The 10-year, US-led campaign against al-Qaeda has claimed Osama bin Laden and many of his top lieutenants while failing to extinguish the threat they posed. Islamic militants have adapted to the war on terror, creating new dangers that are harder to detect and defeat.
Terrorists inspired by bin Laden’s violent message are determined to carry out smaller attacks and remain fixated on aviation and economic targets such as oil and gas fields, pipelines, transportation routes and refineries, according to counterterrorism experts inside and outside the government.
Followers are using new and harder-to-monitor tools to preach, communicate and raise money, and are trying to recruit operatives who arouse less suspicion. Such efforts were highlighted yesterday by a government warning of a possible strike on New York or Washington timed to the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“This is an organisation that has been dynamically changing,” Michigan Republican Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a September 6 meeting with reporters and editors in Bloomberg News’ Washington Bureau. Where money once came primarily from the Persian Gulf, he said Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in northern Africa has become the movement’s biggest funder, through kidnappings and other crimes.
‘FAR DIFFERENT THREAT’
“What on September 11, 2001, was a largely hierarchical organisation led by Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and seven close subordinates, is now an array of regional groups, small cells and individuals who’ve been inspired by bin Laden’s radical message,” said Rick “Ozzie” Nelson, of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, in an interview. “It poses a far different threat today than it did on 9/11.”
“While we have significantly weakened Al-Qaeda’s core leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan, today we are reminded that they can still conduct regional and international attacks and inspire others to do so,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today in a speech at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “And the threat has become more geographically diverse, with much of Al Qaeda’s activity devolving to its affiliates around the world.”
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“I have long described this organisation as a syndicate of terror, not a monolith, and this is becoming more true every day,” she said.
James W McJunkin, assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Washington Field Office, said Al Qaeda’s ability to stage another “big one” like the September 11 attacks “became less and less of a threat, but the smaller, less-organised ones became more of a threat to us.”
9/11 ANNIVERSARY
New York or Washington faces a possible Al Qaeda-sponsored attack around the time of the 10th anniversary, possibly using a vehicle, said a US official who wasn’t authorised to discuss the matter publicly. US Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matt Chandler said in a statement that the threat was “specific, credible but unconfirmed.”
Terrorists may learn from their own failures, such as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s botched October 2010 attempt to blow up cargo planes with bombs disguised as printer cartridges, and may adopt new tactics. The 2008 attack in Mumbai by gunmen who killed about 160 people demonstrated that guns can kill as many people as bombs and are easier to use.
‘WITHIN REACH’
As a result, Nelson questioned Defence Secretary Leon Panetta’s July 8 declaration that the US is “within reach of strategically defeating Al Qaeda,” and White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan’s assertions that Al Qaeda is “taking it on the chin” and is “on the ropes.”
“While killing bin Laden is a significant achievement for the military and the CIA,” Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit and a professor at Georgetown University, wrote in the book “The National Interest” that “it is a major tactical victory that will only lead to a strategic defeat of the enemy should extreme — and highly unlikely — good fortune prevail.”
Compared with 2001, Al Qaeda today presents different challenges because it is more diffuse, its communications and finances are better concealed and its message has attracted a few like-minded recruits in the West — such as Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, and would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad — who have passports, credit cards, language skills and cultural knowledge that make them harder to spot.
“It’s very difficult to detect these individual lone-wolf actors because they can do a lot outside of the radar screen of the intelligence security services, and a number of individuals we know have been inspired by the propaganda and the rhetoric that is coming from Al Qaeda elements abroad,” White House counterterrorism adviser Brennan told reporters yesterday at a Christian Science Monitor roundtable.
As Al Qaeda diversified, the US government has done the opposite. It created two new agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and has undertaken campaigns and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq that have lasted more than twice as long as America’s involvement in World War II.
The decade-long war on terror already has cost an estimated $2 trillion, a Bloomberg analysis found. Public support for US campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq is waning.
RECRUITS
Keeping al-Qaeda and its recruits at bay, though, isn’t getting any easier. In 2001, the group’s leadership, planning and training was in Afghanistan and drew recruits and financing largely from the Persian Gulf, Pakistan and Central Asia.
Today, its core group, which Brennan said includes hundreds of people, continues to operate — with eyes and ears out for CIA and Air Force drones — in the tribal lands of western Pakistan. It has maintained ties to Afghan and Pakistani terrorist groups and to some former and current Pakistani military and intelligence officers.
In a 2009 cable released by WikiLeaks, then-US ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson wrote that Pakistan’s military and Inter-Services Intelligence agency were covertly sponsoring four militant groups, including al-Qaeda, “and will not abandon them for any amount of US money.”
AL QAEDA SUBORDINATES
While the US has concentrated intelligence efforts and firepower on Al Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan, subordinate or allied groups have taken root in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria and the Sahel countries of northern Africa.
Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee on February 9, Michael Leiter, then director of the National Counterterrorism Center, called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen, “probably the most significant risk to the US homeland.”
Al Qaeda has made few if any inroads in more-populous Muslim countries. None of the rebellions in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria has been an effort to create the Islamic caliphate that bin Laden envisioned.
It’s not yet known whether the ultimate beneficiaries of the so-called Arab Spring will be West-facing democrats or Islamist groups such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
“The metastasisation of Al Qaeda worldwide and the spread of it makes it, again, more difficult to track down, but this is why we have relied so heavily on our international partners and developing those relationships with intelligence and security services overseas,” Brennan said.
‘INTELLIGENCE DISASTER’
Scheuer, the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, said at the Edinburgh International Book Fair on August 27 that the uprisings that toppled leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya who had cooperated with the West have been “an intelligence disaster for the US and for Britain and other European services.”
That, coupled with Al Qaeda’s spread, poses problems for the major intelligence tools the US has been using against the terrorists.
It’s harder and more expensive to keep spy satellites and surveillance drones parked over eight or more locations than it is to keep them trained on the Afghan-Pakistani border. Moreover, Al Qaeda terrorists have long since responded to America’s technological advantage by hanging up their mobile and satellite phones.
BRIBES, BLACKMAIL
That means human intelligence is critical. In Pakistan, US intelligence and special operations officers and the agents they recruit, bribe and blackmail have done much of the work of locating and targeting Al Qaeda leaders.
Human intelligence, though, requires language skills, sources, experience, cultural knowledge — and patience as the CIA tries to develop those capabilities in Al Qaeda’s newer locations.
Also important, McJunkin said, are efforts by some Al Qaeda affiliates to recruit or inspire people in the US, Europe and elsewhere who don’t arouse suspicion.
Shahzad, who failed in an attempt to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square, is a good example of “a guy who was clean,” he said.
Shahzad travelled to Pakistan frequently for family reasons and wound up going “off-track” and getting some terrorist training without popping up on intelligence or law enforcement radar, McJunkin said.
‘MOSTLY INEPT’
However, a new study by the RAND Corp, released August 31, found that: “Despite Al Qaeda’s increasing use of the internet to attempt to radicalise and recruit homegrown terrorists in the United States, the turnout has been tiny and mostly inept.”
The study’s author, Brian Michael Jenkins, said that few of the 32 jihadist plots hatched by US-based terrorists since September 11 got much beyond the discussion stage, and only 10 developed anything resembling an operational plan. Six of the 10, moreover, were the subject of FBI sting operations.
Still, militants don’t have to execute big attacks to succeed, McJunkin said. If a small operation that hurts a few people gets media coverage, “that’s an effective tactic for terrorists,” he said.
Social media, gaming websites and virtual worlds also are making it harder to detect terrorist plotters, McJunkin said. He cited the case of five American students who were reading jihadist material on YouTube, along with CDs and printed material, and decided to go to Pakistan to join the fight.
Some technology may not create as much anonymity as its users think it does, said John Kothanek, former head of Pay Pal’s criminal investigations team, who conducted several terror-related investigations for Pay Pal and EBay.
CHARITIES
“I’ve seen certain charities will have line after line of ’Here’s a donation, here’s a donation,’” Kothanek said. “Then all of the sudden someone will say, ‘Here’s 500 bucks, buy some grenades.’”
“Even as we make progress against core al-Qaeda we are finding that, with the rise of Al Qaeda affiliates, the terrorist financing threat has metastasised and, in some ways, become more intractable,” Daniel Glaser, assistant Treasury secretary for terrorist financing, told a House Financial Services subcommittee on September 6. “These affiliates rely on non-traditional sources of funding, including criminal activity and, most notably, kidnapping-for-ransom.”
“We have not seen the end of Al Qaeda, its associated movements, or its ideology,” concludes a September 7 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Al Qaeda has been buffeted relentlessly by global counterterrorism pressure. It has had its ideology increasingly marginalised by global opposition and opprobrium as well as the protest movements in the Arab world.
‘‘Even so, Al Qaeda and affiliated movements can still rear its heads violently and inspire individuals with its distorted narrative — enabled in many ways by globalisation, underlying regional grievances, the stresses of youth bulges, and the force-multiplying effects of modern technology.’’