Injured al-Qaida still slithers, grows new fangs
By LISA HOFFMAN, Scripps Howard News Service
September 7, 2003
Two years after its operatives exploded America's sense of domestic security, the al-Qaida terror network has also been shaken to its core.
More than 3,000 al-Qaida suspects have been detained in 90 countries, the United States says. Nearly all those who orchestrated or carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are behind bars or dead.
Worldwide, more than half of al-Qaida's most important known actors have been captured or killed.
Although al-Qaida has mounted a string of small-scale attacks, more than 100 others have been aborted, Attorney General John Ashcroft said recently. And while evidence suggests it was trying mightily, the Islamic extremist group has been unable to score a follow-up blow anywhere nearly as significant as the U.S. attacks.
Even so, the nation's top terrorism experts generally agree America's war on al-Qaida is not on the brink of victory. Osama bin Laden remains free, and his network is sprouting in new places with new tactics.
"There are probably senior-level people we don't even know, replacing those we have gotten," said Richard Clarke, who was White House counterterrorism chief until he stepped down in January.
Rand Corp. terrorism analyst Bruce Hoffman agreed. "It would be imprudent to write al-Qaida's _obituary just yet," he recently wrote. "The post-9-11 al-Qaida has shown itself to be a remarkably nimble, flexible and adaptive entity."
What follows is a look at some _of what Hoffman and other experts say about the current and future state of the terror outfit:
n Al-Qaida is filtering back into Afghanistan, where its operatives are helping train disaffected Afghanis in terror tactics.
n The continuing chaos and growing anti-American atmosphere in Iraq is reported to be attracting Islamic militant fighters from around the world, including some with al-Qaida ties.
n A growing focus on "soft" American targets instead of better-protected government or military facilities means that American businesses, hotels, housing compounds, churches and schools abroad and at home are more likely to be in the al-Qaida bull's-eye, experts say.
Attacks also are likely to be carried out by small cells or individuals acting on their own initiative, with al-Qaida financial assistance.
n Harvard University terrorism expert Jessica Stern says al-Qaida is recruiting Latino Muslims via the Internet and African-American Muslims in U.S. prisons. It also is building ties with Swiss neo-Nazis and organized crime in India.
"Al-Qaida appears almost as the archetypal shark in the water, having to constantly move forward, albeit changing direction slightly, in order to survive," Rand's Hoffman wrote.
Generally successful so far in avoiding post-Sept. 11 al-Qaida violence, America must essentially do the same to stay a step ahead of terrorists, Stern wrote in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.
"Only by matching the radical innovation shown by professional terrorists such as al-Qaida - and by showing a similar willingness to adapt and adopt new methods and ways of thinking - can the United States and its allies make themselves safe from the ongoing threat of terrorist attack," Stern wrote. |
