Military

DATE=10/21/02

TYPE=FOCUS

NUMBER=8-014

TITLE= AL-QAIDA ON THE MOVE

BYLINE=ED WARNER

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

CONTENT=

VOICED AT:

INTRO: A spate of attacks by al-Qaida or its allies have raised the terrorist threat in much of the world. VOA's Ed Warner asked some veteran analysts where they think al-Qaida is heading and how much damage it can do.

TEXT: A devastating bombing in Bali, Indonesia, that took close to 200 lives and injured some 300. A series of lethal bombings in the Philippines, the latest in Manila. A French oil tanker set ablaze off the coast of Yemen. U-S troops in Kuwait fired on with one fatality. A series of attacks recently thwarted in Germany, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

Al-Qaida is back in action, says CIA Director George Tenet, and more attacks are sure to come.

But it is a somewhat altered Al-Qaida. Flushed from their base in Afghanistan, its members have dispersed around the world. Now they operate in smaller units with less centralized command, says John Pike, director of Global Security.org, a defense research group:

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The challenge of these small attacks is that they do not require a lot of centralized financing, a lot of centralized planning, and consequently, it is going to be a lot more effort required locally in order to make these attacks difficult to conduct. It is not as though simply scooping up a few leaders is going to shut down the entire operation.

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Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid says al-Qaida is a global movement whose essence is now local. It is much more steered from the bottom up than from the top down, says Magnus Ranstorm, director of the Center for the Study of terrorism at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

This makes al-Qaida and its affiliates harder to find, say analysts, but it also means they cannot do quite as much damage. What they can do is bad enough, but as the 9/11 attacks on the United States showed, it could be much worse.

Counter-terrorism strategist Larry Johnson says the attacks will vary according to local conditions:

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In places like Kuwait, they have been limited to trying to shoot at marines with limited effectiveness. They did kill one, but by and large they wind up getting themselves killed or captured. In places like Indonesia, where they have a wider base and less government intervention to prevent them from operating, they are able to carry out the attack as we saw in Bali.

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The destruction of al-Qaida's Afghanistan base had mixed results, says Jim Walsh of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard:

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It is a good thing because that central headquarters does not have the capacity to organize highly complex transnational operations as it used to when it had a safe haven and all the time and resources it needed. On the other hand, these little groups, these smaller fragments, are free to do whatever they want to do on their own, and can cause real problems as we have seen in Bali.

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Analysts say it is important to distinguish among the now scattered terrorist groups. It is a little too easy and misleading to label them all al-Qaida,

says Jim Walsh:

/// WALSH ACT ///

When we talk about al-Qaida, it is also important to keep in mind that is just a phrase. We tend to think it is all this one big organization when in reality there are only a couple hundred official al-Qaida members, maybe as many as 300 members. Al-Qaida really is a network of affiliated groups.

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When an attack occurs, says Mr. Walsh, it can be attributed to one of three kinds of terrorist organizations:

/// WALSH ACT ///

Either it is one of these groups that is free-lancing on its own. It is one of these groups that is in association with al-Qaida and perhaps at some organizational level, there is some concert or some coordination. And then there are going to be attacks which are really wholly owned, operated and implemented by al-Qaida itself, and one would expect those to be the higher profile attacks.

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In their new locations, the various terrorist groups will exploit local grievances and find recruits among the discontented. Jim Walsh notes a few possibilities:

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Kashmiris who are interested in Kashmir separating from India, Saudis, Indonesians who want to set up an Islamist state and kick the Christians out - a variety of people with a variety of causes, very few of whom are actually hard-core members of al-Qaida but are nevertheless sympathizers and sometimes partners in terrorist operations.

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Many Australians died in the Bali assault. Analysts say they may have been targeted because of Australia's support of President Bush's proposed war with Iraq.

Anti-Americanism is a factor in other attacks, say analysts. The target of the terrorists in the Philippines was the city of Zamboanga, where 260 U-S troops are stationed to help in counter-terrorism.

Significantly, they were not struck, notes Ralph Peters, author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World." He writes in the Wall Street Journal that the fragmented and weakened terrorists are not able to hit the desired military or government targets and must settle for softer ones.

They also made the mistake of shocking Indonesia into taking action against them. A nation that has been too complacent, says Mr. Peters, now has the motivation, the evidence and the anger to crack down on the terrorists.

How to crack down? Local terrorism requires a local response, advises John Pike.

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If you think about the literally thousands of targets that terrorists could be going after, this is unavoidably something that is going to require a global campaign that is going to be implemented locally. And without that sort of local law enforcement, local security, there is simply no way you are going to be able to stop these attacks.

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Yemen, for one, appears to be providing that local law enforcement. With U-S help, it has gone on the offensive against the terrorists. Its army has scoured cities and mountains for them. Islamic jurists wander the prisons urging militants to return to the true faith that does not countenance terrorism.

The Washington Post reports that Yemen has taken more than 100 suspects into custody and has deported a greater number of foreigners with suspicious backgrounds. Acting on U-S intelligence, the army closed in on the brother-in-law of one of the 9/11 hijackers. Surrounded, he took his own life with a grenade.

Despite the fact that a French oil tanker was blown up off the coast of Yemen in early October, U-S officials express satisfaction with the country's counter-terrorism efforts. A U-S diplomat says "the Yemeni position is that they have primary responsibility for dealing with al-Qaida, and I think we agree with that. Yemen is a much less hospitable nation than al-Qaida wanted it to be."

Mr. Pike says it will take several years before all the security measures are in place to deal effectively with the terrorists. But there is plenty to do in the meantime.

Counter-terrorists must be as agile and adapatable as the terrorists, says Robert Andrews, a former Green Beret and CIA officer. In the Washington Post, he writes that small, mobile teams must spread around the world, employing diplomacy as well as weaponry and secrecy to beat the terrorists at their own game.

For FOCUS, this is Ed Warner