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Al-Qaeda Has a New Strategy

(Washington Post) Bruce Hoffman - Throughout 2008 and 2009, U.S. officials repeatedly trumpeted al-Qaeda's demise. Yet al-Qaeda late last month launched two separate attacks less than a week apart over Detroit and at a CIA base in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is aggressively seeking out, destabilizing and exploiting failed states and other areas of lawlessness. While the U.S. remains preoccupied with trying to secure yesterday's failed state - Afghanistan - al-Qaeda is busy staking out new terrain. Over the past year, it has increased its activities in Pakistan, Algeria, the Sahel, Somalia and, in particular, Yemen. Al-Qaeda is covetously seeking recruits from non-Muslim countries who can be easily deployed for attacks in the West. Al-Qaeda has become increasingly adept at using the Internet to locate these would-be terrorists. During the past 18 months, American and British intelligence officials have said, well over 100 individuals from such countries have graduated from terrorist training camps in Pakistan and have been sent West to undertake terrorist operations. Remarkably, more than eight years after Sept. 11, we still don't fully understand our dynamic and evolutionary enemy. We claim success when it is regrouping and tally killed leaders while more devious plots are being hatched. Al-Qaeda needs to be utterly destroyed. This will be accomplished not just by killing and capturing terrorists - as we must continue to do - but by breaking the cycle of radicalization and recruitment that sustains the movement. The writer is a professor of security studies at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center.
2010-01-12 09:58:00
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