Part I: Status of the Anti-Terrorism War One Year On
10 September 2002

One year after the attacks on New York and Washington, both the United States and al Qaeda have mixed successes to show for their respective efforts.

Washington's goal has been very simple: don't get attacked again. And at least superficially it has been successful. Yet this is also a very complex and difficult goal to achieve. The lack of follow-on strikes by al Qaeda since Sept. 11 does not necessarily prove that there will be no more attacks on U.S. soil. Therefore, Washington has pressed a second closely related goal: destroy al Qaeda's ability and will to strike the United States.

In taking the war to al Qaeda, however, Washington has struggled with finding the strategic lever to accomplish its goals. The initial response was to strike at Afghanistan and the Taliban regime, which offered sanctuary to al Qaeda. At the same time, the United States initiated a series of ad hoc and often uncoordinated attacks on al Qaeda assets and allegedly associated groups around the world. Washington has now firmly turned its sights on Iraq.

For al Qaeda, its goals are much more complex, but the time frame in which it operates offers the group greater flexibility in operations. Al Qaeda ultimately wants to re-establish an Islamic empire and views itself as the vanguard of the Islamic world. By demonstrating that the United States is not an invulnerable megalith, al Qaeda hopes to inspire its sympathizers and supporters to reshape the Islamic world, toppling the regimes viewed as too pro-Western and rallying all Muslims around a grand unifying cause.

Although al Qaeda has demonstrated that the United States still has a soft, vulnerable underbelly, it has been surprised by the lack of political and social turmoil in the Islamic world. The group perhaps misread anti-U.S. sentiments, assuming there to be more will to action behind the rhetoric. The lack of successive attacks after Sept. 11 has raised questions in the Islamic world and beyond about whether the U.S. counterattack has been so successful as to crush al Qaeda's will and ability to continue the fight.

But this may reflect more on al Qaeda's internal structure and planning than the effectiveness of U.S. actions. In the past the group has waited a few years between major attacks, and under the current circumstances, it has little need to prove it is still surviving the U.S. assault given that Washington daily reiterates the continued terror threat.

Both the United States and al Qaeda are far from declaring victory. The United States continues to press the offensive and warn of the ongoing threat from al Qaeda, while the group has survived but not yet triggered the momentum needed for a massive paradigm shift in the Islamic world. And as the conflict continues, both sides are struggling for credibility -- al Qaeda to prove that even the United States cannot crush it, and Washington to demonstrate that anyone who threatens the United States cannot survive.

Part II

The United States One Year Later
10 September 2002

Summary

Over the past year, one overwhelming imperative has driven the U.S. war against terrorism: preventing another attack on U.S. soil. And so far, at least, Washington has been quite successful. But the United States will continue to push the offensive, as the absence of a second major strike since Sept. 11, 2001, offers little proof that al Qaeda has been rendered unwilling or incapable of more attacks.

Analysis

The one-year anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington serves as a convenient point from which to observe the accomplishments in the U.S. anti-terrorism war. Washington has been driven by two overriding goals in the current campaign, one defensive and one offensive. The first and foremost is to not be attacked again. The second closely related goal is to destroy al Qaeda's capability to inflict another Sept. 11.

Superficially, Washington has proven successful in its main strategic aim: There have been no more successful terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001. But this initial success raises an important set of questions.

Does the absence of attacks guarantee there will be no more in the future? Does a year without follow-on strikes demonstrate that Washington has effectively destabilized or destroyed al Qaeda? Or is the lack of successive strikes simply a product of the internal dynamics of al Qaeda, a sign that the group is reshaping and adjusting its tactical planning to fit the current global situation?

For Washington, the question of confidence in the security of the United States is one of intelligence. How deeply has U.S. intelligence penetrated al Qaeda, how sure is Washington of its attempts to destabilize the group and how well does the intelligence community understand al Qaeda's current capabilities and plans? Despite a year's worth of effort by the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and all other U.S. intelligence organizations, Washington's picture of al Qaeda now may not be much clearer than it was on Sept. 10, 2001.

The intelligence community has certainly better dissected the command and control structure of al Qaeda over the past 12 months, including using information from foreign intelligence agencies and capturing al Qaeda prisoners and communications intercepts to draw a finer resolution of certain aspects of the organization. But like the story of the blind men feeling the elephant, as certain aspects of al Qaeda become more clear, the more muddled the overall picture may become.

Thus, Washington can never be certain that its defensive wall will prevent another al Qaeda attack. Instead, the U.S. administration has laid out a second major goal of its anti-terrorism war: the complete destruction of the enemy's war-making capability. Although Washington continues to develop defensive strategies -- from the creation of the Office of Homeland Defense to heightened security for airline travel and cargo shipments -- it has simultaneously shifted its priority to striking al Qaeda and all other potential threats on their own turf.

Since the end of the Civil War, the United States has been fairly successful in keeping all of its wars far from home. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place 2,400 miles from the United States mainland, and Washington pressed the war through the Pacific and South China seas toward Japan. With the war against al Qaeda, there are greater domestic defense measures being enacted -- even beyond the level of the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans -- but the bulk of operations continue to be waged far from America's shores.

The initial U.S. target was Afghanistan, where al Qaeda enjoyed security under the protection of the ruling Taliban government. And to some degree the U.S. campaign there was effective, as the Taliban fell to the combination of U.S. air strikes and Northern Alliance offensives. Al Qaeda abandoned its Taliban protectors, leaving them as the sacrificial lambs for the American slaughter, and dispersed into the countryside, slipping across borders into Iran, Pakistan, Central Asia and beyond.

This may not have been their original intention. Al Qaeda arranged the Sept. 9, 2001, assassination of key Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Masood with the intent of throwing the Northern Alliance forces into confusion and leaving the U.S. military with few allies in Afghanistan through which to strike back at the Taliban or al Qaeda. But rather than fragmenting, the Northern Alliance pulled together -- with the financial and military support of Moscow and Washington -- and led the ground assault against the Taliban.

The U.S. military began bombing attacks on Afghanistan on Oct. 7, and by Nov. 13 Northern Alliance forces moved into Kabul. On Dec. 7 these forces ousted the remnants of the Taliban from their last major city stronghold, Kandahar. On Dec. 22 the interim Afghan government of Hamid Karzai was inaugurated, and in January British Prime Minister Tony Blair, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan paid separate visits to Afghanistan.

Yet although al Qaeda was perceived as having been denied sanctuary in Afghanistan, the battle has not been won. The Northern Alliance forces, now reorganized under the Karzai government, maintain only minimal control of Afghanistan, primarily in a few of the larger cities. But even Kabul and Kandahar, ostensibly secured by the presence of U.S. and international forces, remain susceptible to attacks by suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Along with the attack on Afghanistan, Washington launched the second phase of the war: small, targeted, cooperative attacks on al Qaeda cells and associates worldwide. This included seizing suspected al Qaeda financial assets, rounding up and questioning immigrants in the United States and working with law enforcement in Europe and beyond to crack al Qaeda cells. In addition, Washington began military training and cooperation with several nations, from Yemen to Georgia to the Philippines, to target local groups linked to al Qaeda.

According to government and military reports, these international actions have prevented numerous follow-on attacks. By mid-October 2001, U.S. authorities were already saying that their efforts had foiled planned bombings of U.S. and NATO facilities in France, Turkey, Yemen and Brussels. In December, U.S. authorities took Richard Reid into custody after he allegedly tried to detonate a bomb in his shoe on a flight from Paris to Miami. And such incidents continue to be reported, most recently a foiled bombing attempt on the U.S. Embassy in Manila.

But these repeated preventions of alleged al Qaeda attacks, which have been touted as intelligence victories by Washington and others, may not reveal the whole story. Many of the attempted or allegedly attempted attacks, and even some successful ones such as in Pakistan and Tunisia, were likely the work of local groups or individuals, perhaps sympathetic with al Qaeda, but not likely under direct orders from Osama bin Laden or his central command.

The problem for Washington remains being sure that al Qaeda cannot strike the United States again. Just because it hasn't doesn't mean it can't. Washington knows that the only sure defense is a dynamic and aggressive offense. Yet given al Qaeda's diffuse and stateless structure, the U.S. intelligence and military communities continue to struggle with finding just what lever will allow the United States to achieve its strategic goal.

The United States has attacked Afghanistan and removed the Taliban leadership, which offered al Qaeda sanctuary. The United States remains engaged in an ad hoc and non-systematic series of attacks on al Qaeda cells around the world. Now Washington is looking at Iraq as a possible focal point for its military force. This third facet has been long in coming.

As early as November 2001, two months before U.S. President George W. Bush's "axis of evil" speech and only one month after the start of the air campaign in Afghanistan, Powell had already noted that Washington would address Iraq's weapons programs after the campaign in Afghanistan.

The Iraq question has obviously caused some problems for U.S. coalition efforts, but the general fear of al Qaeda attacks keeps U.S. allies and most everyone else on their toes domestically to avoid becoming targets themselves. But the real issue is just how much U.S. intelligence has achieved over the past year and what it means for the future.

As already mentioned, the most obvious aspect of the war against terrorism is the simple but profound fact that there have been no further successful attacks on U.S. soil since Sept. 11. How much of this is a result of U.S. intelligence activities and how much is due to the natural reaction of al Qaeda shifting with the changing international situation has yet to be revealed. Historically, al Qaeda has waited years between major attacks, so the current lack of operations could simply reflect business as usual for the organization, despite the heightened intelligence efforts.

U.S. intelligence has disrupted some al Qaeda cells, but probably left others undiscovered and untouched. It has achieved a preliminary end in Afghanistan, denying al Qaeda the immunity it had before. But Washington has not clearly disrupted al Qaeda's central command cell nor prevented it from reaching out with new tentacles to tie in with other militant groups. And perhaps most important, Washington has not achieved its goal of eliminating the capability and will of al Qaeda to attack again.

The war against al Qaeda is essentially an intelligence war, not one in which the might of the U.S. military can provide the overwhelming advantage to Washington. And the flurry of activity, from the numerous reports of stymied terrorist attacks to arrests and interrogations around the globe, suggests that Washington is still trying to form a clear and precise picture of al Qaeda -- something that may never be entirely possible.

U.S. intelligence activities have left al Qaeda unsure of the reliability of its own assets and may be pre-empting reciprocal action by al Qaeda. At the same time, Washington remains uncertain of the extent of damage it has inflicted on al Qaeda's global network. In effect, U.S. intelligence may have hit al Qaeda harder than it knows, and al Qaeda may be less compromised than it suspects.

But in the meantime, as Washington continues to try to sort out the al Qaeda puzzle, there is one thing the U.S. government is very sure of: It knows exactly where Baghdad is, and that gives focus to the momentum.

Part III Al Qaeda One Year Later
10 September 2002

Summary

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, al Qaeda's war aims have proven substantially more complex than those of the United States, yet that complexity and the longer time frame the group has to pursue its goals give it greater flexibility in waging the war. Al Qaeda retains the initiative on the battlefield, but it must resume its attacks to maintain its credibility.

Analysis

Osama is dead.

Osama is alive, leading a reconstituted al Qaeda from somewhere on the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Al Qaeda is being led by bin Laden's son.

Al Qaeda is fragmenting into smaller mega-cells, coordinated from Iran by third-tier commanders.

Trying to discern the viability of al Qaeda and the status of its war with the United States through such sparse and conflicting allegations and tactical details is doomed to failure. There is simply insufficient information available about this elusive and dynamic foe to craft a coherent picture of al Qaeda one year after Sept. 11.

This is the core intelligence problem that faces the United States and its allies. Al Qaeda is a globally distributed irregular army waging a low-grade, unconventional war. Washington has no clear initial order of battle for al Qaeda, no measure of the disruption caused by U.S. countermeasures since Sept. 11, no gauge of the group's regeneration rate and no reliable count of its casualties.

If we are to make any sense of the war to date from al Qaeda's perspective, we must pull back to the 30,000-foot level and focus on the simple and irreducible facts. We must juxtapose al Qaeda's war aims and capabilities with Washington's war aims and countermeasures if we are to have any hope of narrowing our understanding of al Qaeda's status.

The U.S. war aim is simple: don't get bombed again. Another attack at any time would be a failure for Washington. But it is impossible to achieve this goal with a strictly defensive strategy, so Washington has been forced to charge, half blind, into a battlefield spanning the globe, with the clock ticking.

Al Qaeda's war aim is far more complex: re-establish an Islamic empire stretching from Morocco to Mindanao. This goal is no less difficult to achieve than that of the United States in the long run. But the key freedom of time and multiple available avenues gives al Qaeda much more flexibility in crafting its strategy.

The group has no delusion that its 3,000 or so members will be able to drive the United States from the oil-rich Middle East on their own. Al Qaeda always positioned itself as a vanguard, leading a jihad that it fully expected to unite individuals and groups from across the Islamic world. Its goal was to inspire popular uprisings against the secular and pro-Western regimes of the Middle East, gradually increasing its havens and sources of support while denying the same to U.S. forces.

To achieve this goal, al Qaeda set out to undermine U.S. credibility by demonstrating its ability to strike the continental United States and survive the ensuing retaliation. It would then attempt to shape the war, pitting the United States against Islam, illustrating the collaborationist nature of local regimes and drawing the United States ever deeper into conflicts across the region.

A great part of this strategy involves manipulating Washington into doing al Qaeda's work for it. The group does not need to maintain a high tempo of attacks if it can control U.S. perceptions of the state of the war and control and constrain U.S. actions. In the meantime, al Qaeda can husband its limited resources to attack only when and where necessary to achieve maximum results and maintain the war's momentum.

Al Qaeda has had very mixed results over the past year. The Sept. 11 attacks vividly demonstrated al Qaeda's ability to hurt the United States. It destroyed highly symbolic buildings and inflicted a substantial loss of life. It temporarily shut down the financial and transportation sectors, refocused U.S. foreign policy around the globe and instigated a full-scale attack on Afghanistan and a smaller U.S. foray into the Philippines.

But the United States did not take the hit to its credibility that al Qaeda had hoped. Yes, Americans were hit at home, but they pounded back, unseating the one regime that did provide safe harbor for al Qaeda. And Washington continues to pursue its offensive strategy, demanding and receiving support as often as it asks diplomatically for assistance. Washington not only increased its existing military presence in the Islamic world, it established new bases around the Middle East.

The United States certainly has been drawn deeper into conflict. Washington's war aim necessitates a proactive defense, and al Qaeda's dispersal requires an offensive campaign to reach deeper into the social fabric of many countries. But at the same time, the perception that the United States is at war with Islam does not appear to have gained ground in the Islamic world.

Yes, the war has generated friction between Washington and Islamic regimes, as well as with secular regimes in the Islamic world and erstwhile allies outside the region. But neither the U.S. offensive nor al Qaeda's fatwas appear to have triggered a broad answer to the call for jihad in defense of Islam. The war has driven Middle East regimes to ally with each other in the interest of national sovereignty and regional stability, but not in terms of a broad Islamic front.

Most significantly, there have been no popular uprisings in support of al Qaeda. U.S.-allied regimes in the Middle East have at best faced only sporadic and ephemeral demonstrations. Judging from al Qaeda videos, documents and its own doctrine, this muted response must have come as a major surprise and disappointment.

After all, Sept. 11 was not the first strike in a strategic bombing campaign. It was a recruiting ad. And if that couldn't bring in the recruits, what would? Al Qaeda appears to be preaching to the choir thus far, inspiring only fellow militants.

As for demonstrating its ability to strike and survive, the group has been pummeled by U.S. countermeasures, which shattered its haven in Afghanistan and dispersed its forces. Broad sweeps in the United States and by allied intelligence services shut down logistical and communications networks, froze bank accounts and netted hundreds of people who may or may not be al Qaeda operatives.

But for all that, nobody claims al Qaeda has been destroyed. Quite the contrary, the United States continuously asserts that the organization survived, is reforming and that even its senior leaders escaped destruction. In the run-up to the anniversary of the attacks, Washington has closed embassies abroad and raised the alert level at home.

Still, since Sept. 11 there have been no major follow-on attacks, and minor ones have been thwarted or have occurred outside the United States in countries like Tunisia. This raises the question of why? Should more attacks be expected, and if so when?

STRATFOR continues to debate two views on this. The first argues that al Qaeda never intended to strike again so soon after Sept. 11. The group has an extremely patient and conservative pattern of operations. It husbands its scarce and, in the case of suicide bombers, irreplaceable resources to achieve the maximum "bang for the buck."

Given its need to carry out major, complex, inspirational attacks with minimal resources, in areas far from its home base, al Qaeda puts the highest priority on security. Blown operations require starting from scratch, a costly prospect if they took years of planning and preparation. Al Qaeda does not act rashly or unnecessarily but picks the time and place of its attacks to maximize the chances of success, relying on sympathizers to fill in the gaps between major operations with smaller strikes. It is in no hurry. The Islamic empire was not built in a day.

Al Qaeda saw no reason to change its modus operandi or tempo of operations simply because of the magnitude of the Sept. 11 attacks. Actually, judging by the multiple redundancies it built into the attack plan and the response of al Qaeda leaders after Sept. 11, it appears the group was surprised by the magnitude of the success it achieved. At the same time, al Qaeda clearly expected a much greater popular response to the attacks, with sympathizers launching strikes of their own.

Whatever it expected to achieve on Sept. 11, al Qaeda knew the United States would strike back hard, but beyond Afghanistan it could not anticipate how hard or where the retaliation would come. A security conscious organization would not expend resources on a series of partially prepared operations, given the risk that some or all of them would be struck in the U.S. retaliation.

Rather it would wait, first dispersing to avoid the main thrust of the U.S. response, then evaluating the damage it sustained, then regrouping and restructuring to compensate for the new battlefield situation. Only then would it begin to plan for the next major attack.

This appears to be the pattern the group followed, with damage evaluation underway by late spring, and regrouping and restructuring underway over the past month or two. It appears that uncertainty over the degree to which their networks have been compromised has led al Qaeda's leaders to disaggregate command and control and spawn several smaller "baby al Qaedas" throughout the region.

This will limit damage to al Qaeda as a whole -- should one or more of these groups be compromised -- and could even increase the tempo of attacks. But with fewer resources and increased isolation, attacks by these groups likely will be smaller and more subject to failure than those carried out by the former organization. Also, evidence suggests that al Qaeda is falling back on an even older strategy and is reviving the guerrilla war it knew well in 1980s Afghanistan and prepared to wage in Somalia until U.S. forces pulled out of there in 1993.

The alternative argument is that al Qaeda planned follow-on strikes to Sept. 11 but for some reason did not carry them out. The argument is that the change in magnitude represented by the attacks reflected a new al Qaeda doctrine and marked the beginning of a new phase of the war, to be matched by a change in tempo of operations as well. That attacks did not occur represented one of two possible developments.

The first is that al Qaeda grossly miscalculated the effectiveness of U.S. countermeasures, and when it came up for air, it was confronted both by substantial damage to its networks and by the intelligence problem of uncertainty over what was compromised but not yet eliminated. This would have sent al Qaeda into the same cycle of damage evaluation, regrouping, restructuring and operational planning described above.

The alternative is that al Qaeda's leaders had to know what was going to hit them, given what they hoped to achieve on Sept. 11. They must have anticipated at least a temporary isolation of al Qaeda's high command and therefore planned for semi-autonomous follow-on strikes.

But events surprised them. First, they did not have to fight for survival and credibility. They were surprised by the ineffectiveness of U.S. military and intelligence operations against al Qaeda. Moreover, Washington did not declare victory but instead continued to trumpet the ongoing threat posed by al Qaeda.

As long as the United States acted as al Qaeda's public relations department, the group did not have to strike again to prove itself viable. Al Qaeda was under no pressure to "use it or lose it." Second, there were no popular Islamic uprisings, suggesting al Qaeda needed to rethink the deployment of its forces and the focus of its attacks.

Whether follow-on attacks were planned or not, the result is largely the same.

One year later, al Qaeda is still alive, though it has yet to show that it survived with the functionality to strike again. The structure of the organization was damaged, but the individuals and the ideology continue to exist. It can re-form to fit circumstances. Al Qaeda is popular in the Middle East, but its attack was not particularly inspirational.

Al Qaeda retains the initiative. It is still forcing the United States to react to shadows in the night, while Washington is slowly becoming bogged down in Afghanistan and is still struggling with coalition games on its proactive strategy toward Iraq.

Neither al Qaeda nor the United States seems to have much traction, nor does either have a real grip on the tempo of operations.

Al Qaeda has flexibility that allows its survival, but if it is to bolster its own credibility and gain control of the tempo of the war, it needs to move into the next phase and resume strikes. It must demonstrate that the lack of follow-on strikes has been its choice, not the result of the effectiveness of U.S. countermeasures.

And so, a year later, the focus turns to the United States. Has it constructed the defensive perimeters necessary to thwart the next serious attempt by al Qaeda?