The authoritative Peter Bergen has a must-read assessment of Al Qaeda's status two decades after it was founded. The piece needs to be read in full, but in short he notes that AQ's central objective - to bring down the governments of the Middle East in order to see them replaced with theocratic regimes - has been a resounding failure. The U.S now has a bigger presence than ever in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and its relationships with the Arab regimes are even stronger, united as they have become by a common enemy. Not only that, but by killing thousands of Muslims in the last few years, Al Qaeda has undermined its credibility with Muslims around the world. Most visibly, it has been routed in Iraq.
That's the good news. The bad news is that Al Qaeda is retrenching and reforming along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and that Bin Laden's anti-Western ideology is a powerful influence on the new generation of Taliban leaders.
Which Western countries are most at risk from a major attack? Not the U.S, according to Bergen, in part because the Muslim community there is better integrated than in Europe. The nexus that most concerns counterterrorism experts is that between militant British muslims and Al Qaeda's new headquarters in Pakistan's borderlands:
The lesson of the July 2005 London subway bombings, the foiled 2006
scheme to bring down transatlantic jetliners and several other
unnerving plots uncovered in the United Kingdom is that the bottom-up
radicalization described by Sageman becomes really lethal only when the
homegrown wannabes manage to make contact with the group that so
worries Hoffman, al-Qaeda Central in Pakistan.
"Hotheads in a coffeehouse are a dime a dozen," said Michael Sheehan,
who until 2006 was the deputy New York police commissioner responsible
for counterterrorism. "Al-Qaeda Central is often the critical element
in turning the hotheads into an actual capable cell." Which is why it's
so worrisome that counterterrorism officials have noticed dozens of
Europeans making their way to the tribal areas of Pakistan in the past
couple of years.
Comments