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Killebrew: America's next threat: A politically transformed Al-Qaida
By Robert Killebrew
The war against terrorism is going to last a long time, as President Bush and other officials have said, and predicting the future is always uncertain. But as we consider the evolution of this protracted conflict, we should be aware of one high probability: that the al-Qaida we will face in 2010 will be an even more dangerous threat to America than the al-Qaida our troops are fighting today.
Following the historical pattern of terrorist movements everywhere -- from Russia's Bolsheviks to the Irish Republican Army to Palestine's Hamas -- we can expect that within a decade al-Qaida will open one, or possibly several, political fronts in predominantly Islamic states, transforming itself from a deadly but diffuse terrorist movement into implacably hostile governmental factions throughout the Middle East that will pose critical geostrategic challenges to America and our allies.
Although today's terrorists are an indisputable menace, they do not yet threaten global peace or our survival. But the political transformation of al-Qaida into a radical pan-Islamic movement would divide the world between the progressive West and a number of belligerent, deeply reactionary, nuclear-armed states, and raise the possibility of far more serious conflict.
The current leaders of al-Qaida, and the generation emerging in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, are hard and practical men. They have promulgated a broad strategic agenda -- driving the United States out of the Middle East, forcing an end to U.S. aid to Israel and to U.S. backing for "corrupt" Arab regimes -- that cuts across Islam's fault lines and unites alienated Muslims throughout the underdeveloped world. Unspoken, but certainly assumed, in the al-Qaida agenda is the installation of more pious Islamic regimes, or even, ultimately, a resurrection of a pan-Islamic caliphate like the Ottoman Empire, long a dream of Middle Eastern Islamic radicals.
To carry out short-term plans for regional terrorism, al-Qaida has an almost limitless pool of manpower. But its emerging leaders will soon realize -- if they have not already -- that their higher objectives cannot be achieved by hit-and-run attacks, no matter how devastating. For ambitions this vast, they need to transmute terror into political legitimacy in the same way that Fatah transformed itself into the quasi-government of the Palestine Liberation Organization, leading to the sight of a gun-toting Yasser Arafat at the podium of the United Nations. Hezbollah is acquiring political legitimacy in Syrian-dominated Lebanon, as is Hamas in Palestine and Gaza. "Legitimacy" doesn't matter to al-Qaida today, but it must have it tomorrow if it wants to stay in the game.
