In August 1996, Osama bin Laden made a formal declaration of war against the United States. Almost exactly five years later, al Qaeda inflicted more direct damage on the United States in the space of an hour than the Soviet Union had accomplished during the five decades of the cold war. No one could have predicted such an outcome in 1996 when al Qaeda lost its base in Sudan and moved to Afghanistan. The threat from al Qaeda materialized quickly and somewhat unpredictably compared to the more conventional threats that the United States has faced in the past, including those from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Clearly, making predictions about the future actions and strength of the most deadly terrorist organization in history is inherently difficult. We know much more in 2008, however, than we did a decade ago about al Qaeda’s intentions and capabilities. We are therefore able to make some reasonably accurate assessments of where the terrorist group will be in five years.(1) To make such assessments, we must first understand where the organization is today.

Al Qaeda Today

The conventional wisdom is that al Qaeda, the organization, has been largely destroyed, replaced by an ideological movement and a new generation of “homegrown” terrorists implementing attacks such as the 2004 Madrid bombings that killed 191 people. While the rapid spread of the al Qaeda ideological virus in the past several years should be cause for considerable concern, it would be wrong to conclude that the central al Qaeda organization is no longer a threat. Such a view underestimates the resiliency of al Qaeda as a criminal organization, animated by strong ideological/religious beliefs and drawing strength from local insurgencies along the Afghan-Pakistan border, in Kashmir, and in Iraq. Because of these ideological beliefs and its ties to vibrant insurgencies, al Qaeda is able to withstand multiple blows to its leadership and infrastructure. The following sections present evidence for the resiliency of the al Qaeda organization.

Al Qaeda’s Alarming Reach into the United Kingdom

The London bombings on July 7, 2005, were a classic al Qaeda plot. The ringleader, Mohammed Siddique Khan, visited Afghanistan in the late 1990s and spent several months in Pakistan in 2003 and 2004. According to a British government report, Khan “had some contact with al Qaida figures” in Pakistan and is “believed to have had some relevant training in a remote part of Pakistan, close to the Afghan border,” during his two-week visit in 2003. Khan was also said to be in “suspicious” contact with individuals in Pakistan in the four months immediately before he led the London attacks (United Kingdom House of Commons 2006).
Furthermore, Khan appeared on a videotape that aired on Al Jazeera two months after the attacks, saying “I’m going to talk to you in a language that you understand. Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood” and describing Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri as “today’s heroes” (BBC 2005c). The videotape bore the distinctive logo of As Sahab, the television production arm of al Qaeda, which indicates Khan’s connection to al Qaeda’s media team based on the Afghan-Pakistan border. In 2006 a similar videotape of another London suicide bomber also appeared, which was made by As Sahab, further evidence of al Qaeda’s role in the bombings (CNN 2006a). The grim lesson of this London attack is that al Qaeda was able to conduct simultaneous bombings in a major European capital thousands of miles from its base on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

In August 2006, a plot was foiled in the United Kingdom to bring down as many as six American airliners with liquid explosives. According to the testimony of Lt. General Michael Maples, head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, that plot was directed by al Qaeda from Pakistan (Maples 2007). On November 5, 2007, Jonathan Evans, the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5, said that the British government believed two thousand individuals in the United Kingdom were a threat to security. Evans noted that the “terrorist attacks we have seen against the UK are not simply random plots by disparate and fragmented groups. The majority of these attacks, successful or otherwise, have taken place because al Qaeda has a clear determination to mount terrorist attacks against the United Kingdom. . . . Over the last five years much of the command, control, and inspiration for attack planning in the UK has derived from al Qaeda’s remaining core leadership in the tribal areas of Pakistan” (Evans 2007).

The Vitality of al Qaeda’s Propaganda Division, As Sahab

Bin Laden has observed that 90 percent of his battle is conducted in the media (Bergen 2006b). The first major production of al Qaeda’s propaganda arm, As Sahab, debuted on the Internet in the summer of 2001, signaling a major anti-American attack was in the works. Since then, it has continued to release key statements from al Qaeda’s leaders. In 2007 it released at least eighty audio and video clips, more than in any year in its six-year history. (IntelCenter 2007). While unlikely to have a fixed studio location, the operation includes cameramen as well as editors using programs such as Final Cut Pro on laptops; the tapes produced are increasingly sophisticated, with animation effects, studio settings, and subtitles in languages such as English. Clearly, al Qaeda has recovered sufficiently to be capable of managing a relatively advanced propaganda operation.

The Continuing Influence of bin Laden and Zawahiri

Bin Laden may no longer be calling people on a satellite phone to order attacks, but he remains in broad ideological and strategic control of al Qaeda around the world. For example, in 2004, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, then leader of foreign fighters in Iraq, renamed his organization “Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers” and publicly swore bayat, a religiously binding oath of allegiance, to bin Laden.
Moreover, the dozens of video and audio files that bin Laden and Zawahiri have released since 9/11 have reached hundreds of millions of people worldwide through television, newspapers, and the Internet, making them among the most widely distributed political statements in history. The tapes have urged al Qaeda’s followers to kill Americans, Westerners, and Jews, some including specific instructions that militant cells have acted upon. For instance, on October 19, 2003, bin Laden called for action against Spain because of its troop presence in Iraq, representing the first time that al Qaeda’s leader had singled out the country (Nash 2006). Six months later, terrorists killed 191 commuters in Madrid. In the spring of 2004, bin Laden offered a three-month truce to European countries willing to pull out of the coalition in Iraq. Almost exactly a year after his truce offer expired, an al Qaeda–directed cell carried out bombings on London’s public transportation system, killing 52 commuters. In December 2004, bin Laden called for attacks on Saudi oil facilities, and in February 2006, al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia attacked the Abqaiq facility, arguably the most important oil production facility in the world. (That attack was a failure.)

Influence in Iraq

Much of the violence in Iraq is the work of foreign fighters. It is therefore significant that when Abu Musab al Zarqawi was killed in June 2006, al Qaeda in Iraq’s new leader, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, released a statement on a jihadist Web site pledging allegiance to bin Laden that read, “We are at your disposal, ready for your command” (CNN 2006c). Al Qaeda’s new leader in Iraq is a longtime associate of Zawahiri’s; both were members of Egypt’s ultraviolent Jihad Group for more than two decades. This suggests that Abu Hamza al-Muhajer will take more direction from al Qaeda central on the Afghan-Pakistan border than his predecessor did.
Although al Qaeda in Iraq with its several thousand members is smaller than the largest Iraqi insurgent groups, it has been punching above its weight. The U.S. military estimates that al Qaeda has been responsible for up to 90 percent of the more than eight hundred suicide bombings in Iraq to date, which have killed an estimated ten thousand people (Bergen and Cruickshank 2007a).

Attracting Other Militant Groups to its Standard

In May 2006, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of a key militia fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, pledged allegiance to bin Laden and al Zawahiri on a tape broadcast by al Jazeera (VOA News 2006). In September of that year, the Algerian Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC) announced that it was putting itself under the al Qaeda umbrella (Haahr 2006). GSPC is considered the most significant terrorist movement in Algeria and its leader, Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, explained that “the organization of al-Qaeda of Jihad is the only organization qualified to gather together the mujahideen” (Bergen 2006e). The merger of the Libyan Fighting Group with al Qaeda in November 2007 was yet another indication of the organization’s continued strength in attracting militant organizations.

A Role in the Rapidly Deteriorating Security Situation in Afghanistan

The use of suicide attacks, improvised explosive devices, and the beheadings of hostages--all techniques that al Qaeda perfected in Iraq--are methods that the Taliban has increasingly adopted in Afghanistan, making much of the south of the country a no-go area. Suicide bombings were virtually unknown in Afghanistan until the 21 attacks in 2005 (Karzai and Jones 2006), but U.S. sources say that number rose to 139 suicide attacks in 2006 (Williams and Young 2007).
Mullah Dadullah, a key Taliban commander, gave two interviews to Al Jazeera in 2006 before he was killed, illuminating the Taliban’s links to al Qaeda. Dadullah said, “We have close ties. Our cooperation is ideal,” adding that Osama bin Laden was at that time issuing orders to the Taliban (Marzban 2006). Indeed, a senior U.S. military intelligence official says that “trying to separate Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan serves no purpose. It’s like picking gray hairs out of your head” (Bergen 2006e). Dadullah also noted that “we have ‘give and take’ relations with the mujahideen in Iraq” (Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI] 2006). A videotape posted to the Internet by al Qaeda in May 2006 shows how important Iraqi techniques have become to the Afghan insurgency. On the tape, an Arab suicide bomber preps a car bomb and then drives it into what appears to be NATO convoy. These developments suggest that al Qaeda is enjoying something of a comeback along the Afghan-Pakistan border and might plunge Afghanistan into chaos.

A New Base in Pakistan

To the extent that al Qaeda has a new base, it is in Pakistan, from where bin Laden and Zawahiri have released a stream of audiotapes and videotapes. Evidence of al Qaeda’s growing strength in Pakistan can also be seen in the advice and personnel it is offering the Taliban in its campaign of suicide attacks in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda today clandestinely operates small training camps in Pakistan. According to a senior U.S. military intelligence official, “People want to see barracks. [In fact] the camps use dry riverbeds for shooting and are housed in compounds for 20 people where they are taught calisthenics and bomb making” (Bergen 2006e). Because Pakistan is the new training ground for al Qaeda recruits, the organization will continue to be a significant threat. Terrorist plots have a much higher degree of success if some of the cell’s members have received training in bomb making and operational doctrine in person. For example, two of the London July 7, 2005, suicide bombers received al Qaeda training in Pakistan (Myers 2005). In Pakistan, al Qaeda has also been able to deepen its cooperation with Kashmiri militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, for instance, was arrested at the home of a Lashkar-e-Toiba leader in Pakistan in 2002 (Burke 2002). The same year Jaish-e-Mohammed and al Qaeda cooperated together in the kidnapping and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl (Cronin 2004). The Kashmiri issue is also being mobilized by al Qaeda in Pakistan to bring in recruits.

Al Qaeda in the Next Five Years

The Question of Leadership

The single biggest variable about the future of al Qaeda is what will happen to bin Laden, who has survived the most intense manhunt in history. In the short term, bin Laden’s death would likely trigger violent anti-American attacks around the globe. In the medium term, his death would deal a serious blow to al Qaeda, since bin Laden’s charisma and organizational skills have played a critical role in the organization’s success. It is possible that some of bin Laden’s eleven sons might choose to go into their father’s line of work; already Saad bin Laden has played a significant role in al Qaeda, although he is presently under a form of house arrest in Iran (Reuters 2006). Bin Laden’s capture or death would likely trigger a succession battle within al Qaeda. While Zawahiri is technically bin Laden’s successor, he is not regarded as a natural leader, but rather viewed, even among the Egyptians within al Qaeda, as a divisive force. The loss of bin Laden would likely challenge the unity of an organization that internal documents indicate has often been fragile.

A Growing Haven on the Afghan-Pakistan Border

The Pakistani military and its intelligence agency, ISI, have proven unwilling or incapable of destroying al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in their country. This situation holds unfortunate implications for countries with large Pakistani diaspora populations, such as the United Kingdom, whose citizens make four hundred thousand visits to Pakistan each year (Correra 2006), a tiny minority of whom end up training with terrorist groups including al Qaeda. While this problem is less pronounced in North America and Europe, where Pakistanis make up a relatively small proportion of the Muslim population, already in the United States, Spain, and France, terrorism cases involving Pakistani immigrants are emerging.
In addition, the Taliban on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, ever more identified as the true guardian of Pashtun rights, have increasingly adopted both al Qaeda tactics and ideology and could thus provide al Qaeda with a political constituency of sorts. This possibility is worrisome because the Pashtun tribal grouping numbers some 40 million people on both sides of the border (CIA 2007; Population Census Organization 2007). Meanwhile, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf--a key U.S. ally--was less popular in his own country than Osama bin Laden, according to a poll of Pakistanis conducted in October 2007 (Terror Free Tomorrow 2007). Furthermore, should Afghanistan slide into chaos--at this moment a real possibility--al Qaeda would benefit from the increased number of safe havens along the border regions.

The Growing Influence of European Militants in al Qaeda

The Islamist terrorist threat to the United States today largely emanates from Europe, not from domestic sleeper cells or--as is popularly imagined--the graduates of Middle Eastern madrassas. Omar Sheikh, who kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, is a British citizen of Pakistani descent who studied at the London School of Economics. The 9/11 terrorists became more militant while they were students in Hamburg (Bergen 2006d). Indeed, Robert Leiken of the Nixon Center has found that, of 373 Islamist terrorists arrested or killed in Europe and the United States from 1993 through 2004, an astonishing 41 percent were Western nationals who were either naturalized or second generation Europeans or converts to Islam (Leiken 2005). Leiken found more terrorists who were French than the combined totals of Pakistani and Yemeni terrorists. Future terrorist attacks that will be damaging to American national security are therefore likely to have a European origin. Citizens of the European Union who adopt al Qaeda’s ideology can easily move around Europe and enter the United States because of the Visa Waiver Program with European countries.

Indeed, the most likely perpetrators of another major terrorist attack on American soil come from militant British citizens of Pakistani descent. Most of those arrested in the 2006 plot to bring down as many as six American airliners over the Atlantic, for instance, were young British Pakistanis (PBS 2006).
This threat posed by militant British citizens of Pakistani heritage is not a new one. Since 9/11 British Pakistanis have been responsible for a wide range of terrorist attacks and plots around the globe. They mounted suicide attacks in London in July 2005, plotted to blow up a huge fertilizer bomb in the London area in 2004, carried out a suicide attack in Tel Aviv that killed four in 2003, attempted two separate suicide operations against U.S. airliners in 2001 and 2006, and participated in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002. In a number of these cases, al Qaeda either trained or worked with the British terrorists.
The danger to the United States of the nexus between British Pakistanis, al Qaeda, and the Kashmir issue was underscored in August 2004 when British police arrested eight individuals--many of them British citizens of Pakistani Descent--for involvement in an operation to attack financial landmarks (such as the New York Stock Exchange and the International Monetary Fund in Washington), targets they surveyed between August 2000 and April 2001. The cell’s leader, Abu Issa al-Hindi, a British convert to Islam, was radicalized by his experience fighting in Kashmir (Washington and McGirk 2004).

More broadly, European Muslim militants, both converts and immigrants, will provide foot soldiers for al Qaeda. Muriel Degauque, for instance, a Belgian baker’s assistant who converted to Islam, carried out a suicide attack for al Qaeda in Iraq directed at an America convoy outside Baghdad in November 2005 (BBC 2005b). Three out of four of the 9/11 pilots and two key 9/11 planners, Khaled Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi bin al Shibh, became more militant while they were living in the West. It seems that some combination of discrimination, alienation, and homesickness turned them all in a more radical direction. Los Angeles Times researcher Swati Pandey and I examined the biographies of seventy-nine terrorists responsible for five of the worst anti-Western terrorist attacks in recent memory--the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Africa Embassies bombings in 1998, the 9/11 attacks, the Bali nightclub bombings in 2002, and the 2005 London bombings--and found that one in four of the terrorists involved had attended colleges in the West (Bergen 2006a).

Similarly, Sageman (2004) argued that many terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda are either immigrants to the West or second-generation Muslims who have not integrated into their European host countries. With the native populations of most Western countries in steep decline and the economies of many Muslim countries in free fall, there is likely to be an exponentially growing number of Muslim immigrants to the West in coming years, some of whom will feel alienated, adopt bin Laden’s worldview, and volunteer to become part of al Qaeda (Sageman 2004). How critical this issue becomes depends to a large degree on the ability of imams and Muslim community leaders to turn the younger generation away from radical ideologies. Some evidence shows that imams in Europe are beginning to take steps to tackle this radicalization.

The Impact of the Iraq War

The Iraq War has increased radicalization in the Muslim world and provided al Qaeda with more recruits than it would otherwise have had. Some have claimed that Iraq will reduce terrorism by drawing jihadists to the country like moths to a flame--where they can be killed or captured before doing damage in the West. But this assertion incorrectly assumes that the world contains a finite number of jihadists. In fact, the pool of potential terrorists has expanded in the past five years. As the administration’s own 2006 National Intelligence Estimate explained, “The Iraq War has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists . . . and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives” (U.S. Director of National Intelligence 2006). To test this thesis empirically, Paul Cruickshank and I compared the period after September 11, 2001, through the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 with the period from March 2003 through September 2006. We found that the rate of deadly attacks by jihadists had increased sevenfold since the invasion and that, even excluding terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, fatal attacks by jihadists in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third since March 2003 (Bergen and Cruickshank 2007b).

As the war in Iraq concludes, it is likely to generate a ferocious “blowback,” which could be longer and more powerful than what followed the Afghan war against the Soviets. Foreign volunteers fighting U.S. troops in Iraq today, already aligned with al Qaeda, will find new targets around the world after the war in the country ends. Several factors could make this blowback from the Iraq War even more dangerous than the fallout from Afghanistan. Foreign fighters in Iraq are more battle-hardened than the “Afghan Arabs” led by bin Laden who fought demoralized Soviet army conscripts. The foreign fighters in Iraq are testing themselves against arguably the best army in history, acquiring skills in their battles against Coalition forces that will be far more useful for future terrorist operations than those their counterparts learned during the 1980s. Mastering how to make improvised explosive devices or how to conduct suicide operations is more relevant to urban terrorism than the conventional guerrilla tactics used against the Red Army. U.S. military commanders say that techniques perfected in Iraq have already been adopted by militants in Afghanistan (Bergen and Reynolds 2005).

In the short run, the countries most at risk from blowback are those whose citizens have traveled to fight in Iraq. Thus, Arab countries bordering Iraq are particularly vulnerable to blowback, as evidenced by the November 2005 bombings in Amman, Jordan. The country perhaps most vulnerable to returning jihadists is Saudi Arabia because Saudis make up the largest bloc of foreign fighters in Iraq. Given Saudi Arabia’s strategic importance to the United States, this is of great concern. There is also evidence of Iraq War recruits from Europe beginning to return home. To date there is no evidence of any individuals traveling from the United States to fight in Iraq, so the number of “returnees” to the United States is likely to be minimal. Foreign fighters in Iraq may begin to migrate to Western countries (a trend that will be accelerated if these veterans are not allowed to return to their home countries, as was the case after the Afghan jihad).
Compounding this threat is the fact that al Qaeda’s ideas have found more fertile ground among Iraqis than was the case among Afghans, who are culturally quite different from the Arabs who form al Qaeda’s core. In addition, the Iraqi refugee population is growing. Already 2 million Iraqi refugees live outside the country, most of them Sunnis, and 2 million more have been displaced internally. Those numbers are likely to increase significantly as the United States draws down in Iraq. We know from the experiences of the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan that refugee populations can be breeding grounds for militants such as the Taliban. The substantial refugee populations in places like Jordan and Egypt could prove a significant problem to important American allies and a destabilizing force throughout the region (Bergen 2007).

Also of concern is that parts of Iraq, like Afghanistan in the 1990s, could become a safe haven for al Qaeda terrorists if Sunni areas of central and western Iraq over the next five years become a type of failed state. The inevitable drawdown of U.S. combat brigades from Iraq is likely to strengthen al Qaeda significantly, while Sunni militants and foreign fighters would likely be interested in fighting a Shiite regime that would be perceived as a U.S. puppet even after most American troops depart. It is also likely that--as happened following the Soviet withdrawal in Afghanistan--the perception of a “defeat” of another world superpower may encourage more foreign militants to join the Iraq jihad bandwagon.

U.S. withdrawal would also be a boon to al Qaeda because of a probable intensification in the civil war. Although al Qaeda has lost its hold on Anbar Province in western Iraq, if Shiite militias intensify their attacks on Sunnis in demographically mixed areas following an American pullout, Iraqi Sunnis will be more likely to turn to al Qaeda to defend them. In such a scenario, al Qaeda in Iraq’s virulent anti-Shiite ideology will also likely resonate more strongly among Sunnis, especially the younger generation.

The one important caveat is that al Qaeda’s ability to gain control of territory or achieve even a ministate in Iraq will be limited by the nihilistic tendencies of its recruits. The barbaric violence and extreme puritanism of al Qaeda’s recruits have turned off many Iraqi Sunnis, especially because Sunnis themselves have often been the victims of al Qaeda violence. Al Qaeda’s prospects in Iraq depend greatly on the degree to which Sunni Iraqis view it as protector or oppressor.

Then there is the possibility of a Sunni-Shia civil war. If the trend continues, al Qaeda in Iraq will increasingly concentrate its attacks on Shia rather than Coalition targets. In the past bin Laden and Zawahiri have acted as something of a brake on al Qaeda attacking Shia, for example advising Abu Musab al Zarqawi in 2005 to draw back from his deliberate targeting of the Shia in Iraq (Bergen 2006c, 365-68). That could change as the Iraqi civil war heats up and Sunnis are seen as increasingly threatened by the Shia.

The Outlook for Future Tactics and Targeting

Since the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda and its affiliated groups have increasingly attacked Western economic and business targets. The shift in tactics is in part a response to the fact that the traditional pre-9/11 targets, such as American embassies, warships, and military bases are now better defended, while so-called soft economic targets are ubiquitous and easier to hit. The suicide attacks that killed sixty in Istanbul in November 2003--directed at a British consulate and the local headquarters of the HSBC bank--are indicative of this trend. The plotters initially planned to attack Incirlik Air Base, a facility in western Turkey used by American troops, but concluded that the tight security at the base made the assault too difficult. Therefore, the plotters transferred their efforts to the bank and consulate because they were relatively undefended targets in central Istanbul (Williams and Altindag 2004).

Al Qaeda also learned an important lesson from 9/11: disrupting Western economies and, by extension, the global economy, is useful for their wider jihad. In a videotape released in October 2004, bin Laden pointed out that for al Qaeda’s $500,000 investment in the 9/11 attacks, the United States economy sustained a $500 billion loss, stating, “Every dollar al Qaeda invested defeated a million dollars” (McLean 2004). At the same time, al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist groups are increasingly targeting companies that have distinctive Western brand names. In 2003, suicide attackers bombed the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. The same year in Karachi, a string of small explosions at eighteen Shell stations wounded four, while in 2002 a group of a dozen French defense contractors were killed as they left a Sheraton Hotel, which was heavily damaged. In October 2004 in Taba, Egyptian jihadists attacked a Hilton Hotel. In Amman, Jordan, in November 2005, al Qaeda in Iraq attacked three American-owned hotels--the Grand Hyatt, Radisson, and Days Inn--killing sixty people. Around the same time, a Kentucky Fried Chicken was attacked in Karachi, killing three (BBC 2005a).

Al Qaeda attacks on oil facilities accelerated sharply beginning in 2004. Suicide bombers struck Iraq’s principal oil terminal in Basra on April 21, 2004. In Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, al Qaeda’s Saudi Arabia affiliate attacked the offices of ABB Lummus Global, a contractor for Exxon/Mobil, on May 1, 2004, killing six Westerners. Four weeks later, in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia, al Qaeda attacked the office buildings and residential compounds of Western oil firms. Twenty-two were killed. On December 16, 2004, bin Laden drew unusually specific focus to al Qaeda’s operations in Saudi Arabia and the need to target oil interests, stating in an audio recording, “One of the most important reasons that led our enemies to control our land is the theft of our oil. . . . Be active and prevent them from reaching the oil, and mount your operations accordingly” (Daly 2004). And as noted above, in February 2006, al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia unsuccessfully attacked the Abqaiq facility, perhaps the most important oil production facility in the world. Al Qaeda will continue its attacks on oil installations, pipelines, and oil workers for the foreseeable future in both Saudi Arabia and Iraq, the two countries that sit on the largest oil reserves in the world.

Increasingly, al Qaeda should be expected to attack Israeli/Jewish targets. Despite bin Laden’s declaration in February 1998 that he was creating the “World Islamic Front against the Crusaders and the Jews,” al Qaeda only started attacking Israeli or Jewish targets in early 2002. Since then, al Qaeda and its affiliated groups have directed an intense campaign against Israeli and Jewish targets, killing journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi, bombing synagogues in Tunisia (BBC 2002) and Turkey (CNN 2003b), and attacking an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, killing thirteen. At the same time as the attack on the Kenyan hotel, al Qaeda also tried to bring down an Israeli passenger jet with rocketpropelled grenades (RPGs), an attempt that was unsuccessful (Filkins 2002). In the future, al Qaeda will likely intensify its campaign of attacking Jewish and Israeli targets. For that reason, bin Laden’s statement in October 2004 that Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 inspired his desire to attack the United States is worrisome, as bin Laden has now moved the Israeli-American alliance to the center of his justification for al Qaeda’s attacks against the West (Bergen 2006c, 291).

At the same time, al Qaeda is increasingly likely to deploy female suicide bombers. On November 9, 2005, Muriel Degauque became the first woman to conduct a suicide operation for al Qaeda, detonating a bomb in the town of Baquba as she drove past an American patrol. She was killed immediately and inflicted no casualties. And only hours after Degauque’s attack, Saijida al-Rishawi, a thirty-five-year-old Iraqi woman, walked into a wedding reception at a Radisson hotel in Amman Jordan, dressed festively like the man accompanying her, Hussein Ali al-Samara, whom she had married just days earlier. Under their clothes, they were both wearing explosive belts, and when her belt failed to explode, her husband pushed her out of the hotel and exploded his. The couple had been dispatched by Abu Musab al Zarqawi as part of an operation that killed sixty (Synovitz 2005).

Sunni militants that make up al Qaeda have historically held a powerful taboo against the use of women in combat. Now, al Qaeda, like Hamas and Chechen militants before it, has overcome initial reluctance to using females because they give operations a greater chance of success: women are less likely to be flagged for security checks and attract far less suspicion. In 2005, Islamist terrorist groups used female suicide attackers for the first time in Egypt and Kashmir (Bergen and Cruickshank 2007c).

Al Qaeda should be expected to continue to use the Internet to spread jihad. Where a few years ago there were only a dozen jihadist Web sites, today some four thousand Web sites spread militant ideology, post training manuals, and allow potential terrorists to meet online (Weimann 2006). The power of the Internet to foment jihad was underlined in June 2006 with the arrests of suspected bombing plotters in Ontario who reportedly became radicalized through militant Web sites and received online advice from Younis Tsouli, the Britainbased webmaster for Islamic extremist sites who called himself “Terrorist 007,” before he was arrested in 2005 (Katz and Kern 2006). Increasingly, al Qaeda strategy, tactics, and even operational instructions will be posted in passwordprotected jihadist forums.

Al Qaeda is likely to deploy two tactics in the next five years that that would have significant detrimental effects on American interests. The first is the use of RPGs or surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to bring down a commercial jetliner. As mentioned above, al Qaeda already attempted such an attack against an Israeli passenger jet in Kenya in 2003 (Johnston 2002), which nearly succeeded. A successful effort by al Qaeda to bring down a commercial passenger jet anywhere in the world would have a devastating effect on both global aviation and tourism. The second tactic would be to deploy a radiological bomb attack, most likely in a European city. Such an attack would have a much greater ability to terrorize than the small-scale chemical and biological attacks that terrorists have mounted in the past. Most observers would conclude that the terrorists had “gone nuclear,” even though a radiological bomb is nothing like a nuclear device. In June 2004, a report in the New Scientist magazine, based on records from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, indicated that the risk of a radiological “dirty bomb” attack is growing (Edwards 2004). Eight incidents in 1996 involved smuggling radioactive materials suitable for such a device, whereas in 2003 there were fifty-one such cases. The dramatic rise in smuggling has coincided with efforts by al Qaeda to acquire radioactive materials and to deploy and detonate a “dirty” radiological bomb, which al Qaeda ideologue Mustafa Setmariam Nasar described as a necessity (Bergen 2006c, 347-48). A radiological bomb attack in a Western city would kill relatively few people but would cause enormous panic and likely severely damage global investor confidence.

The study mentioned earlier that I conducted with Swati Pandey of the seventynine terrorists responsible for five of the worst anti-Western terrorist attacks since 1993 has some sobering implications for the future use of chemical, biological, radiological, and even nuclear weapons by al Qaeda. In our sample, 54 percent of the terrorists (as compared to 52 percent of the American public) had attended college. The most popular major for the terrorists was engineering, followed by medicine. In other words, the terrorists who have succeeded in carrying out spectacular attacks against Western targets in the past have been college-educated, technically proficient men who are capable of manufacturing and deploying chemical, biological, and radiological weapons. At some point they could also assemble a crude “gun-type” nuclear device and detonate it in a European city. While very unlikely to happen in the next five years, certainly a top al Qaeda goal is to use nuclear weapons against a Western target. Al Qaeda attracts the kind of highly educated men who one day might be able to pull off such an attack (Bergen 2006a).

Al Qaeda Strategy Over the Next Five Years

As al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote shortly after 9/11 that the most important strategic goal of al Qaeda is to seize control of a state, or part of a state, somewhere in the Muslim world. He wrote, “Confronting the enemies of Islam, and launching jihad against them require a Muslim authority, established on a Muslim land that raises the banner of jihad and rallies the Muslims around it. Without achieving this goal our actions will mean nothing” (al-Zawahiri’s autobiography, as quoted in Bergen 2007). Such a jihadist state would then become a launching pad for attacks on the American homeland. We have seen al Qaeda attempt to set up such a state in Afghanistan. Now al Qaeda’s main strategic goal for the next few years is to establish a jihadist ministate in Iraq, in the heart of the Middle East, rather than on the periphery of the Muslim world as al Qaeda was able to do under the Taliban. Another key goal will be to maintain its base on the Afghan-Pakistan border, seeking a safe haven that replicates some of the features of its Afghan haven before the fall of the Taliban. The tribal areas along Pakistan’s western border are proving a congenial place for al Qaeda to regroup.

Al Qaeda’s aim in the next five years will also be to stay relevant and to stay in the news. The organization will be opportunistic in spinning to its purposes hotbutton issues for Muslims around the world, as it did during the Danish cartoon controversy and the month-long conflict in Lebanon in 2006. It is possible thatal Qaeda may also seek to aim more attacks at Christians, including the pope, in the coming years. The situation in Darfur is also likely to be a flashpoint, since al Qaeda seems to view Western humanitarian interventions in that country in the same way as it viewed the humanitarian mission in Somalia in the early 1990s--as a Western attempt to colonize Muslim lands. Al Qaeda fighters are likely to become embroiled in the Darfur conflict in the next few years.

The Likelihood of an Attack on the United States in the Next Five Years In my view, there is a low-level probability that al Qaeda will be able to attack the United States in the next five years, although that prediction may change once the war in Iraq winds down and militant veterans seek other battle fronts. In the past, when al Qaeda terrorists have tried to launch attacks in the United States, they have done so only after arriving from somewhere else. Ahmed Ressam, for instance, who lived in Canada before he tried to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in December 1999, was an Algerian who had trained with al Qaeda in Afghanistan (Bernton et al. 2002). Similarly, the nineteen 9/11 hijackers hailed from countries around the Middle East. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 that killed six, was a Pakistani who had also trained in an al Qaeda camp (Bergen 2001, 36). None of these attackers relied on al Qaeda “sleeper cells” in the United States, and no evidence indicates that such cells exist today. Moreover, the United States is a more impenetrable target than it was before 9/11. The ability of an al Qaeda terrorist to enter the country and mount a successful operation has been greatly diminished by U.S. government actions, the heightened awareness of the American public, and the weaker state of al Qaeda itself.(2)

One area of concern, however, is American citizens of Pakistani descent traveling back home to Pakistan to acquire terrorist training and direction from al Qaeda as the London bombers did before the July 7, 2005, attacks. The FBI says Syed Ahmed, an American citizen of Pakistani descent, traveled from Atlanta to meet with a cell in Ontario, Canada, to discuss possible additional attacks in the United States after attempting to attend a terrorist training camp in Pakistan (CNN 2006b). In June 2003, Iyman Faris, a U.S. citizen born in Kashmir, pled guilty to helping al Qaeda plan attacks in the United States, including a plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge (CNN 2003a). Faris admitted to meeting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, in 2002 in Pakistan to plan those operations. It should be noted that the American Muslim population as a whole is far less radicalized than in Europe, and therefore the number seeking training or contact overseas with al Qaeda is likely to be near zero. Al Qaeda itself remains quite capable of attacking a wide range of American economic interests overseas; killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan; and targeting U.S. diplomatic facilities in Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East.

Al Qaeda’s Long-Term Strategic Weaknesses

Al Qaeda continues to kill Muslim civilians, despite the Koran’s express forbiddance of killing both civilians and fellow Muslims. Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia lost a great deal of support after its campaign of attacks in 2003 that killed mostly Saudis. The same effect can be seen in Indonesia where Jemaah Islamiyah, the al Qaeda affiliate, has killed mostly Indonesians in its attacks over the past three years. Popular revulsion also followed al Qaeda in Iraq’s 2005 attacks against the three American-owned hotels in Amman, Jordan, that killed mostly Jordanians. The brutality of operations undertaken by Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Iraq before his death shocked Muslims around the world, although Zarqawi’s brutal techniques have appealed to some ultraradicalized young Muslims.
Moreover, the personal popularity that bin Laden enjoys in much of the Muslim world does not translate into the kind of mass support for al Qaeda that Hezbollah enjoys in Lebanon; this is not surprising considering the lack of al Qaeda social welfare services, schools, hospitals, or clinics. In addition, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have had a tendency of overreaching in their statements, with Zawahiri in danger of overexposing himself in the dozens of videotapes released between in 2006 and 2007. In 2006, both Hamas and the Sudanese government told al Qaeda’s leaders to stop interfering in their affairs. At the same time, al Qaeda’s leaders have constantly expanded their list of enemies, with statements of opposition to all Middle Eastern regimes; Muslims who do not share their views; the Shia; most Western countries; Jews and Christians; the governments of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Russia; most news organizations; the United Nations; and international NGOs. Making a world of enemies is never a winning strategy (Bergen 2006e).

Another weakness lies in al Qaeda’s lack of a positive vision. While it is clear what bin Laden is against, it is less obvious what he is for, beyond the restoration of the caliphate. In practice, such a restoration would mean Taliban-style theocracies stretching from Indonesia to Morocco, which a quiet majority of Muslims do not want. An interesting poll in Saudi Arabia in 2003 (Bergen 2006e) found that 49 percent of Saudis admired bin Laden, while only 5 percent wanted to live in a bin Laden–run state. Sudan under Turabi, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and Iran under the ayatollahs do not look very attractive to most Muslims.
These strategic weaknesses have already led to declining support both for bin Laden and for terrorist attacks on civilians in a number of Muslim countries; they will likely cause long-term damage to al Qaeda. In the shorter term, however, they are unlikely to have a significant impact on the group because al Qaeda is drawing energy, support, and new recruits from insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—conflicts that are likely to go on for longer than five years. In an authoritative study of ninety-one insurgencies in the past century, Seth Jones (2006) found that it takes fourteen years for a government to win against the insurgency and eleven years for insurgents to win against the government. Either way, we are in for protracted conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq that are likely to energize and fuel al Qaeda over the next five years.

Notes

1. This article is not focused on the many jihadist terrorist movements around the world that are inspired by al Qaeda, but only with the organization founded by bin Laden in 1988 that went on to implement the 9/11 attacks.

2. However, American homegrown terrorists inspired by al Qaeda might still carry out a small-bore terror attack inside the United States in the next five years.