CIA Agent On The Effects of the Iraq War

[otterinbham 0]

In the wake of today's suicide attack at a U.S. base outside Kabul that killed more than 20 people and apparently was aimed at disrupting Vice President Dick Cheney's trip to Afghanistan, we are going to examine the dramatic rise in suicide attacks in Afghanistan and the resurgence of the Taliban and al Qaeda along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

To help us sort through these developments, we will be joined by former CIA officer Art Keller, who hunted members of al Qaeda in Pakistan in 2006. His job was to gather intelligence about the terrorists from his post on a Pakistani army base. With blonde hair and blue eyes, Keller had no chance of going undercover; he was a spy-master, not a spy.

Speaking out for the first time, Keller explains how the Taliban and al Qaeda are merging and how they learned successful techniques from the war in Iraq.

"Iraq is really a training ground. Tactics from Iraq have migrated, especially the employment of IEDs and suicide bombers again," Keller says. "They see what's effective."

Keller says the war in Iraq has shortchanged the U.S. effort to go after al Qaeda in Pakistan.

"I think a great deal of the resources have gone to Iraq," Keller says. "I don't think it's appreciated that the CIA is not really a very large organization in terms of field personnel. So we do not have infinite amounts. And if you do a couple larger deployments, that uses up a lot of people, because we also have the rest of the world that we have to keep an eye on."

Keller will also help us analyze a wave of new videotapes obtained by CNN from al Qaeda and the Taliban. Those tapes chart the mounting mayhem that the militants are causing both in Afghanistan and in the wild tribal regions of western Pakistan.

"They didn't believe in suicide. They believed that was a sin against Islam," Keller says. "And now, there are waves and waves of suicide bombers being dispatched. So a very strong cultural prohibition has been eroded."