Wednesday, January 15, 2003

Steven Den Beste on the current state of Al-Qaeda:

al Qaeda has let opportunity after opportunity for a major blow against the US go by. Two New Years have passed, with streets of major cities filled with revelers. Not a single suicide bombing. They didn't attack on the 4th of July. They didn't attack on September 11, 2002. They've let several major dates which are significant to Arabs and Muslims pass by. They didn't attack the malls during Christmas season. They haven't managed to pull off a single attack against us in the 12 months since the Tora Bora fight. Do you really think they're holding back?

We've seen lots of threats, and dire warnings, and exhortations to the faithful. We've seen damned little in the way of actual carrying-out. What we're seeing looks immensely like one or two guys with Internet access trying to make al Qaeda look threatening to cover up the fact that they are in deep crisis, such among them as are even left free and alive.

For civilians like us, the only reasonable conclusion is that al Qaeda has been deeply crippled, and the reason they have not made any attacks is that they can't. I do not for an instant believe that they have a bazillion sleepers in the US, and preplaced weapons, and all kinds of other stuff like that which they're holding back for some special occasion. If they could hit us, they'd have done so by now.


I found this initially compelling, until I considered something I heard on (of all places) The McLaughlin Group last week. The show's participants were making predictions for the coming year, and one of them (I don't recall which) said that he believes that in 2003 Al-Qaeda will launch its next big attack, because it fits into the Al-Qaeda time-frame of roughly a year-and-a-half between major attacks. Keeping this in mind, I looked at this timeline of Al-Qaeda's history, and I saw that he was right. Al-Qaeda takes its sweet time in planning and executing its attacks; they select their targets very carefully for psychological effect; while they definitely do exult in the killing of civilians, pure body count does not seem to be their primary concern when planning a strike.

SDB tells us that they're probably crippled, since there have been so many great opportunities for strikes that Al-Qaeda has allowed to go by; but with the exception of their averted plots at the millennium, none of Al-Qaeda's attacks have been aimed at big, splashy events when they could kill tens of thousands in a single stroke. (And one could make the case that this was even the case of the busted millennium plot, as the target was not the throngs in Times Square but LAX.) One thought that has kept coming back to me since 9-11-01 is the fact that if they had merely wanted to kill as many Americans as possible with their four highjacked airplanes, the terrorists would have been better advised to strike on Sunday, 9-09-01 -- which was the opening day of the 2001 NFL season. Imagine the carnage if those highjackers had flown their jets into four sold-out football stadiums, each packed with 70,000 people. Hell, imagine if they had struck the World Trade Center later in the day on 9-11-01, when more people would have arrived for work in the buildings.

I think that SDB is operating under the idea that "No news is good news", and there may be an extent to which this is true -- but it's not, I think, to the extent that SDB believes. We've almost certainly disrupted Al-Qaeda, but on the basis of the evidence we've seen (which isn't much, since the effort against Al-Qaeda is, as SDB rightly notes, a shadow war the victories of which are not trumpeted or heralded as much as they might deserve to be) and on the basis of Al-Qaeda's own history, I don't think it's at all reasonable to conclude that we have crippled them.

SDB seems to be committing the classic error of drawing a conclusion that is unwarranted by the facts. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

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