Four days before the fall of Kabul in November 2001, Osama bin Laden was still in town. The Al Qaeda leader's movements before and after September 11 are difficult to trace precisely, but, just prior to the attacks, we know that he appeared in Kandahar and urged his followers to evacuate to safer locations in anticipation of U.S. retaliation. Then, on November 8, he was in Kabul, despite the fact that U.S. forces and their Afghan allies were closing in on the city. That morning, while eating a meal of meat and olives, he gave an interview to Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who was writing his biography. He defended the attacks on New York and Washington, saying, "America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq. The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal." Six months later, when I met Mir in Pakistan, he told me that the Al Qaeda leader had, on that day, appeared to be in remarkably good spirits.

Kabul fell on November 12, and bin Laden, along with other Al Qaeda leaders, fled to Jalalabad, a compact city in eastern Afghanistan surrounded by lush fruit groves. (He was quite familiar with the area, having maintained a compound in a Jalalabad suburb in the 1990s.) Tracking bin Laden closely was Gary Berntsen, a bear-sized CIA officer with a pronounced Long Island accent, who arrived in Kabul on the day it fell. Berntsen had been serving in Latin America on September 11 when he was yanked to run the CIA's fast-moving ground operations in Afghanistan. It was a perfect job for an operative with a distinctly independent and aggressive style.

By November 14, Berntsen was receiving a stream of intelligence reports from the Northern Alliance that the Al Qaeda leader was in Jalalabad, giving pep talks to an ever-growing caravan of fighters. Berntsen dispatched an eight-man CIA team to the city. To provide them with local guides, he made contact with Hazarat Ali--an Afghan commander, longtime opponent of the Taliban, and nose-picking semi-illiterate. Ali sent three teenaged fighters to escort the U.S. team into Jalalabad, which was now crawling with fleeing Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.

But bin Laden wasn't in Jalalabad for long. Following the fall of Kabul, Jalalabad descended into chaos; no one was in charge for at least a week. Abdullah Tabarak, a Moroccan who is alleged to be one of bin Laden's bodyguards, reportedly told interrogators that, during the month of Ramadan, which began on November 17, bin Laden and his top deputy, Egyptian surgeon Ayman Al Zawahiri, left Jalalabad and headed about 30 miles south. Their destination was Tora Bora, a series of mountain caves near the Pakistani border. Berntsen's team remained one step behind them, for now.

**

Tora Bora was not yet a familiar name to many Americans. But what would unfold there over the subsequent days remains, eight years later, the single most consequential battle of the war on terrorism. Presented with an opportunity to kill or capture Al Qaeda's top leadership just three months after September 11, the United States was instead outmaneuvered by bin Laden, who slipped into Pakistan, largely disappeared from U.S. radar, and slowly began rebuilding his organization.

What really happened at Tora Bora? Not long after the battle ended, the answer to that question would become extremely clouded. Americans perceived the Afghan war as a stunning victory, and the failure at Tora Bora seemed like an unfortunate footnote to an otherwise upbeat story. By 2004, with George W. Bush locked in a tough reelection battle, some U.S. officials were even asserting, inaccurately, that bin Laden himself may not have been present at the battle.

The real history of Tora Bora is far more disturbing. Having reconstructed the battle--based on interviews with the top American ground commander, three Afghan commanders, and three CIA officials; accounts by Al Qaeda eyewitnesses that were subsequently published on jihadist websites; recollections of captured survivors who were later questioned by interrogators or reporters; an official history of the Afghan war by the U.S. Special Operations Command; an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and visits to the battle sites themselves--I am convinced that Tora Bora constitutes one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history. It is worth revisiting now not just in the interest of historical accuracy, but also because the story contains valuable lessons as we renew our push against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For the rest of the story, visit The New Republic, where this was originally published.

Peter Bergen, AfPak Channel editor, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a national security analyst for CNN.

By Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann

Scott Shane has a must-read in today's New York Times about the possible expansion of the CIA's program of drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas to Baluchistan, the large and sparsely populated southern Pakistani province where the Afghan Taliban is headquartered.

Having written about the drones a bit ourselves, we read it with great interest and were struck by one of Shane's anonymous sources, a government official who claims that the more than 80 drone strikes in less than two years have killed "more than 400" enemy fighters and "just over 20" civilians.

A study we conducted in mid-October, based on a careful analysis of the most accurate media counts of the strikes, found that between some 370 and 540 militants were killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since the start of 2008. There have been a few more strikes since the study was released, bringing the total of militants killed to between 384 and 578. So that's close enough to be in the same range as the government official's estimate of more than 400 militants killed.

What is troubling -- and in our view, highly unlikely -- is the official's claim that only some 20 civilians have been killed by these drone strikes, a fatality rate of only around 5 percent. Given that one strike alone on the funeral of a suspected Taliban militant in South Waziristan in late June killed at least 18 people described as civilians, according to a report in the London Times, it seems implausible that only a handful more were killed in all of the 81 drone strikes that have occurred since the beginning of 2008.

The methodology by which the anonymous government official arrived at his conclusion of "just over 20" civilians and "more than 400" militants killed by drone strikes since the start of 2008 is unknown, but we worry that the official may be putting a good deal of spin on the figures about civilian casualties because of the unpopularity of the drone strikes in Pakistan; Pakistanis often complain that they not only violate national sovereignty but cause large numbers of civilian casualties.

Our own data shows that if we consider just the period from 2008 until the present, the average civilian fatality rate is between 35 and 40 percent; far more than the five percent claimed by the government official.

Peter Bergen, AfPak Channel editor, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, where Katherine Tiedemann is a policy analyst.

JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Bergen

Three senior administration officials outlined on Tuesday some of the concepts and processes that went into President Obama’s new plan for Afghanistan.

Between September 13 and November 23 the president chaired 10 meetings of his national security team to deliberate over the new strategy.

The president agreed with the ground commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal’s assessment from the summer that the key goal of the strategy was to reverse the momentum of the Taliban in the next 12 months. He selected from the menu of troop deployment options the one that got American boots on the ground in the most rapid manner.

There are six objectives those forces will try to accomplish.

First, reverse the momentum of the Taliban in coming months.

Second, deny the Taliban access to key cities and population centers as well as control of major roads.

Third, prevent al Qaeda from regaining a safe haven in Afghanistan.

Fourth, degrade the Taliban to the point that the Afghan army and police can take up responsibility for security in certain districts and provinces.

Fifth, build up the size of the Afghan army to 134,000 by 2010 and also the size of the police so that by the summer of 2011 the U.S. and NATO can start handing over security to the Afghan army in certain areas.

Right now, of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces only one, Kabul province, is entirely under Afghan military and police control. The officials emphasized that the handover to Afghan security services in 2011 would likely be possible only in "some parts of the country."

Sixth, to build up the key institutions of the Afghan government such as the Ministry of the Interior.

To help achieve those goals the US will deploy 30,000 soldiers into Afghanistan and NATO and other countries helping in the effort in Afghanistan are expected to contribute a further 5,000 to 7,000 soldiers.

The cost of the troop deployment will be $35 billion – some of that consumed by servicemen’s salaries and benefits and the rest to be spent in building Forward Operating Bases for the troops of the surge in a country with little infrastructure and also to supply mine resistant troop vehicles known as MRAPS. (In Helmand Province 80 percent of Marine casualties are caused by the mines known as IEDs.)

A further dimension of the strategy is to encourage the “reintegration” of those Taliban fighters willing to lay down their arms, although one official conceded that senior Taliban leaders had shown little interest in taking such offers up, as for the moment, they believe they are winning the war in Afghanistan.

Peter Bergen, AfPak Channel editor, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a national security analyst for CNN, on whose website this was originally published. 

By Peter Bergen

It's time to table fancy counterinsurgency doctrines about "connecting the Afghan people to the government" -- Afghans have never had, and don't expect much, in the way of services from their government, and it's time now to focus on something much more basic: security. The last government to provide Afghans with real security was... the Taliban. When they ruled the country before 9/11, security came at a tremendous price: a brutal, theocratic regime that bankrupted the country and was a pariah on the world stage.

But in the context of Afghan history, the Taliban bringing security was decisively important, since what had immediately preceded their iron rule was a nightmarish civil war during which you could be robbed or killed at will by gangs of roving ethnic and tribal militias.

The United States learned the lesson of the paramounce of security in Iraq with some success starting in 2007. But the U.S. seems to have developed instant amnesia about this issue in Afghanistan. A glaring symbol of the collapse of security in the country is the 300-mile Kabul-to-Kandahar highway, economically and politically the most important road in the country, which is now too dangerous to drive on.

Who will then provide security? The Afghan army is relatively small and generally ineffective. The police are worse. The plans to ramp up the size and efficacy of those forces are, of course, a key part of the American exit strategy from the country. But that training mission is going to take years. Nor are NATO allies going to add significantly more troops. Indeed, a number of NATO countries are already heading to the exits.

That means that it now falls to the United States to do the heavy lifting in Afghanistan, and if the United States is serious about securing the country and rolling back the Taliban, the President really doesn't have much choice but to put significant numbers of more troops on the ground. That way, he can start winning the war: win back the American public, roll back the Taliban -- who at the leadership level have melded ideologically and tactically with al Qaeda -- and provide real security to the Afghan people.

Peter Bergen, the editor of the AfPak Channel, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and at New York University's Center on Law and Security, and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader. He is CNN's national security analyst.

By Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann

The Obama administration has dramatically ratcheted up the American drone warfare program in Pakistan. Since President Obama took office, U.S. drone strikes have killed about a half-dozen militant leaders along with hundreds of other people, a quarter of whom were civilians.

As a result of the unprecedented 42 strikes by drone aircraft into Pakistan authorized by the Obama administration, aimed at Taliban and al Qaeda networks based there, about a half-dozen leaders of militant organizations have been killed.

The dead include two heads of Uzbek terrorist groups allied with al Qaeda and Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, in addition to hundreds of lower-level militants and civilians, according to our analysis.

The number of civilian deaths caused by the drones is an important issue, because in the charged political atmosphere of today's Pakistan, where anti-Americanism is rampant, the drone program is a particular cause of anger among those who see it as an infringement on Pakistan's sovereignty. A Gallup poll in August found that only 9 percent of Pakistanis favored the strikes, and two-thirds opposed them.

And, according to Philip Alston, a U.N. human rights investigator, the use of drones to carry out targeted assassinations that end up killing civilians may well violate international law.

On Tuesday at a news conference in New York, Alston publicly warned that unless the Obama administration explains what the legal basis is for selecting the individuals targeted by drone attacks, "it will increasingly be perceived as carrying out indiscriminate killings in violation of international law."

An important factor in the controversy over the drones, put forth by some commentators, is the widespread perception that they kill large numbers of Pakistani civilians. Amir Mir, a leading Pakistani journalist, wrote in The News in April that since January 2006, American drone attacks had killed "687 innocent Pakistani civilians."

A month later, a similar claim was made in the New York Times by counterinsurgency experts David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, who wrote that drone strikes had "killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent." In other words, in their analysis, 98 percent of those killed in drone attacks were civilians. Kilcullen and Exum advocated a moratorium on the strikes because of the "public outrage" they arouse.

A very different picture was presented this month by the Long War Journal, an American blog that closely tracks terrorist groups, in particular al Qaeda and the Taliban. Bill Roggio, the editor of Long War Journal, concluded that according to his close analysis of the drone strikes, only 10 percent of those killed were civilians.

Our analysis suggests quite different conclusions than those of either Kilcullen and Exum or the Long War Journal.

But first, a word on our methodology. Our analysis of the drone campaign is based only on accounts from reliable media organizations with substantial reporting capabilities in Pakistan. We restricted our analysis to reports in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal; accounts by major news services and networks -- the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, CNN and the BBC -- and reports in the leading English-language newspapers in Pakistan -- The Daily Times, Dawn and The News -- as well as those from Geo TV, the largest independent Pakistani television network. (Links to all those individual reports can be found here.)

The news organizations we relied upon collectively for our data cover the drone strikes as accurately and aggressively as possible. And though we don't pretend that our study is accurate down to the last civilian death in every drone strike, we posit that our research has generated some quite reliable data on the number of militant leaders killed, a fairly good estimate of the number of lower-level militants killed and a reliable sense of the real civilian death rate.

Since 2006, our analysis indicates, 82 U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan have killed between 760 and 1,000 people. Among them were about 20 leaders of al Qaeda, the Taliban and allied groups, all of whom have been killed since January 2008.

It is not possible to differentiate precisely between militant and civilian casualties, because the militants live among the population and don't wear uniforms and because the militants have the incentive to claim that all the casualties were civilians, but government sources tend to claim the opposite.

However, of those killed in drone attacks from 2006 through mid-October 2009, approximately 500 to 720 were described in reliable press reports as militants, or roughly two-thirds of the total killed.

Based on our count of the estimated number of militants killed, the real total of civilian deaths since 2006 appears to be in the range of 260 to 320, or one-third of those killed.

That finding tracks with polling by the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, described by The News of Pakistan as "a think tank of researchers and political activists" that works in the Pakistani tribal region along the Afghan border, where the drone attacks have consistently taken place.

It found that more than half the people surveyed in winter 2008 in this region, known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, said the drone strikes were accurate and were damaging the militant organizations based there.

Under President Obama, the strikes have taken out at most half a dozen militant leaders while killing approximately 450 other people. Of those, about 75 percent are reported to have been lower-level militants, and about a quarter appear to have been civilians. The strikes appear to have killed a slightly lower percentage of civilians in the past nine months than during the earlier years of the American drone campaign in Pakistan.

Obama, far from curtailing the drone program he inherited from President George W. Bush, has dramatically increased the number of U.S. Predator and Reaper drone strikes. There have been 44 strikes in Pakistan this year (two while Bush was still in office), compared with 34 in all of 2008. None of the strikes under either Bush or Obama has targeted Osama bin Laden, who seems to have vanished like a wraith.

The leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, the mastermind of Benazir Bhutto's December 2007 assassination and many of the suicide bombings in Afghanistan, was a frequent target of the drone attacks. Under Obama, according to our analysis, 15 drone strikes specifically targeted Mehsud.

But he still didn't see it coming. On August 5, Mehsud, a diabetic former gym instructor, was receiving a leg massage on the roof of a house in South Waziristan when a missile from a drone slammed into his hideout, killing one of his wives, her father and the terrorist chief himself.

The Pakistani press was jubilant. "Good Riddance, Killer Baitullah" was the lead headline in the quality Dawn newspaper.

Much of the previous coverage in Pakistan of U.S. drone strikes in the tribal region had ranged from critical to downright hostile. But in the case of Mehsud, U.S. strategic interests and Pakistani interests were closely aligned because the Pakistani Taliban's victims included not only Bhutto, the country's most popular politician, but hundreds of Pakistani policemen, soldiers and civilians.

As the drone attacks have put al Qaeda and allied groups under increased pressure, law enforcement authorities have uncovered few serious plots against U.S. or European targets that are traceable back to militants who had trained in Pakistan's tribal regions since summer 2008, when the drone program was first expanded.

A major exception is Najibullah Zazi, a onetime coffee-cart operator on Wall Street who later worked as a shuttle van driver at the Denver, Colorado, airport.

Authorities say Zazi, an Afghan immigrant, was planning to launch this fall what could have been the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since September 11. He had traveled in late August 2008 to Pakistan, where by his own admission he was trained in explosives by al Qaeda members in a tribal area along the Afghan border.

The FBI found pages of handwritten notes on Zazi's laptop computer about the manufacture and initiation of explosives and the components of various detonators and fusing systems, technical know-how he had picked up at one of al Qaeda's training facilities between late summer 2008 and January 2009, a period of intensified drone attacks.

Drone strikes are an important tool to disrupt al Qaeda and Taliban operations and to kill the leaders of these organizations, but they also consistently kill Pakistani civilians, angering the population and prompting violent acts of revenge from the Pakistani Taliban.

For the time being, however, they appear to be the least bad option the United States has for reducing the threat from Pakistan's militants, given that an American ground assault into Pakistan's tribal regions is out of the question and that U.S. and Pakistani strategic interests are more closely aligned today than they have been in years because of the two countries' shared interest in attacking the Pakistani Taliban and their al Qaeda allies.

Peter Bergen, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the editor of the AfPak Channel and a national security analyst for CNN, on whose website this was originally published. Katherine Tiedemann is a policy analyst at New America. For more on the New America Foundation study, read here.

Graphic: CNN

By Peter Bergen

We are losing in Afghanistan, on two fronts. The most important center of gravity of the conflict -- as the Taliban well recognizes -- is the American public. And now, most Americans are opposed to the war.

For years, Afghanistan was "the forgotten war," and when Americans started paying attention again -- roughly around the time of President Obama's inauguration -- what they saw was not a pretty sight: a corrupt Afghan government, a world-class drug trade, a resurgent Taliban and steadily rising U.S. casualties.

Many surely thought: Didn't we win this war eight years ago?

Americans, of course, hate seeing the deaths of fellow citizens in combat, but even more they hate to see those deaths in the service of a war they believe they are either not winning or maybe even losing, which is one of the reasons why they largely turned against the Iraq war in 2006.

Within a couple of years, Iraq came back from the brink and started to turn around, after which the war there became largely a nonissue for most Americans. Similarly, the American public would be more likely to tolerate the losses of blood and treasure in Afghanistan if they saw real progress being made there. And right now, they don't.

The second front we're losing is the Afghans themselves, who are the United States' center of gravity in the Afghan war. Eight years into this conflict, America and its NATO allies -- who are still looked on favorably by a majority of Afghans -- are not providing large swaths of the Afghan population with the most basic public good, which is security.

It's time to table fancy counterinsurgency doctrines about "connecting the Afghan people to the government" -- Afghans have never had, and don't expect much, in the way of services from their government, and it's time now to focus on something much more basic: security.

The last government to provide Afghans with real security was ... the Taliban. When they ruled the country before 9/11, security came at a tremendous price: a brutal, theocratic regime that bankrupted the country and was a pariah on the world stage.

But in the context of Afghan history, the Taliban bringing security was decisively important, since what had immediately preceded their iron rule was a nightmarish civil war during which you could be robbed or killed at will by gangs of roving ethnic and tribal militias.

It is has been a staple of Western political theory since the mid-17th century, when Hobbes wrote "Leviathan," that if the state does not provide security to its people, life will be "nasty, brutish and short." Hobbes wrote "Leviathan" in the shadow of the English Civil War, deriving from that bloody conflict the idea that the most important political good the state can deliver is security.

The United States relearned this lesson in Iraq with some success starting in 2007. But the U.S. seems to have developed instant amnesia about this issue in Afghanistan, where around 40 percent of the country was controlled by the Taliban or was at high risk for attacks by insurgents, according to a private assessment prepared by the Afghan military in April, which was obtained by CNN.

A glaring symbol of the collapse of security in the country is the 300-mile Kabul-to-Kandahar highway, economically and politically the most important road in the country, which is now too dangerous to drive on.

Who will then provide security? The Afghan army is relatively small and generally ineffective. The police are worse. The plans to ramp up the size and efficacy of those forces are, of course, a key part of the American exit strategy from the country. But that training mission is going to take years. Nor are NATO allies going to add significantly more troops. Indeed, a number of NATO countries are already heading to the exits.

That means that it now falls to the United States to do the heavy lifting in Afghanistan, and if Obama is serious about securing the country and rolling back the Taliban, he really doesn't have much choice but to put significant numbers of more troops on the ground. That way, he can start winning the war: win back the American public, roll back the Taliban -- who have melded ideologically and tactically with al Qaeda -- and provide real security to the Afghan people.

Such a ramp-up will have an additional benefit. In the larger war on al Qaeda and its allies, the center of gravity is the Pakistani public, military and government because it is in Pakistan where al Qaeda and its Taliban allies are headquartered. And in one of the most important strategic shifts since 9/11, the Pakistani military and government are now getting serious about wiping out large elements of the Taliban and allied groups on their territory and, most importantly, are doing it with the support of their population.

No longer are Pakistani military operations against militants in Swat and Waziristan seen by Pakistanis as "America's war": they are now seen as being in the vital interests of the Pakistani state because the Pakistani Taliban and other jihadist groups have made major strategic errors since early 2009, including marching close to Islamabad, attacking Pakistan's equivalent of the Pentagon and killing hundreds of Pakistani soldiers and policemen.

This new development is vitally important. Over the years, U.S. military commanders have often talked about hammer and anvil operations in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan that would bring an American hammer down on the militants based along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, who would then in turn be caught on a Pakistani anvil.

In reality, the American hammer was never large and the Pakistani anvil was never strong.

But the ongoing Pakistani military incursion into Waziristan, which was preceded by months of "softening up" operations with air strikes and artillery as well as a ramped-up American drone program aimed at al Qaeda and Taliban leaders there, is today setting the conditions for a real anvil.

The hammer must now be applied.

Armed groups don't sue for peace when they believe they might have the upper hand, and right now, the Taliban feel that they are winning the war -- or at least not losing it, which for most insurgencies amounts to the same thing. If there is to be some kind of political reconciliation with elements of the Taliban, that will only come once they truly believe they have no prospect of military success.

At the same time, key roads, cities and towns in Afghanistan must also be secured. Without providing that security, as Hobbes wrote three and half centuries ago, governments of any kind will fail at their most basic task.

Peter Bergen, a frequent visitor to Afghanistan since 1993, is the editor of the AfPak Channel and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He is a national security analyst for CNN, on whose website this was originally published.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

By Peter Bergen

On July 25, Najibullah Zazi, a lanky man in his mid-twenties, walked into the Beauty Supply Warehouse in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. The visit was captured on a store video camera. Wearing a baseball cap and pushing a shopping cart, Zazi appeared to be just another suburban guy.

Of course, not many suburban guys buy six bottles of Clairoxide hair bleach, as Zazi did on this shopping trip-or return a month later to buy a dozen bottles of "Ms. K Liquid," a peroxide-based product. Aware that these were hardly the typical purchases of a heavily bearded, dark-haired young man, Zazi-who was born in Afghanistan and spent part of his childhood in Pakistan before moving to the United States at the age of 14-kibitzed easily with the counter staff, joking that he had to buy such large quantities of hair products because he "had a lot of girlfriends."

In fact, the government believes that Zazi, a onetime coffee-cart operator on Wall Street and shuttle-van driver at the Denver airport, was planning what could have been the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since September 11. Prior to his arrest last month, the FBI discovered pages of handwritten notes on his laptop detailing how to turn common, store-bought chemicals into bombs. If proven guilty, Zazi would be the first genuine Al Qaeda recruit discovered in the United States in the past few years.

The novel details of the case were sobering. Few Americans, after all, were expecting to be terrorized by an Al Qaeda agent wielding hair dye. But it was perhaps the least surprising fact about Zazi that was arguably the most consequential: where he is said to have trained.

In August 2008, prosecutors allege, Zazi traveled to Pakistan's tribal regions and studied explosives with Al Qaeda members. If that story sounds familiar, it should: Nearly every major jihadist plot against Western targets in the last two decades somehow leads back to Afghanistan or Pakistan. The first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was masterminded by Ramzi Yousef, who had trained in an Al Qaeda camp on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Ahmed Ressam, who plotted to blow up LAX airport in 1999, was trained in Al Qaeda's Khaldan camp in Afghanistan. Key operatives in the suicide attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000 trained in Afghanistan; so did all 19 September 11 hijackers. The leader of the 2002 Bali attack that killed more than 200 people, mostly Western tourists, was a veteran of the Afghan camps. The ringleader of the 2005 London subway bombing was trained by Al Qaeda in Pakistan. The British plotters who planned to blow up passenger planes leaving Heathrow in the summer of 2006 were taking direction from Pakistan; a July 25, 2006, e-mail from their Al Qaeda handler in that country, Rashid Rauf, urged them to "get a move on." If that attack had succeeded, as many as 1,500 would have died. The three men who, in 2007, were planning to attack Ramstein Air Base, a U.S. facility in Germany, had trained in Pakistan's tribal regions.

And yet, as President Obama weighs whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, the connection between the region and Al Qaeda has suddenly become a matter of hot dispute in Washington. We are told that September 11 was as much a product of plotting in Hamburg as in Afghanistan; that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are quite distinct groups, and that we can therefore defeat the former while tolerating the latter; that flushing jihadists out of one failing state will merely cause them to pop up in another anarchic corner of the globe; that, in the age of the Internet, denying terrorists a physical safe haven isn't all it's cracked up to be.

These arguments point toward one conclusion: The effort to secure Afghanistan is not a matter of vital U.S. interest. But those who make this case could not be more mistaken. Afghanistan and the areas of Pakistan that border it have always been the epicenter of the war on jihadist terrorism-and, at least for the foreseeable future, they will continue to be. Though it may be tempting to think otherwise, we cannot defeat Al Qaeda without securing Afghanistan.

To read the rest of this article, visit The New Republic, where this was originally published.

Peter Bergen, the editor of the AfPak Channel, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and at New York University's Center on Law and Security, and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader. He is a national security analyst for CNN.

TARIQ MAHMOOD/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Bergen

It hasn't been too often in the past couple of years that you could write about good news from Pakistan. But if there is a silver lining to the atrocities that have plagued the country in the past several years, it is the fact that the Pakistani public, government and military are increasingly seeing the jihadist militants on their territory in a hostile light.

The Taliban's assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the country's most popular politician; al Qaeda's bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad; the attack on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore; the widely circulated video images of the Taliban flogging a 17-year-old girl; and multiple large-scale attacks on Pakistani police and army installations by the Taliban have provoked real revulsion among the Pakistani public.

In fact, historians will likely record the Taliban's decision to move earlier this year from Pakistan's Swat Valley into Buner District, only 60 miles from Islamabad, as the tipping point that finally galvanized Pakistan to confront the fact that the jihadist monster it had helped to spawn was now trying to swallow its creator.

The subsequent military operation to evict the Taliban from Buner and Swat was not seen by the Pakistani public as the army acting on behalf of the United States as was often the case in previous such operations, but something that was in their own national interest.

Support for Pakistani army operations against the Taliban in Swat has increased from 28 percent two years ago to 69 percent today.

In fact, arguably not since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 have American strategic interests and Pakistani strategic interests been so closely aligned.

This month it looks virtually certain that the Pakistani military will launch an operation into the tribal regions of Waziristan against the militants based there, who have long provided a haven to al Qaeda. That comes on the heels of an aggressive American drone campaign in the Waziristan region that Pakistani leaders have privately encouraged.

And the militants are losing the war of ideas in Pakistan. Support for suicide bombing has dropped from 33 percent to 5 percent in Pakistan over the past several years. The number of Pakistanis who feel the Taliban and al Qaeda operating in Pakistan are a 'serious problem" has risen from 57 percent to 86 percent since 2007.

When Baitullah Meshud, the Taliban leader who had unleashed his suicide bombers across Pakistan in the past two years, was killed two months ago in a U.S. drone strike, the tone of the Pakistani media coverage was celebratory. "Good Riddance, Killer Baitullah" was the lead headline in the quality Dawn newspaper.

The changing attitudes of the Pakistani public, military and government constitutes arguably the most significant strategic shift against al Qaeda and its allies in the past several years. It will have a direct impact on the terrorist organization and allied groups that are headquartered in Pakistan.

What does this mean for Obama's "Af-Pak" plan? Well, the newly hostile attitude of the Pakistanis to the armed religious zealots on their lands has not translated into any great love for the United States, which is consistently viewed unfavorably by large majorities of them.

As the debate about Afghanistan in the White House moves forward, one important factor in that discussion must be the hostility of the Pakistanis to a large additional troop deployment in neighboring Afghanistan. This is particularly important in light of the fact that the Pakistani military is doing what the U.S. government has hoped for for several years, which is taking newly aggressive steps against important elements of the Taliban in Waziristan.

However, changing attitudes in Pakistan do not mean, for the moment, that the Pakistani military will do much to move against the Taliban groups based on their territory that are attacking U.S. and other NATO forces in Afghanistan, such as Mullah Omar's Quetta shura, the Haqqani network and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezbi-Islami.

Every silver lining in Pakistan must also have a cloud.

Peter Bergen, the editor of the AfPak Channel, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and at New York University's Center on Law and Security, and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader. He is a national security analyst for CNN, on whose website this was originally published. 

A Majeed/AFP/Getty Images