Al-Qaeda as a Parody of Its Former Self

Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's No. 2, is battling for relevance. (Photo by Visual News/Getty Images)
In Mukkaled's view, al-Zawahiri's answers reveal to what extent al-Qaeda has lost its effectiveness as an organized, global movement to the more focused and popular local movements such as Hamas. "It is clear," Mukkaled writes, "that the Al Qaeda movement is experiencing confusion on the organizational level following a blow to its infrastructure as a result of the pursuit of its leaders and activists and this is directly reflected in the movement’s ideas."
Mukkaled may be too quick to dismiss Osama bin Laden's creation, and glosses over numerous reports about al-Qaeda's reconstituted operational structure in the northwestern tribal lands of Pakistan. But Mukkaled is also right in one regard, as true today as it was on before or after 9/11: As Caleb Carr wrote in The Lessons of Terror (Random House, 2002), "the most significant thing that the terrorists of today share with those who practiced warfare against civilians in earlier times is an abiding inability to see that the strategy of terror is a spectacularly failed one." Al-Qaeda's power is grounded mostly in the fear it inspires, not in the objectives it's capable of attaining--spectacular one-time hits like 9/11 and the Cole bombing aside.


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