How menacing is Al Qaeda?

What does the term “Al Qaeda” mean today?

About what it meant on Sept. 11, 2001: More than an organization, it’s an ideology driven by historical tides, personal circumstance, political complaint and religious belief that takes as its goal the establishment of a kingdom of radical Islam across the Muslim world. As its primary means to that goal, it has declared war on its many enemies, both East and West. As its primary weapon, it has adopted terrorist attacks against any and all targets -- civilian and military. So in that sense, Al Qaeda is what it ever was: a determined and resolute enemy.

Has its once-sophisticated

hierarchy been shattered?

Al Qaeda was never the massive, refined army of terror it was portrayed to be. That depiction grew out of a desperate and probably unconscious rationalization. If Al Qaeda was not a sophisticated enemy, how could it ever have succeeded so spectacularly in its assault on the United States?

The answer most Americans -- including me -- gave to that question was that it obviously could not have otherwise succeeded. The smoking pile of rubble in Lower Manhattan was all the evidence required -- people tend to create the enemy they want, rather than see the enemy in front of them.

Are there fewer members of

Al Qaeda since 9/11?

Al Qaeda was probably never more that a couple of hundred men. (Even the man more responsible than any other for planning 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, according to what he has told his interrogators, didn’t formally join Al Qaeda until the plot had been set in motion.)

Is Al Qaeda singular in its fanaticism?

Al Qaeda sat at the heart of a sprawling web of like-minded organizations, a network of networks, but it was never in any sense in control. It was fuzzy, ill-defined. And it is fuzzier and smaller still today. But that doesn’t mean the danger is lessened. The danger isn’t so much the organization, it’s the ideology that has spread around the globe.

If it’s so small, why is it so hard to root out?

Al Qaeda’s small size in many ways has helped, not hindered, it. Its size kept it hidden. Recall that, according to former deputy national security advisor Richard Clarke, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in the private councils of the Bush administration, lamented the lack of targets to retaliate against in Afghanistan. Clarke pointed this out as a criticism of Rumsfeld’s advocacy of attacking Iraq, but the point was nonetheless valid. Al Qaeda wasn’t a country. It didn’t have an army or tanks or missiles or fighter jets. It didn’t have to. That is the fundamental nature of asymmetric warfare. An opponent, as we are relearning in Iraq, doesn’t have to have mass in order to be at least marginally effective.

I recall interviewing U.S. commanders in Iraq in the growing unease of early summer 2003, when attacks against U.S. military and Iraqi security forces began to occur with growing sophistication and regularity. The Americans said they weren’t worried. One characterized the attacks as “militarily insignificant.” “They’re one-offs,” he said, implying they were more nuisance than threat.

That has proved to be a misjudgment of dire consequence. The overestimation of Al Qaeda has had its own consequences. Expending so much economic and political effort on formal entities -- Al Qaeda and Iraq -- that sponsor terror has helped deflect attention from informal networks like the ones that carried out the Madrid and possibly London bombings. More than that -- as the people of Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul, Madrid and now London have discovered -- it has helped them grow.

What role does Osama bin Laden

continue to play?

The ideology has diffused; so probably has Bin Laden’s influence. He undoubtedly remains important as an inspiration and a model, but lacking his Afghanistan redoubt and training camps, his hands-on effect can’t help but be reduced.