A former top CIA counterterrorism official today questioned the central tenet of the war in Afghanistan, saying a U.S. defeat and Al Qaeda's return to a safe haven there would not pose a grave threat to the United States.

Paul R. Pillar, a South Asia expert who was deputy chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center in the late 1990s, argued in a Washington Post Op-ed piece that Al Qaeda's haven in Afghanistan was not critical to the success of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and would be even less so today.

"How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven?"  Pillar asked.

What do you call a tsunami that falls on a deserted island?

A seismic event.

George Will's call for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, which surfaced on Aug. 31, seems to fit that category. It hit Washington when the chattering classes were at the beach, toughing out stay-cations or busy putting their kids in school.

So let's take another look.

The father of the Pakistani bomb says that helping the CIA fight the Russians in Afghanistan gave his country "the space" it needed to develop nuclear weapons.

"We were allying with the United States in the Afghan war. The aid was coming," nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan said in an Aug. 31 Pakistan television interview, an English translation of which surfaced Tuesday.

"I maintain that the war had provided us with space to enhance our nuclear capability," Khan  added.

"The credit goes to me and my team, because it was a very difficult task, which was next to impossible. But given the US and European pressure on our program, it is true that had the Afghan war not taken place at that time, we would not have been able to make the bomb as early as we did," Khan said.

Pakistan denied Wednesday that any of its nuclear facilities had been attacked, while the author of the original allegation said his words were being ripped out of context.

Shaun Gregory, a U.K.-based expert on Pakistan, reported in a prestigious West Point, N.Y. counterterrorism journal that extremist militants had attacked nuclear arms facilities three times over the past two years.

Recent jihadist attacks on Pakistan's nuclear facilities did not threaten the security of the weapons inside, an American intelligence official says.

The feds have been hyping their domestic terrorism cases for several years now, and the arrest of seven North Carolina men this week appears to be no exception.

The headliners in the case, of course, are ordinary folks Daniel Patrick Boyd and his two sons, who prosecutors say led three lives: good family men, likeable neighbors and secret terrorists.

Most people probably think of terrorists as natural born killers.

But in the confession of Ajmal Lasab, the only Pakistani gunman to survive the terror attack on Mumbai last November, a more complex picture emerges.

Anyone who thinks that Predator drones and NSA intercepts have made the old-fashioned recruiting of human spies a waste of time - as many U.S. commanders in Afghanistan seem to think - should talk to the family of Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl.

According to an exclusive report from ABC News reporter Matthew Cole moments ago, Bergdahl, who disappeared June 30 from his base in Afghanistan, has been moved to South Waziristan, in Pakistan, where U.S. forces are officially prohibited from operating.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has taken to many stumps lately to proclaim that the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" saved the United States from another terrorist attack.

That leaves the question of what prevented another terrorist attack after the torture, as some call it, of terrorist suspects stopped.

A retired Pakistani general confided a deep worry to a friend in Washington last week: that some young officers in Pakistan's regular army have become increasingly sympathetic over the past few years to the Taliban and their brand of radical Islam.

While he had no numbers or percentages of officers sympathetic to the Taliban, the possibility of any defections raises questions about the reliability of these officers during any sort of push against the Taliban by the Pakistani army.

A top private risk analysis firm gave embattled Pakistan a three-in-ten chance of a military coup even before the latest offensive by Taliban rebels.

New York-based Eurasiagroup, whose head of research is top former State Department, White House National Security Council and CIA official David F. Gordon, said in a little noticed, late April report that it was more than possible the Pakistani Army would step in to stabilize the rebel-threatened country.

The premise of  Eurasiagroup's "scenario" is that "the global economic crisis proves too much to handle for the political leadership in Pakistan."

The report was evidently written before Islamic Taliban rebels overran the Swat Valley this month, forcing the army into barricaded camps and threatening the viability of the Islamabad government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Presumably, the risk of a military coup is far greater now.

Fingers are pointing every which way in the wake of Monday's blood-soaked assault on a police academy in Lahore, Pakistan, that left 27 cadets dead and twice that number wounded.  

But according to the usually reliable Asia Times Online, the attack represented an ominous development in the already perilous Pakistan security situation.

Quoting "militant sources," the magazine said the raid was "the first major operation of the new nexus comprising al-Qaeda, Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud and Punjabi militants."

I had to laugh when I heard our next ambassador to Afghanistan say, "every poll will show that 90 percent of the people firmly reject the Taliban."

You can't make this stuff up.   

Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry may be a great warrior, a very smart guy, and turn out to be a  very fine ambassador. But that's a bunch of baloney.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden more than backed up his boss's view Tuesday that U.S. and NATO troops are not winning the war in Afghanistan.

"We are not now winning the war, but the war is far from lost," Biden told a news conference in Brussels today after three hours of talks with NATO allies.

But an assertion by Biden that 70 percent of Taliban guerrillas could be persuaded to stop fighting or turn against their Afghan brothers-in-arms drew scoffs from experts in Kabul.

Special Forces troops tend to think they carry the fate of the world in their rucksacks.

In Pakistan, they may be right.

Years from now we may look back at the "secret" deployment of some 70 U.S. military advisers to Pakistan as a turning point in the global war on terrorism, the moment when a daring idea and brilliant execution snatched victory from a looming disaster.

Or the opposite: a Pakistani version of Ia Drang, the 1965 battle when North Vietnamese regulars showed they could go toe-to-toe with American troops, signaling a long, devastating and -- in that case -- losing war.

Make no mistake about it: Pakistan hangs in the balance.

It's intermittently amazing to me that we managed to conquer Japan and Germany in four-plus years (with no small help from the Russians, of course), yet after almost twice that time we haven't been able to crush a raggedy band of 8th-century minded terrorists in an area no bigger than Montana.

We didn't even have a plan, as it turned out, as late as last spring, almost seven years after al Qaeda launched big hits on us from its mountain redoubts on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. Today it's said to be ensconced in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, loosely controlled by Islamabad in a regional autonomy arrangement.

The increasingly bold attacks on NATO supplies in Pakistan should be cause for serious worry, U.S. counterterrorism operatives are saying.

The attacks mean that Islamic extremist fighters in the region are adopting the tactics that their fathers and uncles employed more than a quarter century ago -- with CIA backing - to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

The objective: to choke off supplies to occupying troops on the ground.

"The bad guys understand our operations and what our lifelines are all about," said an analyst with counterterror experience in the region.

A little over a decade ago I sat in the living room of Hamid Gul, a still-powerful former head of Pakistani intelligence, listening to him rail in cold fury about the United States.

A hawk-like man with laser black eyes, Gul was known as the "father of the Taliban" for his role in midwifing the fundamentalist Afghan coalition into a fighting force that took Kabul and ruled the country with a puritanical zeal until ousted by the U.S. in the wake of 9/11.

Now he's been fingered by the U.S. as one of four former top Pakistani intelligence officers supporting Islamic terrorism.

The U.S. warned India, perhaps even twice, about impending attacks on Mumbai from Pakistan, according to anonymous senior officials.

But what about Pakistan?  If the reports are correct, did U.S. intelligence warn the Pakistan government that terrorists were about to launch the Mumbai assault from its territory?

If not, why not?

And if so, what did Pakistan do about it?

That seems to be the most obvious element missing from the story so far, that terrorists launched their assault from Pakistan.

The effect of saying that India was warned in advance is to portray its security officials as incompetent, if not derelict. (Some have already resigned.) 

In other words, it tends to spread at least some of the blame for the attacks to Indian officials, at least temporarily, and away from the growing conclusion that Pakistan is to blame for the tragedy.

I have no reason to doubt that a "senior U.S. official" - probably Condoleezza Rice, en route to India -- told the Associated Press that the "Bush administration warned India before last week's brutal attacks in Mumbai that terrorists appeared to be plotting a mostly waterborne assault on its financial capital."

Other unnamed officials, including "a senior counterterrorism official" and Pakstani intelligence sources, chimed in along the same lines, adding details to the allegation that at least some of the terrorists came by sea.

Some news organizations had already found Pakistanis who said they saw suspicious looking men come ashore.

"Waterborne" can only mean from Karachi, the sprawling Pakistani port teeming with al Qaeda-linked terrorists and groups backing armed assaults on India over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Were Pakistani security forces provided with the alleged U.S. warning as well, so they could hunt down the plotters?

Or did the U.S. withhold it, on grounds that Pakistani military, intelligence and security units, riddled with extremist Muslim spies, cannot be trusted?

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, aboard Air Force one with President Bush en route to North Carolina, declined to answer any questions about the affair.

"I'm not able to talk about any of our intelligence community -- any of their cooperation with any other country," she told reporters, according to the White House transcript.  "It would not be appropriate for me to do so, so I have to decline to comment on that."

Likewise, a CIA spokesman declined comment, saying the agency "does not, as a rule, publicly discuss exchanges with other intelligence services."

The National Intelligence Directorate did not immediately respond to e-mail inquiries.

A Pakistani spokesman said he would need more time to provide a definitive answer to the question.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, interviewed Tuesday by CNN's Larry King, said his government was "in no way responsible" for Mumbai.

"Even the White House and the American CIA have said that today," he asserted -- falsely -- according to an advance transcript.  "The state of Pakistan is of course not involved. We're part of the victims, Larry."

Zaradi also said he "would not know" if Lashkar-e-Toiba, the militant, Pakistan-based group fighting to end Indian dominance of Kashmir, was involved with the Mumbai suicide-massacre.
 

"If indeed they are involved, we would not know," he said.

"Again, they are people who operate outside the system. They operate like -- al Qaeda, for instance, is not state-oriented. They operate something on that mechanism, and we would love to -- I've already offered to India full cooperation on this incident, and we intend to do that."

Zadari also suggested no one found to be involved would be turned over to India.

"If we had the proof, we would try them in our courts, we would try them in our land and we would sentence them," he said.


(For more on this, see tonite's PBS show, WorldFocus.)

"Look at their targets. The two hotels they attacked--the Taj and the Oberoi--are old, iconic Indian hotels. It used to be true that these places were affordable only by Westerners. But this is no longer true, and it's one of the big changes over the last ten years in India. The five-star hotels today are filled with Indians. Businessmen, wedding receptions, parties...these are real meeting places now, and even those who cannot afford to stay there often pass through the lobby."

"I think he is correct, and besides, the real business center of Mumbai is now out by the airport and this is where the 'Western' hotels he mentions are primarily located.  So in this sense, if their targets were Westerners, while many would be, and were, in the Taj and Oberoi, the real target-rich environment would be where Zakaria mentions."

"Indeed, Pakistan's intelligence service has waged a proxy war against India using terrorists for decades. The two nuclear powers have avoided a large-scale exchange, but the Pakistani ISI has repeatedly sponsored or aided terrorist groups targeting civilians in India. For example, Indian authorities were quite vocal in blaming Pakistan for the July 11, 2006 train bombings, which killed more than 200."

Newly minted CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus gets a chance to see if his Iraq magic has any chance of working elsewhere next week, when he travels to Islamabad amid a swirl of negotiations aimed at getting the Taliban to halt its Afghan insurgency.

According to some reports, the U.S. itself is ready to talk directly with the Taliban in hopes  of driving a wedge between it and al Qaeda, which it has hosted since the 1990s. 

But while the Taliban was talking in the Pakistani capital this week, its fighters were striking in Afghanistan's capital, in a brazen attack on the Ministry of Culture in the heart of Kabul. 

According to some reports, Saudi Arabia had already quietly brokered talks between the Pakistanis and the Taliban, who were said to be tiring of the al Qaeda Arabs led by Osama bin Laden.