2007 was a bad year for al Qaeda

Strategy Page:

It's not been a good year for Islamic terrorism. In Iraq, al Qaeda was crushed when the principal al Qaeda supporters, the Sunni Arab minority, turned on the terrorists. Same thing happened, to a lesser extent, in Afghanistan, where some of the pro-Taliban tribes turned anti-al Qaeda, and killed hundreds of al Qaeda fighters. In North Africa, defeated Algerian terrorist groups joined al Qaeda, and tried to revive their revolution. This meant adopting the al Qaeda suicide bomber tactics. While al Qaeda was able to do more than one bombing a day (at their peak) in Iraq, and several a week in Afghanistan, the Algerian branch averaged less than one a month. These attacks grabbed headlines, but the public reaction was all wrong, for the terrorists. The average Algerian saw dead Moslem women and children, and became even more hostile to Islamic terrorism.

Saudi Arabia, which used to be (at least on September 11, 2001) where al Qaeda had the most fans, has turned quite hostile to the group. A recent poll showed only ten percent of Saudis approve of al Qaeda, although 15 percent have high regard for Osama bin Laden. At the same time, 88 percent approved the governments counter-terrorism campaign. What this demonstrates is that, while many, if not most, Arabs approve of terror attacks on the West (which is popularly believed to be the cause of all the Arab world's ills, but that's another subject), once they have Islamic terrorists operating in their own country, they turn on the terrorists. This has been going on since, well, forever. Some recent examples were in the 1990s, when Islamic terrorism failed in Egypt and Algeria. Now the tactic has failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is a flop at making a comeback in Algeria.

Worse yet, for the terrorists, there have been no attacks in the U.S. or Europe....

Al Qaeda is trying to shift resources to Pakistan, where it believes, in cooperation with some pro-Taliban Pushtun and Baluchi tribes, it can survive. Al Qaeda also believes that it has a shot at overthrowing the Pakistani government, and gaining control of nuclear weapons. This is a fantasy, as less than 20 percent of Pakistanis support Islamic radicalism, and there are many factions. But al Qaeda is running out of options. In the last seven hears it went from triumph (the September 11, 2001 attacks) to one disaster after another....

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Much of this happened despite the best efforts of Democrats to deliver Iraq to al Qaeda. There is still a strong push among Democrats to returned to the failed lawfare strategy of fighting al Qaeda. You can see this with the current row over the destruction of interrogation tapes of terrorist leaders. Strategy Page suggest that al Qaeda's current situation may be dire enough to prompt someone to take advantage of the reward being offered for al Qaeda leadership. It would make a nice Christmas or Eid present this year.