In today's Washington Post, Bruce Hoffman manages to succinctly frame al Qaeda's new strategy in five clear, concise steps. Together, he says, they boil down to this: "al-Qaeda's leadership has now adopted a 'death by a thousand cuts' approach." Oh, yeah, and the U.S. government is ill-prepared to counter this new strategy.
Hoffman starts off by noting that the terrorist organization U.S. officials continue to say is "on the ropes" has managed to inflict two major wounds -- the suicide bombing of a CIA base in Afghanistan dealt a powerful psychological blow, and the failed Christmas Day bombing of a U.S.-bound airliner has resulted in a time-consuming and expensive evaluation of existing counter-terrorism strategies.
Overwhelming intelligence systems, forcing expensive responses, creating divisions between governments, exploiting failed states and recruiting from non-Muslim countries is apparently all it takes to run a terror outfit these days.
Hoffman lays it all out in rather simple terms, before stating the obvious:
But while al-Qaeda is finding new ways to exploit our weaknesses, we are stuck in a pattern of belated responses, rather than anticipating its moves and developing preemptive strategies. The "systemic failure" of intelligence analysis and airport security that Obama recently described was not just the product of a compartmentalized bureaucracy or analytical inattention, but a failure to recognize al-Qaeda's new strategy.
... Remarkably, more than eight years after Sept. 11, we still don't fully understand our dynamic and evolutionary enemy. We claim success when it is regrouping and tally killed leaders while more devious plots are being hatched. Al-Qaeda needs to be utterly destroyed. This will be accomplished not just by killing and capturing terrorists -- as we must continue to do -- but by breaking the cycle of radicalization and recruitment that sustains the movement.
