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At the very end of the cover story in NYT today:

*The officials interviewed Friday made no attempt to disguise their belief
that the counterterrorism campaign, which was favored by Vice President
Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2009, has outperformed the more troop-intensive
counterinsurgency campaign pushed by Mr. Gates, Gen. David H. Petraeus and
other top military planners. *

June 18, 2011
Qaeda Woes Fuel Talk of Speeding Afghan Pullback By MARK
LANDLER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/mark_landler/index.html?inline=nyt-per>and
HELENE
COOPER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/helene_cooper/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration nears a crucial decision on how
rapidly to withdraw combat forces from
Afghanistan<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/afghanistan/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>,
high-ranking officials say that Al
Qaeda<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_qaeda/index.html?inline=nyt-org>’s
original network in the region has been crippled, providing a rationale for
an accelerated reduction of troops.

The officials said the intense campaign of
drone<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/unmanned_aerial_vehicles/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>strikes
and other covert operations in Pakistan — most dramatically the raid
that killed Osama bin Laden — had left Al Qaeda paralyzed, with its leaders
either dead or pinned down in the frontier area near Afghanistan. Of 30
prominent members of the terrorist organization in the region identified by
intelligence agencies as targets, 20 have been killed in the last year and a
half, they said, reducing the threat they pose.

Their confidence, these officials said, was buttressed by information found
in Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. They said the trove revealed disarray
within Al Qaeda’s leadership, with a frustrated Bin Laden indicating that he
could no longer direct terrorist attacks by lieutenants who feared for their
own lives.

The American success in the counterterrorism campaign would seem to bolster
arguments for a swift withdrawal from Afghanistan — an issue the
administration is currently examining. The officials emphasized that Mr.
Obama had not yet made a determination on that question.

Fighting Al Qaeda, they noted, was the main reason Mr. Obama agreed to
deploy 30,000 more troops last year, even as he adopted a broader, more
troop-intensive and time-consuming strategy of making key towns in
Afghanistan safe from the
Taliban<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/taliban/index.html?inline=nyt-org>and
helping the Afghans to build up security forces and a
better-functioning
government.

The focus on progress against Al Qaeda was also a counter to arguments made
by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and other military officials in recent
days that the initial reduction of troops should be modest, and that
American combat pressure should be maintained as long as possible so that
the gains from the surge in troops are not sacrificed.

The military has been pressing for a plan under which only a few thousands
troops out of the 100,000 currently in Afghanistan would come home
immediately, with the bulk of the 30,000 troops sent last year remaining for
another year or more.

The officials declined to discuss Mr. Obama’s views on how many troops
should be withdrawn, or how quickly. But their analysis of the
counterterrorism operations clearly reflected conclusions presented to the
president as the deliberations over force levels reach their final stage.
The conclusions would seem to give Mr. Obama room to justify a more
accelerated withdrawal than the plan sought by the Pentagon.

The White House appears to be moving swiftly to conclude the internal
debate, with officials saying that the president may announce a decision as
early as next week, avoiding the kind of drawn-out deliberations that
preceded Mr. Obama’s decision in late 2009 to increase troop levels in
Afghanistan by 30,000.

Mr. Gates, in an interview on Friday, said: “This was a much more
abbreviated process. Nobody wanted to go through what we went through in the
fall of 2009.”

In the 18 months since then, one official said, Mr. Obama has developed
strong views about what has worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The infusion
of troops into Afghanistan, he said, had broken the momentum of the Taliban,
which in 2009 had made alarming inroads toward its goal of toppling the
Afghan government.

But the success in singling out terrorists in neighboring Pakistan has been
far more striking, with another official saying that the United States was
“poised” to defeat Al Qaeda in what was once its most thriving haven. The
organization could no longer use that region as a “launching pad for
attacks,” he said. “The safe haven is a misnomer now,” he added. “It is
anything but safe for Al Qaeda.”

Officials acknowledge that worldwide, Al Qaeda is far from broken. They
consider Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to be the most immediate threat
to the United States homeland, hatching plots from its base in Yemen like
the attempt to blow up a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009.

The recent success against Al Qaeda also does not guarantee that its
militants will not take root again in Afghanistan, particularly as the
United States turns security over to a shaky Afghan government. And a fast
reduction of troops could allow the Taliban, which is stalled but not
destroyed, to regain power it recently lost to the surge.

In Pakistan, the recent gains could be reversed by the deteriorating
relationship between the Pakistani and American governments, which threatens
to curtail cooperation in counterterrorism operations and increase Pakistani
opposition to drone strikes.

Still, for Mr. Obama, who is weighing the heavy costs of the Afghan war as
well as an increasingly restive Congress and public, counterterrorism
success is a potentially appealing argument for a relatively rapid American
withdrawal.

In 2009, intelligence officials identified 30 top Qaeda leaders in Pakistan
and along the Afghan-Pakistan border, a senior administration official said.
“We took 15 off the battlefield last year,” he said, including Sheik Saeed
al-Masri, the group’s third-ranking operative until he was killed in a drone
strike in 2010.

In addition, he said, 5 more of the 30 leaders on the 2009 list were killed
this year, including Ilyas Kashmiri, a Pakistani veteran of the
Soviet-Afghan war who was accused in 2009 of conspiring with two Chicago men
to attack a Danish newspaper that had published a cartoon depicting the
Prophet Muhammad.

While typically new operatives take the place of those killed, the rapid
pace of attacks has dealt an unusually heavy blow to the organization. An
American intelligence assessment concluded that the 28 drone strikes the
Central Intelligence Agency has carried out in Pakistan since mid-January
have killed about 150 militants, according to an official.

And then there was the spectacular raid by the Navy Seal team that killed
Bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 2. It produced
a cache of information — documents, hard drives and other materials — that
officials said contained revealing discussions between Bin Laden and his key
commanders. “The sense was clear that morale was hurt,” an official said,
describing the findings without offering documentation or specifics about
the internal communications. “They worried most about safety.”

The officials interviewed Friday made no attempt to disguise their belief
that the counterterrorism campaign, which was favored by Vice President
Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2009, has outperformed the more troop-intensive
counterinsurgency campaign pushed by Mr. Gates, Gen. David H. Petraeus and
other top military planners.

“This progress has been enabled by our surge, and the training of A.N.S.F.,
which will be critical to the durability of gains against the safe haven and
against the Taliban,” said Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council
spokesman, referring to the Afghan National Security Force. “These gains
would not have been possible at this rate and quality without the service of
our men and women in uniform.”

Besides going after Qaeda and Taliban operatives, the counterinsurgency
campaign includes a broad plan to try to improve governance in Afghanistan,
fight corruption, train the Afghan Army, wean farmers off the cultivation of
poppies, promote women’s rights and protect local population centers.

When Mr. Obama decided in December 2009 to go with the more ambitious plan
backed by the Pentagon, the president said he would allow “18 months to test
those concepts,” a senior White House official said.

“What we’ve seen is the pursuit of Al Qaeda has yielded probably even
greater successes than we thought,” the official said. As for the assortment
of projects under the banner of counterinsurgency, the official said that
the “infusion of resources has allowed the Afghan National Army forces to be
trained up.”

David E. Sanger, Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt contributed
reporting.


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Alexander Snyder-Mackler
(302) 598-867