The frightening evolution of al-Qaida

Robert Windrem Senior investigative producer • E-mail

Over the past year, essentially since the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004, U.S. intelligence and policy-makers have had a changed view of al-Qaida.  Instead of the hierarchical organization portrayed by the president — with his scorecard of how many leaders have been killed or captured — those closest to the counterterrorism effort see a network that while less capable of mega-attacks like Sept. 11 is more capable of a long-lasting war against the United States and the West.

The capture or killing of Osama bin Laden would be a major event in the war on terrorism, one with positive — and even some negative — consequences for the United States and its allies, but it would not signal the end of al-Qaida, the end of Islamic terrorism or even the reconfiguring of the network.

“Certainly, the al-Qaida organization represents the embodiment of some kind of a network of global terrorism,” Porter Goss, the CIA director, recently told NBC News.  “And it's dangerous.  It's dangerous in a lot of places.

“But we think in sort of an organized Western mind about what a network would look like. It's not. It's very amorphous. Some of it is self-starting. There are cells here and cells there that are loosely related.  There are associations.”

In interview after interview with officials of the U.S., French, Spanish, British and Saudi counterterrorism efforts, that is now the accepted wisdom. No one is optimistic the death or capture of bin Laden would significantly change the landscape of terrorism, although on a positive note, no one is complacent either.

As one British diplomat put it, “The U.S. is winning the war on al-Qaida but losing the war on terrorism — and the reason is Iraq.”

Roger Cressey, who was the National Security Council’s deputy director of counterterrorism in the Clinton and Bush administrations, agrees.

Good news, bad news
“Al-Qaida, as we knew it, is pretty much on its death bed now. I mean, we've had real successes in attriting its capability, so the organization that attacked us on 9/11 no longer poses the same type of threat,” said Cressey, now an NBC News consultant.

“That’s the good news. The bad news is we've seen a growth in this global Sunni extremist movement, partly driven by Iraq, but also by other events, which is much more difficult to track, follow and ultimately disrupt. So as we're doing really well against what was al-Qaida, we've got a new threat — this movement, which is much more of a challenge.”

Madrid is cited as the key turning point in the evolution of Islamic terror. Initially, Spanish and U.S. counterterrorism officials sought links between al-Qaida (or, as the CIA now describes it, “al-Qaida Central”). But quickly they realized there weren’t any. The attack was put together in eight weeks, using stolen explosives and cell phone detonators put together by one of the conspirators.  It required no central direction from the mountains of Pakistan, simply a charismatic leader with links to men trained in the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.

For motivation, though, they had Spanish help for the U.S. war in Iraq, and for inspiration they had bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. The Madrid bombings killed 191 people, the third-largest death toll from Islamic terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001.

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