(This analysis is part of UPI's Special Report on the anniversary of the 2001 terror attacks.)
In nearly two years since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, America's counter-attack -- the war on terrorism -- can claim to have rallied one of the largest international coalitions in history. And yet with lethal bombings this year already in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Morocco, al-Qaida and its allies remain terrifyingly effective.
"We've built a coalition against terrorism unlike any other," says Marc Grossman, undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department. "We have 90 nations that have arrested or detained 2,700 terrorists and their supporters since September 11th; 17 nations contributed nearly 6,000 troops to Operation Enduring Freedom and to the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul; 161 countries have blocked terrorist assets totaling $116 million."
The great institutions of international diplomacy have rallied to the cause. The NATO alliance has now assumed responsibility for security in Afghanistan. The United Nations has backed the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings and the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism. The European Union pushed its central banks to help identify and block money laundering, and U.S. Customs officers are now routinely working in European ports to monitor shipping containers.
Despite other arguments between the United States and traditional allies like France and Germany over the war in Iraq, the cooperation of their police and intelligence and judicial services against terrorism has continued.
"There is no doubt that terrorism is the enemy of every civilized state, and that unprecedented levels of cooperation and information-sharing by the civilized states will be the key to its defeat," says French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. "This is in all our interests."
Even more striking has been the level of cooperation from Russian and Chinese security services. But then terrorism is everybody's concern; the Russians have been shaken by suicide bombers and Islamic fundamentalism in the Chechen war, and the Chinese fear Islamic influence among the Uighur separatists of central Asia.
The intelligence services of five countries, including the Russians, were involved in breaking a ring of al-Qaida operatives who planned to blow up British warships in Gibraltar's harbor. Other planned attacks in the Philippines, in Singapore and elsewhere were also aborted. These successes inspired President George Bush to claim on May 1 that "the turn of the tide" had come in the war on terrorism.
"It is not over," Bush noted. "But it is not endless."
Thanks to the global coalition, the finances and communications of al-Qaida are under constant pressure. The arrest in Thailand in August of Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali and supposedly al-Qaida's mastermind in Southeast Asia, reportedly came through an intercepted cell phone message.
Careful police work and unprecedented international cooperation has begun to roll up some crucial al-Qaida networks. The arrest last September in Pakistan of Ramzi Binalshib led to the arrest of Khaled Sheikh Mohammad, al-Qaida's logistics chief and the most senior figure yet taken. His courier networks led in turn to Hambali, believed to be the planner of the Bali bombing.
The cooperation has not been without friction. The Indonesian government is now pressing hard for Hambali to be released from U.S. custody to their own police, for interrogation and probable prosecution over the Bali bombing. The Saudis, wary of al-Qaida's appeal to their own fundamentalists, were at best lukewarm and spasmodic in their cooperation -- at least until the bombing attacks in Riyadh on May 12. But countries like Syria and Libya, long seen as suspects in terrorism, have been sharing information -- in part because their largely secular regimes have their reasons to fear Islamic zealotry.
"I think al-Qaida has lost ground over the past two years," notes Gerard Russell, of the British Foreign Office's Islamic Media Unit, which closely follows Muslim opinion. "But I don't claim that resentment of the West has disappeared."
There are several paradoxes here. Unprecedented international cooperation has not stopped al-Qaida, and may even have spread it. After the fall of the Taliban regime in Kabul, there was no geographic center or headquarters to target, and many of al-Qaida's leaders and militants escaped to regroup elsewhere. Its already decentralized structure has not been easy to penetrate, and even its failures produce martyrs who can help spread the cause. Al-Qaida's terrorist strikes are not just ends in themselves, but deliberately catalytic events, designed to raise Islamist consciousness and recruits.
"We are seeking to incite the Islamic nations to rise up and liberate its lands and to wage jihad for the sake of God," Osama bin Laden said in an interview on al-Jazeera TV in June 1999.
So the second paradox is that the war in Iraq has vastly increased the amount of Islamic land to be "liberated" of Western occupying troops, and given al-Qaida a whole new target, a new battleground, and a new focus of recruitment. Arab veterans of the Afghan wars, always the hard core of al-Qaida, are reportedly flocking to Iraq to join the anti-American resistance. Jerry Bremer, the American proconsul in Baghdad, calls Iraq "the new battleground of the war on terrorism."
The third paradox is that the Bush administration benefited hugely after 9/11 from the support and cooperation of the international community, including the United Nations. The war on terrorism has been a truly global effort. And yet by taking the war to Iraq, where the al-Qaida links were not easy to demonstrate, the United States and its British allies found little support from other governments and came embarrassingly close to international isolation.
The lesson of the war on terrorism is that international cooperation works. That lesson was not successfully applied in the case of Iraq -- where the need for U.N. and other international support is all the more pressing. As the casualties of the "peace" in Iraq overtake those of the briskly efficient war, both British and American governments are facing sharp internal criticism. And as al-Qaida's main target states, the United States and Britain have tightened their security measures and widened their legal powers, sparking new concerns for civil liberties.
"Providence, which has bestowed on America the responsibility to lead the world in liberty, has also handed America a great trust: to provide the security that ensures liberty," argues U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.
But the promised enlargement of the controversial U.S. prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo in Cuba undermines Ashcroft's reassuring statements. The fate of their own nationals at Guantanamo has sparked political storms in Britain and Australia, two staunch allies -- and made it all the harder for moderate Arab states to maintain their cooperation.
This threat to the anti-terror coalition has become increasingly clear at the United Nations, where over the past two years a special committee has tried to develop a unified plan on addressing terrorism. The committee has been adjourned without result -- largely because a group of Islamic nations that wanted to exclude activities taken "during an armed conflict, including the situation of foreign occupation." The issue that they cited was Palestinian resistance to Israel.
Thus the final paradox is that even after al-Qaida and 9/11, after the bombing at Bali and the missile attacks on civilian airliners at Kenya's international airport, the old problem still holds good, that one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. Even in the face of a global threat such as al-Qaida, an avowed enemy to all governments that do not follow its theocratic and fundamentalist beliefs, international cooperation has its limits.
The Bush administration has tried to wage the war on terrorism as a self-contained operation. But the world, and the thinking of even friendly Arab and other governments, does not work that way; they cannot separate the war on terrorism from the Israel-Palestine conflict. Above all, they cannot follow Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair in seeing the war in Iraq as just another campaign in the war on terrorism, which makes it all the harder to win it.
"Since the war in Afghanistan ended, we have had more attacks in more parts of the world than ever before," says M.J. Gohal, a specialist in terrorism at the Asia Pacific Foundation. "These are not indications of al-Qaida being rolled back, or the network being on the run."
On the other hand, if Iraq and the Anglo-American forces are now to be the chosen battleground of al-Qaida, then there may be a chance to use the West's technological edge to identify them, pin them down, and bring them to decisive battle. The problem is that guerilla wars seldom work that way, and that al-Qaida has a great many more soft Western targets outside Iraq. And the breakdown of the U.S. electricity grid in August was a grim reminder of just how vulnerable Western societies remain.
