the face of the intelligence community.'' He implied that the only reason it passed was election-year politics.

A slap in the face to the intelligence community? The slap in the face goes to the administration officials who reduced the numbers of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan in 2002, and to the war planners that let the Afghan warlords do our dirty work, and to those who looked to Iraq rather than taking care of the business at hand, which was and is finding Osama once and for all. Five years is just too long to wait.