The catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 ripped off a veneer and exposed what was growing beneath the surface: al Qaeda’s successful efforts to tap Muslim grievances around the world and infect disparate, home-grown groups with its global jihad. Al Qaeda has helped groups like Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia target the “Near Enemy” – their governments, and the “Far Enemy” – the United States.
Ten years after the event, it appears that 9/11 was the peak of al Qaeda’s strength, when it reached from its caves in Afghanistan to destroy symbols of modernity, forcing governments around the world to change outdated paradigms of Cold War defense structures. Bin Laden’s victory was short-lived: 9/11 was a strategic error for his forces because now they were exposed and vulnerable. In the next decade, they would never be that strong again.
Since 9/11, there has been no other al Qaeda attack on US soil or any other al Qaeda attack of a similar magnitude anywhere. Osama bin Laden is dead, and most of al-Qaeda’s ‘legacy leaders’ have been killed and replaced. More than 40 plots have been foiled in the last decade, according to the Heritage Foundation. Some officials have declared all of this a “victory,” but lessons from the Philippines show that the next defeat can come from the jaws of “victory.”
In 1995, the architect of 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (known in intelligence circles as KSM), evaded arrest in the Philippines in what was then lauded as “the greatest counterterrorism victory.” US and Filipino officials foiled “Bojinka,” a plot for midair explosions on 11 US airplanes flying from Asia. If KSM’s plot had succeeded, more people would have died in the planned “48 hours of terror” than in the Sept. 11 attacks.
The terrorist cell headed by KSM in the Philippines included his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993; Abdul Hakim Murad, perhaps the first commercial pilot recruited by al Qaeda; Wali Khan Amin Shah, who fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan; and bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa.
KSM powered al Qaeda’s drive as a learning organization, taking many of the cell’s plots from that time, incorporating them into training at al Qaeda’s camps, and resuscitating them through the years:
- Shoe bombing: First tested by Yousef in the Philippines, this technique resulted in a successful midair explosion on Philippine Airlines in 1994, and was later taught by KSM to his recruit, Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber, in 2001.
- Cyanide: Discussions in the Philippines on the use of cyanide for terror attacks with the Abu Sayyaf would resurface again in the early 2000s in Great Britain.
- Attacks on nuclear reactors: Plots discovered in the Philippines would resurface again in 2002.
- Liquid bombs: This tactic was tested three times in the Philippines in 1994, including exploration of methods for getting bomb elements through airport security. It would resurface again in 2006 during the London liquid bombs plot – a later version of Bojinka.
Finally, there was one plot so fantastic no one paid attention, neither law enforcement and intelligence agencies, nor journalists closely following terrorism. Murad, the pilot trained in the United States, told his Filipino interrogators about a suicide mission involving planes:
[H]e will board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger …. There will be no bomb or any explosive that he will use in its execution. It is simply a [suicide] mission that he is very much willing to execute.
Among the targets he named: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The interrogation report was from January 1995. Authorities in the Philippines have called it the blueprint for 9/11.
Six years after the pilot told authorities about the plans, the World Trade Center Towers were attacked again. What his nephew started in 1993, KSM finished in 2001. Jet fuel from two planes that slammed into the buildings weakened the structures at a molecular level, causing the towers to collapse hours after the impact. Nearly 3,000 people died that day, exactly 10 years ago.
The lesson from the Philippines in 1995 is simple: Don’t underestimate the power of one person and one idea.
Aside from KSM, one other man escaped the 1995 dragnet: the Indonesian cleric Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali. He did exactly what KSM did for al Qaeda, except he did it for its Southeast Asian arm, Jemaah Islamiyah, or JI. Hambali built JI’s network and became its operations chief, planning and carrying out the region’s deadliest attacks, including the Bali bombing in 2002 that killed 202 people.
The fierce reaction from law enforcement agencies around the world to the Sept. 11 attacks has affected al Qaeda and JI similarly: their centralized command structures have been hit hard, and their operational capabilities have been degraded.
Still, the old networks remain and continue to spread al Qaeda’s virulent ideology. Let’s call it the jihadi virus. Smaller, more ad hoc and less professional cells carry out attacks without central coordination. These cells also continue to recruit, and they have caused the development of the networks to grow in a more haphazard pattern.
The central core of both al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah have been weakened, but their ideology has sparked a movement. The networks have been degraded, but it is now more difficult for law enforcement to predict when and where the next attack will occur. This can result in smaller, disparate attacks happening more frequently, as has been seen this year in Indonesia and the Philippines.
The danger is that these isolated cells and/or individuals may spontaneously regenerate some form of a network around them to carry out larger plots, something that occurred in Indonesia with the return of the Bali bomber, Dulmatin, and the discovery in 2010 of the Aceh training camps.
All this shows that despite counterterrorism successes, it’s hard to declare victory given the viral nature of al-Qaeda’s ideology. All it takes are the right leaders to spark a regeneration that can allow the network to carry out larger-scale attacks. Remember the Philippines in 1995.
Maria Ressa is an Author-in-Residence at the International Centre for Political Violence & Terrorism Research and the author of Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia. She will be contributing to The Long War Journal on terrorism issues in Southeast Asia.
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By: Maria Ressa
Source: MariaRessa.com and The Long War Journal, Sept. 11, 2011
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