Al Qaeda: often foiled, still global

Lots of people are saying there was no threat in the tape; I'm not sure that is true. [Bin Laden] spent more time than before talking about how this war could be ended by conversion. People ... say that is stupid. [But] his audience is often the Muslim world, and his offering us a chance to convert is telling Muslims he ... went the extra mile. [He is] building up the ability for the Muslim world to be able to say he did all he could before he attacked.

Jenkins: We're in a national debate here about where we are in this thing, and we do have to keep in mind that we view things very differently from them. To us, war is a finite undertaking with a clear beginning and a clear end. To our jihadist foes, war is a perpetual condition, as bin Laden himself put it in one of his addresses. This clashing began centuries ago and will continue until Judgment Day – or, as one of his operational planners who is now in custody (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) put it more succinctly: War is life. With that kind of view, they have no need for the kind of timetables that we think about. Moreover, we are a nation of pragmatists, and we want to know what is the return on our investment. If that investment is in blood, the young lives of our men and women, or if we are investing the public treasure, devoting a great deal of effort to this, [we want to know]: "What is the return: What are we getting for this investment?" Those types of concerns about metrics, measures of progress, don't really occur to our jihadist foes for whom fighting itself is an obligation. For them, this conflict is process-oriented not progress-oriented.

What does Al Qaeda have to fear?

Jenkins: The operational environment for them is a lot more hostile. Over the longer term, they may have concerns that their decentralized organization may not suffice to sustain their terrorist campaign. They constantly worry about the loss of unity: That is a recurring theme in their communications. United, they believe they can be victorious. But the historical weakness of Islam has been the lack of unity, so they constantly talk about this.

They worry about Muslims turning against indiscriminate violence, and there's been some discussion about that in their communications. Despite their continuing efforts to galvanize Islam, there has been nothing approaching mass uprisings or demonstrations on their behalf, so their support is shallow. They can inspire handfuls of young men to take a destructive and self-destructive course of action. But there is no mass response to their exhortations....

The biggest concern they have, underscored by their communications, is loss of relevance as the world moves on. That is the fate of organizations like that. Terrorist campaigns don't end with the captures of every high-level terrorist in the organization or of formal surrenders. For example, the Red faction in Germany. They were still sending messages in the 1990s. The Red Brigades [active in Italy during the 1970s] were still sending missives. When we are up to the 200th message of Zawahiri, no one will care. They may be locked in their own little universe of discourse where they become irrelevant to world events. We're not there yet. But to them, that's a fate worse than – well, martyrdom would be welcome. Irrelevancy would be the worst fate.

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