Some interesting background articles on al-Qaeda and the war have been coming out and worth the read (with some skepticism of course). The LA Times ran an article looking at al-Qaeda which had some interesting details:

If Al Qaeda strikes the West in the coming months, it’s likely the mastermind will be a stocky Egyptian explosives expert with two missing fingers.

His alias is Abu Ubaida al Masri. Hardly anyone has heard of him outside a select circle of anti-terrorism officials and Islamic militants. But as chief of external operations for Al Qaeda, investigators say, he has one of the most dangerous — and endangered — jobs in international terrorism.

…

Masri’s emergence reflects Al Qaeda’s resilient, hydra-like structure. As leaders fall, mid-level chiefs step up, shifting tactics and targets with determination and innovation.

But Al Qaeda seems diminished despite insistent propaganda and an onslaught of violence in Iraq, South Asia and North Africa. The network has not pulled off an attack in the West since 2005.

…

The plots attributed to Masri were ambitious, but authorities infiltrated two cells long before they could strike. Some trainees seemed more fierce than talented. And the number of seasoned field commanders dwindles, former CIA officer Marc Sageman said in an interview.

Lots of details are exposed regarding some of the most infamous plots and how intelligence forces were able to penetrate the terrorists cells and stop them. But the other impression you get is our war is impacting al-Qaeda’s capabilities, as the rate of attrition on their side thins their ranks of ‘leaders’ who end up being replaced by thugs.

Another long article came out in the UK Times about scholars doing research on al-Qaeda. Take this one with a couple of grains of salt because these people are full of themselves. But again I found it an interesting read. I will quibble with two claims they made then leave folks to read it at their leisure:

Bergen has also shed light on the thinking behind the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden’s intention was to provoke a US invasion of Afghanistan, whereupon the US would get stuck, like the Soviet Union had done in the 1980s, and eventually collapse from the economic burden of the war. It is ironic that the US would later choose to place itself in the situation envisaged by Bin Laden, not in Afghanistan, but in Iraq.

Well, we are not stuck and sinking in Iraq by a long shot. The US is not going to collapse in these terrorist wars – we are not losing people or material at rates we saw in Vietnam, Korea and WW II. This is where some bias sneaks into the interpretation – but the statement about Bin Laden’s intentions are enlightening. It shows a naivete that is quite astounding. If the scholars are naive to think Iraq would end America, then how naive was Bin Laden to think Afghanistan would end America? Afghanistan did not host the world’s 4th largest army at one time, like Iraq. As long as we don’t make similar bad judgement calls (like surrendering and running when there is no reason to) then we can defeat this enemy.

One more quibble with the article, when it tries to determine when terrorists decide use suicide bombs. First, the part I agree with whole heartedly:

Both fit the description of “the radical loser” drawn up by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 2006: in a short and highly readable monograph (Globalization and the Radical Loser), Enzensberger reflected on the psychological processes and deeper causes behind terrorist atrocities.

His thesis is that terrorism is committed by marginalized and humiliated men who have found comfort and empowerment in collectivities that take the form of militant groups. However, most militant groups from the 1960s and 70s have either disappeared or adopted a very local agenda since the end of Communism reduced their global appeal. Today, only one movement is able to wage war on a global scale, namely Islamism. This movement owes its strength to its decentralized character and its ability to exploit religious, political and social grievances. It is an essentially modern phenomenon which uses terrorist tactics and sophisticated media.

The deeper cause of the growth of Islamism, Enzensberger argues, is the intellectual sclerosis of the Arab and Muslim world, as documented by the Arab Human Development Report. The hostility of medieval Islamic scholars to secular knowledge prevented progress and sent the Muslim world into a state of near-permanent civilizational backwardness. This economic and scientific inferiority has created a sense of humiliation which is particularly painful because it clashes with the age-old Arab sense of superiority towards other peoples.

Now where we part ways and I think the scholars missed the obvious:

Suicide bombing seems to presuppose a strong religious conviction. Surely, only a firm belief in an afterlife – supplemented in the jihadist case by the reward of seventy-two virgins – would make humans carry out this kind of violence. Not so, argues Pape; a majority of attacks in his dataset have in fact been carried out by secular groups, in particular the Sri Lankan LTTE. The common denominator between groups that use suicide terrorism is not their religiosity, but the territorial nature of their struggle. The main perpetrators of suicide attacks between 1980 and 2001 – such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Hezbollah in South Lebanon, Hamas in Israel, the PKK in Turkey – were all fighting for territory against a democratic opponent. Pape thus concludes that the root cause of suicide terrorism is not religion, but foreign occupation.

Not sure if it was deliberate, but making a leap from “democratic opponent” to “foreign occupation” is a huge stretch. The reason the suicide bomb is used against democracies is simple and obvious. People will give up their freedoms and rights for protection. So if you want to chip away at democracy you make the people feel threatened and willing to throw away their civil liberties (or those of others). This makes a democracy unstable and dictators and tyrants can step in to ‘fix’ the problems.

And this is what al-Qaeda and these other Islamo Fascists want – to take over as supreme leaders. They abhor democracy and the freedom of choice it provides people. And so they use suicide bombs to violently oppress the masses and/or destabilize the democratically elected government.

And their willing or witless allies in all this carnage is the hand-wringing news media which exaggerates and conflates every attack as the end of civilization as we know it and another reason just to quit and let the thugs have their way. In fact, the drive-by media has been so well trained (like Pavlov’s dog) that they can be counted on to report the body bags and blame security forces for not being everywhere all the time – just as the terrorists expect them to. And just as they need them to.

In Iraq and elsewhere this knee-jerk reaction to the suicide bombers has begun to backfire locally. While the media played their roles to the hilt here in the US, the media in Iraq showed the carnage and made clear who were the ones blowing up people. And the result was the destabilization backfired and the insurgents were run out of town or killed. A lesson the news media is too arrogant to face at the moment – but a lesson all the same.

It is rare to find an article that claims American success in the war, albeit with more work to be done. But the UK’s Globe and Mail did run such a balanced article and is worth a read:

The conventional view from Washington, supported by a slew of recent reports, is that Afghanistan has plunged into a spiral of violence. Some parts of the country have certainly experienced deteriorating security. Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently noted there was a 27-per-cent increase in violence from 2006 to 2007. Most of this was in the south, where Canadian, British and Dutch soldiers are battling the Taliban and other groups.

But in eastern Afghanistan, where the bulk of U.S. forces are deployed, violence levels declined by 40 per cent in 2007. In Khowst, which I visited last month, suicide attacks dropped from one a week in 2006 to one a month in 2007.

The most significant reason is a shift in U.S. strategy. Building on counterinsurgency lessons from the British, French and American historical experiences, the U.S. military has increasingly focused its efforts on “soft power.” This has translated into a greater focus on reconstruction and development projects, and less emphasis on combat operations.

We are learning, and winning the hearts and minds. And there will be a lot of lessons for us and the world to learn from this Islamo Fascist terrorist war. Like how not to let large regions of the Earth fall behind and create pockets of desperation that only produce violence in the end. Once done I think everyone across the political spectrum will be more open to preemptive efforts, like what George Bush has been doing for Africa and the AIDS epidemic. That is a reasonable and humane effort to help fellow human beings in need that can divert a wave of anger. And I don’t mean just throwing money and pretending that works. Those liberal policies failed us too many times to play hands-off sugar-daddy. Anyway, something to contemplate for the future.

Right now is the present and the forces arrayed against us, while diminished, are still dangerous. And they have this year to make something big happen. Right now we have a war to finish and we are progressing, slowly, towards success. BTW, impatience is no reason to quit – unless you are a loser. Then it is the universal reason to quit, and it has been forever.