Joshua Foust: How Strong Is al Qaeda Today, Really?
In his column for the Atlantic, ASP fellow Joshua Foust discusses the current state of al Qaeda one year after the death of Osama bin Laden.
The last successful attack by Islamist terrorists on a Western country took place in 2005 in London. But that doesn’t mean the threat is gone; rather, the threat has changed.
Probably the most difficult challenge facing the U.S. right now is not so much al-Qaeda itself but the growing number of insurgencies reaching out to al-Qaeda for legitimacy and support. These groups are spread across the Middle East and North Africa — coincidentally, perhaps, along the periphery of the Arab Spring, in countries that did not experience a rapturous collapse of their tyrannical regimes. They confound easy attempts at labeling, too, since they combine elements of insurgencies, terrorist movements, local concerns (and local names — al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and so on), and global allies.
Those local affiliate groups do not pose the same threat that al-Qaeda once did. Despite the danger and chaos al-Shabab can sow in Somalia, it is not blowing up embassies, punching holes in U.S. Navy vessels, or flying airplanes into American buildings. And even the most virulent, violent of these groups — al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based group, seems to be the analysts’ choice — couldn’t even manage to pull off a tiny underwear bomb that wouldn’t have destroyed the airplane it was on anyway.
