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| Capitol Hill: Michael Chertoff (l.), attends a Senate Homeland Security and Governemtnal Affairs hearing, "Confronting the
Terrorist Threat to the Homeland: Six Years after 9/11," with Michael McConne Jim Young/Reuters |
Al Qaeda: often foiled, still global
Bin Laden's network has not successfully attacked the US since 2001 but fosters worldwide support for its war of ideas.
from the September 11, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
How Al Qaeda sees itself
Following are excerpts from three experts who have for years tracked Osama bin Laden and his formation of the Al Qaeda network. Michael Scheuer headed the Osama bin Laden unit, set up in the early 1990s, at the Central Intelligence Agency. While working there, he wrote "Through Our Enemies Eyes," a book that analyzed everything Mr. bin Laden said over several years and looked at how he structured the Al Qaeda network before 9/11. Brian Jenkins, author of "Unconquerable Nation," which delves into the subject of terrorism, has served as an adviser on terrorism to governments and government agencies for decades and is a senior adviser to the president of RAND Corp. in Washington. In December 2003, he headed a team exercise for the Defense Department that looked at Al Qaeda from the inside out. Bruce Hoffman, formerly with RAND, is author of "Inside Terrorism." He is currently a professor of security studies at Georgetown University in Washington.
Where does Al Qaeda stand today?
Mr. Scheuer: Al Qaeda is very good at replacing lost leaders. People say they rebuilt. I really question how much damage we did to them. I'm not taking anything away from the intelligence services, the special forces that went in there, but Osama bin Laden is clearly capable of replacing them and Al Qaeda is not an organization small enough that we can bring them to justice one man at a time.
I think they may be as potent as before 9/11. There's a whole new tier – a new level of threat from people they've inspired.... That's a tremendous victory for bin Laden because he said all along, "I can't do this by myself or Al Qaeda can't do it by itself. Our main job is not fighting, killing; it's inspiring." Apparently that's working. There have been attacks in Spain, Britain, Germany, Denmark, Canada, Italy,... Algeria, Morocco, [and] in Lebanon now.
Mr. Jenkins: Actually, if you look at their communications, they are increasing in frequency, and they are increasingly improving in production value. The lag time between current events that are referred to on the tapes and their issuance used to be in terms of weeks or even of a couple of months. Now it's down to a few days. [Ayman al] Zawahiri or someone else can comment upon it – and that tape can be put together and delivered within a few days. That confirms not only that they are monitoring world events, which they can do easily with the radio, but they have sufficient confidence in their communications and the security of those communications that they can deliver these on a regular basis without fear that it will compromise the security of the top leadership itself.
What's the role of Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's No. 2?
Mr. Hoffman: Al Qaeda is back to having a command-and-control center, and I think Zawahiri runs it, not Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden has been wheeled out once every two or three years for this very theatrical statement. He is still of enormous symbolic importance, but Zawahiri I think is exercising day-to-day command. He has overseen the reorganization and regrouping [of Al Qaeda] after the setbacks in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. For sure, it's a smaller version of itself with fewer camps or training facilities. But it still has the committees; it still has a Majlis Ashura [its ruling council], which Osama bin Laden hasn't attended in two years.
Scheuer: Zawahiri is not a terribly popular man within the organization. He's not an easy man to like – very abrasive. Egyptians as a whole are not easy to like by other Arabs. They lord it over the Arab world because of their 4,000-year-old history.
What is Al Qaeda's view of the US?
Scheuer: The message has been consistent for more than a decade now.... [Bin Laden is] confident they're winning. He points out that America is hurting economically. We're in bad shape in Iraq, bad shape in Afghanistan. He directly tried to deepen the divisiveness in this country's political affairs. [He said] Democrats failed to do what they said they would after they were elected.
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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