And in a manner of speaking they are correct. The original little rag-tag band of religious fundamentalist extremists (soulmates of Lefty and Granny)are now fewer in numbers, scattered, and mainly meaningless. OBL has not been seen in four years. Zawahiri the number two, on the othe hand, is still very active, but has been relegated to the back burner of militant ranks of the world. Yes, folks, for the cost of half a trillion dollars before this is all over, tens of thousands of US soldiers dead or wounded, El Busho has all but defeated a handful of villians who managed one huge strike here in the US and have not been seen here since. The trumped up war against al Qaeda in Iraq has been a fraud all along. Any group can call itself or can be called al Qaeda, and cetain people, ignorant people, will eat it up. But calling a Ford a Chevy just because it has four tires doesn't make it a Chevy. And conflating certain factions fighting the US presence in Iraq al Qaeda does not prove them to be associates of OBL or Zawahiri.
So congratulations, McSameites (the new Bushites) you have spent thousands of lives and billions of dollars to partially squash a flea. One formerly very lucky flea. Must make you feel like real men. Especially you, Granny.
That original al-Qaeda has been defeated.
Usamah Bin Laden has not released an original videotape since about four years ago. There was that disaster with the cgi black beard. There was the old footage spliced in by al-Sahab. But nothing new on videotape. I conclude that Bin Laden, if he is alive, is so injured or disfigured that his appearance on videotape would only discourage any followers he has left.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's number two man, is alive and vigorous and oppressively talkative. But he has played wolf so many times with no follow-through that he cannot even get airtime on cable news anymore, except at Aljazeera, and even there they excerpt a few minutes from a long tape.
Marc Sageman in his 'Understanding Terror Networks' estimates that there are less than a thousand Muslim terrorists who could and would do harm to the United States. That is, the original al-Qaeda was dangerous because it was an international terror organization dedicated to stalking the US and pulling the plug on its economy. It had one big success in that regard, by exploiting a small set of vulnerabilities in airline safety procedures. But after that, getting up a really significant operation has been beyond them so far.
In the region, Usamah Bin Laden wanted to overthrow the royal family of Saudi Arabia, and install an al-Qaeda-led, Taliban-like 'emirate' in that country. He wanted to expel US troops from Prince Sultan Air Base, which he considered a form of American military occupation of Saudi Arabia and thus of two of the holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina.
Ayman al-Zawahiri wanted to overthrow the Egyptian government. His Egyptian Islamic Jihad was building cells and capacity for a violent attack on the Egyptian president, just as constituent elements of al-Qaeda had assassinated Anwar El Sadat in 1981.
But the Saudi government has not been overthrown. The US troops are out of Saudi Arabia, so talk has died down about the occupation of the two holy cities, which never made much sense to begin with (there were few or no foreign troops in Hijaz, the west coast along the Red Sea, where Mecca and Medina are located). The Saudi royal family is flush with tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues. It may fall to a popular revolution as with Iran, in the future, but any such instability is unlikely to be led by al-Qaeda. Only 10% of Saudis now say they think well of that organization, and they are the ones who do not think it carried out September 11.
Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, has been devastated inside Egypt. Most of its cadres were killed or imprisoned. It had had an alliance,since 1980 or so, with the Gama'a al-Islamiyyah of the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman. The leadership of the Gama'a has broken with the sheikh, and many of the leaders have renounced violence as a political path. They have written and published 20 or so 'recantations' that interpret the Qur'an as commanding peaceful activitsm and denouncing violence.
That is, one of the major unexpected outcomes of Sept. 11 has been to turn one of the major Egyptian fundamentalist organizations into a peace movement.
Everywhere you look, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad is weaker or has dwindled into insignificance.
So if the original al-Qaeda has been defeated, what are the prospects of violent Muslim radicalism?
Terrorist groups are active in four major contexts among Muslims:
1) There are tiny one-off cells (a group of seven acquaintances, e.g., unconnected to any larger organization) among some Muslim communities of Western Europe. They have no real political prospects or import, although they can be briefly disruptive. They are expressions of discontent by a handful of obsessive personalities with Western foreign policy toward the Muslim world. There are also small one-off cells in some Muslim countries, such as Morocco, but so far they are not politically important. These cells are nurtured by the internet and might have dissipated in its absence.
2) There are larger organizations or networks in some Middle Eastern countries that deploy terrorist tactics for political purposes. The radical Muslim movement of Algeria is an example. Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia made a push 2003-2006 but was largely repressed.
3) In small territories under what is locally perceived as direct foreign military occupation, organized national liberation movements have sometimes deployed Muslim radicalism as an ideology of resistance and resorted to terrorist tactics, as with Hamas in Gaza, and the Kashmiri and Chechen jihadi groups (Hizbullah in Lebanon had its genesis in Israeli occupation of the South of that country). They are leant greater significance and popular support by the national liberation project, but they are operating among relatively small populations (Gaza is 1.5 million) and are taking much larger occupiers, so that they can be crushed or marginalized over time.
One implication of Sageman's work is that these groups centered on national liberation seldom pose a terrorist threat to the United States. Hamas, for instance, pledged no attack on the US. Sageman found no Kashmiris among the international terrorist groups-- they are focused on their domestic project of liberation.
4) Virtually in a class by themselves are the Islamic State of Iraq in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, and the Taliban, whether the Tehrik-i Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan or the neo-Taliban of southern Afghanistan. The Islamic State of Iraq and similar organizations are called by Washington 'al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI-- but the groups themselves generally do not call themselves this since the killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi. They have been attrited in Iraq by Shiite death squads, by American military operations and special death squads, and by the opposition of tribal and other local political forces, such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades, which allied from summer 2006 with the US. They operated on a much bigger scale than the groups in 3) and had the potential to control big swathes of territory before their defeat. The radical Sunnis' strategy in Iraq, of targetting Shiites and provoking an ethnic civil war, doomed them, since it left them a small minority toward which the majority was deeply hostile. They were forestalled by their own tactics from taking up the mantle of Iraqi nationalism, and so remained terrorist groups without larger political import.
While the Taliban are broadly unpopular in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, they do have some claim on sentiments of sub-nationalism among the Pushtun ethnic group and so have managed to become political movements and not just terrorist groups (though they continue to deploy terrorism as one tool for accomplishing their political goals). The neo-Taliban in Afghanistan seem to be near to taking Ghazni, which is not so far from the capital, Kabul.
Although the US is worried about the Arab volunteers who take refuge among the resurgent Taliban, they are a tiny element and cannot easily launch international terrorist operations from FATA. NATO is making a significant error if it does not recognize that the neo-Taliban is more than just a small international terrorist organization. Rather, it has elements of a national liberation organization (in northwest Pakistan it is the lentil-eating Punjabis who are coded as the 'foreign' occupiers).
While counter-terrorism activities can be usefully pursued in these three areas, it is clear that the local perception of foreign occupation is part of the problem, and a long-term occupation is likely to exacerbate the violence rather than reduce it.
