Islamist Terrorism Poses Renewed Threat

[Steve Gardner]

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to the arms industry. It looks as though the spread of 'American peace' has guaranteed your continued prosperity for 2008 and beyond.

Source: Forbes

In early October, then-U.S. National Counterterrorism Center Director Scott Redd said that the U.S. public was not "tactically" safer than it was before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Many other U.S. and European officials ended 2007 less optimistic about the global terrorism situation than they began it.

This is in spite of the more positive outcomes of the international community's response to terrorism:

--The U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 initially hobbled al-Qaida by loosening command-and-control links between its core leadership and dispersed operatives.

--The network may still be less capable of executing attacks of the scale and lethality of the Sept. 11 operation.

--Improved homeland security may have prevented terrorist attacks, notably in the United States.

--The Iraq intervention and occupation may have temporarily drawn some jihadists to Iraq and away from other potential "fields of jihad."

Yet, Islamist terrorism poses a renewed threat in 2008 amid signs of sustained and possibly increasing robustness among al-Qaida and its affiliates and the enduring resonance of its ideology.

As 2007 drew to a close, intensifying instability prevailed across the key fronts of Islamist terrorism. With the United States, the United Kingdom and NATO preoccupied in Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been increased incidents of terrorist activity in multiple regions, often exhibiting cross-pollination of tactics:

--Pakistan. Political fluidity and instability in Pakistan had the effect of relaxing government pressure on the Taliban and on al-Qaida, which has reconstituted a territorial base in Pakistan's tribal areas near the Afghan border.

--Afghanistan. Al-Qaida is opportunistically increasing its activity in Afghanistan and seeking to re-establish a base there as the Taliban regain strength. While some of the backing for this resurgence comes from poppy production, support from foreign sources also appears to have increased. Casualties from suicide bombings, relatively unknown prior to 2006, have spiked in the past two years.

--North Africa. The September 2006 "re-branding" of the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat as "Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb" signaled an embrace of trans-national themes by a group whose prior aims were predominantly national in scope. The broadening of target choice to encompass Western interests as well as Algerian state institutions was confirmed in a plot to attack U.K. and U.S. embassies, and a double suicide bombing in Algiers in December that killed 17 U.N. officials.

--Somalia. Since Ethiopia's December 2006 invasion of Somalia, which displaced the Council of Somali Islamic Courts regime in Mogadishu and installed the Transitional Federal Government, a complex insurgency has developed. Carried out by clan and Islamist fighters, its tactics--targeted assassinations, roadside bombings and some suicide attacks against Ethiopian and government forces and facilities--reflect those of the insurgency in Iraq.

--Europe. Early in November, the head of the U.K. Security Service ("MI5") made a speech raising the publicly acknowledged estimate of the number of active terrorist supporters in the country from 1,600 to 2,000. He warned that the problem had not yet peaked and that radical Islamists were methodically grooming and radicalizing individuals as young as 15 for acts of terror.

The one region where better news has emerged is South-east Asia. Efforts by the Indonesian authorities appear to have weakened Jemaah Islamiah, while the Philippines has claimed significant victories against Abu Sayyaf and reported progress in peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. A separatist insurgency in the Muslim-majority provinces of southern Thailand has intensified, but there is little evidence that militants there have systematic links to regional or global Islamist movements.