Guess what? There is an Iraq/al Qaeda link

Last year, the CIA boosted its presence in Pakistan and Aghanistan to ~50 clandestine operatives in order to track down HVT1 and HVT2 (aka high-value targets one and two, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahri.) While the intel surge hasn’t produced any substantiated leads ("We're not any closer" said a military official on the brief), the CIA recently identified a pernicious trend that is not without irony: al Qaeda’s operations, once starved for cash after 9/11, are being kept afloat by cash flowing out of Iraq.

To summarize: the administration said we needed to go into Iraq because Saddam had connections to al Qaeda. While it turns out that this link was fallacious, post-Saddam Iraq is now the engine that keeps al Qaeda’s operations awash in cash, recruits and technical training.

Greg Miller writes today in the LA Times that Iraq has become AQ’s “most profitable franchise”:

In one of the most troubling trends, U.S.officials said that al Qaeda's command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as from kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity. He suggests that Musharraf’s deal with “tribal leaders” has facilitated flows from Iraq and has “made travel easier for operatives migrating to Pakistan after taking part in the insurgency in Iraq. Some of those veterans are leading training at newly established camps and are positioned to become the 'next generation of leadership' in the organization, said the former senior CIA official.”

Miller’s article is well worth a read. MORE