Despite nearly a decade of war, al Qaeda is stronger today than when it carried out the 9/11 attacks. Before 2001, its history was checkered with mostly failed attempts to fulfill its most enduring goal: the unification of other militant Islamist groups under its strategic leadership. However, since fleeing Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas in late 2001, al Qaeda has founded a regional branch in the Arabian Peninsula and acquired franchises in Iraq and the Maghreb. Today, it has more members, greater geographic reach, and a level of ideological sophistication and influence it lacked ten years ago.
h/t FM
There are lots of facts in this article, but the author doesn’t create a coherent story. Some of his facts undermine his thesis.
Al Qaeda was founded in the late 1980’s. Its growth was overshadowed by the fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Also, in its early years their operations were mostly focused against the Soviet Union and against enemies WITHIN Islamic nations, so we didn’t notice it.
During the 1990s, Al Qaeda began to branch out and coordinate attacks in many places. These attacks included the 1993 WTC bombing, Philippine Air Lines Flight 434, and the destruction of our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. They may or may not have been part of the Khobar Towers attack in 1996. These were NOT failed attempts. In 2000 they struck the USS Cole and failed to hit USS The Sullivans. Contrary to the article, Al Qaeda was at its pinnacle in the 1990s, culminating with 9/11. Although 9/11 had a large and shocking impact, it was really a very small operation. Bear in mind that these many attacks were committed by relatively few people.
After 9/11, they were involved in bombings or attacks in Madrid, Bali, Istanbul, the Philippines, London, Egypt, Jordan, Algiers, Kandahar, and Denmark. They were also involved in more than a dozen bombing in Iraq during the war. The attacks dwindled in both size and number as their forces and organization became depleted, and they were unable to mount a successful attack inside the US. This decline is directly attributable to our enhanced security measures, cutting off much of their funding, and depleting their resources through relentless attacks.
To say that Al Qaeda is more organized and more capable today than they were before our post-911 response is simply not based on any objective facts or logical reasoning.
The subsidiaries were ALWAYS independent organizations, relying on local talent, externally and internally generated funding, and seeking local objectives. The article makes this point. It was the presence of Al Qaeda (the Base) which coordinated the activities of the subsidiaries to make the larger organization seem more powerful and cohesive than it really was. It would be like some crime boss in New York taking credit for every murder committed in the US.
After the US invaded Afghanistan, Al Qaeda began to lose most of its command and control. When we invaded Iraq, that became the focal point of their efforts – that’s where most of their successful attacks took place. When Iraqis finally turned against them, they retreated back to their places of origin.
Now, the fate of Al Qaeda is in doubt. Saying it’s a “succession crisis” assumes the organization is a going concern as a headquarters. Much more likely, the leadership of individual cells or “franchises” will simply re-assert their own control and independence.
Al Qaeda will make a last gasp – attempting a coordinated attack around the world to demonstrate its effectiveness. They will have to pay dearly for this.
But that may never happen if the local leaders don’t want to play the game anymore. Also, if it does happen, they will deplete or expose too many resources to be effective thereafter. This would not, as the author says, demonstrate its organizational health but expose its desperation.
We are much better off now than we were ten years ago. That’s not to say we there isn’t a high probability of seeing a major attack very soon. The only way that attack can save Al Qaeda is if it reinvigorates funding and the loyalty of the local leaders in the larger organization. I don’t see that happening. Our enemies are growing weary of war too.
POW – your last sentence, “Our enemies are growing weary of war too.”, do you mean that they are tired of trying to fight on the battlefield (a forum they’re not well prepared for), or that they’ve decided to stop trying to expand Dar al Islam?
Al_Q is the name America gave this group. It was propped up and exhibited as a tiny fringe of extremists determined to give Islam a bad name and solely responsible for unpleasantness not the ideology that gave it its marching orders. All focus was to be put on AL-Q so that the Saudis might not come under scrutiny as the engine behind Sunni Jihad. Some one crunched the numbers somewhere and determined that playing Whack-a-Mole in the boondocks of Islam and losing a few hundred citizens and soldiers a year was worth not interrupting the flow of oil. It has to be a cynical economic decision, no one can stay this stupid on their own this long.
Lawrence wright has a better and more optomistic take:
http://m.spiegel.de/international/world/a-760938.html#spRedirectedFrom=www
Wright has written one of the best histories of the group and I think has a better understanding of the Arab world as a whole.
Would movements, such as in Egypt, not have occurred had bin Laden been killed or captured earlier? Given that little has changed in the culture save the removal of ONE tyrant, perhaps it is immaterial to ask. The culture itself is rancid and the possibility for several bin Laden clones has risen since the September 11th attacks. The need for immediate and decisive retaliation after the September 11th attacks was crucial. We’ve trusted Pakistan to our great detriment. We’ve shown whatever remains of al Qaeda what little will we have.
I would like to be optimistic that since bin Laden’s death al Qaeda will wither and die but am unsure.
Back in the mid 1800’s there was a similar movement to AQ that gave rise to the British expedition to Omdurman in the Sudan (Mahdiism). It lasted about ten years and then flared out. I expect this one will be the same – a flash in the pan – before they go back to sitting in the dirt and drinking mint tea or Turkish coffee and watching the camels wander by.
Nothing that a few weeks of carpet bombing wouldn’t change. Bring on the B52’s.
If you declare war, say you are at war, then use the weapons you have available.
Collateral damage is expected. It works.
The problem for the west is not al Qaeda itself by name. This is but one small group or drop in a sea of Arabic and the greater Islamic culture of jealous based hate for the west germinated in Arab culture, and ideological hate borne within the religious culture. They are a basket weave of hatred between these cultures ingrained throughout the Middle East and now greater world.
There is no way to negotiate with this. The issue all started when we embraced such alien thinking as equals and invited them into our lands. Sort of like never invite a vampire inside the house analogy. The best thing the west can do now, is pull out of Islamic lands and close our own borders to Islam. We need to suppress their growth in our countries, and indeed start an aggressive campaign of deportation, and anti-Islamic deprogramming in our own cultures.
The War on Terror is over.
There will always be random acts of violence here and there by groups of evil losers….but Osama Bin Laden was a real life James Bond villian and now he’s dead and his organization is in ruins.
Al-Qaeda is about as much a threat today as Nazi’s were in 1946.
Al-Qaeda is about as much a threat today as Nazi’s were in 1946.
You do know that the lifespan of Nazism was less than 20 years, that all the Nazis were first generation converts to Nazism, and the stuff that al-Qaeda has been doing is backed up by a globe straddling 1400 year old religion that hundreds of generations have been born into right?
Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are only practicing Islam the way the prophet Mohammad himself practiced it and until the ideology itself goes away, Jihad isn’t going to go away.
Osama bin Laden was only a figurehead.
He wasn’t the brains or the spiritual leader behind the movement, and he certainly wasn’t the one-and-only source of funds or even Saudi funds.
Oz >
I agree.
This is not about Osama Bin Laden or al Qaeda. It’s about 1.6 BILLION practitioners of Islam around the globe. If only a fractional percentage of them takes violent action in the name of their religion/ ideology, we are in big trouble – As we are.
This is not a clash of religion or a few madmen out to get the west. Christian, Buddhist, Hindu alike fight Islam on their boarders and in their homelands.
If you were a “Trekkie” it would be akin to the Borg sailing across space assimilating the universe’s inhabitants into their collective. We can either fight with assertive force, or we can defend our homelands with vigorous nationalism. Nothing short of either will stop the invasion full stop.
My reading indicates that al Qaeda decends from radical Muslim groups originating in Palestine and Egypt. Wahihabism(?) out of Saudi Arabia financed and promoted international radical Islam for decades. Each young male Muslim is taught that jihad is a religious duty. Al-Qaeda first formed in the Sudan. Saudi Arabia provided discount airfare to Afganistan to have them fight the Russians. The whole process is backfiring on the Sauds as these trained guerrillas are now infiltrating Saudi Arabia.
My uncle told me that he grew up next to a neighbour who had served with Lawrence in WWI. What he saw there so disturbed him that he ended up shooting himself in his barn about ten years after the war ended.
If Al Qaeda was behind 9/11, why did building 7 fall? Look at the friggin’ video of building 7 dropping straight down on it’s own footprint.
This is goddamn stupidity. Al Qaeda and the muslim brotherhood are all creations of the CIA/MI6.
http://sgtreport.com/2011/05/real-terrorism-government-created-terrorism/
Do you honestly believe they killed bin laden and threw his body in the ocean just to stir up doubts? jesus h… Is there anything you won’t believe?
That’s just as stupid as saying Hitler had a larger war machine at the beginning of 1943 than in 1939
when he and Stalin invaded Poland. Factually correct but meaning what? Paratroops should have stormed Berlin in summer 1940?
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When Hitler invaded France 1940 he used thousands of pieces of Czech armour! One of the main tenants for German aggression was to secure critical resources for their economy which was the 3rd largest in the world in 1939. THe British navy controlled the seas which led to the continental ground war.
You’re at least partly right, ct, but there’s more to it. Germany didn’t actually have any great difficulty supplying its economy, before the war or even after it started. They first started encountering problems after they invaded Russia, which had been their biggest and most reliable supplier.
In conquering France, the Germans did indeed use tanks seized from the Czechs, which were appreciably better than the tanks they were making themselves at the time. But even so the French armies were better equipped. France collapsed because of a failure of leadership, not because they were overpowered or outgunned. And the Czechs were not conquered because they had tanks to steal; that was incidental spoils of war. Rather, the Czech state was built on traditionally German territory which Hitler wanted back. The Slovaks had not made the same mistake and Hitler was quite willing to let them be and trade peacefully with them.
The war was a continental ground war largely because that was all that Hitler was interested in. Germany had the resources to challenge Britain at sea if she’d wanted to, but simply didn’t. Hitler made no attempt to build a proper navy. He lost most of what navy he had in the Norway campaign, and showed no sign of missing it particularly. Hitler wasn’t exactly thinking in terms of making Germany a world power, which would have required a navy. He was more concerned to make Europe a world power, after he had united it under German leadership. From that point of view, the navy could wait, and they could always use somebody else’s in a pinch. It was the prospect that he might use the French navy in a pinch that moved the British to destroy the French fleet at Oran.