But the strategy seems at odds with President Bush's statements last week about the threat posed by Al Qaeda's efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In a speech on Tuesday, the president warned that Al Qaeda was "seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons," and said that if the group acquired such weapons it would represent "a threat to every nation and, eventually, to civilization itself."
Despite the president's statements, the decision not to strike the suspect sites appears to result from a deep sense of caution among senior government officials about the quality of the intelligence collected about the sites, as well as the possible unintended political and diplomatic consequences of attacks on dual-use facilities.Collecting intelligence about facilities of this sort is an inexact science at best; intelligence officials and policy makers have learned from past mistakes to be wary when using such information. After the terrorist bombings of two American embassies in East Africa in August 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, which officials believed was connected to Al Qaeda.
But the United States was heavily criticized after it became clear that the evidence linking the plant to Al Qaeda was weak, and that the C.I.A. had been unaware that the plant's ownership had changed well before the cruise missile attack.
The bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war in 1999 also haunts the C.I.A.; analysts mistakenly believed that the building was the headquarters of a Serbian government agency involved in weapons proliferation. During the Persian Gulf war, United States officials engaged in strenuous debates over what to do about sites in Iraq that were suspected of involvement in Saddam Hussein's secret program to develop weapons of mass destruction. There was concern about the accuracy of the intelligence, and also about whether bombing raids would release dangerous chemicals or biological weapons into the atmosphere. After the war, American officials realized that in many cases their information had been incorrect and they had bombed the wrong sites, while many of the real weapons facilities had gone unscathed.
One official said the Bush administration was worried that complaints might be made charging that the United States was destroying the public health and agricultural sites of Afghanistan. The official added that such dual-use targets — which could be employed to make fertilizer and vaccines, or chemical weapons and anthrax — were being deliberately avoided for that reason.
Still, Al Qaeda has shown an eagerness to use whatever weapons it can obtain against American targets in its terrorist operations, and that makes its efforts to acquire chemical and biological weapons particularly worrisome to United States intelligence officials.
The official intelligence assessment is that Al Qaeda has a "crude chemical — and possibly biological — capability," a Pentagon official said recently. In addition to the small quantities of cyanide gas that it may have produced, the terrorist group may also have experimented with other crude poisons such as chlorine and phosgene.