Al Qaeda: shift to smaller, 'softer' targets?

Al Qaeda is far from gone, terrorism experts warn. The new attacks being waged – from the bombings in Bali and on the French tanker in Yemen to the shootings of marines in Kuwait – show the terror network is reconstituting itself, entering a new phase in which attacks are smaller in scale and aimed at "softer" targets.

The group's leaders and its hard-core members – somewhere between 250 to 300 – have been killed, captured, or pushed from Afghanistan. But the thousands of foot soldiers who went through Al Qaeda training camps are disbursed throughout the world – waiting for signals to strike.

Those signals were sent, some experts and US officials say, through recent messages by Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri that were broadcast by Al Jazeera TV throughout the Muslim world.

The new attacks underscore that these foot soldiers – and their loosely affiliated terror groups – have been able to coalesce in other countries and put together the manpower and materiel to wage more attacks.

That makes it all the more crucial, experts say, for the US not only to break up the group's leadership, but to continue to pull in Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern countries in political partnerships to combat the terror group.

"As long as the leadership is alive, they can give strategic and tactical directions," says Rohan Gunaratna, an expert on terrorism at St. Andrews University in Scotland. "The US has been largely fighting this war militarily. It needs to develop a multidimensional approach, pulling in more Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern countries."

Those are the countries where thousands of young men who passed through Al Qaeda training camps have gone. Al Qaeda began decentralizing, Dr. Gunarata says, soon after the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Africa, when Pakistan – pressed by the US – began arresting members passing through.

But that diaspora greatly accelerated last October, after the US military campaign so successfully ended the rule of the Taliban regime that harbored Al Qaeda.

Today, there are basically three sets of Al Qaeda operatives. There is the greatly disrupted leadership – on the run, but still apparently able to orchestrate attacks.

Then there are regional leaders who were sent out in the late 1990s by Al Qaeda. They head up regional groups like Jemaah Islamiyah, the radical Islamist group in Indonesia suspected of setting off the bomb in Bali.

Below that are thousands of foot soldiers from many nations – Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and more. "These groups are sympathetic with Al Qaeda, but carry out operations on their own; they're freelancers," says Jim Walsh, an international security expert at Harvard University. "To put a perverse twist on it, you have groups thinking globally but acting locally."

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