The Daily Whim
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Tue. Nov 11, 2003
Strategy, Schism, or Simply Schizo?
Yesterday, I wondered if Al Qaeda is experiencing a bit of schism in their strategy, and pointed out their tactics have never mated up well with any expressed strategy. Of course, in order to veer from “the company line,” there must be a plan from which to stray.
In a lengthy essay well worth reading, Donald Sensing says there never was one: “I see no evidence that bin Laden has ever had any plan except violence itself, committing it where he could, when he could. He commits violence against Western targets with no vision apparent beyond the violence. He has no idea of how to constitute a true nation state. He is a man whose vision extends no further than more fighting, which is to say, he has no vision at all.”
“If the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the emplacement of American bases throughout central Asia, the destruction of al Qaeda’s key leadership, the seizure of its monetary assets and the activation of Saudi security services against the kingdom’s terror cells are all the result of bin Laden’s inscrutable planning, then I say he’s the best planner we’ve got.”
And Al Qaeda’s random killings of Muslims are costing them what little support they had, even in Saudi Arabia: “‘They lost their support on the street,’ said Ehab al-Khiary, 27 … ‘They are killing people with no cause.”
“‘They can no longer say they are more or less raising the banner of jihad,’ said Saad A. Sowayan, a professor specializing in Bedouin poetry at King Saud University, sipping orange juice in a hotel coffee shop. ‘Jihad is not against your own people.’”
“The fact that the targets were fellow Muslims lent the sense that the attackers might just be pursuing pure chaos. ‘If they were really seeking change they would resort to actions that would win them the support of the people,’ the professor said. ‘Before, people could find excuses. It is getting so irrational that you cannot explain it, you cannot defend it, you cannot understand it.’”
On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, when we thought we faced a long tough fight with a deadly smart enemy, who could have imagined they would ultimately be so self-defeating?
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Does this mean the war on terror is over? Since Al Qaeda is apparently limited to killing folks in their own neighborhood and are no longer an "imminent" threat to the US, what does that mean? If our action in Afghanistan effectively crippled Al Qaeda, why did we go into Iraq?
I am no Oracle. I'm not even the quarter-eating meachnical Fortune Teller at the amusement park. But I'll give you my personal views on your questions. "Does this mean the war on terror is over?" No more so than the Normandy invasion meant WWII was over. Normandy was a turning point, as a result of an absolutely massive effort, but it didn't end the war by itself. We may have reached a similar turning point, though we long ago left behind the days of "Iwo Jima moments." In this case, it may be that the turning point is more a collective understanding of the hollow nature of Al Qaeda's violent acts. An understanding that crosses culture and religion, and strips Al Qaeda of support. But the realization that your enemy is strategically bereft does not stop your enemy from trying to kill more of you. Or kill more of anyone. I don't know how you decide "the war on terror is over." But in just this year, Al Qaeda has either claimed credit for or thought to be behind a half dozen bombings that have killed more than a hundred people (mostly Muslims) and wounded hundreds more. It hardly seems like the time to declare "victory," just because the victims are no longer mostly Americans or Westerners. "Since Al Qaeda is apparently limited to killing folks in their own neighborhood and are no longer an 'imminent' threat to the US, what does that mean?" I think it means two things: that we have been very successful at stripping Al Qaeda of their greatest capabilities, and that whatever attack they might have planned on the US homeland, it is the equivalent of a batter going up to the plate swinging solely for the homer. A single won't do, they won't even try it, but swinging solely for the home run is a very low percentage proposition. It takes a lot of skill, preparation, and experience ... things it's hard to accumulate and execute when you're expending resources and energy to remain "on the run" and uncaught. I still think they have dangerous potential. But their big mistake was not realizing the dangerous potential we have, and they may never be able to recover from that gross underestimation. "If our action in Afghanistan effectively crippled Al Qaeda, why did we go into Iraq?" I've already written about ten gazillion words on this topic, and I'm not going to repeat them here. I don't think we effectively crippled Al Qaeda just by our military action in Afghanistan. It has been a much broader effort (several major arrests in Pakistan, Predator launched missiles in Yemen, etc.). And though I worried that WMD might propagate out of Iraq, I also stated clearly this was a mess we helped create a decade ago, when we wrapped up the Gulf War in such an unsatisfactory manner. We let the last two Republican Guard divisions escape out of the Basra pocket, when six more hours of war would have prevented that (oh, but 100 hours was such a nice round historic number, wasn't it?). We called for uprisings by the Iraqi people, and when they were brutally put down by those very two divisions (and the helicopters we allowed them to use), we stood by and did nothing. There's now an estimated 300,000 Iraqis in mass graves that stand as testimony. Never in history has a country made it its stated policy to go to war to clean up a mess it left behind by previous inaction. It is diplomatically inconceivable that a country would build its case for war on that tenet. But that's exactly what happened in Afghanistan (when the Soviets fell, we pulled out, too, leaving a vacuum that birthed the Taliban, and the future bite on the ass that was 9/11). And in my opinion, that's what happened in Iraq, too.