(Wall Street Journal) Ali Soufan - While al-Qaeda central has been badly weakened by U.S. counterterrorism efforts, the group was never close to being extinguished. It adapted and gave greater power to semi-independent affiliates, such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Boko Haram in Nigeria. The West failed to effectively tackle these affiliates, dismissing them as local problems irrelevant to the war against al-Qaeda. Yet terrorists who endorse bin Laden's jihadist message inevitably move on to the global war against the West. Thus, despite all the successes in the war on terror, al-Qaeda has maintained a steady stream of new recruits, replacing the members that have been killed or captured by the U.S. The writer was an FBI supervisory special agent from 1997 to 2005.
2013-08-08 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive