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Al-Qaeda's New Strategy: Less Apocalypse, More Street Fighting

(Washington Post) Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson - Recent plots, including the Mumbai raid in November 2008, the Times Square car bomb attempt in May of this year and now the plot in Europe, show that al-Qaeda is not only operationally alive and well, but has transformed its post-Afghanistan tactical retreat into a formidable new strategy. There is no reason to think that al-Qaeda has abandoned its all-out jihad, and it is now raising a new army designed to wage traditional urban warfare. With the help of Western members of the Muslim diaspora or converts to Islam who are difficult for Western security services to detect, al-Qaeda's leadership has embraced low-intensity urban warfare in densely populated areas. This was the mode of jihad envisioned by Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin, the late leader of the jihad in Saudi Arabia and the author of the appropriately named turn-of-the-century al-Qaeda combat manual The War Against Cities. Steven Simon is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Jonathan Stevenson is a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College.
2010-10-12 09:17:36
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