I found an interesting article that tries to claim are success in destroying al-Qaeda has given rise to a new danger. Personally I find this line of reasoning ridiculous. It is the old tall poles challenge. When you attack the tall poles and remove these obstacles barring success to a challenge, you still face the next set of tall poles, which are naturally smaller obstacles than the previous set taken out. And when you take out those tall polls, you are still left with another, even shorter set of poles to deal with.

This is the process of whittling down obstacles to the point where you transition from having some level of success and moving on to trying to see how close one can get to perfection. The point is at some point in time, in this endless cycle of exposing endless levels of smaller “tall poles” success is has been achieved and the poles are simply the remaining imperfections of an imperfect world.

Some people keep seeing massive tall poles in the way to success – it is also sometimes referred to as ‘moving the goal posts’. For those who never have a prayer of finding a path through the obstacles to achieve some level of success there never are challenges they find manageable. The entire enterprise is beyond there grasp, so success with some minor warts still looks daunting to them. This is normal for those out of their league.

Think of someone trying to work their way through a neurological surgical procedure who has no idea what they are doing. Even if you walk them through 90% of the procedure with just the last 10% of the steps left – which could be simply stitching up the area – someone untrained for the process still sees endless impossible challenges in front of them.

This is what has been the situation with the Surrendercrats on the far liberal left. They are abysmal when it comes to national security because they lack the understanding, training and expertise to handle complex, dangerous situations. They cry ‘it’s impossible, we cannot succeed’ because – for them – it is impossible. They cannot succeed.

So with this in mind it is fascinating to read this article and realize how far we have truly come in destroying al-Qaeda (the 90% done mark), while the author looks at the next set of terrorist ‘tall poles’ and sees endless, impossible challenges still in front of them:

We are fighting the wrong foe. Over the past six years, the nature of the international Islamist terrorist threat to the West has changed dramatically, but Western governments are still fighting the last war — set up to fight an old al Qaeda that is now largely contained. Unless we understand this sea change, we will be unable to ward off the new menace.

The version of al-Qaeda that Osama bin Laden founded is a fading force. After five detainees who allegedly planned the Sept. 11, 2001, atrocities were arraigned recently before a U.S. military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, it’s worth remembering that the terrorists behind 9/11 were mostly young, well-educated middle-class expatriates from Muslim countries who had become radicalized abroad, especially in the West. Such key 9/11 plotters as Mohamed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi met and became radicalized as students in Hamburg, then went to Afghanistan looking for al Qaeda.

But over the past six years, most of the professional terrorists who fit this profile have been eliminated during the U.S.-led manhunt for ”high-value targets.” The few that remain are huddled in the Afghan-Pakistani border area, struggling to extend their reach beyond Pakistan.

Emphasis mine.  The professional, experienced al-Qaeda members have been decimated and chased from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and other places.  They now ‘huddle’ in the encircled tribal areas of Pakistan, easy targets when we have strong intelligence that allow us to take action.

What is interesting is how these professional, educated terrorists are given equal credibility to uneducated, untrained, awkward ‘grass roots’ terrorists who typically bundle their ways into our security nets before they can do any real damage.  

That old guard is still dangerous and still plotting spectacular attacks. But it is the new wave that more urgently requires our attention. It is composed of homegrown youths who dream of glory and adventure, who yearn to belong to a heroic vanguard and to root their lives in a greater sense of meaning. Inspired by tales of past heroism, they hope to emulate their predecessors, even though, for the most part, they can no longer link up with al Qaeda Central in the Pakistani badlands. Their potential numbers are so great that they must now be seen as the main terrorist threat to the West.

Delusional kids who have no clue what they are getting into are not the same threat as seasoned professionals who trained tens of thousands of foot soldiers who are now gone or captured.  Yes, in this imperfect world there will always be terrorist wannabes.  There are still Hitler/Nazi wannabes in the world, even here in the US of A.  Does that make America a hotbed for Nazism or anti-Semitism?  Of course not.  It simply means those ‘tall poles’ that allow the idea of Nazism to flourish are really only a bunch of twigs and stubs, so diminished they are mostly joke and only a small (yet serious) threat.

From reading this article it seems to be al-Qaeda is all but destroyed globally.  The only thing left to replace or augment it is disparate group of idiots who are more clueless than serious.  Those who never could grasp how to face and solve the problem of terrorism will be the last to realize we have succeeded sufficiently to declare a major victory (but not mythical perfection in purging evil – which is never purged, just beaten back into submission for a time).  They will be the ones still wringing their hands with worry and angst because they don’t have the intellect or expertise to understand the threat, let alone when victory has been achieved.

Denial of reality is not always ‘speaking to power’.  Many times it is simply immense ignorance strutting its stuff to confident experience and successful results.  And it does speak volumes (both in terms of content and volume)

Tags: Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, GWOT, Iraq, Pakistan, Victory