Al Qaeda having to adapt
Image via Wikipedia...The common thread on all al Qaeda attacks is the mass murder for Allah. They believe that by killing non combatants we will eventually submit to their weird religious beliefs. Fortunately, the chances of that happening are remote in the extreme even with this administration. The good news with the Democrats in power is they no longer think it is a problem to intercept enemy communications for the most part.
... Now huddled in the tribal regions of Pakistan, the organization that attacked us on 9/11, al Qaeda main, has been roughly handled.
Because of the actions of two successive administrations, much of this enemy's senior leadership had been captured or killed -- recently, more the latter than the former. What remains of that leadership spends a lot of its waking moments worried about ensuring its own survival rather than threatening ours.
Steps taken to enhance American intelligence and to increase cooperation within the American intelligence community and between American and foreign intelligence services are also paying dividends.
The classic al Qaeda attack, inflicting mass casualties by hitting iconic targets, is now very difficult for them to mount. Such attacks take time to prepare and have multiple threads: logistics, recruiting, training, operations, finance. We have become much better at detecting these threads and rolling up these plots. The 2006 airliner plot in the United Kingdom, for example, might well have succeeded if it had been mounted against our intelligence services as they existed in 2001, but not in 2006, or now.
But we are far short of arranging a victory celebration. Al Qaeda's capacity to mount its traditional brand of spectacular attacks has been reduced, not eliminated. And this is a learning, adaptive and determined enemy.
The new flavor of al Qaeda's threat is lower threshold, less centrally managed and more local. The 2009 Christmas Day attack on an airliner as it approached Detroit, Michigan, was the first attack on our homeland that did not have a thread that took it back to al Qaeda main in Pakistan. It was mounted by an al Qaeda franchise in Yemen and conducted with little training or vetting of the attacker since the enemy knew they risked the operation's compromise with any deeper contact with him.
Other recent threats -- Times Square and the New York City subway -- have been similarly lower threshold and these were engineered by long-term residents of the United States.
This shift is what we in the intelligence community feared as we, like other Americans, watched cable news coverage of the carnage in Mumbai nearly two years ago. Beyond lamenting the immediate tragedy, we anticipated that al Qaeda would go to school on the attacks and see that a small number of terrorists with simple weapons and cell phones could achieve the kind of macro political and economic impact that they had always pursued.
And go to school they have. Future threats will likely be less complex, less well-organized, less likely to succeed, less lethal when they do -- but unfortunately, more frequent.
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This has resulted in our discovering certain plots and it has also led to the enemy using more primitive and less efficient means of communication. I expect this point counter point with the enemy to continue.
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