Al-Qaeda as a Parody of Its Former Self

"Ayman al Zawahiri’s insistence to appear from time to time, and fabricating press conferences that may take up to four months to be completed, is nothing more than an attempt by Al Qaeda to maintain its struggle as a model and idea after it proved to be impossible to continue as an organizational entity," writes Lebanese television journalist Diana Mukkaled in Asharq Al-Awsat, the Arab Daily.

Referring to al-Qaeda's No. 2, Mukkaled all but laughs off al Zawahiri's machinations to stay relevant "as if he has shifted from the position of Al Qaeda’s operations and military planner and ideologue to become more like a minister of information or Al Qaeda spokesman and perhaps we will soon be able to read his blog on the internet." Al Zawahiri apparently agreed to answer several questions through the Internet, only to let contradictions pile on top of contradictions in his answers (he objects to Hamas' killing of children but sees nothing wrong in terrorist bombings in Algeria that have claimed children's lives, and still gloats about the attacks of 9/11, which claimed several children).

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.