Al Qaeda's dwindling band of brothers

Chicago Tribune:

Wednesday evening's airstrike on the lair of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi amounts to more than the clean decapitation of a terrorist network in Iraq.

That welcome assassination--a phrase you don't often read--adds to growing evidence that Al Qaeda is no longer the menacing monolith that has provoked so much fear in the years since Sept. 11, 2001. What we may be witnessing is the stark decline of a tight network that many governments were slow to recognize--and too hesitant to squash--during its ascent in the 1990s.

The specter of Al Qaeda in decline could rearrange how the world views both the war in Iraq and the U.S.-led war on terror worldwide: While the former continues frustratingly unresolved, the latter looks like a growing success.

Syndicated columnist Fareed Zakaria was among the first to note that the world increasingly yawns at Al Qaeda's attempts to wake up the echoes. "Al Qaeda Central, by which I mean the dwindling band of brothers on the Afghan-Pakistani border, appears to have turned into a communications company," Zakaria wrote last month. "It's capable of producing the occasional jihadist cassette, but not actual jihad. ... [T]he fact that they have not been able to do one of their trademark blasts for five years is significant in itself." So is Osama bin Laden's descent from lyrical leader to mumbler of loopy denunciations--of the United Nations as a "Zionist-Crusader tool" and of China, which "represents the Buddhists and pagans of the world."

The relentless pursuit of Al Qaeda's top ranks has left much of its brain trust dead or detained. Al Qaeda may still have the cachet to inspire local cells, as Canadian authorities asserted when they arrested 17 alleged plotters of bombings in Ontario. But recent attacks have lacerated softer civilian targets in Madrid, London and Egypt. Those have been horrific incidents, but they are less ambitious legacies of the ingenious plot that leveled the World Trade Center.

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All this happened while the liberal Democrats said we were losing. It happened in spite of their attempts to thwart the war effort.