Both sides in terror war bloodied, but unbowed
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Two years after US President George W Bush vowed to take the war to the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks, the fight between the two main antagonists seems to be a draw.
Both the George W Bush administration and al-Qaeda - most recently through a public release on Wednesday of a video and audio tape allegedly of Osama bin Laden himself - are claiming that each has the other right where he wants him (including in Iraq) and exhorting their friends and allies to fight harder for final victory.
And while few contest the notion that Washington has made substantial progress in dismantling al-Qaeda itself, its broader aim of defeating radical Islam and the "jihadis" who draw their inspiration from bin Laden seems as elusive as the Saudi renegade himself.
As Daniel Benjamin, a senior counter-terrorism official under the Bill Clinton administration, put it in the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, the Bush balance sheet is a "mixture of tactical success and strategic slippage".
"Osama bin Laden's ideology continues to spread among most of the world's major Muslim populations, even if his organization has lost strength," Benjamin wrote, echoing the view of most independent experts that the war in Iraq, which President Bush has depicted as part of the "war on terrorism", has also served as a major recruitment tool for jihadis throughout the Islamic world.
That al-Qaeda as an organization has been badly hurt is beyond question. As the administration never tires of saying, two-thirds of its top leadership have been either captured or killed. The past year's capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a top operative who helped plan the September 11 attacks, and, more recently, Hambali, the alleged chief of the network's operations in Southeast Asia, have been cited as major breakthroughs.
Similarly, international efforts to cut off financing of al-Qaeda and similar groups are considered to have made dramatic progress. And, by ousting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Bush has succeeded in denying al-Qaeda headquarters, safe haven, training facilities and other perks that came with a friendly state.
But none of those accomplishments translate into anything like final victory. As was conceded as recently as last week, US intelligence agencies still consider al-Qaeda a potent network, capable even of pulling off a terrorist act causing mass casualties within US borders. That apprehension is felt at the grassroots: three of every four citizens admit their fears of another terrorist attack are as great as or greater than they were two years ago.
And while Washington can take considerable satisfaction from the fact that no major terrorist incident has taken place in the United States since September 11, 2001, the rest of the world, according to Benjamin, has witnessed "an unprecedented wave of terrorism ... including attacks in Bali, Moscow, Mombassa and Riyadh, to name only a few of the most lethal strikes".
But more worrying, according to Benjamin and other experts, is the steadily growing evidence that the battle to win Muslim "hearts and minds" to a more "moderate" and pro-Western world view is being lost, particularly in the wake of the Iraq invasion.
"As bad as the situation inside Iraq may be," Jessica Stern, a terrorism specialist at Harvard University's school of government, wrote in the New York Times last month, "the effect that the [Iraq] war has on terrorist recruitment around the globe may be even more worrisome.
"Intelligence officials in the United States, Europe and Africa say that the recruits they are seeing now are younger than in the past," she went on, quoting Arab colleagues as warning that the Iraq war was "a gift to Osama bin Laden" and a clarion call to do battle against Washington, particularly in Iraq.
By invading Iraq, "Bush and the neo-cons hoped they could drain the terrorist swamp in the long run", Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote last week. "But in the short run, they have created new terrorist-breeding swamps full of angry young Arabs who see America the same way Muslims saw Westerners during the Crusades: as Christian expansionist imperialists motivated by piety and greed."
This perception is reflected in recent surveys of opinion in the Islamic world, particularly in Arab states. A much-cited survey of 20 countries, including eight predominantly Muslim nations, by the Pew Global Attitudes Project immediately after the war, found that Washington's image in the Islamic world has fallen dramatically over the past two years, with less than 15 percent of respondents from Turkey to Indonesia reporting favorable impressions of the United States overall.
The same survey found that a sharply growing percentage of Muslims see the US as a serious threat to Islam and express "at least some confidence" in bin Laden to "do the right thing regarding world affairs".
On the latter issue, solid majorities in Palestine, Indonesia and Jordan, and nearly half of respondents in Morocco and Pakistan, voiced at least some sympathy and support for the al-Qaeda leader.
Many analysts believe that the US image in the Islamic world has only worsened in the four months since the polls were taken because of Washington's failure to provide security and basic services to the Iraqi population and to come up with any evidence that ousted president Saddam Hussein harbored illegal weapons or had close ties with al-Qaeda - the two main justifications cited by Bush for going to war in the first place.
"That has clearly added to the impression in the region that this was a war of conquest carried out in the name of anti-terrorism," said one State Department official who declined to be identified. "What little credibility we had [in the region] has gone up in smoke."
That loss in credibility has also contributed to stretch the already deep strains between Washington and its European allies, most of which were already deeply skeptical of Bush's obsession with Iraq before the war. "The president has much less credibility than he did before the war, and he didn't have much to begin with," said Charles Kupchan, the director of a high-level task force on US-European ties at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"Governments that backed the war [in spite of strong public opposition] paid a political cost for sending troops. Now that many of the claims made by Bush prior to the war have been proven questionable, they will find it even more difficult to continue their support."
Indeed, a growing consensus in Washington - even among some Republicans - is that the "war on terrorism" took a disastrous and extremely costly detour last year when the administration launched its campaign for war with Iraq. Not only did the war divert intelligence and military resources from the offensive against al-Qaeda and its allies, but it appears to have given them new life.
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