Soccer Dad

Well why not?

Charles Krauthammer asks when "The Other Shoe" is going to drop. By "the other shoe" he's referring to a followup attack by Al-Qaeda.

We are coming up on 21/2 years since Sept. 11, 2001. Think back: On Sept. 11, everybody was waiting for the other shoe to drop -- within days or weeks, but surely within months. When nothing happened, it was said that al Qaeda works on 18-month cycles, with long planning and preparation.
Well, it is now almost a year plus 18 months. And while there have been terrorist attacks against generally soft targets in other (mostly Islamic)countries, we have not had a single attack, major or minor, in the United States.

Krauthammer wasn't the first to broach the question. In fact at the Tollbooth blog David Nieporent asks the same question:

So why only one attack? (Not that I'm rooting for another attack, mind you. I just don't get it. It just seems like, whatever Al Qaeda's specific goal, extra attacks would have helped immensely.)

Krauthammer's has two answers. One is

The first is that al Qaeda has been so severely degraded and disrupted that it simply cannot do it. It has lost its Afghan base, lost much of its funding and is reduced to going back to where Islamic radicals were years ago: launching minor guerrilla operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and sending operatives out to hit soft targets such as synagogues in Tunisia and consulates and banks in Istanbul.
A variation on this theme is the idea that as al Qaeda's international presence shrinks, terrorism is becoming more regionalized, being taken over by actors such as Jemaah Islamiah (Indonesia), Abu Sayyaf (Philippines) and Ansar al-Islam (Iraq).

The second answer is much weaker:

The other explanation is that it is a matter of pride. Having pulled off the greatest terrorist attack in the history of the world, al Qaeda does not want to sully its reputation by resorting to the cheap car bomb.

Strangely, Krauthammer favors the second explanation. I find that explanation less than compelling. After all Al-Qaeda first announced itself to America by car (or truck) bombings in Saudi Arabia, Kenya and Tanzania. Why would it find future attacks by those same means beneath its dignity?
The 9/11 attacks were symbolic. They were strikes against American financial, military and political power. It's possible that even more attacks were planned for that day or the near future but were forestalled when the government shut down all commercial air traffic.
Although I'm skeptical of Krauthammer's "anticlimax" argument for what is protecting us now, I think it was, in part, responsible for why there were no attacks in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Al-Qaeda wanted the enormity of what happened to sink in. Some car or bus or truck bombs would have distracted us from the enormity of the Al-Qaeda victory that day. But I would think that 2 1/2 years after the fact, if they were capable, they would be more than happy to blow up a car or a truck and take scores of people with them instead of thousands.
Two years ago, less than 6 months after the attacks, we went to ground zero. (My brother-in-law escaped from the 51st floor of the north tower.) If there had been several more attacks aftewards would we have gone? Maybe, because of the family connection. But many of the others probably wouldn't have.
Bret Stephens in a review of a book "Civilization and Its Enemies" by Lee Harris notes a slightly different explanation:

"The targets were chosen by al-Qaeda not for their military value--in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor--but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized on the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life."

In other words, 9/11 was "a pageant designed to convey a message not to the American people but to the Arab world." This insight helps to explain why the U.S. wasn't afterward beset by a series of small-scale attacks. Such attacks, Mr. Harris observes, would have been easier to carry out and had a more destabilizing effect on the American economy. But they would have lacked the glamour and stylishness that was Osama bin Laden's trademark; indeed, they would have put him on a par with lesser terrorists.

Instead of arguing as Krauthammer did that the Al Qaeda was sending a message to America, it was rather sending a message to the Arab street. (Which was quite receptive for those who remember the streets of Ramallah on September 11 and 12)
Regardless of the motive(s) behind the 9/11 attacks there's also the issue of the means of the attack. Have those means been restricted? I think we have to answer in the affirmative.
First of all, Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson wrote "Terror on Trial" three months prior to 9/11. In retrospect the article is positively chilling. Pipes and Emerson argue:

Perhaps the most disconcerting revelations from the trial concern Al-Qaeda's entrenchment in the West. For example, its procurement network for such materiel as night vision goggles, construction equipment, cell phones, and satellite telephones was based mostly in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, Bosnia and Croatia. The chemicals purchased for use in the manufacture of chemical weapons came from the Czech Republic.

The point is that it appears that the trial of the embassy bombers provided a lot of operational detail of Al Qaeda in the U.S. Had the FBI started following some of these leads it might have been able to prevent 9/11. The FBI didn't. I don't believe that the American based organization would necessarily have known of the specific plot, but they would have been in place to provide logistical support to Atta and his crew. An effort to pursue the leads from the embassy bombing trial might have been able to disrupt the Al Qaeda infrastructure enough to prevent it from aiding Atta and the 18 others.
The 9/11 attacks were also different from another reason. Usually there are recruiters and there are the "soldiers." The soldiers are the actual "martyrs" who kill themselves and others.
In this case Atta (and presumably the three other team leaders) functioned in both roles. I suspect that among Al Qaeda's leadership there are not that many who are willing to sacrifice themselves. In other words, to pull off another 9/11 would require a number of "dual use" terrorists. I suspect that their number is quite small. (No family member of Hamas leadership ever was a suicide terrorist. And only Rantissi publicly declared that he wanted his son to martyr himself. His wife, incidentally, very publicly disagreed.)
Obviously, it's a good thing that there hasn't been a successful followup to 9/11. (Richard Reid attempted to followup but fortunately was unsuccessful. This may be a reflection of Al Qaeda's degraded leadership. There was a time when there was a string of unsuccessful attacks by Islamic Jihad. That happened after Israel had taken out part of the PIJ's leadership. Not everyone knows how to screen for effective suicide terrorists.)
At first, I really think that Al Qaeda was appreciating its handiwork. By the time Al Qaeda would have been willing to try again its leadership had been dispatched from Afghanistan and was in hiding trying to stay alive. Operationally, now, Al Qaeda is severely handicapped. Hopefully that weakness, combined with increased vigilance (that didn't exist prior to 9/11) will keep Al Qaeda silent.

Posted by SoccerDad at February 13, 2004 03:38 AM | TrackBack