Al-Qa'ida on the Brink? Two Dissents

The Los Angeles Times provides some additional reporting on Douglas E. Lute's appearance at the Aspen Security Forum Friday, quoting the lieutenant general as saying "I think there are three to five senior leaders that, if they're removed from the battlefield, would jeopardize Al Qaeda's capacity to regenerate." 

Two dissenting views garnered some attention last week.  Previously, on Thursday retired Admiral Dennis C. Blair, who was forced out last year as Director of National Intelligence, told the same forum that the United States should end the drone war in Pakistan.  "It's not going to lower the threat to the U.S.," he said, because al-Qa'ida has proved "it can sustain its level of resistance to an air-only campaign."  Instead, Blair believes that cooperation with the government's of Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia is the only way to bring peace to the world's ungoverned spaces. He goes so far as to say that drone strikes in Pakistan need "two hands on the trigger," and should be launched only when "we agree with them on what drone attacks" should target.

Umm, yeah. 

Apparently, Admiral Blair hasn't heard about the planned operations against jihadist IED factories in Pakistan that failed either due to poor operational security or deliberate tip-offs after the United States shared the intelligence with the Pakistanis, precisely the "dual-trigger" relationship Blair envisions.  Also, Blair fails to consider that one way of changing conditions on the ground for the better in failed or at-risk states is precisely by killing the extremists who seek to terrorize the local population and undermine the legitimate authorities through terrorist attacks and intimidation.  Does Blair really think that al-Qa'ida activists in these countries would be less interested in attacking the United States if we worked more closely with governments they consider apostates against their version of the true Islam?

Second, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross writes in National Review Online that statements such as Lute's (or earlier, Secretary Panetta) regarding al-Qa'ida's vulnerability should be taken with a large grain of salt given that U.S. officials have said the terrorist organization was on the ropes several times before over the last decade.  I think Gartenstein-Ross's point about the failure of previous intelligence assessments is correct, but ignores the key point I noted earlier of distinguishing between AQSL and al-Qa'ida's affiliates. 

The idea that we may be "three to five senior leaders" away from permanently crippling the core of the group based in Pakistan may be true (as if killing/capturing those 3-5 were an easy task in its own right), but this won't necessarily impinge upon the various affiliates' -- al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al-Qa'ida in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb,or  al-Sha'baab -- ability to target U.S. interests or the homeland itself.  These are not mutually exclusive developments.

Indeed, although we likely disagree regarding Osama bin Laden's importantce at the time of the Abbottabad raid, I think Gartenstein-Ross would agree that even with bin Laden dead, bin Ladenism lives on, and hence in terms of counter-terrorism policy little has changed since May 1 as we continue to target the broader network.