Al-Qaida remains crux of the problem

As we marked the seventh anniversary of 9/11, many Americans may have been confused about the nature of the current terrorist threat.

The White House has told us for years that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror.” Yet the CIA says the front is now on the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Osama bin Laden and crew are well and operating out of a safe haven just inside Pakistan, not far from where he planned the World Trade Center attacks. Al-Qaida now trains terrorists headed for Europe, the Mideast and South Asia — and probably some who want to come here.

So what is the current threat to us?

I put that question to some of the nation’s top terrorism experts and asked how the next president should handle the problem. You can download the full interviews in podcast form on Sept. 11 at our Philly.com Web site, or listen to audio summaries. Some of the answers may surprise you; most are disturbing, but in the long term there is a glimmer of hope.

Center of terrorism

All the experts agreed that al-Qaida remains at the center of the terrorist problem.

“Remarkably, seven years after 9/11, 10 years after the United States government started seriously trying to combat al-Qaida, al-Qaida is still there,” said Richard A. Clarke, counterterrorism czar under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “According to the CIA director (Michael V. Hayden), it is still as powerful as it was six years ago, still capable of training people from around the world ... and then sending them off around the world to stage attacks.”

Do Osama bin Laden and his followers really present such a threat when they are isolated in remote mountains? They can no longer run big training camps for foreign jihadis as they did before 9/11. Have we entered the era of “leaderless jihad,” as some say, where small groups of radicals can make bombs without contacting al-Qaida central?

Not so, I was told. “Think of al-Qaida as ... a multinational corporation that operates on a global stage,” said Bruce Riedel, senior adviser on Mideast and South Asian issues to the last three presidents. The headquarters is in Pakistan, the chief executive officer is bin Laden, with franchises around the world taking general instructions from headquarters.

Extremists come in small groups to train in Pakistan, including many of those involved in recent terror plots in Europe, said Peter Bergen, one of the leading experts on al-Qaida. Al-Qaida operates a large and professional media operation in the Pakistani mountains, churning out videos.

So, if the problem is centered in Pakistan, how does the Iraq war relate? My interviewees agreed with Ken Pollack, a former CIA Mideast expert and Clinton White House adviser: “The Iraq war was a major distraction from our concentration on al-Qaida.

“There was no link between 9/11 and Iraq, and Iraq was not a central front in the war on terrorism,” Pollack said, “but we made it a central front by our own mistakes.” At best, he added, the recent improvement in Iraq gets us “back to zero. Had we focused on eliminating al-Qaida in 2003, rather than invading Iraq, “al-Qaida perhaps would not be a threat at all.”

Good news

The good news is that al-Qaida’s vicious attacks against Muslims in Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have damaged its image in the Arab world. Bergen, one of the few Americans to meet bin Laden (in 1997), thinks that in the long term, the group may lose the war of ideas and its attraction to some alienated Muslims.

Al-Qaida has fed on the discontentment caused by globalization and used globalization’s Internet tools to rally a following. But it may not offer an attractive enough alternative to its sympathizers — in the long term. The ideal of a fundamentalist caliphate that kills all those it labels as bad Muslims is hardly a positive vision; it may become anathema even to extremists who feel humiliated by the West.

But in the short term, the threat is real, as al-Qaida and allied groups expand their base inside a weak Pakistani state that has nuclear arms.

X Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.