"Tyy

THE AGE OF
SACRED
TERROR
DANIEL BENJAMIN
STEVEN SIMON

RANDOM HOUSE / NEW YORK

<l
 PETER L. B E R G E N

Inside the Secret World of

iL

A Touchstone Book
Published by Simon & Schuster
o NsY s i N c» r O R i
< C w Y O R K IONOON T O R O N T O SY
X
The Atlantic I April 2003 1 The Leadership Secrets of Osama bin Laden 1 Hoffman Page 1 of 4

'Atlantic

The Atlantic Monthly | April 2003

THE AGENDA
SECURITY

The Leadership Secrets of Osama bin Laden

The terrorist as CEO

BY BRUCE HOFFMAN

l Qaeda is clearly weaker than it was at the formal commencement of the war on terrorism, on
A October 7, 2001. It has been deprived of operational bases and training camps in Afghanistan.
Its command-and-control capabilities have been disrupted. Its headquarters have been
destroyed. Its leaders and fighters have been forcibly dispersed, and they are now consumed as
much by providing for their own security as by planning and executing attacks. Communication and
coordination among the disparate parts of al Qaeda's global network are more inconvenient—if not
necessarily less effective—than ever before. These setbacks have forced al Qaeda to alter its targeting
patterns. Displaced and harried, its operatives must now rely on local groups to carry out their plans
and, as a result, have focused on "softer," more accessible targets, in places as diverse as Tunisia,
Pakistan, Jordan, Indonesia, Kuwait, the Philippines, Yemen, and Kenya. These have included
German, Australian, and Israeli tourists; French engineers and a French oil tanker; and such long-
standing targets as U.S. diplomats and servicemen.

But not everything has changed, of course; al Qaeda remains a powerful threat. The organization has
continued to use suicide bombing, both at sea and on land, and commercial aviation remains a
focus—as was made clear in December of 2001, when the shoe bomber Richard Reid attempted to
blow up an American Airlines plane en route from Paris to Miami, and then eleven months later,
when a group in Kenya with links to al Qaeda tried to shoot down an Israeli charter flight using a
hand-held surface-to-air missile.

Al Qaeda has, in fact, proved to be remarkably nimble and adaptive—and the group's strength
derives precisely from its flexibility. The loss of Afghanistan may thus, in the long run, have little
effect on al Qaeda's ability to harm us. Some of al Qaeda's biggest plots—among them Ramzi
Yousef s 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and his subsequent failed plot to bomb twelve
U.S. commercial aircraft over the Pacific—predate the group's strong presence in Afghanistan, which
for al Qaeda was important mainly as a base from which to prosecute a conventional civil war against
the late Ahmad Shah Massoud's Northern Alliance. This conflict required arms dumps, training
camps, staging areas, and networks of forward and rear headquarters—but none of these specific
facilities are necessary to an ongoing international terrorism campaign.

Al Qaeda's core leadership is still alive and at large—perhaps only a third of its leaders are now dead
or captured. Moreover, the two most important figures in al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-
 ROHAN GUNARATNA

Inside
Al Qaeda
7(> my ii'i/c Anne
anil our sons Global Network of Terror
Kci'in and Ryan

Columbia University Press

New York