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THE (TERROR) MARKET AT WORK.
Apparently, al Qaeda is falling way behind on Web 2.0 stuff. "Who would have guessed," snarks Kevin Drum, "that blog commenters would turn out to be the Achilles heel of the international jihadist movement?" I just want the history books to record that the war was won when we killed whichever lieutenant was supposed to attend South by Southwest.
To be a bit more pessimistic though, if the implication of this report is that there are still lots of people who want to join with al Qaeda but who're growing irritated with its centralized control structure, I don't know that I'd consider that a good development. It seems to suggest the possibility of a new generation of more aggressive, savvy terrorist organizations who will be competing with each other for recruits, and may do that by trying to kill folks in ever more spectacular and propaganda-ready ways.
COMMENTS (4)
Yeah, maybe. But what they'd like to do and what they have the capability to do won't necessarily line up. Al Qaeda is dangerous in part because their members are better trained and have better planning than many other terrorist organizations. So other groups may want to do something more spectacular than September 11, but if they're fragmented and disorganized may not have the wherewithal to pull it off. We can hope.
Posted by: Antid Oto | April 23, 2008 12:52 PM
On the one hand, terrorists are bad. On the other hand, if somebody wants to blow up SXSW...
Posted by: Jamey | April 23, 2008 1:33 PM
Agree with Antid. What made al-Qa'ida unusual is that it had a significant amount of training, experience and resources. Post-Qa'idist groups may replicate some of these (e.g., online jihadist manuals provide training materials, the US presence in Iraq has provided experience against the US military in urban environments), but it's unlikely that any of them are going to be able to pull off a 9/11-style attack, complete with sleeper cells and large cash infusions. The surprising thing about al-Qa'ida is that they were able to make the financial and logistical expenditures to carry out attacks well beyond the normal horizon for these kinds of groups.
Even a state partner isn't usually enough to push a terror group over that mark -- the PFLP was pretty effective with Soviet aid, but hardly an al-Qa'ida, while Abu Nidal's fate in Iraq is an example of the dangers of being the pet terrorist of an outlaw state.
Of course, an explosion in unaffiliated terror groups isn't good for *Mideast* stability, where the groups have on-the-ground experience, local allies, and proven ability to carry out attacks, but that's nothing new, and the governments there have various tools (ranging from bribing local tribes to arrest and imprisonment to Hama-style offensives) that we, as a rule, can't or just aren't able to use. And the popular appeal of radical Islam tends to wane when it's locals who are getting killed.
Posted by: tWB | April 23, 2008 3:11 PM
It's always seemed to me that with a middling number of educated people and a moderately healthy budget, almost anyone could be more effective at terrorism than al Qaeda. It's not pleasant to think about, but we're really just tremendously vulnerable in so many ways.
Posted by: southpaw | April 24, 2008 1:58 AM