Muqaawama

Has anyone else been disgusted with the media frenzy surrounding the Christmas Day airline bombing, the endless chatter on what we did and did not do, the recriminations and counter-recriminations by each party about a resurgent terrorist threat and how ill-prepared we are to deal with it?

I take away something entirely different.  Eight years after a well-coordinated attack that brought down or damaged some of the most potent symbols of American might, Al Qaeda’s most successful encore is a scared, lonely, under-sexed Nigerian kid trying to light his underwear on fire.  That tells me something.  Al Qaeda is not the organization it was eight years ago.

Actually, it wasn’t even the Al Qaeda we know.  The organization in Yemen most likely responsible for orchestrating the attack is a start-up venture, certainly taking its inspiration from the original Al Qaeda but having independent leadership (most likely radicalized in Guatanamo rather than Afghanistan) and funding.

Where are Bin Laden and Zawahiri’s hardened jihadists, bent on a Clash of Civilizations?  Do they do anything more than release a canned video tape every few months to let the world know they are still hanging on?  Does Mullah Omar’s Taliban even consult them any more as it devises its own Afghan insurgency strategy from Pakistan’s Quetta sanctuaries?  Is Al Qaeda even operational?  Is it relevant anymore?

Perhaps to our own military-intelligence complex.  Here, we have spent over a trillion dollars over the past near decade just to fight the conventional war against terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan.  This funding trickles down to thousands of private contractors in hundreds of congressional districts.  Districts who rely on the massive military installations on their soil for job growth and tax revenue.  Congressmen and women in these districts who need the campaign contributions from these private contractors to stay in office.  This waterfall of money does not of course include the billions of classified dollars we spend on the intelligence agencies and the funding for the 22 different departments within our government that were recently reorganized under the leadership of the mammoth Department of Homeland Security.  All told, between our military, our bureaucracy, private contractors, consultants, think tanks, media talking heads (including the guy writing this), who devote their time, energy, and resources to the Idea of Islamic terrorism- we can say without a doubt that the largest constituency for terror in the world is right here in America.

What would happen if Al Qaeda was no longer relevant?  What would happen if it were publicized that its management and capabilities had been so degraded over the past eight years that its operational capability, rudimentary to begin with, is almost nonexistent?  (Remember, Osama is the same guy who walked into the Saudi defense minister’s office on the eve of the First Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s tanks had rolled thru Kuwait in a day, and proposed defeating him with a few hundred Afghan mujahideen.  He never really made a lot of sense as a strategic commander.)  What if we found that large swaths of Muslim populations throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds had long rejected Al Qaeda’s heavy-handed tactics and narrow interpretation of Islam?

Well, a lot of Americans would lose their jobs.  Am I the only one who is bothered by this?

There is only one other possibility- however remote.  Perhaps our government is playing defense so well that Al Qaeda can’t get through.  Dick Cheney would certainly like to believe that.  But most rational people discount this idea.  Especially when sting agents from the GAO can infiltrate 10 separate high-security federal buildings with bomb making material without getting caught.  It’s difficult to play defense, particularly with a country of the size and scope of America.  No, the more likely reality is they haven’t gotten thru because they aren’t that sophisticated.

But perhaps they don’t need to be.  At the end of all that spending, reorganization, and white paper activity on terrorism, the countless American lives lost in trying extricate Al Qaeda from its mountain redoubts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the tens of thousands more Americans returning home as walking wounded, both physically and mentally, what happened?  A Nigerian kid trained and inculcated in hate thousands of miles away from the “front lines of terror” boards a plane and quietly infiltrates our perimeter with a party in his pants.

We have more than enough resources dedicated to terrorism.  The problem is allocation.  It’s clear that conventional wars in the Middle East aren’t going to snuff out Al Qaeda.  They may create jobs and prop-up local economies in Pennsylvania and Texas, but that should not be a valid reason to send American men and women off to die in a foreign land.  We need to attack the problem.  There is a powerful, popular, entirely indigenous backlash against political Islam gathering momentum across the Muslim world.  We can see it in faces of the fearless protesters on the streets of Tehran, in local tribal militias fighting extremism across Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, in the gentle mouse-clicks of Internet obsessed youth across the Middle East, more interested in Facebook than Koranic instruction.

These are the people who need our resources.  They will ultimately be the ones who will defeat Islamic terrorism.  It wont be Apache helicopters or Personal Security Details, however much they might add to the bottom line at Northrop Grumman and Blackwater.  It will be every day Muslims rejecting the distortions of their faith.  Let’s devote a little more chatter and budget to them.