Fascinating article in Sunday’s NY Times, essentially asking the question ‘has Al Qaeda metastasized?‘.
The landscape of the terrorist threat has shifted, many intelligence officials around the world say, with more than a dozen regional militant Islamic groups showing signs of growing strength and broader ambitions, even as the operational power of Al Qaeda appears diminished.
Some of the militant groups, with roots from Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Caucasus to North Africa and Europe, are believed to be loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda, the officials say. But other groups follow their own agenda, merely drawing inspiration from Osama bin Laden’s periodic taped messages calling for attacks against the United States and its allies, the officials say.
OK, here’s a question. My knee-jerk reaction is that this demonstrates the fragility of the ‘pursue Al Qaeda’ strategy espoused by many of those who oppose the Iraq War. There is, however, a strong counterargument that our attacks on Al Qaeda dispersed enough of the people involved that, in essence, the operation spread the cancer.
Discuss…
(spelling correction thanks to reader Kalin Harvey)
Well one way to look at is this way.
The Democrats were pretty ticked off after Florida. I call that Afghanistan. Once Bush made great gains in the Senate, House and the Governorships in 2002 they got even more radical. After Iraq they went bezerk. We will see how this anger will bring Bush down in Nov.
So Al quead is spreading. I don’t see that as a problem but as a sign that we now have a bunch of small radical groups ready to fight. They don’t have the bases, money and sofistication that Al Queda had in Afghanistan, so in about 10 years they will wiped out with any major impact by their terrorist actions in that time.
I can’t escape the feeling this is another attempt to find bad news.
Sure, these local groups can be painful, but how are they different from similar insurgent groups that have been fighting across the globe in the past?
A few weeks ago Strategy Page noticed that as a result of the changed geopolitical situation, peace seemed to be breaking out all across the world. That is what will in the end defeat terror and their supporters: a changed equation for the benefits of terror. This is not being reported in the NYT article, which in typical style only focuses on what seems to going bad.
In the meantime, all those who are threatened by this changing equation will tend to come out fighting, until it is clear that their cause is without hope. So far, the signs are mostly positive (Iraq, Lybia, Dr. Khan exposed), and if the US manages to turn Iraq even into a moderate success, the situation will improve further.
Cheers,
Wijnand
The Queen Bees are still out. Chasing the drones is a fruitless and endless task.
well, i think that “pursue Al Qaeda” is just shorthand for “think of the problem in terms of a shadowy and loose network of terrorist organizations that sometimes are helped by elements of foreign governments rather than a proxy war run by foreign governments.”
Maybe I’m an optimist, but I have to view this as a good thing. AQ sucker-punched us because they dreamed big, and had the power to coordinate actions from several areas outside our field of view. The dispersal of the terrorists into smaller, independant cells means that we can play leisurely whack-a-mole as they raise their heads above the ridgeline – if they don’t communicate, they can’t coordinate. If they do, we catches them, precious. And then we eats them.
And if they can’t coordinate, then OBL can video-fulminate from his cave to his heart’s content, while all the dispersed cells will shake their beards up and down in violent agreement, while wondering, who’s he talking to?
AQ was also the NYSE of terror, the big board, where well-heeled Saudi fat cats could safely invest their funds and expect a return on investment. By lopping of the head of the organization, and several of it’s underlying echelons of command, how can he now tell which terror cell begging for funds is a legitmate actor with the means, motivation and intent from a day-dreaming fantasist from the all too common ME scam artist?
So we will continue to see low-level, threshold of pain types of activities, like the subway bombing in Moscow, but hopefully fewer of the nightmare scenarios. Time will tell, I suppose.
Reducing the counterargument to its basics demonstrates its absurdity: “Don’t atack al-Qaeda because because then it will spread and change into smaller groups that are harder to fight.”
So, we should leave them alone? We should have carpet nuked Afghanistan? What’s the intended point?
We heard a lot of this before and during the Afghanistan operation. It went underground after the Taliban collapsed, but many of the lib-left crowd still believe it.
The thing is, you can stop the sentence after the first 3 words: “Don’t attack al-Qaeda….”
That’s the payload. Everything else, from slplintering terrorist cells to the ‘terrible Afghan winter’ et. al., is just the convenient excuse. Where there’s no will, there’s never a way.
Nitin:
For those who wish to treat terrorism as a crime, our methods follow the same tactics used by organized crime task forces:
Pick up the foot soldiers, and squeeze them until they drop a dime on the next level up.
While this takes time, what choice do we have? As Joe says above, carpet bomb thousands of square miles of territory?
Second thoughts:
What is better, one large cancer guaranteed to kill you, or several smaller cancers that MAY be treated?
I think this basically reinforces the point that this is a “War on Bad Philosophy”. If Al Qaeda was an isolated group without a supportive environment, this war arguably would have been over once they had been driven out of Afghanistan. Any fragments of AQ would have fallen into inhospitable terrain, and would have withered away. Instead, we have a collections of jihadists ready and willing to take their place. If it wasn’t obvious already, this will be a long war; swamps have to be drained.
This could be bad. We don’t want Al-Hida members running around prosleytizing and getting more people to join up.
That said, I think it’s good. A small cell in the Celebes with no real support can’t cause the U.S. much trouble. A small cell with no real support in France, even, probably couldn’t cause the French much more trouble than they’ve already got. The real key is to take out the support structure, which I think we’ve largely done. All we need to do is keep at it. If we find a base, we should make it go boom. If another country starts hosting them like Afghanistan, it’s probably time for regime change. (Pakistan is a weird case, and too complicated for discussion in a comment.) They need a powerful command to obtain the big nasty weapons and plan the major attacks. As long as we deny them that, they’re just a bunch of losers with AKs occasionally shooting someone. Not ideal, to be sure, but not a major world threat.
If these cells start fomenting serious revolutions in host countries, though, then we have problems. By “serious,” I mean early-90s Taliban level, not early ’00s MILF (Moro something or other) level.
Ah, the left. Both clever and stupid. Trapped in their modern-day version of Zeno’s paradox…
I’ll have some more on this in tomorrow’s WOT entry, but I think that there are some broader geopolitical issues that are shaking out in this dispersal and in other regions as well.
The 19th century was the century of empires. The 20th century was the century of nation-states fighting each other in largescale confrontations. By the latter half of the 20th century, a focus emerged on regional / ethnic identity – witness the push for EU recognition of semi-autonomous areas like Scotland and the Basque country. The breakup of Yugoslavia illustrates the ancient ethnic and religious tensions that had been papered over by national boundaries, but it is in no way unique in that regard.
Where will the lines of common identity vs. local identity be drawn in the 21st century? I suspect Virginia Postrel is right and that the primary fracture lines will be those who favor very limited social and governmental control of thought, action and speech vs. those who wish to control them in the name of one or another “good” – whether that be social equality in Europe or religion among Islamacist fundamentalists.
This poses a huge problem for movements like al Qaeda, the Palestinians, the IRA, the violent arm of the Basques and others who up until now have drawn geographical boundaries for their demands — autonomy for Scotland and Ireland and the Basque nation, “special recognition” for French this and that because NATIONAL BORDERS MEAN LESS NOW.
Al Q. started this way as well – US out of Saudi territory — but quickly morphed into defining things in apocalyptic ideological terms of Islam vs. the West. From a tactical point of view, this matters only insofar as it gives short-term impetus to local / regional affiliations. The means to dismantle such networks remains the same, however: cut off funding, cut off local support and fight the generation-long fight to counter murderous and uneducated hatred.
Ooops, sorry about the boldfaced shouting in that post – clicked on Post rather than Preview.
Robin,
In many cases the 20th-century nation-states were simply empires renamed: USSR/Russia, China, India, Ethiopia (Amharic Christian), Indonesia (now Javanese rather than Dutch), Yugoslavia (Greater Serbia before WW2). None of them are nation-states. The same goes for big chunks of former empires, like Canada, the U.S., or Brazil. They’re states, but not (ethnic) nations.
Only those empires that lost major wars were carved up: the Hapsburgs, the Wilhelmine Germans (or Prussians), the Ottomans. The obsession with ethnic or regional identity goes back at least to the early part of the 20th century (actually before 1848 in Europe), with 1919 being its crucible year. A lot of would-be nations came away from Versailles awfully disappointed.
What seems to feed secessionist or (national or religious) salvation movements above all to be bad governance (including losing costly wars, even Cold Wars), whether a state is huge or tiny.
The major question facing world civilization today seems to be how to improve governance worldwide. Recarving the world into a handful of huge, abstractly administered empires doesn’t sound to me very workable. In fact, it doesn’t have a very good track record. But national sovereignty based on ethnicity (real or imagined) doesn’t have that great a track record, either. Is national sovereignty a right or a privilege or an obstacle? And who gets to decide? That’s what the states with the power to change things seem to be haggling over now.
Joe hit it right on the head.
OT: Anyone else surprised we’re still talking about WMD? Is that really the best the Dems have got?
In response to your original question, the answer is no. As Fred Pruitt and I noted yesterday, all of these organizations that the Times references were already members of bin Laden’s International Front as it was formed back in 1998.
Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, for example, was more or less established with money from bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa in the early 1990s. They mostly run their own organization except when al-Qaeda calls upon them to do something big and that’s the way that the senior leadership prefers it because it makes it that much harder to kill the organization. That’s the whole idea of cells and a dispersed command structure that was originally cooked up by Marxist orgs decades ago. Al-Qaeda is simply learning the lessons of history, and any pretending that there’s any causal relationship between this and the war in Iraq is ahistorical – Abu Ubeid al-Qurashi was writing about this being the organization’s strategy in early 2002 in response to questions about how the network would continue to function post-9/11 after the loss of Afghanistan.
In reply to some of the comments:
“So Al quead is spreading. I don’t see that as a problem but as a sign that we now have a bunch of small radical groups ready to fight.”
They were always ready to fight, we just didn’t pay as much attention to them in the 1990s when the GIA and GSPC were killing tens of thousands of innocent Algerians because we were too preoccupied with OJ Simpson. Most of these orgs have been operating under bin Laden’s aegis for at least a decade.
“Sure, these local groups can be painful, but how are they different from similar insurgent groups that have been fighting across the globe in the past?”
They coordinate strategy, resources, and training to a degree not seen since the days of the old Comintern, which is more or less what this is a Wahhabi version of. This is hardly old news and should be known by anyone who’s studied the subject since at least 1998. Rohan Gunaratna said basically the same thing a couple of months ago.
“well, i think that ‘pursue Al Qaeda’ is just shorthand for ‘think of the problem in terms of a shadowy and loose network of terrorist organizations that sometimes are helped by elements of foreign governments rather than a proxy war run by foreign governments.'”
Al-Qaeda was always an organization of organizations, that was the whole idea behind MAK during the Afghan War, to unite all of the disparate elements of the Islamist revolutionary vanguard under a single banner. Same thing goes with forging agreements with like-minded states as far as accomplishing individual objectives goes.
“AQ sucker-punched us because they dreamed big, and had the power to coordinate actions from several areas outside our field of view.”
They attacked us because they believed that we were a degenerate civilization that didn’t have the stomach for a long, drawn-out war as well as the ability to absorb mass casualty terrorist attacks. Based on past US experiences in Beirut and Somalia, the enemy believed that there was emphirical evidence to support this conclusion.
“The dispersal of the terrorists into smaller, independant cells means that we can play leisurely whack-a-mole as they raise their heads above the ridgeline – if they don’t communicate, they can’t coordinate.”
The problem at hand is that they are engaging in both activities, that was the whole point behind the terrorist convention in Iran this last week or another one scheduled to take place in Bangladesh.
“The dispersal of the terrorists into smaller, independant cells means that we can play leisurely whack-a-mole as they raise their heads above the ridgeline – if they don’t communicate, they can’t coordinate.”
The problem is that they are communicating, where do you think all of this “chatter” is coming from that causes us to raise the alerts?
“So we will continue to see low-level, threshold of pain types of activities, like the subway bombing in Moscow, but hopefully fewer of the nightmare scenarios.”
The Moscow subway bombing is the 3rd such attack on the Russian capital in less than year in what is hardly a free society. The bomber killed 40 people, which is more than died in the Passover Massacre. The double bombing in Irbil last weekend killed over 100, including a number of Kurdish leaders. I’d hardly call those kinds of body counts something to sneer at as far as the organization’s capabilities go.
“A small cell with no real support in France, even, probably couldn’t cause the French much more trouble than they’ve already got.”
Tell that to the cell that was busted two years ago that planned to gas the Russian Embassy in Paris.
“The real key is to take out the support structure, which I think we’ve largely done. All we need to do is keep at it. If we find a base, we should make it go boom. If another country starts hosting them like Afghanistan, it’s probably time for regime change.”
I can rattle off 4 nations that are more or less providing them with aid and support right now – Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Burkina Faso. They also pretty much run their own enclaves in Georgia, Mindanao, Somalia, ect.
“They need a powerful command to obtain the big nasty weapons and plan the major attacks.”
As I said, this is the purpose behind the terror summits. Battle plans are drawn up and strategy is being formulated.
“As long as we deny them that, they’re just a bunch of losers with AKs occasionally shooting someone. Not ideal, to be sure, but not a major world threat.”
That was the same basic perception of them that proved so dangerous during the 1990s. In all likelihood, they still have a working chemical weapons factory in the Pankisi Gorge. We know that training camps still exist in Mindanao and Azad Kashmir as well as that the organization likely already possesses crude chem/bio capabilities. This is one of the reasons why I am so wary of triumphalism in this instance – we’ve made an enormous amount of progress, more than I ever would have possibility thought we could have, but there is still a lot of work left to do.
“If these cells start fomenting serious revolutions in host countries, though, then we have problems.”
The revolution route has been more less pushed to the sidelines in favor of attacking the West directly, in large part because the organization recognizes that should they succeed in a succesful revolution it will likely bring the full force of the West down on top of them.
I agree w/ what Joel and Robin said, so I’ll leave it at that.
Naming the enemy has always been the problem with this war. Not just because it’s hard to put a finger on it (though that’s a factor) and not just because some of the obvious candidates are not in fact the enemy (though so is that), but also because there are PC reasons for not naming certain candidates as the enemy. Which means it doesn’t get discussed and our perception of who is the enemy remains fuzzy, instead of being refined.
Is it terrorism? Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. (And in any case, the al Queda attacks on the US weren’t terrorism in the classic sense.)
Is it al Qaeda? (What if the same people continue attacking us, but call themselves something else?)
Is it Islam? Islam is “the religion of peace”. [end of permitted discussion]
Is it the Arab nation? “What are you saying??? We can’t kill 300 million people!!!” [end of permitted discussion]
Is it Jihadism? Again, this is an ideology, not an enemy – although toxic ideologies can make an enemy of a people or nation, viz Nazism. Variation: is it Wahhabi Islam?
I don’t have any quick answers. But we haven’t really had this discussion, and the result is that there’s endless confusion. People say with a straight face that the war in Iraq was a “distraction” from the “War on Terror”, which they equate with finding some of OBL’s tissue. Once the DNA identification is made, we can all, presumably, go home. Other say that the war is “over”, so why are there still attacks in Iraq? Etc.
The discussion here is interesting and enlightening. A group of you who are obviously well read in this subject are batting around ideas and various possible scenarios. All of you, whatever your disagreements, recognize that we are at war with the enemy of our civilization.
The problem, as I see it, is that the majority of the voters in the next election have no concept of what is being discussed here. Just read the print media or listen to the political discussion now taking place in the Democratic primaries. The further away from Ground Zero, the less the public is aware that we are at WAR.
The Democrats have made George Bush the issue, not our enemies. And most pro war people are spending most of their time defending the President from repeated scurrilous lies and half truths. Only Don Rumsfeld has had the luxury of straight talk. Just rehear his NATO remarks and compare them to todays MTP and you will cringe at the comparison.
If GWB loses to Kerry in November, be prepared for a replay of the 1930s. Only this time, Kerry will return from New York and the UN with “peace in our time” Chamberlain was not leading the British people. He was following the polls and the overwhelming desire of the British public to appease Hitler, lest he get pissed off and do something bad. And you all know the rest of that story.
When I said that about the 1930s to my wife, she asked me why I thought the American public under the age of 40 would even know what Munich was. To my dismay I have to agree with her.
“Only Don Rumsfeld has had the luxury of straight talk.”
C’mon. Rumsfeld is busy spinning how when he says “we know” he means “we suspect” and when he says “we’re certain” he means “it might be so.”
What Rumsfeld has had, until recently, is the luxury of prevaricating without anyone controverting him.
You know, 9/11 affected the beliefs of a great many liberals in this country. The action against the Taliban was the first such that my father supported, going back to Korea. But the failure to find WMD in Iraq and the consequent damage to entire structure of our doctrine of “preemptive war”—which side is it that never reconsiders its positions?
Andrew:
“which side is it that never reconsiders its positions?”
I would actually argue that stubborness is now present on both sides of the aisle. On the right (which is where I come from so this is the area with which I’m most familiar), there has been far too much willingness to accept human rights justifications as the sole casus belli for going to war, all the while there have been no large-scale efforts to provide humanitarian assistance or aid to those who are currently being oppressed in Sudan (Darfur, specifically) or Zimbabwe. Even efforts to send US military assistance to Liberia under human rights premises were pooh-poohed within right-wing circles as an unnecessary exercise that had nothing to do with American interests. As you know, my own support for the war is based on my own conclusion that Saddam’s ties to al-Qaeda constituted a threat to the United States. I supported US military intervention in Liberia under much the same rationale – the Taylor regime was in bed with al-Qaeda and providing it with diamonds as a way by which to evade international efforts to freeze the organization’s finances. So I’m consistent on this one, though I wish I could say the same for many of my ideological bretheren.
On the left, however, there is in my own experience far too much of a tendency to buy into the “Bush lied/misled” meme, especially when it comes to things like the al-Qaeda connection where in the case of the post-August 2002 info (i.e. after Feith and Co’s stuff was rejected) where there is more or less evidence at hand to refute it. A case example of this would be the story that Isikoff and Hosenball ran awhile back claiming that Zarqawi was just an anti-Hashemite terrorist who hated bin Laden. It’s pure crackpot stuff when one looks at the larger picture of all that is know at Zarqawi, but the two folks ran with it because it played into their goal of painting the administration as having misled/lied to the American public. And that’s just a casual glance at the kind of idiocy that Spikey and Hosenball have been known to bring up in regard to the al-Qaeda connection, including their out-and-out erroneous reporting w/ regards to Farouk Hijazi’s claims about the nature of the relationship.
Much same can be said of the willingness in lefty circles to take Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah’s denials (though Zubaydah’s was actually a non-denial, per the Feith memo) of Iraq/al-Qaeda cooperation at face value while ignoring that there is a far greater number of both individuals like Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, Moammar Ahmed Yousef, and numerous Ansar al-Islam captives, as well as other data that provided, among other things, the Clinton administration’s rationale to attack al-Shifa. The claim that secular and religious fanatics are ideologically opposed, incidentally, looks extremely foolish in light of al-Qaeda’s cooperation with a nominally Christian despot like Taylor.
So yeah, I’d say that stubborness is very much a bipartisan trait.
AL:
The dominant analogy, no matter which way you tend to go on the issue of scattering (what Virginians call a “skedaddle”) Totalitarianism 3.x is that we’re essentially dealing with a cancer. And it’s probably justifiable to carry the analogy a bit further by observing that the “treatment” is going to have some fairly toxic consequences for the organism under treatment. It’s a race, in that sense, to reduce the load to the point that the immune system itself can cope with the remainder, before killing the organism. The concept of amputation could also be relevant.
But the analogy takes a turn when we consider that the cancer or infection was really facilitated by the poor conditions existing in parts of the organisms system, so the “wholistic” or “ecological” approach (in conjunction with more invasive short term therapies that don’t undermine that approach too much) gives the greatest odds of not only a cure, but also protection from remission.
There are no guarantees. At least, none that I know of.
Saying that attacking Al Qaeda fostered its mestatisization is like saying that s**t floats because someone makes it float. The assumptions here are plain silly, on the level of the “blood for oil” contention.
This is not a serious allegation. Those making it are not serious people, and anything further they say on the subject should be considered with that in mind.
I’m certainly far from an expert on Al Qaeda but my understanding was that this is always how it has been for Al Qaeda. Unlike most other terrorist organizations Al Qaeda has always been excessively active in linking up with other Jihadist groups. I have to wonder if this new round of link ups isn’t a very positive sign. The fact that Al Qaeda is spending a lot of effort to build up its terrorist network is probably the most telling indication that their old network has been gutted, and they need a new one, fast. So this, most likely, is Al Qaeda rebuilding, or trying to rebuild at least. If we can keep hitting them before they do rebuild then we’ll keep them on the run and getting weaker and weaker every time around, until they’re spent.
Yes, these other organizations have been around a while. But there is a difference between these semi-autonymus ones and Al Qaeda cells. The latter had a command structure that went up and down the chain. Afghanistan and our other efforts have damaged, if not broken, that chain.
So, in a sense, these cells have been set loose to act mostly on their own with only general instructions (hit Musharaff, for example). This may seem to be more troubling since they are harder to pinpoint, to follow.
Yet for those who are used to being given specific orders, being on their own causes them to make mistakes…like killing too many muslims. The attacks in Turkey are a good example, the backlash from Turkish muslims was very strong. The same with a couple of the attacks in the kingdom. Talk about losing hearts and minds. Mistakes like these hurt recruiting.
Dan,
Taylor was a warlord doing whatever was in his best interest to a) maintain power and b) survive.
Being as the USA has arranged the removal of Charles Taylor from power without occupying Liberia, exactly how much of a threat was he and how appropriate was occupying Libera as a means of addressing his threat?
The calculations of warlords about helping Al-Qaeda for cash has changed after Afghanistan and Iraq.
America has Special Forces directed JDAM to deal with the slow learners inside failed states
The only places where Al-Qaeda can operate in the style it had grown used to in Afghanistan — i.e. not bombed to death by the Special Forces directed JDAM — are in failing states Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran that have enough political cohesion (and other reasons) to keep out those Special Forces.
The first two are using up their line of American diplomatic credit to stay off the top of our War on Terrorism “to do list” and the last is a charter member of the Axis of Evil.
The one thing made clear by our two military campaigns to date is thate no one in these failed states will fight to defend them. You only have to kill the cornered rates in the ruling elites and their regime security forces. The mop up may be protracted and costly, but the outcome is certain.