A secret plan by the United States -- to launch a mission by Special Operations forces into Pakistani tribal areas to capture or kill top Al Qaeda [Images] leaders -- has been held up for more than six months and there was mounting frustration in Pentagon over the continued delay, a media report said.

Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about Osama bin Laden's network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal areas, a problem that, the report said, had been exacerbated by years of missteps in Washington and Islamabad, sharp policy disagreements, and turf battles between American counter-terrorism agencies.

The plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was intended to eliminate some of those battles, the New York Times claimed.

The plan was meant to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington's risk-averse attitude toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan.

They also argue that catching bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive.

But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light. The plan has been held up in Washington by the very disagreements it was meant to eliminate. A senior Defence Department official said there was mounting frustration in the Pentagon at the continued delay.

The story of how Al Qaeda has gained a new haven is in part a story of American accommodation to President Prevez Musharraf whose advisers, the paper says, played down the terrorist threat. It is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights from counter-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq.
Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terror camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States, the officials were quoted as saying.

The new camps are smaller than the ones the group used prior to 2001. However, despite dozens of American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, one retired Central Investigative Agency officer estimated that the makeshift training compounds now have as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago, the paper said.

The paper quotes American intelligence officials as saying that the Qaeda hunt in Pakistan, code-named Operation Cannonball by the CIA in 2006, was often undermined by bitter disagreements within the Bush administration and within the intelligence agency, including about whether American commandos should launch ground raids inside the tribal areas.

Inside the CIA, the fights included clashes between the agency's outposts in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Islamabad. There were also battles between field officers and the counter-terrorism center at CIA headquarters, whose preference for carrying out raids remotely, via Predator missile strikes, was derided by officers in the Islamabad station as the work of 'boys with toys'.

The paper quoted current and former military and intelligence officials as saying that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.

Some former officials told the paper that Bush should have done more to confront Musharraf, by aggressively demanding that he acknowledge the scale of the militant threat. Western military officials were quoted by the Times as saying that Musharraf was instead often distracted by his own political problems, and effectively allowed militants to regroup by brokering peace agreements with them.

Even critics of the White House, the paper notes, agree that there was no foolproof solution to gaining control of the tribal areas. But by all accounts the administration failed to develop a comprehensive plan to address the militant problem there, and never resolved the disagreements between warring agencies that undermined efforts to fashion any coherent strategy.

"We're just kind of drifting," Richard L Armitage, former deputy secretary of state, who was the administration's point person for Pakistan, told the paper.

Under pressure from Pakistan, the Bush administration decided in 2003 to end the American military presence on the ground. In a recent interview, Armitage said he had supported the pullback in recognition of the political risks that Musharraf had already taken. "We were pushing them almost to the breaking point," Armitage said.

To have insisted that American forces be allowed to cross from Afghanistan into Pakistan, Armitage said: "might have been a bridge too far."

In order to keep pressure on Pakistan about the tribal areas, officials decided to have Bush raise the issue in personal phone calls with Musharraf.

But the conversations backfired, it said, adding two former US government officials say they were surprised and frustrated when instead of demanding action from Musharraf, Bush instead repeatedly thanked him for his contributions to the war on terrorism.