Assessing al Qaeda
From today’s Washington Post: Strikes Have Disrupted Al-Qaeda:
Drone-launched U.S. missile attacks and Pakistan’s ongoing military offensive in and around the Swat Valley have unsettled al-Qaeda and undermined its relative invulnerability in Pakistani mountain sanctuaries, U.S. military and intelligence officials say.
This sounds promising. But unfortunately, the article provides no evidence or details. All we have are a few hopeful sounding assessments from unnamed government officials, combined with pure speculation like:
The offensive in Swat against its Taliban allies also poses a dilemma for al-Qaeda, a senior military official said. “They’re asking themselves, ‘Are we going to contest’ ” Taliban losses, he said, predicting that al-Qaeda will “have to make a move” and undertake more open communication on cellphones and computers, even if only to gather information on the situation in the region. “Then they become more visible,” he said.
This is about as soft as anything one is likely to read in a newspaper: Speculation about al Qaeda’s internal debates, combined with a prediction about their likely response, leading to a wishful implication that AQ will be forced to come out into the open and as a result be vulnerable to military action. There is literally nothing solid here.
Al Qaeda does not have any large scale infrastructure. It does not need to move. The organization is on the ground in Pakistan and probably does not need to fire up a significant intelligence gathering operation in order to gain situational awareness. If I were an al Qaeda leader, I’d be laying low, letting the tide of Pakistani military operation ebb and flow — as they inevitably will. I could be completely wrong, but my assessment contains precisely as much data as is provided in the Post story.
We are making a terrible mistake if we assume that the advance of Pakistani forces on a map represents control of territory, or worse that it reflects the elimination of operating areas of al Qaeda. If the Pakistani offensive truly has positive consequences, they will show up in due time. But for right now, we have to realize that we still don’t know what we don’t know.
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