The Evolution of Counterterrorism Will T PDF

The evolution of counterterrorism:
will tactics trump strategy?
AUDREY KURTH CRONIN *
The fight against Al-Qaeda has demonstrated two countervailing trends in the
five years after the London attacks of 7 July 2005, with counterterrorism successes
abroad offset by growing concerns about terrorist operations on the home front.
Al-Qaeda’s own actions engendered a backlash in many Muslim-majority countries,
undercutting the movement’s legitimacy and potential lifeblood; but this did not
halt radicalization as a domestic threat to the US and Europe. Al-Qaeda’s global
setbacks in Iraq and the border regions of Pakistan were offset by evidence of
resurgence in affiliates in Algeria, Yemen and Somalia, and some elements of the
Taleban. Even as Al-Qaeda’s top leadership hunkered down in the Hindu Kush
mountains and watched their subordinates being killed off through stepped-up
drone attacks, new affiliates began naming themselves ‘Al-Qaeda’ and expanding
their reach, perpetuating the image of a seamless global threat and sending western
special forces, analysts and journalists on a seemingly endless quest to pursue
individual manifestations of terrorist activity around the world.
During this period, Al-Qaeda’s global threat was in fact serious but not seamless.
The western allies inadvertently reinforced it by swallowing the narrative of an
endlessly adaptive, coherent movement with tentacles reaching throughout the
world. The international and domestic spheres therefore grew increasingly out
of phase with one another. Robust reasons for optimism about the movement’s
strategic implosion began to emerge on the international front in 2006, but they
were overshadowed by heightened concern about tactical innovations, as well
as fear of new ‘Al-Qaedas’ rising. While there was clear progress against the
Al-Qaeda movement abroad, repeated smaller attacks on soft targets, numerous
failed attempts, the emergence of additional ‘jihadist’ volunteers and evidence of
more widespread radicalization of young Muslims in the West made the threat
at home more pressing and immediate. And the spectre of a major, unexpected
attack using weapons of mass destruction (WMD) on western soil continued to
haunt policy-makers. Even as the allies fought two wars together, the American
public clung to the fragile delusion of zero risk at home while the British public
grew increasingly angry at each setback abroad. Policy prescriptions thus tended
* This article contains only the author’s personal views and does not represent the policy of the US National
War College or any other US government agency.
International Affairs 86: 4 (2010) 000–000

© 2010 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Affairs
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to reflect popular emotions while strategic perspectives of (or even definitions of )
the enemy were scarce.
Was Al-Qaeda growing or declining in its power and reach? The answer
depended upon which lens analysts used—and virtually no one wore bifocals.
Central to the debate were the questions how, where and to what degree exactly
the two broad spheres (global and local) were operationally connected; and,
when they were connected, where the source of impetus lay. Lines of authority
or control between home-grown operatives and Al-Qaeda’s core were discussed,
dissected, disputed. If there was an echo of the Cold War in any of this, it was
in the shrill public exchanges between terrorism experts about the robustness,
capacity and command-and-control of Al-Qaeda’s leadership, reminiscent of
twentieth-century clashes among Sovietologists about the viability of the Polit-
buro.1 In truth, there was both good news and bad news about the evolution
of global terrorism between 2005 and 2010, and a clear-eyed assessment of the
threat required objective in-depth analysis and appreciation of both sides of the
assessment. The menace of additional local attacks on either side of the Atlantic
worsened, was imminent, and brought tightened domestic measures and intelli-
gence assets targeted at Al-Qaeda affiliates; at the same time, the core’s safe haven
in the border region of Pakistan shrank, dozens of Al-Qaeda’s leaders were killed
and the movement’s evolving global footprint showed signs of strategic vulner-
ability.
The good news: sources of strategic vulnerability

‘Good news’ is rare in discussions of global terrorism, as pessimistic prognoses
are invariably safer (not to mention more lucrative)—and it is likely that sooner
or later the Al-Qaeda nebula will succeed in another major attack against the
West. But in the five years after the London attacks, three global developments
showed promise: first, the cataclysmic scenario of an inter-civilization ‘long war’
without end proved incorrect; second, clear evidence of a popular backlash against
Al-Qaeda among Muslims emerged; and third, the counterterrorism policies of
major states became more closely aligned and more sophisticated.
No clash between civilizations

With respect to the so-called ‘clash of civilizations’, the evidence was clear:
the clashes that occurred were mainly within civilizations, not between them.
As western allies focused on themselves, the vast majority of attacks associated
with Al-Qaeda during this period involved Muslims attacking Muslims overseas.
Although there were serious home-grown threats throughout Europe and the
United States (on which more below), pundits who had argued that the Al-Qaeda
1
Most notably the acrid public spat between Bruce Hoffman and Marc Sageman. See Bruce Hoffman, ‘The
myth of grass-roots terrorism’, Foreign Affairs 87: 3, May–June 2008, pp. 133–8; Marc Sageman, ‘The reality
of grass-roots terrorism’, Foreign Affairs 87: 4, July–Aug. 2008, pp. 163–5, and Hoffman’s reply, pp. 165–6.
2
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The evolution of counterterrorism
movement represented a ‘clash of civilizations’ between the ‘Islamic world’ and
‘the West’ were quite wrong.
Al-Qaeda was killing its intended flock. To be sure, a hefty proportion of
victims of Al-Qaeda attacks had always been fellow Muslims: the vast majority
of the hundreds of Kenyan and thousands of Tanzanian victims of the 7 August
1998 attacks were innocent Muslims, for example. The difference now was that the
enhanced international spotlight shone on Al-Qaeda’s leaders in the wake of 9/11
proved a double-edged sword, gaining them notoriety but also familiarizing broad
swathes of humanity with their brutal and illegitimate terrorist tactics. While
we do not have reliable figures on the religious orientation of victims (only their
nationalities), there is little doubt that global terrorism killed a far greater propor-
tion of Muslims than members of any other religion during this period, with the
overall number of terrorist attacks in the Near East and South Asia consistently
much higher than in the western hemisphere.2
Indeed, following the 7/7 bombings, Al-Qaeda’s attacks became more violent
and more indiscriminate, as the group killed increasing numbers of Muslim
civilians around the world.3 A large and growing proportion of casualties of
Islamist terrorism were the very people whose well-being Al-Qaeda claimed to
cherish and promote. According to a report by the Combating Terrorism Center
of West Point (relying on data reported in the Arab press), there was a sharp
decline in western casualties of terrorist attacks for which Al-Qaeda claimed
responsibility in the aftermath of the attacks in Madrid (2004) and London (2005),
with no western fatalities at all in 2006, followed by only 12 of 571 in 2007 and
2008 combined. From 2006 to 2008, therefore, only 2 per cent (12 of 661) of
victims of Al-Qaeda-claimed attacks were from the West, and the remaining
98 per cent were inhabitants of countries with Muslim majorities.4 From 2006
to 2008 a person of non-western nationality was 54 times more likely than an
individual from a western country to die in an attack claimed by Al-Qaeda.5 In
its effort to maintain momentum and relevance, Al-Qaeda shifted from attacks
on westerners and western territories (where its capacity had decreased not least
as a result of new countermeasures) to attacks on Muslims in Muslim-majority
countries, a development that proved its rhetoric was hollow.
2
See US National Counterterrorism Center, ‘2008 Report on terrorism’, p. 20, http://wits.nctc.gov/Report-
PDF.do?f=crt2008nctcannexfinal.pdf, accessed March 2010.
3
Even excluding casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, about 39% of casualties from 2004 to 2008 were westerners,
a proportion that is further reduced to 13% if the attacks on London and Madrid are removed from the analy-
sis. See Scott Helfstein, Nassir Abdullah and Muhammad al-Obaidi, ‘Deadly vanguards: a study of al-Qa’ida’s
violence against Muslims’, occasional paper series, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Dec. 2009, p.
10, http://www.ctc.usma.edu/Deadly per cent20Vanguards_Complete_L.pdf, accessed 4 June 2010.
4
Helfstein et al., ‘Deadly vanguards’, p. 2. Although it is admittedly difficult to be certain what a victim’s reli-
gious affiliation is strictly on the basis of his or her nationality, the overwhelming likelihood is that a Saudi, a
Palestinian or a Jordanian, for example, will be Muslim. The precise methodology for these figures is carefully
explained in the report.
5
Helfstein et al., ‘Deadly vanguards’.
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Widespread Muslim backlash against Al-Qaeda

Second, Al-Qaeda’s targeting of civilians in terrorist attacks led to a muscular
backlash in Muslim communities. The November 2005 bombings in hotels in
Amman, Jordan, orchestrated by Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), marked the beginning
of this phenomenon. Only four months after the tragedy of 7/7, the Amman
bombings killed 38 members of a Muslim wedding party in one hotel, including
parents of the bride and the groom as well as Jordanians, Palestinians and Iraqis,
and many more people in bombings of two other hotels the same day. With a
death toll of 63 in total, these were Jordan’s worst ever terrorist attacks. The result
was widespread revulsion, mass marches and shouts of ‘Burn in hell Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi!’ In a series of hasty communiqués, AQI was forced to claim that the
deaths were accidental and to promise that the group would never again target
innocent Muslims.6 In a captured letter, Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, famously chided AQI’s Jordanian leader, Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi,
for his tactics in Iraq (particularly his horrifying, widely publicized beheadings),
reminded him of the need for popular support (at least until jihadist rule was
established) and argued that more than half the struggle was taking place ‘in the
battlefield of the media’.7 The tactics did not change, and by June 2006 Zarqawi
was dead.
Citizens of Iraq suffered more Al-Qaeda attacks than those in any other country.8
Even where fighters associated with Al-Qaeda were drawn by the presence of
occupying western troops, the dynamic sadly devolved into intra-Muslim, intra-
regional violence. The war in Iraq shifted from a destructive initial invasion,
post-conflict chaos and a resulting Iraqi insurgency aimed at western occupiers
(2003–2005), to a much bloodier intra-Muslim sectarian war, especially following
the elections of January 2005—a year in which the level of violence claimed by
Al-Qaeda in Iraq was especially high.9 While precise casualty figures for Iraqi
civilians were disputed and the perpetrators sometimes difficult to discern, the
toll taken on Muslim civilians was undeniable: multiple sources agreed that the
number of civilian deaths increased sharply in 2006 and 2007. During this time,
Shi’is and Sunnis settled longstanding scores between them, killing thousands
of fellow Muslims.10 Tactics changed during the period as well: the number of
suicide attacks, vehicle bombs and summary executions jumped, as the country
appeared headed for a full-scale sectarian civil war.11
6
See http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=jihad&ID=SP104305, accessed 16 Decem-
ber 2008.
7
The letter was made available by the US Director of National Intelligence in October 2005. An English trans-
lation can be accessed here: http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/letter_in_english.pdf.
8
Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI. This conclusion was drawn as the result of extensive study of Arab media reporting
of casualties of Al-Qaeda attacks. Helfstein et al., ‘Deadly vanguards’, p. 3.
9
Helfstein et al., ‘Deadly vanguards’, p. 7.
10
The numbers are disputed; in-depth analysis of the numbers of Iraqi civilian casualties is beyond the scope of
this article. For more information, see e.g. the Iraqi Body Count (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/, accessed
16 May 2010), the Associated Press and the Iraqi Health Ministry (http://abcnews.go.com/International/
WireStory?id=7411522, accessed 16 May 2010) and NPR.org (http://www.npr.org/news/specials/tollofwar/
tollofwarmain.html, accessed 16 May 2010).
11
Iraqi Body Count (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/).
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However, a defining moment came in 2007 when local Sunni Iraqi leaders
began to turn against fighters associated with Al-Qaeda, most of whom were, after
all, non-Iraqi aliens. Especially in Anbar province, the so-called Sunni Awakening
took hold: Sheikh Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi, a tribal leader in western Ramadi
whose father and three brothers had been killed by Al-Qaeda assassins, told the
press that Al-Qaeda members were ‘killing innocent people, anyone suspected
of opposing them. They brought us nothing but destruction and we finally said,
enough is enough.’12 The shift in attitude among Sunni sheikhs coincided with
an increase in US troops deployed to Baghdad in the ‘surge’. It was not that the
occupying westerners in Iraq were suddenly well loved; only that their presence
seemed less threatening than the struggle over who would rule the new Iraqi state
after they left. Again, although many also wanted to kill US troops, the principal
dynamic was not now ‘Islam vs the West’, but a struggle for power and influence
within Iraq—further evidenced by bombings as the US drew down its troops.
These fratricidal killings in turn had a powerful effect on how the group and
its leaders were viewed. Widespread revulsion at the targeting of innocents was
reflected in numerous public opinion polls. Comparing data from 2003 to 2009,
for example, the Pew Research Center found that support for Osama bin Laden
declined sharply among Muslims in eight of the nine countries surveyed in its
multi-year Global Attitudes Project.13 Most striking was the drop in support
in Indonesia (59 per cent in 2003 to 25 per cent in 2009) and Jordan (56 per
cent to 28 per cent).14 Even in the Palestinian territories bin Laden lost ground:
although the majority of Palestinian Muslims continued to express confidence
that bin Laden would ‘do the right thing regarding world affairs’, that majority
narrowed from 72 per cent in 2003 to 52 per cent in 2009. Indeed, only in
Nigeria was bin Laden more popular in 2009 (54 per cent) than he had been in
2003 (44 per cent).15
Support for the tactic of suicide bombing likewise fell virtually everywhere,
but most dramatically among Pakistanis, who in 2009 vehemently rejected the
tactic, with 87 per cent believing that such acts were never justified.16 Not coinci-
dentally, the number of suicide attacks in Pakistan had vastly increased over this
period: there were only 22 suicide attacks in Pakistan between 2002 and 2006,
but 45 in 2007 alone—notably including the assassination in December of the
former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Deaths from terrorist attacks in Pakistan
12
Todd Pitman, ‘Sunni sheiks join fight vs. insurgency’, Associated Press, reported in Washington Post, 25 March
2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/25/AR2007032500600_pf.html,
accessed 28 March 2010. See also ‘Dysfunction and decline: lessons learned from inside al-Qai’da in Iraq’,
Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, 16 March 2009, http://www.ctc.usma.edu/harmony/Dysfunc-
tion.asp, accessed 30 May 2010.
13
‘Declining support for bin Laden and suicide bombing’, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1338/declining-muslim-
support-for-bin-laden-suicide-bombing, accessed 28 March 2009.
14
In Indonesia, the election of Barack Obama may also have played a role in public opinion shifts.
15
Countries surveyed included Indonesia, Pakistan, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Nigeria and Egypt, as well
as the Palestinian territories. Yemen was not included in the polling.
16
Only 43% of Pakistanis polled in 2002, a few months after the 9/11 attacks, felt that the attacks were ‘rarely
or never justified’, and one-third said they were ‘often or sometimes justified in order to defend Islam’.
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q uadrupled from 2006 to 2007, then almost doubled again in 2008;17 so the dramatic
change in attitude towards bin Laden and terrorism was directly correlated with
the increased targeting of Pakistani civilians by Al-Qaeda and affiliated groups.
Al-Qaeda’s terrorist tactics hit home: in Pakistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia
and many other Muslim countries, attitudes towards Al-Qaeda tracked directly
with a backlash against the targeting of local innocents.
But this was not just a bottom-up reaction. Prominent voices of criticism also
emerged among Islamic religious authorities, and indeed within the Al-Qaeda
movement itself. In September 2007, Sheikh Salman Al-Oudah, a well-known
Saudi religious scholar with a large following among young Muslims, condemned
Al-Qaeda’s killing of ‘innocent people, children, elderly, and women’ and directly
asked bin Laden: ‘Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden
of these hundreds of thousands or millions [of victims] on your back?’18 Sheikh
Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah Aal Al-Sheikh, the Grand Mufti in Saudi Arabia,
issued a fatwa in October 2007 forbidding young Saudis to join the Jihad.19 A
few months later Al-Qaeda tried to assassinate him. Instead of targeting only
westerners, Al-Qaeda attacks in the Kingdom, such as the November 2003 attack
on the al-Muhayya housing complex, killed large numbers of Arabs and Muslims,
including many children. This apparently sparked a change in popular attitudes
that became obvious in later years. ‘If they were really seeking change they would
resort to actions that would win them the support of the people,’ said a professor
from King Saud University. ‘Before, people could find excuses. It is getting so
irrational that you cannot explain it, you cannot defend it, you cannot under-
stand it.’20
Renunciations of Al-Qaeda went well beyond the Saudis. In November 2007,
Noman Benotman, a former high-level member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting
Group, broke with Al-Qaeda over its senseless killings. His public rebuke received
wide coverage in the Arab press.21 Twenty-two months later, imprisoned leaders
of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group issued a 417-page document entitled Correc-
tive Studies on the Doctrine of Jihad, Hesba and Ruling, distancing themselves from
Al-Qaeda and rejecting its actions on religious grounds.22 The Palestinian Hamas
labelled the Riyadh bombings ‘harmful to Islam’, and the Egyptian Al-Gama’a
17
Eric Schmitt, ‘Terrorist attacks in Pakistan rising, US reports’, New York Times, 1 May 2008, http://www.
nytimes.com/2008/05/01/world/americas/01iht-01terror.12474736.html, accessed 29 March 2010, reports 1,335
fatalities in Pakistan in 2007; US State Department, Country report on terrorism, 2008, reports 2,293 Pakistani
fatalities in 2008 (p. 24).
18
Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, ‘The unraveling: Al Qaeda’s revolt against bin Laden’, New Republic, 11
June 2008, pp. 3–4, http://www.tnr.com, accessed 29 March 2010.
19
Indeed, 28 Al-Qaeda militants were arrested in Mecca, Medina and Riyadh during the Hajj for allegedly
plotting to target religious leaders.
20
Neil MacFarquhar, ‘Among Saudis, attack has soured Qaeda supporters’, New York Times, 11 Nov. 2003. For
more on Al-Qaeda’s bloody spree in Saudi Arabia, see Thomas Hegghammer, ‘The failure of jihad in Saudi
Arabia’, Combating Terrorism Center, West Point, 25 Feb. 2010, pp. 16–18, http://www.ctc.usma.edu.
21
Bergen and Cruickshank, ‘The unraveling’. See also Sudrasan Raghavan, ‘Former militants wage a new battle
in native Libya’, Washington Post, 31 May 2010, p. A6.
22
See Camille Tawil, The Al-Qaeda organization in the Islamic Maghreb: expansion in the Sahel and challenges from
within jihadist circles (Washington DC: Jamestown Foundation, April 2010), pp. 18–20.
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al-Islamiyya harshly criticized them as well.23 Speaking from his prison cell that
same month, Dr Fadl (alias Sayyid Imam Al-Sharif ), the former Emir of Egyptian
Islamic Jihad and a brilliant Islamist whose ideas had helped lay the groundwork
for Al-Qaeda, condemned his former protégé Ayman al-Zawahiri and held him
personally responsible for the movement’s setbacks.24 Fadl argued that it was
forbidden to kill civilians, to harm those of another sect or to condemn other
Muslims, and he labelled 9/11 ‘a catastrophe for Muslims’. Obviously stung by the
criticism, in March 2008 Zawahiri posted online a 190-page defence entitled ‘Al
Tabria’ (‘Exoneration’).25 Al-Qaeda was especially vulnerable to such criticism, not
just because of its terrorist activities but also because not a single person in the
ranks of the leadership had standing as a religious scholar.
So, while many of the conditions that gave rise to Al-Qaeda were unchanged,
the violence continued and the threat persisted, between 2007 and 2010
Al-Qaeda’s legitimacy among Muslims came under siege. Aware of their battered
image and eroding support base, Al-Qaeda’s leaders went on a media offensive,
becoming more shrill, self-referential and out of touch with reality. In December
2007, Al-Qaeda began posting invitations on Arabic-language websites asking
for questions from the public to be submitted to second-in-command Ayman
al-Zawahiri online, so he could answer them in an open internet forum.26 Deliv-
ered four months later by As-Sahad, Al-Qaeda’s media arm, Zawahiri’s answers
revealed hypersensitivity about the accusations made against the group, especially
the charge that the group was killing innocent Muslims. ‘We haven’t killed the
innocents, not in Baghdad, nor in Morocco, nor in Algeria nor anywhere else,’
said Zawahiri. ‘If there is any innocent who was killed in the mujahedeen’s
operations, then it was either an unintentional error or out of necessity.’27 Other
nuggets of insight were that it is against Islamic law for any Muslim to live perma-
nently in a western country ‘under the laws of the infidels’, that global warming
would ‘make the world more sympathetic to and understanding of the Muslims’
jihad against the aggressor America’ and that the theory that Israel carried out the
9/11 attacks was a lie manufactured by the Iranians and their proxy Hezbollah so
as to show ‘that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as
no [one] else did in history’.28 On the latter, Zawahiri continued: ‘Iran’s aim here
23
‘Hamas condemns Riyadh bombing as harmful to Islam’, Reuters, 13 Nov. 2003; Karam Zuhdi, ed., Tafji-
rat al-riyadh: al-ahkam wa’l-athar [The Riyadh bombings: rulings and effects] (Cairo: Maktabat al-Turath
al-Islami, 2003); cited by Hegghammer, ‘The failure of jihad’, p. 21, n. 52.
24
Al-Sharif adopted the nom de guerre Fadl as a fighter in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. See Lawrence Wright,
‘The rebellion within: an Al Qaeda mastermind questions terrorism’, New Yorker, 2 June 2008, http://www.
newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/02/080602fa_fact_wright?printable=true, accessed 29 March 2010. Fadl’s
book, Rationalizing jihad in Egypt and the world, first published on the tenth anniversary of the 1997 Luxor
massacre, was serialized in the newspapers Al Masri Al Youm and Al Jarida.
25
Wright, ‘The rebellion within’. See also Gilles Kepel, Beyond terror and martyrdom: the future of the Middle East
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 258–9.
26
Stephen Farrell, ‘Qaeda deputy to take queries’, New York Times, 21 Dec. 2007, http://www.nytimes.
com/2007/12/21/world/middleeast/21zawahiri.html?_r=1, accessed 31 March 2010.
27
Associated Press, ‘Al-Qaeda’s no. 2 defends attacks’, New York Times, 4 April 2008, http://query.nytimes.com/
gst/fullpage.html?res=9B00E2DB123EF937A35757C0A96E9C8B63, accessed 31 March 2010.
28
‘Al-Qaeda accuses Iran of 9/11 lie’, BBC News, 22 April 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7361414.stm,
accessed 31 March 2010.
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is also clear—to cover up its involvement with America in invading the homes of
Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.’ Hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood (especially
Yusuf Al-Qaradawi) and arguments about the illegitimacy of Hamas also occupied
Zawahiri’s attention.29 All of these responses were Al-Qaeda’s attempts to recap-
ture the momentum, burnish their dulled reputation and limit the damage done
by prominent critics.
Emerging counterterrorism coalition among states

The turn of the tide against Al-Qaeda was not merely the result of the movement’s
bad targeting, image problems and faltering narrative, or of popular revulsion
against its activities. At least as important was the third good news develop-
ment: the changing actions and policies of major states. The transformation
was most dramatic among those who suddenly found themselves directly under
fire, including Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Singapore, Indonesia and Jordan. For
example, after a string of lethal attacks on housing compounds in Riyadh and
Al-Khobar that killed 200 people, the Saudi government took aggressive steps
to respond. These included engaging in a widespread internal crackdown (the
total Saudi security budget rose from $8.5 billion in 2004 to $12 billion in 2006)
and beefing up non-kinetic counterterrorism measures (including a vigorous
public education campaign and two major counterterrorism conferences).30 It
also opened itself to broader cooperation with other governments, enhancing
collaboration with the United States on terrorist financing and accepting special
forces training from the United Kingdom.31 The Indonesian government likewise
created a well-run counterterrorism police force, Detachment-88, which carried
out numerous important operations that seriously damaged the Al-Qaeda affiliate
Jemaah Islamiyah ( JI) and its associated splinter groups.32 After the high pace of
terrorist operations in Indonesia between 2002 and 2005, there was a four-year
lull in JI attacks when state counterterrorism operations took down major cells,
apprehended leading figures and captured large amounts of explosives.33 There
was also a growing willingness to share counterterrorism intelligence on the part
of a large number of governments with inherent advantages in human intelli-
gence, including Pakistan, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Philippines,
29
Jarret Brachman, Brian Fishman and Joseph Felter, ‘The power of truth? Questions for Ayman al-Zawahiri’,
Combating Terrorism Center, West Point, 21 April 2008, http://www.ctc.usma.edu.
30
US State Department, Country reports on terrorism 2004, http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/c14813.htm; Hegg-
hammer, ‘The failure of jihad’, p. 19, citing Nawaf Obaid, ‘Remnants of Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia: current
assessment’, presentation at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, 2006.
31
US State Department, Country reports on terrorism 2004; Hegghammer, ‘The failure of jihad’, p. 19; Christo-
pher M. Blanchard and Alfred B. Prados, Saudi Arabia: terrorist financing issues, Congressional Research Service
(CRS) report for Congress, #RL32499, 14 Sept. 2007, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/RL32499.pdf,
accessed 7 April 2010.
32
See Andrew Higgins, ‘Indonesia turns tide against extremists’, Washington Post, 13 May 2010, pp. 1, 14.
33
Also known as Densus-88, the force was created in 2003. Most notable among its successes was the killing of
the bomb-maker and charismatic recruiter Noordin Top, whose personal and financial links with Al-Qaeda
were key to JI’s affiliation. Zachary Abuza, ‘Indonesian counter-terrorism: the great leap forward’, Terrorism
Monitor 8: 2, 14 Jan. 2010, pp. 6–8, http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews per cent5Btt_
news per cent5D=35910&tx_ttnews per cent5BbackPid per cent5D=7&cHash=c8f140fc9a, accessed April 2010.
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Malaysia, Indonesia and Turkey.34 While that cooperation was mainly bilateral, it
nonetheless represented a long stride forward in meeting a common threat. In this
regard, the close and fruitful counterterrorism intelligence cooperation between
the United Kingdom and the United States represented one of the highlights of
the period following the 7/7 attacks. Non-kinetic counterterrorism initiatives
included innovations in deradicalization, negotiation and reintegration, particu-
larly of poor or ignorant foot-soldiers who blindly followed less corrigible leaders.
Highly publicized examples of deradicalization and re-education programmes got
under way in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Singapore. Singa-
pore’s programme sent Muslim clerics into prisons to educate ‘jihadist’ inmates
in the tenets of Islam and seemed to yield positive results. Efforts to structure
enhanced dialogues and reconciliation were also put in place in Tajikistan (the
Tajik Secular–Islamic dialogue project) and Algeria (national reconciliation
project).35 The United Kingdom and the Netherlands also launched deradicaliza-
tion programmes. All of these efforts received a great deal of attention—from the
perspective of proven results, perhaps more than they were due;36 however, efforts
to expand counterterrorism measures beyond classic crackdowns to multifaceted
programmes of activity demonstrated the development of greater sophistication
among a broad range of targeted states. And their very existence undercut the
claim that local regimes were hostile, anti-Muslim or unapproachable.
So, even as the Taleban surged, the alliance struggled for clarity on its Afghani-
stan strategy and the threat of indigenous attacks in the US and UK grew, there
was evidence of a widespread popular backlash, a broader emerging state counter-
terrorism coalition, and good reason to hope that the Al-Qaeda movement was
imploding. Yet little of this was apparent to non-Arabic-speaking western publics
and politicians, or to much of their English-speaking media, all of which were
fixated primarily on day-to-day events at home. Even counterterrorist officials
naturally tended to focus upon the next attack in the West and how to prevent
it, missing an opportunity to exploit the crumbling legitimacy of the enemy and
explain its strategic implications. Almost by default, winning came to be deter-
mined by whether or not there was another attack or attempted attack in the
West—an impossible standard to meet, ceding ground to the badly losing side and
heightening its need to attack again, in any way possible.
34
Derek S. Reveron, ‘Old allies, new friends: intelligence-sharing in the war on terror’, Orbis 50: 3, Summer
2006, pp. 453–68, and ‘Counterterrorism and intelligence cooperation’, Journal of Global Change and Governance
1: 3, Summer 2008, pp. 1–12, http://dga.rutgers.edu/JGCG/vol_1_3.html, accessed 8 June 2010.
35
The Yemeni Committee for Dialogue, first instituted in 2002, was among the first such programmes to work
with prison inmates. It was discontinued in 2005. Under pressure from the US, not least because nearly half
the Guantánamo inmates are Yemeni, there are efforts under way to revive it. See Maris L. Porges, ‘Deradicali-
sation, the Yemeni way’, Survival 52: 2, April–May 2010, pp. 27–33. For more on deradicalization programmes,
see Tore Bjorgo and John Horgan, eds, Leaving terrorism behind: individual and collective disengagement (London:
Routledge, 2009).
36
Indonesia’s programme, for example, was underresourced, had no institutionalized follow-up, and had several
known cases of recidivism, including one of the suicide bombers in the 2009 Jakarta hotel bombings. See
Abuza, ‘Indonesian counter-terrorism’, p. 8.
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Audrey Kurth Cronin
Bad news: Al-Qaeda’s adaptations, innovations and flanking manœuvres

Notwithstanding its strategic failures, Al-Qaeda made tactical advances. Even a
hollowed-out core can spread its vitriol and kill a lot of innocent people: there is
no necessary direct correlation, especially in the short term, between a campaign’s
popular support and its capacity for terrorist attacks. Groups that are on the
defensive often learn, innovate, diversify, even metastasize, and Al-Qaeda was no
exception. Feeling on the defensive, Al-Qaeda’s leaders struggled to adapt. The
drift away from an intercivilizational narrative led to renewed efforts to attack
western soil in creative ways. The erosion of popular support as a result of the
killing of Muslim civilians brought attempts to kill more non-Muslim civilians
in publicized attacks. The high attrition and operational setbacks suffered by the
core yielded efforts to reach out to competitor groups so as to demonstrate conti-
nuity. Terrorism is carnage, but also theatre: especially when governments gain
the upper hand, groups scramble to exploit state vulnerabilities so as to regain a
mental edge, and to survive.
A defensive Al-Qaeda thus continued to be dangerous. After 2005, two
strategic innovations shifted the threat downwards and sideways: downwards,
to further radicalization of individual British and American citizens launching
smaller attacks (or near-misses) in the both the UK and the US; and sideways, to
reinvigorated Al-Qaeda affiliates, some of which had only recently moved from
local to global agendas and tried projecting force abroad for the first time. The
irony was that, even as the core Al-Qaeda leadership were in hiding or on the
run, their finances reduced, their constituents repulsed, their legitimacy seriously
questioned, Al-Qaeda’s incentives for achieving a successful operation in the West
were greatly increased. And so—through angry affiliates, allies and amateurs
concocting explosives materials in their kitchens—they kept trying to kill civil-
ians on western soil.
Home-grown terrorists
One way to do this was to attract native citizens already in place. While Muslim
majority populations abroad cooled to Al-Qaeda, young British Muslims were
drawn in troublesome numbers to the group’s propaganda of violence. The tragedy
of 7/7 shone a harsh spotlight on UK citizens of South Asian descent, revealing
deep identity problems, receptivity to extremist narratives and fury at what they
saw as attacks on Islam worldwide. The postwar experiment with multicultur-
alism seemed a failure, as second- and third-generation immigrants struggled to
find their place within society and unpredictably moved from anger to action.
In August 2006, Peter Clarke, then Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police and head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, told journalists: ‘The threat from
terrorism is real. It is here, it is deadly and it is enduring.’37 Three months later,
37
‘Eleven charged over Bomb Plot’, BBC News, 21 Aug. 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5271998.
stm, accessed 8 June 2010.
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Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, then Director General of the Security Service
(MI5), warned of ‘some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1600 identified
individuals (and there will be many we don’t know) who are actively engaged in
plotting, or facilitating, terrorist acts here and overseas’.38 The Security Service
knew of 30 individual plots to kill people and had experienced an 80 per cent
increase in caseload between January and November 2006.39 Although the UK
had been targeted as early as 2000 (with a disrupted attack on Birmingham’s city
centre), the police and security services scrambled to grasp and track the extent
of radicalization that had since occurred, so as to get ahead of violent conspiracies
directed against civilians at home.
Fortunately, through a combination of hard work, community input, skill and
luck, the British police and Security Service had considerable success, disrupting
a series of operations following close on the heels of the 7/7 attacks.40 In August
2006 they foiled in its late stages a plot (Bojinka II) to blow up numerous airliners
flying from Europe to the United States, an operation that could have killed
thousands of people, rivalling the casualty count of the 9/11 attacks.41 Two nail
bombs were planted in Trafalgar Square in June 2007 by Bilal Abdullah and Kafell
Ahmed, who then tried to drive a suicide car bomb into the departure lounge at
Glasgow International Airport the next day.42 Police arrested recruiters sending
young men to training camps in Pakistan to prepare them for fighting in Afghani-
stan, and even uncovered camps in the Lake District and the New Forest.43 The
challenge was to respond in a comprehensive way that would stop terrorist attacks
without alienating the British Muslim community, upon whom any long-term
solution ultimately depended.44 The close historical connection between the UK
and Pakistan, extreme interpretations of Islam long preached by certain London
38
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, ‘The international terrorist threat to the UK’, speech given at Queen Mary,
London, 9 Nov. 2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article632872.ece, accessed 10 May 2010.
Her successor increased the number to 2,000 known (and probably 2,000 unknown) about a year later: Jonathan
Evans, ‘Intelligence, counterterrorism, and trust’, address to the Society of Editors by the Director General
of the Security Service, 5 Nov. 2007, https://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/intelligence-counter-terrorism-and-
trust.html, accessed 16 May 2010.
39
Manningham-Buller, ‘The international terrorist threat to the UK’.
40
The UK government’s counterterrorist strategy, known in its updated version as CONTEST II, may be
found at http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/news-publications/publication-search/contest/contest-strategy/
contest-strategy-2009?view=Binary, accessed 16 May 2010.
41
Don van Natta, Jr, Elaine Sciolino and Stephen Grey, ‘Details emerge in British terror case’, New York Times,
28 Aug. 2006.
42
Bilal Abdullah was an Iraqi Sunni doctor. This case is distinguished among those in Britain by the fact that
there was no connection to Pakistan, only to Al-Qaeda’s core and Al-Qaeda in Iraq. See Raymond Bonner,
Jane Perlez and Eric Schmitt, ‘British inquiry of failed plots points to Iraq’s Qaeda group’, New York Times,
14 Dec. 2007, cited by Michael Clarke and Valentin Soria, ‘Terrorism in the United Kingdom: confirming
its modus operandi’, RUSI Journal 154: 3, June 2009, p. 48. See also Peter Neumann and Brooke Rogers,
Recruitment and mobilisation for the Islamist militant movement in Europe, The International Centre for the Study
of Radicalisation, King’s College London, Dec. 2007, p. 14, http://www.icsr.info/publications/papers/12345
16791ICSREUResearchReport_Proof1.pdf, accessed 8 June 2010.
43
Clarke and Soria, ‘Terrorism in the United Kingdom’, p. 47.
44
The UK’s comprehensive counterterrorism policies, CONTEST (developed in 2003, elaborated in 2006) and
CONTEST II (updated in 2009), consist of four pillars: ‘Pursue’, ‘Prevent’, ‘Protect’ and ‘Prepare’. See HM
Government, The United Kingdom’s strategy for countering international terrorism (London: TSO, 2009), http://
security.homeoffice.gov.uk/news-publications/publication-search/contest/contest-strategy/contest-strat-
egy-2009?view=Binary.
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Audrey Kurth Cronin
imams, easy access by vulnerable teenagers to the Al-Qaeda narrative online, and
simmering anger at UK policy in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq all combined to
keep Britain vulnerable to attack. As the current Prime Minister David Cameron
once observed, ‘Anyone who thinks they have a simple answer to the threat of
terrorism hasn’t understood the question.’45
In contrast, for most of this period Americans were sanguine about home-
grown threats and primarily concerned about contagion spreading from opera-
tives entering US ports of entry via the UK. Nevertheless, received wisdom about
contrasting immigration patterns, higher per capita income and a greater degree
of assimilation of young Muslims into American society were called increasingly
into question, not least by anguished parents of ‘jihadist’ volunteers who suddenly
vanished abroad.46 Then, in late 2009, a series of high-profile events brought the
Al-Qaeda threat home again. One chilling near-miss was the case of Najibullah
Zazi, an airport shuttle driver and US legal resident who travelled to Afghanistan
to fight with the Taleban. While there he was recruited by Al-Qaeda, trained in
weapons and explosives, and sent back to the United States to target the New York
subway with a suicide attack, using a TATP bomb (similar to the kitchen-built
bombs used in the 7/7 London attack).47 Had it succeeded, the attack would have
marked the eighth anniversary of 9/11. American David Headley was arrested in
October 2009 as a conspirator in the bloody Mumbai attacks that had been orches-
trated by the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Toiba. US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan
killed 13 people and wounded 30 others in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas,
in November. Then Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian radicalized while
a student in the UK, tried to destroy a transatlantic jetliner bound for Detroit on
Christmas Day by igniting explosives hidden in his underwear. Finally, in May
2010 naturalized American Faisal Shahzad tried to blow up a primitive (but poten-
tially lethal) car bomb in New York’s heavily populated Times Square, in an opera-
tion apparently directed by the Pakistani Taleban.48 While some of these attempts
were reassuringly amateurish—and certainly none approached the preparation,
scale and complexity of 9/11—their number and frequency had clearly increased.
Sooner or later someone would get lucky: the next attack was definitely a matter
not of ‘if ’ but of ‘when’.
45
David Cameron, ‘Politics should not use national security for political advantage’, address to the Inter
national Institute for Strategic Studies, London, 22 Nov. 2006, http://www.iiss.org/recent-key-addresses/
david-cameron-address/, accessed 8 June 2010.
46
The parents of the five Pakistani-Americans who vanished from Northern Virginia in December 2009 are
one recent example. See Jerry Markon, ‘Pakistan arrests 5 N. Va. men, probes possible jihadist ties’, The
Washington Post, 10 Dec. 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/09/
AR2009120901884.html, accessed 8 June 2010.
47
Carrie Johnson and Spencer S. Hsu, ‘Najibullah Zazi pleads guilty in New York subway bomb plot’, Washington
Post, 23 Feb. 2010. The FBI was tipped off by Scotland Yard, which had intercepted an email from Pakistan,
giving instructions about how to carry off the operation: ‘British spies help prevent Al-Qaeda-inspired
attack on New York subway’, Daily Telegraph, 9 Nov. 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/
northamerica/usa/6529436/British-spies-help-prevent-Al-Qaeda-inspired-attack-on-New-York-subway.
html, accessed 3 June 2010. The American Bryant Neal Vinas likewise travelled to Pakistan in 2007, was trained
by Al-Qaeda in 2008 and was then encouraged to carry out a suicide attack against the Long Island railroad in
New York. See Michael Powell, ‘US recruit reveals how Qaeda trains foreigners’, New York Times, 24 July 2009.
48
Associated Press, ‘Pakistani Taleban behind Times Square plot, Holder says’, New York Times, 9 May 2010. Had
the bomb ignited, it might have killed hundreds in the crowded square.
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Reinvigorated Al-Qaeda affiliates

Al-Qaeda’s second strategic innovation was connected to the first: relying more on
reinvigorated affiliates. Al-Qaeda affiliates only began using the name ‘Al-Qaeda’
as part of their labels in late 2003, but this soon became standard nomenclature as a
way to project a powerful, homogeneous movement. Global successes in damping
down terrorism in such places as Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Bangladesh and Singapore
were offset by signs of resurgence in parts of Africa, South Asia and the Arabian
Peninsula. In February 2010, for example, the Somali group Al-Shabaab announced
that it would formally ally itself with Al-Qaeda in an effort to establish an Islamic
state in Somalia.49 The group, which already controlled much of the country, was
split between Somali nationalists who wanted to avoid foreign leadership and
those who supported a global agenda more closely aligned with Al-Qaeda. The
goal of Al-Shabaab was to establish an Islamic state that would be ruled by Shari’a
law, although the degree to which local nationalist aims had been incorporated
into a global jihadist agenda was open to question. Al-Shabaab seemed primarily
focused on bringing westerners into the battle in Somalia, with a network of
recruiters drawing young Somali men from the United States, Canada, Sweden
and Denmark—though there was also concern among intelligence services about
what would happen when former fighters returned home.50
Moving further north, bin Laden and Zawahiri reached out to their longstanding
Algerian affiliate. After more than a decade of informal cooperation, in 2006 the
Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat in 2006 declared ‘unity’ with Al-Qaeda
and formally changed its name to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). In
2007–2008 it carried out a series of suicide attacks in Algeria (including a failed
assassination attempt against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika) that revealed a shift
toward Al-Qaeda’s tactics and ideology. The group operated mobile training camps
along the Algeria–Mali border and supported itself through regional trafficking
and kidnapping, giving rise to deep concern in Morocco and Tunisia that AQIM
would contaminate indigenous groups.51 By late 2009, however, rank-and-file
AQIM members were questioning the legitimacy of Al-Qaeda’s suicide tactics
and civilian targeting, perhaps reflecting criticisms published by the Libyan Islamic
Fighting Group in the neighbouring state. It is impossible to say at the time of
writing how ideological wrangling within AQIM will be resolved. But dangerous
as both groups are—and regardless of what they call themselves—Al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb and Al-Qaeda’s core are by no means locked in an unbreakable
relationship.
49
Sarah Childress, ‘Somalia’s Al Shabaab to ally with Al Qaeda’, Wall Street Journal, 2 Feb. 2010.
50
Shiwa Ahmed, a 26-year-old Somali American, blew himself up in Bossaso and was America’s first suicide
bomber. Kenyans broke up a cell plotting to kill Hillary Clinton during her August 2009 visit to their coun-
try, and a released member of that cell returned to Denmark and tried to murder the Danish cartoonist Kurt
Westergaard a few months later. See Rafaello Pantucci, ‘American jihad: new details emerge about al-Shabaab
recruitment in North America’, Terrorism Monitor 7: 37, 3 Dec. 2009, pp. 3–4, and ‘East African terrorism
comes to Scandinavia’, Terrorism Monitor 7: 2, 14 Jan. 2010, pp. 4–6.
51
See Al Qaeda and affiliates: historical perspective, global presence, and implications for US Policy, CRS report for
Congress #R41070, 5 Feb. 2010, esp. pp. 14–18, accessible at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/R41070.pdf,
accessed 8 June 2010.
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Audrey Kurth Cronin
As for projecting force, AQIM was intended by Al-Qaeda central as a bridge-
head from which to launch violence in Europe; yet attacks against Europeans have
thus far all been in North Africa (the Sahara and Sahel regions). While several
European countries have seen arrests of operatives allegedly connected to AQIM,
the group has thus far failed to fulfil Al-Qaeda’s global ambitions for it.52 With
increased international investment pouring into North Africa, AQIM’s western
target set is likely to grow; but there are signs that the group favours lucrative
hostage-taking and trafficking near home over orchestrating the kind of transna-
tional political violence that Al-Qaeda prefers.53
The most dangerous of the rising affiliates was in Yemen, which grew into a
hotbed of Al-Qaeda-associated activity towards the end of this five-year period.
While it was apparent by 2008 that jihadists had failed in neighbouring Saudi
Arabia, Yemen’s Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) reconstituted itself
and formally merged with the Saudi chapter so as to project an image of continu-
ity.54 AQAP militants regrouped and became more active, attacking the American
Embassy, killing Belgian and South Korean tourists, attempting to assassinate the
Saudi counterterrorism chief and targeting the weak Yemeni regime. Despite a
promising beginning, the government’s rehabilitation programme, the Committee
for Dialogue, appeared to have failed.55 Al-Qaeda worked hard to lay a long-term
foundation in the country, with members marrying into tribes, recruiting former
prisoners and tailoring their message to a Yemeni audience. By 2010, militants
were operating with impunity in Yemen, not least because the government was
weakened by an insurgency in the north, leaving AQAP increasingly unfettered,
ambitious and dangerous.
With Yemen’s AQAP, Al-Qaeda again attempted to build up a regional organi-
zation with the potential to evolve into a global successor. The group was certainly
dangerous to Saudi Arabia: all of the former Guantánamo detainees who fled Saudi
Arabia went to Yemen and were among its ranks.56 But there were global ties to the
United States as well. Major Hasan had exchanged emails with Anwar al-Awlaki,
an American-born radical cleric who had once served as an imam in Denver and
52
For much more about AQIM, see Jean-Pierre Filiu, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb: Algerian challenge or global
threat?, Carnegie Papers 104 (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Oct. 2009),
and ‘Al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb: a case study in the opportunism of global jihad’, CTC Sentinel 3:
4, April 2010, pp. 14–15. There is evidence of considerable funding coming from Europe to AQIM. See
Europol, TE-SAT: EU terrorism situation and trend report 2008, http://www.europol.europa.eu/publications/
EU_Terrorism_Situation_and_Trend_Report_TE-SAT/TESAT2008.pdf, accessed 8 June 2010.
53
Geoff D. Porter, ‘AQIM and the growth of international investment in North Africa’, CTC Sentinel 2: 11,
Nov. 2009, pp. 9–12.
54
Thomas Hegghammer argues that the Yemeni adoption of the name AQAP was an effort to assume the legacy
of the crushed Saudi AQAP, but that there was little actual overlap between the two organizations. See Hegg-
hammer, ‘The failure of jihad’.
55
Christopher Boucek, Shazadi Beg and John Horgan, ‘Opening up the jihadi debate: Yemen’s Committee for
Dialogue’, in Tore Bjorgo and John Horgan, eds, Leaving terrorism behind: individual and collective disengagement
(New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 181–92; Gregory D. Johnsen and Christopher Boucek, ‘The dilemma of
the Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo Bay’, CTC Sentinel, Special Yemen Issue, Jan. 2010, pp. 25–8.
56
The threat to Saudi Arabia reportedly remains high: according to the Saudi interior ministry, the government
arrested 991 Al-Qaeda suspects in 2009 alone, most of whom were Saudi nationals. Hugh Tomlinson, ‘Saudis
“foil major Al-Qaeda attack on kingdom”’, The Times, 25 March 2010, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/
news/world/middle_east/article7074436.ece, accessed 8 June 2010.
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San Diego, later fleeing to Yemen in 2004. The Christmas Day bomber Abdul-
mutallab likewise sought out AQAP, and they trained him to execute what was to
them a relatively low-cost, low-risk operation aboard Northwest Flight 253. The
group’s previous focus had been on removing ‘infidels’ from the Arabian Penin-
sula; the airline bombing attempt was the first time AQAP had tried to orchestrate
an attack in the United States—though it seems to have been a matter of grabbing
an opportunity that fell into its lap.
Finally, as western operations in Iraq wound down and debates over stepped-up
drone attacks and the effectiveness of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghani-
stan continued apace, investigators unearthed new connections between groups on
the Afghan–Pakistan border and operatives in the US. Evidence that the Pakistani
Taleban (Tehrik-i-Taleban Pakistan or TTP) might have planned and financed
Faisal Shahzad’s May 2010 Times Square car-bomb attack was still emerging at
the time this article was being written. It was unclear whether he had travelled to
Pakistan and offered himself for training, or whether Pakistani groups such as the
TTP, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Toiba had reached into the United States
and radicalized Shahzad, who was a naturalized American citizen. Either way,
Al-Qaeda, the Taleban, the war in Afghanistan, the campaign of drone attacks and
the safety of the American people at home appeared more intertwined than ever.
The widespread conviction that the Pakistani Taleban was a localized force that
could not project violence beyond South Asia was shaken, raising a troublesome
prospect: was the Pakistani Taleban now becoming a transatlantic terrorist group
like Al-Qaeda?
With respect to Al-Qaeda, the good news in this period far outweighed the
bad, but the battleground of western terrorism and counterterrorism had shifted
to the minds of western constituents, where popular anxiety now ruled. The
increased danger posed by home-grown threats and resurgent Al-Qaeda affiliates
drew the attention of the media and the public, most of whom yearned for a
sense of progress in the fight against Al-Qaeda to fit the high expectations of
the two-front war abroad. Each potential attack was a shattering disappointment.
Threat assessments in terrorism are notoriously difficult to conduct under the
best of circumstances; all the more so if the operatives involved emerge without
warning, without prior experience, without serious training, with no obvious
law enforcement profile and radicalized through popular media—as was increas-
ingly becoming the case. No president or prime minister could be seen to be ‘soft
on terrorism’ or to make excuses for lapses in security, especially if there was
another successful attack on western soil. In the US, both in Congress and over
the airwaves, highly partisan commentators jockeyed for advantage and bickered
over whether American counterterrorism policies, undertaken at great expense in
lives and treasure, had yielded the expected results. Even as Al-Qaeda struggled
to survive, dispassionate assessments of the threat (and the western response to it)
became increasingly difficult.
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Audrey Kurth Cronin
The evolution of counterterrorism policy, Bush to Obama

In view of the good news and bad news of the five years after the 7/7 London
attacks, how did counterterrorism policy evolve and adapt? In the United States,
there was much popular angst about the question ‘How are we doing?’, most of
it oriented towards the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on Al-Qaeda,
with the question why bin Laden had not yet been eliminated looming large.
Still, most Americans believed that fighting terrorists in places such as Iraq and
Afghanistan reduced the likelihood of further terrorist attacks at home. The
attacks and attempted attacks of 2009–10 thus tested a foundational principle of
the US campaign against Al-Qaeda, not least because they reignited the fear of
another comparable terrorist attack, perhaps including WMD this time, on US
soil. The result was further erosion of popular support for the two wars, in the
midst of a severe recession and widespread anxiety about jobs.
Nonetheless, the transition from the Bush to the Obama administration brought
a significant shift in emphasis in US public counterterrorism pronouncements. The
framing of the allied campaign as a ‘(global) war on terror’ and a ‘long war’ shifted
to the narrower ‘attack on Al-Qaeda and its allies’. Bush’s storyline had lumped
disparate factors together, harking back to twentieth-century struggles against
totalitarian enemies and using easily understood battle cries such as ‘You’re either
with us or against us in the fight against terror’ to rally the American people.57
President Obama struck a contrasting note with his June 2009 speech at Cairo
University in Egypt: ‘So long as our relationship is defined by our difference,
we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote
conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice
and prosperity. And this cycle of suspicion and discord must end.’58 The narra-
tive of the counterterrorism campaign thus changed, from generalizations about
evil to an emphasis on disaggregation, nuance and complexity—and the accom-
panying counterterrorism policies generally followed suit. While many in the
world reacted with relief, however, it remained to be seen whether Obama’s more
cerebral approach would resonate with the American people over time.
The US approach to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan likewise changed
from broad statements about a global war encompassing both theatres to more
narrowly focused, customized counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in each
place. At the time of writing, it was unclear whether the new policies would
bear fruit, especially in Afghanistan, where disparate factions of the Afghani and
Pakistani Taleban began to align against the western allies. In this regard, the most
disturbing aspect of the May 2010 Times Square bombing attempt was evidence that
nationalist and jihadist groups across the border in Pakistan—including Al-Qaeda,
the TTP, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Toiba and probably others—may have
swallowed their natural differences and pooled their resources to cooperate against
57
George W. Bush, ‘You are either with us or against us’, CNN.com, 6 Nov. 2001, http://archives.cnn.
com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/, accessed 8 June 2010.
58
‘Remarks by the President on a new beginning’, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, 4 June 2009, http://www.
whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6–04–09, accessed 8 June 2010.
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the ‘far enemy’. Some feared that America’s disaggregation of the enemy had come
too late to avert the enemy’s aggregation, in turn, against us.
Another major shift from Bush to Obama was the transition from emphasizing
troops on the ground fighting ‘Al-Qaeda’ (which, especially in the beginning,
meant virtually anyone shooting at them) to greater reliance upon targeting
specific enemy leaders. Along with the decision to send 30,000 more troops to
Afghanistan, President Obama authorized an expansion of the CIA’s programme
to use unmanned drones to kill specific militants in the border region between
Afghanistan and Pakistan.59 The logic was to confine the violence to those respon-
sible for planning attacks, reducing the impact upon surrounding civilian areas
and obviating the need for more blunt, high-casualty military offensives in rough
and unfamiliar terrain. According to a report by the New America Foundation,
the rate of targeted attacks multiplied: there were 51 reported drone strikes in
Pakistan’s tribal areas in 2009 alone, compared to 45 strikes in total over the entire
eight-year Bush administration.60 While the drone attacks reportedly killed a large
number of dangerous militants and disrupted numerous operations, the policy
was highly controversial due to its unpopularity with the Pakistani public, its
shaky legal grounds and the killing of nearby civilians.61 There were also questions
about its effectiveness in degrading the Taleban’s ability to mount operations in
Pakistan or Afghanistan over the long term.62
Combined with the enhanced focus upon drone attacks near the Afghanistan
war zone was a broad expansion of US special operations forces in both combat
and non-combat areas throughout the world. According to a directive signed by
CENTCOM Commander General David H. Petraeus in September 2009 (and
later publicized in the New York Times), these missions were intended to build
ties with local forces, as well as to conduct clandestine intelligence-gathering.63
While the Bush administration had also relied considerably upon special opera-
tions, the Obama administration integrated them more directly into its overall
counterterrorism strategy, using them not only for unilateral strikes but also to
train indigenous forces and conduct joint operations.64 Asking for a 5.7 per cent
increase in the special operations budget for fiscal year 2011, the administration
increased the number of countries in which they were deployed from 60 to 75
worldwide, with growth concentrated especially in the Middle East, Africa and
Central Asia.65
59
Shane Shane, ‘CIA to expand use of drones in Pakistan’, New York Times, 4 Dec. 2009.
60
Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, ‘The year of the drone: an analysis of US drone strikes in Pakistan,
2004–2010’, Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative policy paper, New America Foundation, 24 Feb. 2010, p. 1,
http://counterterrorism.newamerica.net/publications/policy/the_year_of_the_drone, accessed 3 June 2010.
61
Bergen and Tiedemann, ‘The year of the drone’.
62
For much more on the historical record of decapitation in counterterrorism, see Audrey Kurth Cronin, How
terrorism ends (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), ch. 1, pp. 14–34; Jenna Jordan, ‘When heads
roll: assessing the effectiveness of leadership decapitation’, Security Studies 18: 4, pp. 719–55.
63
Mark Mazzetti, ‘US is said to expand secret actions in Mideast’, New York Times, 24 May 2010. According to
the article, the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Executive Order was signed on 30 Sept. 2009.
64
Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe, ‘US “secret war” expands globally as special operations forces take larger role’,
Washington Post, 4 June 2010, p. A1.
65
DeYoung and Jaffe, ‘US “secret war” expands globally’.
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Despite an effort to chart ‘a new beginning’, the Obama administration was
dogged by many of the same issues that had hampered the Bush administration.
Virtually all of the institutional innovation in counterterrorism had been in
Washington, with the creation of two centralized bureaucracies, the large Depart-
ment of Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).
Each collected much more data but continued to struggle to analyse and dissemi-
nate it effectively. While the two new agencies prevented numerous attacks,
in this Washington-centric counterterrorism ‘more and bigger’ did not always
translate directly into ‘smarter and better’.66 And the division between global and
local perspectives on counterterrorism continued to be reflected in the institu-
tional structures of homeland defence and international operations. In the face
of powerful cultural, institutional and even intellectual biases, vigorous efforts
to integrate these levels of analysis had limited success. It was partly a human
capital problem: how many American analysts were there, really, who could
effortlessly work the boundaries between international affairs, regional expertise,
strategic thinking and domestic law enforcement? A global and local bifurcation
thus hobbled the development of a truly strategic US perspective on terrorism
and counterterrorism.
A final continuing challenge was the embarrassing status of the Guantánamo
detention facility. One of the first things the newly inaugurated President
Obama signed in January 2009 was an executive order directing the closing of the
Guantánamo detention camp within a year.67 But in order to close it down, the
United States had to find a place to send the remaining detainees, some half of
whom (91) were from Yemen. Just as the Obama administration was preparing to
send some 30 of them back home, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s Christmas Day
bombing attempt revealed the potency of the AQAP affiliate in Yemen. At the
time of writing, the administration planned to move the remaining Guantánamo
detainees to a facility in Thomson, Illinois; but many in Congress opposed the
move. So, more than a year after making the closure of Guantánamo one of his
top priorities in counterterrorism, Obama still struggled to achieve it.68
Thus, overall there were two key policy differences between the Obama and
Bush administration approaches to counterterrorism, fleshed out publicly by the
new administration in mid-2010. First was the effort to disaggregate the threat, to
respond to different elements of ‘Al-Qaeda’ differently. In the words of the White
House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, ‘In all our efforts, we will exercise
force prudently, recognizing that we often need to use a scalpel, not a hammer’—
66
The NCTC was created in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. Its purpose was
to be a single integration centre for intelligence and operations related to counterterrorism, thus overseeing
interagency coordination between (domestic threats) FBI, Health, State, Justice and Treasury departments
and others, and (international threats) Defense, State, Justice and Treasury departments and key members of
the intelligence community. See Mike Leiter, ‘Eight years after 9/11: confronting the terrorist threat to the
homeland’, evidence to hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee,
30 Sept. 2009, http://www.dni.gov/testimonies/20090930_testimony.pdf, accessed 3 June 2010.
67
Mark Mazzetti and William Glaberson, ‘Obama issues directive to shut down Guantanamo’, New York Times,
22 Jan. 2009.
68
Marisa L. Porges and April Longley Alley, ‘Camp nowhere’, Foreign Policy 177, 15 Jan. 2010, http://www.
foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/15/camp_nowhere, accessed 31 May 2010.
18
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the most obvious ‘scalpel’ being the drone attacks along the Pakistan–Afghanistan
border and the expanded special operations missions in non-combat areas abroad.69
But there were no guarantees: while the United States would continue to take
a pre-emptive approach, designed to disrupt and dismantle Al-Qaeda before an
attack was attempted, this was now balanced by equal emphasis upon the need
for American resilience in the wake of another terrorist incident on US soil. So
the second broad shift was the administration’s attempt to inoculate the American
people in advance of a tragedy. An emphasis on protecting core values, planning
for contingencies, and avoiding fear and paralysis in the wake of an attack held out
hope of defusing the classic power of terrorism to leverage popular fear, inflame
political factions and provoke devastating overreactions. Brennan continued: ‘We
must be honest with ourselves. No nation, no matter how powerful, can prevent
every threat from coming to fruition.’70
Conclusion: looking to the future

Regardless of setbacks during the five years after the 7/7 attacks, the bad news
of Al-Qaeda’s partnerships and innovations failed to outweigh the broader
sea-change in global attitudes towards Salafist jihadists, many of whom now
found themselves on the run amid their own purported constituencies. With
the benefit of hindsight, it became easy to see that the Al-Qaeda movement had
deeply undermined itself, particularly through the killing of such a large number
of Muslims in its terrorist attacks during this period. If Ayman al-Zawahiri was
correct that more than half of the struggle was taking place ‘in the battlefield of
the media’, then western leaders needed to take more aggressive steps to spotlight
the growing hollowness and illegitimacy of this movement. Even at a time of
heightened anxiety (especially in the US), the international mobilization against
Al-Qaeda was gaining momentum. But because most Britons and Americans did
not speak Arabic or follow esoteric religious debates about Al-Qaeda’s sometime
bizarre Salafist tenets, they missed out on vast areas of the continuing controversy.
Even as their enemies were imploding from within, these westerners (perhaps
understandably) paid close attention only to what directly affected them.
The question now was whether or not the US and the UK governments
would be wise enough to work with that implosion process or instead would be
provoked into mistakes that would impede it. Beefing up defensive measures was
certainly wise, as the threat of further attacks was real and immediate. However,
the American obsession with eliminating risk to the homeland had become a serious
vulnerability in itself, as it forced the government to define victory strictly in
terms of the absence of even the smaller attacks that were becoming almost
inevitable, while at the same time amplifying the incentives for undertaking them.
69
John Brennan, ‘Securing the homeland by renewing American strength, resilience, and values’, remarks by the
Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the Center for Strategic and Inter-
national Studies, Princeton University, 26 May 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-
assistant-president-homeland-security-and-counterterrorism-john-brennan-csi, accessed 3 June 2010.
70
Brennan, ‘Securing the homeland’.
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Audrey Kurth Cronin
The hyperbolic publicity given to each incident was making the next one more
likely. As for Al-Qaeda’s core, any operation—even any attempted operation—that
was logistically tied to it in any way came to be defined as a success.
As the period drew to a close, therefore, the real question was whether the two
key western allies could maintain their nerve and enough equilibrium both to
fend off a domestic attack and to make plans for a truly strategic response in the
event that one occurred. This was a tall order for any democracy, as students of
the history of terrorism understood only too well; but it was far from impossible.
The British history of dealing with terrorism gave the UK a head start in this
respect; but at the end of this five-year period the United States also gradually
shifted its domestic policy towards an emphasis on core American values, strength
and resilience in the wake of an inevitable attack. Thus, in addition to stabilizing
Afghanistan, fixing US institutional weaknesses and killing individual operatives
abroad, a key continuing challenge for the counterterrorism strategy of the United
States was to encourage a more realistic popular attitude towards risk at home,
because the threat of individually inspired attacks had now become serious in
both countries. Doing so would not only help to stabilize the country if a tragedy
occurred and reduce the likelihood of making classic counterterrorism mistakes
in response, but might also reduce the magnetic attractiveness of the highly publi-
cized violence in the first place. Terrorism is an almost irresistible tactic to employ
as a game-changer for those on the strategic defensive. As Al-Qaeda violently
imploded, therefore, the allies’ joint challenge for the immediate future was to
ensure that tactics did not trump strategy.
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The evolution of counterterrorism:

will tactics trump strategy?

AUDREY KURTH CRONIN *

International Affairs 86: 4 (2010) 000–000

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The good news: sources of strategic vulnerability

No clash between civilizations

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Widespread Muslim backlash against Al-Qaeda

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Emerging counterterrorism coalition among states

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Bad news: Al-Qaeda’s adaptations, innovations and flanking ­manœuvres

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Reinvigorated Al-Qaeda affiliates

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The evolution of counterterrorism policy, Bush to Obama

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Conclusion: looking to the future

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Bad news: Al-Qaeda’s adaptations, innovations and flanking manœuvres