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October
7, 2002, 9:00 a.m. |
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month Americans focused their emotional energies on the anniversary of
the 9/11 attacks. However, October 7 is also an anniversary worth noting.
It has been a year since Allied forces launched Operation Enduring Freedom
against al Qaeda sanctuaries in Afghanistan, and the Taliban government
that gave them succor. While September 11 was a time of mourning and reflection,
today is an opportunity to take stock of the military accomplishments
in the past year. The Taliban has been overthrown and replaced with an
emerging democracy, the al Qaeda core has been seriously disrupted, and
terror groups linked to bin Laden are being tracked down and their support
structures eliminated. Americans and allied troops have performed admirably,
yet not without losses. Most recently, on October 2, a terrorist bomb
in the Philippines claimed
the lives of two Filipino soldiers and one American, Sergeant First
Class Mark W. Jackson.
Al Qaeda has thus far been unable to successfully mount the significant secondary attacks it has been threatening since last October. Yet, the terrorist organization is not yet vanquished, and significant uncertainties remain, particularly concerning those leading al Qaeda members still at large. On October 3, ITAR-TASS reported that bin Laden henchman Ayman al-Zawahiri had been killed, but gave few details. Abu Qatada, who has been described as al Qaeda's unofficial European ambassador and who has been in hiding since December, broke cover recently to post his views on the 9/11 attacks on the Internet. And of course the fate of Osama bin Laden remains the $25 million question. Hamid Karzai speculated recently that bin Laden was dead but that Taliban leader Mullah Omar was alive. Pervez Musharraf suggested the terror master had died kidney failure, which unnamed American intelligence sources said was probable. Still other unnamed American intelligence sources allegedly picked up bin Laden's voice recently on a telephone intercept. German intelligence also inferred he was alive, as did former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal, who stated that bin Laden is biding his time and will make a dramatic comeback at a moment of his choosing.
If al-Faisal is right, we saw the preview of coming attractions yesterday. Al-Jazeera ran a brief audiotape that it claimed featured the voice of bin Laden himself. There is enough skepticism for the claim to not be taken at face value, and surely voice analysts are subjecting the tape to the most rigorous tests available. The tone is certainly Ladenesque, with the characteristic mix of self-pity and preachy self-righteousness. And nothing in the statement dates the tape precisely — it may be bin Laden speaking anytime after 9/11. But whether or not it originated with the comeback kid himself, the tape can be taken as a definitive al Qaeda policy statement, a declaration that as far as they are concerned the war is ongoing.
The speaker addresses the American people, to whom he speaks as "an honest adviser." He gives us one last chance to mend our ways, by which he means rejecting our "dry, miserable, and spiritless materialistic life" and converting to Islam. He also tells us that we have not learned the lessons from the "New York and Washington raids," namely that "the aggressor deserves punishment." (In fact, we do know that, we just disagree with him on the specifics of who the aggressor is.) He notes that because the U.S. is facilitating the "impending partition of the Islamic world ... the youth of Islam are preparing things that will fill your hearts with fear. They will target key sectors of your economy until you stop your injustice and aggression or until the more short-lived of us die." The speaker's emphasis on economic targets mirrors the same strategic focus enunciated in the last confirmed bin Laden videotape from last December.
One might be tempted to dismiss this latest tape as another in the series of empty threats that began shortly after the bombing started a year ago. Last June, al Qaeda media favorite Sulaiman Abu Gaith promised bin Laden would appear after planned attacks around July 4. Later he said that the group had postponed the comeback tour until September 11, or later. One recent report had it that al Qaeda was refraining from attacking until after the standoff with Iraq was concluded, in order not to give the U.S. a pretext to employ WMDs against Iraq (which implies chillingly that they would employ such weapons against us first).
However, the new tape was released 12 hours after a French oil tanker exploded off the coast of Yemen. The Yemenis quickly ruled out terrorism as a cause of the blast, which of course was their immediate response to the October 12, 2000 U.S.S. Cole bombing as well. Yet, the initial reports are very similar — a ship pulling in for refueling, small craft spotted beforehand pulling up alongside, a hole blown in the side of the ship (which, like the Cole, did not sink). The U.S. Navy issued a warning last month that oil tankers were being targeted. Plus, tankers fit the war aims enunciated in the tape, since they facilitate a key sector of the economy (oil prices jumped 1.3 percent at news of the explosion). One might question the wisdom of attacking a French ship, since this would tend to bring one of the more errant U.S. antiterror allies back into the fold. But in so doing al Qaeda shows the same strategic acumen that led them to shift from bombing overseas embassies and military targets to attacking the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the Congress (which failed when Flight 93 went down), and an aborted component of the plan as reported recently in the Italian press, the Vatican.
The Yemen bombing also brings to mind the terrorist ring broken up in Morocco last May that was seeking to launch similar attacks against U.S. warships passing through the Gibraltar Straits. The ringleader was Fawzi Sad al-Ubaydi, also known as Abu-Zubayr, who was on the FBI's list of 25 most-wanted Bin-Laden affiliates. Abu Zubayr currently resides at Camp X-Ray and may have been the source for the information that generated the tanker alert. He is also a former Captain in the Iraqi secret police, who joined al Qaeda in 1997 — and the degree to which he was a "former" Iraqi agent is a matter of speculation. (Those who deprecate the Baghdad connection take note.)
These events — including the arrest of suspected terrorists in Oregon late last week — remind us that the global war on terrorism continues, and that the enemy will use whatever means are at its disposal in pursuit of its objectives. Furthermore, if the terrorists are captivated by the significance of anniversaries, today is at least as important to them as September 11. Be careful out there.
— James S. Robbins is a national-security analyst & NRO contributor.