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05/31/2007
Al Qaeda
As a Wall Street Journal report by Bill Spindle and Cam
Simpson on May 29, 2007, noted:
“The standoff in Lebanon between a group of armed extremists
and the Lebanese military, now in its second week, vividly
shows how political turbulence in the Middle East has helped a
new breed of al Qaeda-style militants gain footholds where they
had rarely been active on such a scale.”
It shouldn’t be a great surprise to anyone, however. Bruce
Riedel, Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy
at the Brookings Institution, wrote an essay for the May/June
edition of Foreign Affairs titled “Al Qaeda Strikes Back.”
Following are a few excerpts.
“Al Qaeda is a more dangerous enemy today than it has ever
been before. It has suffered some setbacks since September 11,
2001: losing its state within a state in Afghanistan, having
several of its top operatives killed, failing in its attempts to
overthrow the governments of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
But thanks largely to Washington’s eagerness to go into Iraq
rather than concentrate on hunting down al Qaeda’s leaders, the
organization now has a solid base of operations in the badlands
of Pakistan and an effective franchise in western Iraq. Its reach
has spread throughout the Muslim world, where it has developed
a large cadre of operatives, and in Europe, where it can claim the
support of some disenfranchised Muslim locals and members of
the Arab and Asian diasporas. Osama bin Laden has mounted a
successful propaganda campaign to make himself and his
movement the primary symbols of Islamic resistance worldwide.
His ideas now attract more followers than ever.
“Bin Laden’s goals remain the same, as does his basic strategy.
He seeks to, as he puts it, ‘provoke and bait’ the United States
into ‘bleeding wars’ throughout the Islamic world; he wants to
bankrupt the country much as he helped bankrupt, he claims, the
Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The demoralized ‘far
enemy’ would then go home, allowing al Qaeda to focus on
destroying its ‘near enemies,’ Israel and the ‘corrupt’ regimes of
Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. The U.S. occupation
of Iraq helped move his plan along, and bin Laden has worked
hard to turn it into a trap for Washington. Now he may be
scheming to extend his strategy by exploiting or even triggering
a war between the United States and Iran.”
But al Qaeda can be defeated. Certainly al Qaeda didn’t
anticipate the collapse of the Taliban in Afghanistan, though they
recovered quickly to melt into the badlands along the Afghan-
Pakistani border and bin Laden moved to develop a presence in
Iraq, warning the Iraqi people before the U.S. invasion to prepare
for the “Crusaders’ war to occupy one of Islam’s former capitals,
loot Muslim riches, and install a stooge regime to follow its
masters in Washington and Tel Aviv to pave the way for the
establishment of Greater Israel.” Bin Laden disciple Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi then did his best to destabilize the country after the
U.S. moved in, culminating in the attack on the Golden Mosque
in Samarra February 2006. Zarqawi’s subsequent death last
summer obviously changed little.
Bruce Riedel:
“Al Qaeda has expanded its influence in the Middle East and
Europe. It has earned much credibility in the global jihadi
subculture. Its grand plans to topple the governments of Egypt,
Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have failed, but its attacks against them
illustrate the growing breadth of its ambitions and its increasing
reach throughout the Middle East .
“Al Qaeda’s relocation to Pakistan has also provided new
opportunities for the group to expand its reach in the West,
especially the United Kingdom. Thanks to connections to the
Pakistani diaspora, visitors from Pakistan have relatively easy
access to the Pakistani community in the United Kingdom, and
Pakistani-born Britons can readily travel to Pakistan and back –
facilitating recruitment, training, and communications for
jihadists. [By one estimate, Pakistan received 400,000 visits
from British residents in 2004.] .
“Al Qaeda’s growing connections to Europe have made the
United States more vulnerable, too. If it had not been foiled, the
plot last August to destroy ten commercial airliners en route from
the United Kingdom to the United States – which has been tied
back to the Pakistani-British network and was probably timed to
coincide with the sixth anniversary of 9/11 – would have been
devastating .
“Al Qaeda today is a global operation – with a well-oiled
propaganda machine based in Pakistan, a secondary but
independent base in Iraq, and an expanding reach in Europe. Its
leadership is intact. Its decentralized command-and-control
structure has allowed it to survive the loss of key operatives such
as Zarqawi.”
And is bin Laden looking to promote all-out war between the
U.S. and Iran? Bruce Riedel writes that “Al Qaeda worries about
the Sunni minority’s future in a Shiite-dominated Iraq after the
Americans leave.”
“The biggest danger is that al Qaeda will deliberately provoke a
war with a ‘false-flag’ operation, say, a terrorist attack carried
out in a way that would make it appear as though it were Iran’s
doing. The United States should be wary of such deception.”
It could take months, even years, to determine who is truly to
blame, a la the investigation into the bombing of Pan Am flight
103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
Riedel concludes that a critical first step in defeating al Qaeda is
to recommit to Afghanistan. By diverting troops from Iraq to
here, it may encourage U.S. allies to help supply the additional
troops and equipment that are badly needed. Somehow, NATO
must also convince the likes of Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco
and Tunisia to contribute to the stabilization of Afghanistan,
though this isn’t likely.
Pressure also needs to be increased on President Musharraf of
Pakistan to hold free and fair elections this year, though, again,
today there is little cause for optimism on this front as well.
Bruce Riedel concludes:
“It is now fashionable to call the struggle against al Qaeda the
long war. It need not be so, even though helping to rebuild
Afghanistan will require a long-term commitment. Decisive
actions in key arenas could bring significant results in short
order, and a focused strategy could eventually destroy the al
Qaeda movement. On the other hand, a failure to adjust U.S.
strategy would increase the risk that al Qaeda will launch another
‘raid’ on the United States, this time perhaps with a weapon of
mass destruction. For the last several years, al Qaeda’s priority
has been to bleed the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Striking on U.S. soil has been a lesser goal. If al Qaeda survives,
however, sooner or later it will attack the U.S. homeland again.”
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Hott Spotts will return next week.
Brian Trumbore
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