Al-Qaeda Isn’t Beaten Yet

Adecade after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. officials are openly declaring that victory over al-Qaeda is imminent. “Al-Qaeda is sort of on the ropes and taking a lot of shots to the body and the head,” White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan told the Associated Press on Aug. 31. Defence secretary Leon Panetta said in July that the United States is “within reach” of “strategically defeating” the jihadi group, and the Washington Post has confirmed that his assessment is shared by many analysts. But there are reasons to be skeptical of the idea that the threat has almost passed.

An initial reason for skepticism is that we've heard these kinds of claims before. In September 2003, for example, president George W. Bush boasted that up to two-thirds of al-Qaeda's known leadership had been captured or killed, and that the group had been deprived of its sanctuary in Afghanistan. In April 2006, the U.S. intelligence community's consensus held that al-Qaeda had been defeated, as reflected in the National Intelligence Estimate's assessment that “the global jihadist movement is decentralized, lacks a coherent strategy and is becoming more diffuse.” The following month, president Bush echoed this sentiment, saying, “Absolutely, we're winning. Al-Qaeda is on the run.”

President Bush and the U.S. intelligence community overstated al-Qaeda's weakness, and mistakenly believing that the group was defeated helped to produce serious policy errors. Most significant, the United States diverted military and intelligence resources away from Afghanistan-Pakistan to be used in the ill-fated invasion of Iraq. With the U.S. presence in South Asia diminished, al-Qaeda went about establishing a safe sphere for itself in Pakistan's tribal areas.

Between 2006 and 2007, it became clear that al-Qaeda's central leadership was connected to the bombings that struck London on July 7, 2005; and on Aug. 10, 2006, authorities announced the apprehension of more than 20 suspects who were plotting to blow up seven transatlantic flights bound for the United States and Canada from Britain with liquid explosives. Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff commented that if this latter plot hadn't been broken up, “there could have been thousands of lives lost and an enormous economic impact with devastating consequences for international air travel.”

Despite early optimism that the network had been significantly degraded, al-Qaeda was back. By July 2007, official assessments of the group had shifted radically. The new National Intelligence Estimate released that month concluded that al-Qaeda “has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability.”

The fact that the intelligence community has been wrong in predicting al-Qaeda's death before doesn't mean it will always be wrong, but there's little reason to think its understanding of al-Qaeda has drastically improved. Many views held recently by analysts haven't borne out, including the consensus opinion that Osama bin Laden could be found in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (he was in Abbottabad), and the majority view that bin Laden served merely a figurehead within al-Qaeda (he didn't).

Further, other recent evidence suggests that we continue to underestimate the strength of al-Qaeda and its affiliates. During the chaos that has gripped Yemen this year, for example, China's Xinhua news agency reported that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was able to “seize control over swaths of hundreds of kilometres from Lodar city of Yemen's southern Abyan province to southeast Shabwa province's city of Rodhom.” Tribal chieftains told Xinhua that AQAP had established checkpoints and military camps. This is not meant to suggest that al-Qaeda will hold territory in Yemen for a significant period. But the fact that AQAP was able to make such gains suggests that previous estimates of the group's military power didn't capture its full strength.

This skepticism about U.S. intelligence is buttressed by objectively measurable indicators. The 9/11 Commission Report, analyzing the factors that allow terrorist groups to execute catastrophic attacks, concluded that they require physical sanctuaries giving them “time, space and ability to perform competent planning and staff work,” as well as “opportunities and space to recruit, train, and select operatives.”

Al-Qaeda enjoyed one such sanctuary on Sept. 11, 2001, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Today, al-Qaeda affiliates enjoy four: in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and northern Mali. There has also been definitive growth in al-Qaeda affiliates over the past few months in the Sinai and Nigeria. There is no cognizable strategy to dislodge militants from these areas, a fact that in itself suggests it's far too early to envision al-Qaeda's death.

But beyond the threat of a large-scale attack, al-Qaeda's overarching strategy is working fairly well. The group is focused on undermining its enemies' economy; certainly the collapse of the U.S.'s financial sector in September 2008 made it seem mortal. In turn, that produced a strategic adaptation by jihadis, toward what they call the “strategy of a thousand cuts.”

This strategy emphasizes smaller, more frequent attacks, many of which are designed to drive up security costs for their targets. Al-Qaeda operatives have placed three bombs on passenger planes in the past 22 months: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underpants bomb in December 2009, and two bombs hidden in ink cartridges that were placed on FedEx and United Parcel Service planes in October 2010. Abdulmutallab's detonator failed, and the ink cartridge bombs were found before their timers were set to explode, but al-Qaeda doesn't necessarily view those attacks as failures. As radical YemeniAmerican preacher Anwar al Awlaki explained, the ink cartridge plot presented a dilemma for al-Qaeda's foes. “You either spend billions of dollars to inspect each and every package,” he wrote, “or you do nothing and we keep trying.”

Even as many terrorist plots are designed to drive up security costs, the world is entering an age of austerity. Budgets will be slashed, including counterterrorism budgets. Unless the countries that al-Qaeda is targeting find a way to do more with fewer resources, the chance of stopping any given attack will diminish. We may not see another 9/11 in the next decade, but it's likely we'll see more attacks that look like the atrocities that have been perpetrated in Madrid, London and Mumbai.

In short, there's little support for the idea that the threat posed by al-Qaeda has passed. This doesn't mean that we should fear the jihadi group: fear tends to be a pointless, even counterproductive, emotional response to potential danger. Nor does it mean that the countries threatened by al-Qaeda should expand or even maintain their already large counterterrorism budgets. After all, the enemy is expressly trying to grind us down economically.

But policy based on faulty factual assumptions is unhelpful at best, and at worst can help a “defeated” foe rise from the ashes. Just as exaggerating al-Qaeda's strength can produce bad policy, so too can the current exaggerations of its weakness.

– Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is the author of Bin Laden's Legacy (Wiley, 2011), and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.