Warren Strobel of Knight-Ridder has a good article out this week about the ways that the Al Qaeda/jihadist threat has evolved in the last three years: Spin-offs filling Al-Qaeda vacuum San Jose Mercury News 09/09/04.
The metamorphosis of Islamist terrorism is all the more remarkable because it comes despite a relentless, U.S.-led campaign against Al-Qaida that has achieved numerous successes, though many of its stated goals remain unmet.
Strobel may be giving the GWOT (global war on terror) a bit too much credit in saying that the US-led effort has been "relentless." The Iraq War has been a major distraction from the pursuit of Al Qaeda and similar anti-American jihadist groups.
Bin Laden, whom Bush once vowed to capture "dead or alive," remains at large along with his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, probably in areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border. At the same time, the Taliban, which gave bin Laden refuge and supported him in the 1990s, has re-emerged as a force in Afghanistan, where the government struggles for stability and U.S. troops continue to suffer casualties. ...
About 70 percent of Al-Qaida's leadership has been killed or captured since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration says, although it hasn't published details to back up the assertion. Between 2,000 and 4,000 Al-Qaida-linked individuals have been detained in dozens of countries.
Interestingly, military actions have played a relatively small part in the successes of the post-Sept. 11 campaign against terrorists. While the war began with U.S. troops and their Afghan allies ousting the Taliban government in Afghanistan in late 2001, much of Al-Qaida's leadership escaped to Pakistan. (my emphasis)
Since then, the counterterrorism successes largely have been the result of multinational cooperation from police and intelligence services.
If the effort of the government, the press, the intelligence agencies and the military had not been diverted from the fight against terrorism as such into the Iraq War, we might have been seeing a lot more articles like this over the past three years. And the public as well as officials more directly responsible for dealing with counterterrorism and the prosecution of terroristswould likely have much more knowledge about the jihadists. And a lot more successes in combatting them.
Especially given the cynicism we saw in the Bush administration's claims of Iraqi WMDs in the buildup to war, it always sensible to be on guard against amorphous claims that the terrorist thread is becoming more and more dangerous all the time and changing in ways that are impossible to keep up with. Without a grounding in reality, such claims become a never ending enemy, The Terrorists, who are poorly defined but justify massive military spending and more wars like the one in Iraq.
That's not what Strobel is doing in his article, though. Al Qaeda even before 9/11 exercised a considerable portion of its power and influence through affiliated organizations that were not directly controlled by Bin Laden's Al Qaeda leadership to the extent that groups like Egyptian Islamic Jihad were. The latter could have been considered "Al Qaeda proper," while other groups existed more in an "Al Qaeda sphere of influence."
But a big part of Bin Laden's and Al Qaeda's success has been to keep their organization and strategies flexible. Scare stories from the Dick Cheney's of the world aside, there is a jihadist threat that goes beyond Al Qaeda. And though I often emphasize the need for the US to focus on real threats to America itself, it would also be a mistake to see the jihadist network as focused only or primarily on national goals.
Jihadism is a transnational movement. And the web of terror groups that Bin Laden and Al Qaeda have nurtured and influenced has to be combatted by effective international intelligence and law-enforcement collaboration.
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