AQ's Training Camps Empty Out?

That's the report from Roggio (quoted at Hot Air).

It seems to me the alarming thing isn't "What are these suddenly-evacuated jihadis up to?" but more "What are already in-position jihadis planning that requires the evacuation of terrorist camps due to fear of coming retaliatory airstrikes and ground offensives?"

Given the fact that the terrorists safe havens in Pakistan have been pretty secure until now (no matter what Musharraf might say), their leaving is worrisome. If it's true, of course.

Al Qaeda, of course, assassinated the leader of the Northern Alliance just two days before 9/11, anticipating the Northern Alliance would figure in an anti-Taliban/anti-AQ offensive. They anticipated the likely major response to 9/11. After having attempted to kill Musharraf multiple times and multiple large bombings and the Red Mosque standoff, what sort of outrage would the jihadis be contemplating to suddenly worry about a real Pakistani or US attack on their camps?

Not to be alarmist, but Roggio mentions worries about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

Posted by: Ace at 03:48 PM

Comments

1 Either a big attack in the West or a big attempt on Musharraf's life.

Posted by: someone at August 11, 2007 03:58 PM (TXnhk)

Summer is over. They are just heading out to college.

When is Commando Obama parachuting in on a secret mission?

Posted by: eman at August 11, 2007 04:01 PM (F/DIG)

3 I suspect you're right, Ace. Your instincts are pretty damned good. The Islamists have been losing ground for weeks, and the end of August approaches. Of course, this will keep the Dems ourt of the Oval Office for the next 50 years, but we must be prepared to make some sacrifices...

Posted by: ahem at August 11, 2007 04:09 PM (QOCC7)

4 Not to be a pollyanna er nuthin', but usually the side that sends its half-finished trainees to the front is in deep hummus...

Posted by: richard mcenroe at August 11, 2007 04:40 PM (lCheg)

5 So much for the over reported BIG spring offensive, maybe the proper name should be the BIG Spring retreat 'Jihad in retrograde'

Posted by: ScottyClub1o1stABN at August 11, 2007 05:06 PM (F3I7J)

I think the dudes in SC were supposed to be part of whatever is coming. You have the supposed dirty bomb stuff in NYC. It is August 11, all eyes are on Iowa.

I think they are targeting Giuliani.

Posted by: blaster at August 11, 2007 05:22 PM (lfFUo)

The Virgin Depot is going to be empty soon.

Posted by: eman at August 11, 2007 05:27 PM (F/DIG)

8 AQ goes for big stuff: the WTC, sinking a ship, embassy bombings, etc.

Only something "big" would make them leave the camps, but leave the infrastructure behind. The US can't hit the camps with lots of air/missile strikes without toppling Musharraf which so far we have refused to do. Any strikes have been small, Predator-type attacks.

Conclusion: AQ must believe something will happen that will have the US attacking them without restraint or concern about Musharraf.

Yeah that leaves either Musharraf GONE (thus no worries about toppling him) and an AQ-Taliban friendly leader in his place, or a some mass-casualty attack in the US.

Worst case: Pakistan's nuke forces slipped AQ a few nukes to destroy a few cities.

Slightly worse: A carefully planned attack on a skyscraper, stadium, school kills more than 9/11.

AQ's goal is the mass-casualty attack that shows US impotence to stop them and demands submission to their rule. So we should expect something along those lines.

Posted by: Jim Rockford at August 11, 2007 05:29 PM (4878o)

One thing we can not know for certain is whether AQs goals in Pakistan mesh well with Iran's plans for the region. AQ may figure now is the time to strike. They certainly could be thinking it is time to take a shot at turning Pakistan into Alqaedastan, or they could be thinking do it now or we're screwed. They may be letting it all ride on this with no fallback plan. Perhaps AQ hopes to provoke a nuke exchange with India .

How does Iran fit into this? They don't. I think Iran does not want Pakistan to become the first nuclear Jihadi nation. They have another country in mind for that. So, perhaps Iran is just as nervous about Pakistan as we are. Good.

Posted by: eman at August 11, 2007 05:41 PM (F/DIG)

10 I wonder why we don't have better intelligence on this. Oh, yeah, because the Democratic Congress has known that 75% of our intelligence is off because of some idiotic judge screwed the FISA ruling up. They have known about it for months and just let it fall by the wayside while they harry the President and the military. If something happens, I will print this out and hand it out like a club promoter.

Sweetness and Light has the NYTs article where the complicity of the Democrats is all laid out for you. I'll never link the traitorous Times.

Posted by: Stormy70 at August 11, 2007 05:44 PM (Y+o71)

11 The camps emptied out because it was so hot that they decided to have free swim instead. Camp, go figure!

Posted by: dri at August 11, 2007 05:50 PM (koO9y)

12 Well, there is another possibility...

What if they hit their saturation point? Suppose enough of them finally got together, read some newspapers, and decided that their leadership were morons, and that this whole "72 virgins for blowing up a marketplace" crap just didn't make sense? We've been seeing signs that they've run out of top-quality recruits for a while now, what if they ran out of the dimmest trainable ones, and the guys they have left finally got the message?

I'd be checking the camps for fragged leaders.

If we find one or more ranking AQ guys dead in each camp, there's a chance that we won't ever find the rest of them (for the best of reasons).

On the other hand, if one or more cities go up in nuclear flame (or even get something like a dirty bomb), a lot of them are probably running for a completely different set of hills, because they know what's coming, and won't ever want to be associated with anything like AQ, ever again (on pain of really learning what the US military can really do, once the gloves are off... they've seen the results when we're only sorta pissed, and can extrapolate into true SHTF mode).

Posted by: cirby at August 11, 2007 06:03 PM (AbkSG)

Letting Bush complete his term without another terrorist hit on American soil is not something that AQ wants to allow to happen. Like their brothers-in-BSD the Democrats, their nightmare scenario is Bush appearing to have stopped terrorism cold (whether he claimed to or not).

I hope the security around the White House is as good as we think it is. That would be my first guess at what they would like to hit if they can find a way.

Another possibility that worries me is an armed incursion across the Mexican border by a force sufficient to take a small American town and bring instant-sharia into effect before killing everyone. Do we have quick-reaction forces available to thwart that? Could it even be thwarted if we did? Given the lax defense of the border, and the low-population desert and mountain areas south of it in Mexico, it would be a natural operating environment for jihadis.

Yeah, when you see rats running for the exits, something bad is going down. Thanks Nancy, for all your help, hon.

ps. FWIW, posted a comment over at Captain's Quarters under "TSP Cut by 75%..." about how our society has become deranged by the media. A different way of thinking about what is happening, perhaps.

Posted by: sherlock at August 11, 2007 06:43 PM (ojW85)

14 Most of the senior Pakistani Generals have their children living in US. Even Musharraf's son is here. US has been very liberal with these people, and leaves them alone. It is time to start twisting some arms.

Posted by: Tushar D at August 11, 2007 06:56 PM (9ULFg)

Roggio mentions worries about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

Fuck Roggio. I'm sorry, Ace, but I get mighty damned tired of this "weapons of mass destruction" fear-mongering. I didn't buy it in 2002, and I don't buy it now.

1. As Curtis LeMay was fond of reminding fearful civilians, a nuclear weapon is just a weapon. There is no sense in separating nuclear weapons into some supernatural category, apart from other potential weapons. Lots of countries (including France!) have nuclear weapons, yet nuclear weapons haven't been used once -- not by Stalin, not by Mao, not by any tyrant or madman -- since Harry S. Truman dropped the Big One on Nagasaki.

2. To return to the argument I kept having with my friends over Saddam's WMDs back in 2002, the basic point can be summed up in three words: No delivery system. Just as there was no feasible way for Saddam to hit the United States with his WMDs, there is no feasible way for Al Qaeda to use Pakistan's nukes to hit the United States.

Pakistan doesn't have ICBMs. It does have an Air Force, but trying to picture a scenario in which AQ operatives hijack a nuclear-armed Pakistani jet and fly all the way to San Francisco to nuke the Golden Gate Bridge -- eh, I'll leave that to some Hollywood screenwriter trying to concoct a plot for the next season of "24."

The notion that our enemies must use super-weapons is akin to the notion that our enemies are 10-foot-tall supermen -- a bugaboo to frighten the fearful. If indeed Al Qaeda perpetrates another attack inside the U.S., they will use weapons of domestic origin, just like the jets they used on 9/11.

C'mon, people: AQ is clever, but they're not clever enough to smuggle nuclear megatonnage across the Rio Grande. And the manufacture of nuclear weaponry is a very technologically demanding task.

As for fears of a radioactive "dirty bomb," that's another childish bugaboo. The fearful lethality of nuclear weapons stems from their blast, not from their radioactivity. Just blowing a bunch of radioactivity into the atmosphere by conventional explosives is not going to be so super-spectacular.

Besides which, next time Al-Qaeda hits, I bet it won't be in the U.S., but in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Inflicting something on the order of 5,000 U.S. casualties in a single day -- a death toll that would include lots of generals, colonels and rear-echelon womenfolk -- now, that would be a politically effective use of Al-Qaeda's resources. Remember when the Viet Cong briefly invaded the U.S. embassy in Saigon during Tet?

Posted by: Nordbuster at August 11, 2007 07:22 PM (fq/qo)

16 I wouldn't begin to downplay the seriousness of Pakistan's nukes going loose. But it's not all about us as they say. Seems to me India has an historic concern and is a lot closer as a first responder if the shyte hits the fan.

Posted by: Sarge6 at August 11, 2007 07:32 PM (Nittw)

A dirty bomb set of in the Financial District in NYC would be a pretty nasty attack that would certainly kill very few people, but just might make the US Economy puke up its liver.

AQ ICBMs are not the problem, even a large loss of life in a spectacular attack is not the problem, the psychological effect is the problem. AQ wants to hit us hard enough so that we give them what they want, but not so hard that we get royally pissed-off and turn all of MuslimLand into a glow-in-the-dark parking lot. Starting a regional war and having it escalate beyond anyone's control is what is most unnerving...to us in the West. AQ is crazy enough to think world war is the true path to the Caliphate.

Posted by: eman at August 11, 2007 08:20 PM (F/DIG)

why is it that they know when the aq camps are empty and they didn't know when the aq camps were full?

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