More thoughts from Bruce Riedel (see yesterday’s posting). 

On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Sept. 11, 2006, Bin Laden reached out to form a new group called Al Qaeda and Islamic Madre. Al Qaeda thrives in failed or failing states. Algeria was a failing state in the mid 1990s. Al Qaeda wants to bomb it back into being a failed state. It is imperative that this not happen because it offers al Qaeda another highway into the West. Only a concentration of effort on the core leadership will defeat it. If we cut off the arms, they will grow back. We need to cut off the head and the arms in order to defeat it. It’s long time past due to concentrate our efforts on going after and capturing Osama bin Laden.
Why hasn’t the American homeland been hit again? Last August, had it been successful, we would have seen the downing of ten simultaneous aircraft over the Atlantic. Al Qaeda’s intent appears not so much to attack the U.S. but to fight long battles in Muslim countries where they think they have all the advantages – fighting on their home turf and fighting where they think their intelligence will be better than ours and where they will weaken our will to fight back. What they call raids – as in the bombing on the U.S., London, and Madrid are useful ways of taking the war to the far enemy from time to time but they are not the central point of al Qaeda’s strategy.  They know they can never conduct a raid that is so devastating that it will destroy the U.S. Its objective is to develop the quagmire wars in order to defeat us there.
We know very little about al Qaeda’s ability to recruit inside the U.S. We have succeeded in making it more difficult for a young middle Eastern male jihad to penetrate the U.S. But it could still happen if the recruit came from Europe. Al Qaeda thrives on the spectacular. It is most likely that they will not settle for something small, like a mall shooting. Rather, we should expect a long gestation period where the plotting and planning will result in something even more spectacular than 911.
What motivates Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network is not to turn Westerners into Muslims but rather to end a century of what they see as Western domination – plundering, pillaging, raping (all those kinds of words they use) of the Muslim world. They see the key to their success is to return to the way things were before the U.S. gave so much support to their enemies. Their strategy is to attack the far enemy first and then the near enemy can be overthrown.
We should be going after Osama bin Laden and the senior leadership of the organization. The very fact that he has survived 5 years creates a mystique about him and his ideology. He is the Robinhood of the Muslim world. In 2002, we had him cornered. Instead we decided to go to Mesopotamia and fight another enemy in a different dessert. The cost of that strategic mistake is one we are only beginning to see.

We cannot win this war merely militarily or diplomatically. We have to have a grand strategy that integrates all of these pieces. We need to change the narrative. Al Qaeda’s narrative is that the U.S. and its allies seek to take over the Muslim world for their own reasons. That is the narrative that is dominating the jihadist discussions groups. We need to get out of the business of looking like we are pillaging and raping the Muslim world and get back into the business of working with the Muslim leaders to resolve underlying issues of concern to the Islamic world. There is a serious vulnerability for the al Qaeda movement – like the Kashmir movement and the Israeli Palestinian conflict. There is a serious vulnerability for al Qaeda if progress is achieved on the Palestinian front. What could hurt the movement is not just presenting our version of what the world should look like, but by active diplomatic pursuit of resolving issues like the Palestinian conflict. If we change the narrative - the perception the Islamic world has of America - we can win.

 Thoughts from Rene: Yes, we do need to change the narrative. But to do so, we must change our approach. As long as we perceive ourselves as the good guys who have never done anything to incite this crisis, we will remain at war. For peace to be possible, we must try to understand what it is bin Laden and al Qaeda truly want, why they have such hatred for us, and begin to change our tactics. If we are to be perceived as good guys, we must begin to behave as good guys. It is not by more pillaging and killing that we will succeed. We need to take Osama bin Laden out of a position of influence and help the Muslim world regain their dignity.