Al Qaida: No longer a real threat?

He was just one man, said James Kitfield in NationalJournal.com, but Osama bin Laden’s death, one year ago this week at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs, clearly dealt a “crippling blow” to his al Qaida network. The daring raid on that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killed not just bin Laden himself, but the myth of his defiant invincibility, which lured so many Muslims into jihad. The U.S. also harvested “a library’s worth of intelligence” from his compound; it’s no accident that half of al Qaida’s top 20 leaders have subsequently been killed in raids and drone strikes. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s less charismatic successor, has been forced to lie low, said Greg Miller in The Washington Post. He’s also “narrowed al Qaida’s short-term ambitions” toward smaller, overseas attacks. As chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan put it, al Qaida is now “a shadow of its former self.”

The obituaries for al Qaida are the product of “wishful thinking,” said Seth Jones in Foreign Policy. Even as it has lost many leaders from its core group, it has evolved into a decentralized organization of dozens of terrorist groups in Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Nigeria, and other nations. Overall, the network has conducted more operations and killed more people since bin Laden’s death than in the previous year, and is still determined to strike again in the U.S. Indeed, more than a dozen “lone wolf” individuals with ties to al Qaida have been caught in recent years trying to mount attacks on U.S. cities and infrastructure, and though so far they’ve been intercepted, “it only takes one attack to be successful.”

Occasional lone-wolf attacks won’t produce the “clash of civilizations” that bin Laden hoped to trigger, said Michael Hirsh in NationalJournal.com. And today, Islamists have “an alternative to violent jihad.” The Arab Spring has provided new outlets for the frustrations of many of those who might formerly have rallied behind al Qaida. As they seek political power instead of glorious martyrdom, the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups in the Mideast are cutting deals and moderating their extremism, and may even “be forced to govern pragmatically.” It will probably take many years, said Reuel Marc Gerecht in The Wall Street Journal, but democracy will “get evolution rolling,” undermine the theocrats, and result in bin Laden’s worst nightmare: “less angry relations between Islam and the West.”

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