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Both sides in terror war bloodied, but
unbowed
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Two years after US President George
W Bush vowed to take the war to the terrorists who
carried out the September 11 attacks, the fight between
the two main antagonists seems to be a draw.
Both the George W Bush administration and
al-Qaeda - most recently through a public release on
Wednesday of a video and audio tape allegedly of Osama
bin Laden himself - are claiming that each has the other
right where he wants him (including in Iraq) and
exhorting their friends and allies to fight harder for
final victory.
And while few contest the notion
that Washington has made substantial progress in
dismantling al-Qaeda itself, its broader aim of
defeating radical Islam and the "jihadis" who draw their
inspiration from bin Laden seems as elusive as the Saudi
renegade himself.
As Daniel Benjamin, a senior
counter-terrorism official under the Bill Clinton
administration, put it in the Los Angeles Times on
Thursday, the Bush balance sheet is a "mixture of
tactical success and strategic slippage".
"Osama
bin Laden's ideology continues to spread among most of
the world's major Muslim populations, even if his
organization has lost strength," Benjamin wrote, echoing
the view of most independent experts that the war in
Iraq, which President Bush has depicted as part of the
"war on terrorism", has also served as a major
recruitment tool for jihadis throughout the Islamic
world.
That al-Qaeda as an organization has been
badly hurt is beyond question. As the administration
never tires of saying, two-thirds of its top leadership
have been either captured or killed. The past year's
capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a top operative who
helped plan the September 11 attacks, and, more
recently, Hambali, the alleged chief of the network's
operations in Southeast Asia, have been cited as major
breakthroughs.
Similarly, international efforts
to cut off financing of al-Qaeda and similar groups are
considered to have made dramatic progress. And, by
ousting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Bush has
succeeded in denying al-Qaeda headquarters, safe haven,
training facilities and other perks that came with a
friendly state.
But none of those
accomplishments translate into anything like final
victory. As was conceded as recently as last week, US
intelligence agencies still consider al-Qaeda a potent
network, capable even of pulling off a terrorist act
causing mass casualties within US borders. That
apprehension is felt at the grassroots: three of every
four citizens admit their fears of another terrorist
attack are as great as or greater than they were two
years ago.
And while Washington can take
considerable satisfaction from the fact that no major
terrorist incident has taken place in the United States
since September 11, 2001, the rest of the world,
according to Benjamin, has witnessed "an unprecedented
wave of terrorism ... including attacks in Bali, Moscow,
Mombassa and Riyadh, to name only a few of the most
lethal strikes".
But more worrying, according to
Benjamin and other experts, is the steadily growing
evidence that the battle to win Muslim "hearts and
minds" to a more "moderate" and pro-Western world view
is being lost, particularly in the wake of the Iraq
invasion.
"As bad as the situation inside Iraq
may be," Jessica Stern, a terrorism specialist at
Harvard University's school of government, wrote in the
New York Times last month, "the effect that the [Iraq]
war has on terrorist recruitment around the globe may be
even more worrisome.
"Intelligence officials in
the United States, Europe and Africa say that the
recruits they are seeing now are younger than in the
past," she went on, quoting Arab colleagues as warning
that the Iraq war was "a gift to Osama bin Laden" and a
clarion call to do battle against Washington,
particularly in Iraq.
By invading Iraq, "Bush
and the neo-cons hoped they could drain the terrorist
swamp in the long run", Times columnist Maureen Dowd
wrote last week. "But in the short run, they have
created new terrorist-breeding swamps full of angry
young Arabs who see America the same way Muslims saw
Westerners during the Crusades: as Christian
expansionist imperialists motivated by piety and greed."
This perception is reflected in recent surveys
of opinion in the Islamic world, particularly in Arab
states. A much-cited survey of 20 countries, including
eight predominantly Muslim nations, by the Pew Global
Attitudes Project immediately after the war, found that
Washington's image in the Islamic world has fallen
dramatically over the past two years, with less than 15
percent of respondents from Turkey to Indonesia
reporting favorable impressions of the United States
overall.
The same survey found that a sharply
growing percentage of Muslims see the US as a serious
threat to Islam and express "at least some confidence"
in bin Laden to "do the right thing regarding world
affairs".
On the latter issue, solid majorities
in Palestine, Indonesia and Jordan, and nearly half of
respondents in Morocco and Pakistan, voiced at least
some sympathy and support for the al-Qaeda
leader.
Many analysts believe that the US image
in the Islamic world has only worsened in the four
months since the polls were taken because of
Washington's failure to provide security and basic
services to the Iraqi population and to come up with any
evidence that ousted president Saddam Hussein harbored
illegal weapons or had close ties with al-Qaeda - the
two main justifications cited by Bush for going to war
in the first place.
"That has clearly added to
the impression in the region that this was a war of
conquest carried out in the name of anti-terrorism,"
said one State Department official who declined to be
identified. "What little credibility we had [in the
region] has gone up in smoke."
That loss in
credibility has also contributed to stretch the already
deep strains between Washington and its European allies,
most of which were already deeply skeptical of Bush's
obsession with Iraq before the war. "The president has
much less credibility than he did before the war, and he
didn't have much to begin with," said Charles Kupchan,
the director of a high-level task force on US-European
ties at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"Governments that backed the war [in spite of
strong public opposition] paid a political cost for
sending troops. Now that many of the claims made by Bush
prior to the war have been proven questionable, they
will find it even more difficult to continue their
support."
Indeed, a growing consensus in
Washington - even among some Republicans - is that the
"war on terrorism" took a disastrous and extremely
costly detour last year when the administration launched
its campaign for war with Iraq. Not only did the war
divert intelligence and military resources from the
offensive against al-Qaeda and its allies, but it
appears to have given them new life.
(Inter
Press Service)
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