Bush and Al Qaeda
RECENT DESCRIPTIONS by intelligence officials of Al Qaeda's renewed control of terrorist networks and training camps in the tribal areas of Pakistan contrast with previous administration depictions of isolated leaders reduced to acting as little more than a source of ideological inspiration. The new picture seems to belie the triumphalist tone of President Bush, who said a few days before last November's congressional elections: "Absolutely, we're winning. Al Qaeda is on the run."
Which is it, then, a hounded, faltering Al Qaeda or an enemy that has regrouped and become a greater threat than ever? The answer is crucial not only for national security but for America's open society.
An obvious part of the answer is that Bush has played politics with the Al Qaeda threat. When it suits his needs, he inflates the stateless band of Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri into an existential threat. At other times, Bush boasts about routing bin Laden, passing over in silence his administration's failure to send enough US forces to capture the fugitive Saudi in the caves of Tora Bora five years ago.
An accurate assessment of the threat from Al Qaeda depends less on classified intelligence than on a sense of proportion. There is no reason to doubt reports from European and Pakistani intelligence agencies that, from their hideouts in Pakistan, Al Qaeda's leaders have sponsored terrorist attacks that killed people and attacks that were foiled beforehand. It is also clear that extremist groups in Iraq and North Africa have openly sworn fealty to bin Laden and named themselves as regional branches of Al Qaeda.
Nevertheless, bin Laden and Zawahiri are confronting a real-world version of the principle that every action induces a reaction. Even with their safe haven in Pakistan, they no longer enjoy the freedom of action they had under the Taliban in Afghanistan before Sept. 11. When the former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, sent suicide bombers to blow themselves up in Amman, Jordan, in November 2005, murdering Muslim men, women, and children who could not possibly be defined as enemies of the faithful, the nihilism of that act turned millions of people in the Muslim world against Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda has little chance of toppling any government in the Muslim world. It presents instead a threat of episodic terrorism, and it has provoked the security services of many countries to cooperate against that threat. That cooperation should be intensified and expanded, but the threat from Al Qaeda does not justify Bush's curtailing of Americans' civil rights or the government's invading of their privacy. It should never have been used to justify a resort to torture.
These are abuses of power harmful to America's true interests, and they derive from a distorted representation of Al Qaeda.
