I suppose one of the chief attractions of being in the apocolypse business is that nobody can ever prove you wrong. If the catastrophe you have predicted doesn’t happen this year, well, there’s always next year. Point in case being this starkly gloomy article in The Spectator from a certain Sanjay Anand:
No one in any Western intelligence service knows how or when it will come, but they are all agreed on one thing: al-Qa’eda will attack using chemical, biological and nuclear weapons the moment it can acquire them. And that moment is not far off. As Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, said on Tuesday, ‘It is only a matter of time before a Western city is hit by a chemical, biological or radiological attack.’ She added that renegade scientists, probably from Pakistan, were already thought to have given al-Qa’eda most of the technology it needs for ‘dirty bombs’.
Certainly this is not the first time that such melancholy warnings have been issued but the broad scope of these ones make me wonder if the ‘Western Intelligence Services’ are engaging in a bit of back-covering here. Not Mr.Anand though. He is very adamant:
We don’t know when the next attack will happen, or what horrors it will involve. We can depend on one thing, however: the moment we relax our guard, we will be hit.
That certainly fits Al-Qaeda’s modus. They do like popping up with an attack whenever and wherever they are least expected and, hence, prepared for. From a strategic point of view they do need to do something big and spectacular and reasonably soon. It should be borne in mind that Al-Qaeda’s attacks are not a message to the West, they are designed to boost the moral of the wider Muslim world (the ‘Umma’) by reassuring them that the ‘infidel’ is vulnerable and can be beaten. Following the pants-down rout of the Iraqi regime, Al-Qaeda are under pressure to respond in style, lest their legend being to fade and the support that they count on among the people they consider to be their constituents begin to trickle away.
But, perhaps, they are no longer able to function at that level. Who can say what damage the work of Western security forces has done? Mr.Anand is rather dismissive but, then, he needs to be in order for his article to retain any punch. Clearly the editors of The Spectator felt it important enough to give it front-page prominence.
Even pre-supposing I had a back garden (which I do not) I am not about to begin digging it up in order to construct a concrete bunker. But neither can I entirely dismiss Mr.Anand’s dire warnings with anything like the necessary degree of confidence.
In 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo cult released Sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo underground. This only killed a few people because they didn’t get the distribution right (and because they deliberately used a lower concentration of sarin than they could have because they did not want the people who actually put the sarin on the trains to die). This is the only instance so far of a terrorist attack using what is commonly defined as a “weapon of mass destruction”. What they did do was demonstrate that it is possible (and indeed fairly easy) for terrorists with a few competent chemists to produce a very deadly chemical weapon. Thankfully, in the longer term, Aum Shinrikyo was not very dangerous as a terrorist group. (They were a fruitcake cult that was relatively easily dismantled).
On the other hand, the only terrorist group to actually cause mass destruction is Al Qaeda, on September 11, 2001. They did this by exploiting weaknesses in America’s transport networks, so that America provided the weapon as well as the target. This demonstrated to us that there are organisations out there with the will and ruthlessness (and I could say, the contempt for human life, both their own and that of their perceived enemies) to mount attacks on this scale. I think it possibly also suggested that Al Qaeda lacked much technological sophistication. They didn’t use their own weapons because they didn’t have their own weapons. Those weapons they have used in other attacks (explosives) have been relatively unsophisticated, although they have a thing for complex logistics (multiple attacks at the same time, for instance. And a failed shoe bomb attack doesn’t impress me much). The Japanese example demonstrated that with a few good chemists, you could make sarin. Al Qaeda have not tried a copycat sarin attack, and this tends to suggest to me that they don’t have a few good chemists. (Sarin seems to me to be the easiest weapon of mass destruction to make, which is why I would expect them to try to make some). As Al Qaeda are a lot weaker today than they were in 2001 due to America’s intense war on them, I don’t imagine that they are any more capable of mounting an attack with their own weapons than they were in 2001. This is not to say that they will never be able to obtain such weapons from somebody else, but again I think it is likely to be harder for them now than it was before 2001, and they clearly did not do it then.
So, if we see further attacks from Al Qaeda, I tend to think they will be the smaller scale, attacks on embassies, bombs in military barracks or similar type attacks, or they will attempt another September 11 like event in which they exploit some weakness in our infrastructure.
Of course, I could be wrong. I am utterly terrified about the possibility that I could be wrong, and the chance that I am wrong is sufficiently large that I still favour using immense resources to neutralise what is left of Al Qaeda.
And of course, even if I am right, all I am saying is that Al Qaeda are less of a threat than some people think. The prospect of somebody else with the will to attack the civilized world and the technical skills to make sarin or something worse is still out there, and to me it seems inevitable. I think we may find ourselves with an interlude of a few years to prepare for it, however.
The govt will always be predicting more attacks from Al Qaeda, no matter who we invade and how many countries we occupy. The War on Terror, like every govt program, is perpetually just successful enough to demonstrate that govt can be trusted and deserves more resources, but also just enough of a failure to show the govt absolutely requires more resources to protect us.
Sanjay Anand presents a very weak case, ably demolished just now by Michael Jennings. I’m with Mark Steyn on this. Osmana’s a smear of DNA on the wall of a cave somewhere.
The small attacks Anand presents as being ominous precursors of big things to come are not impressive. Ninety-five dead in Chechnya. I’m sorry 95 people are dead in Chechnya, a Muslim area, but it’s not exactly shattering. Twenty-seven dead in Morocco, a Muslim country, likewise. Thirty-four dead in Riyadh (10 Westerners, the rest Saudis), 19 bombs in Shell petrol stations in Pakistan, a Muslim country.
How are they going to escalate from these paltry maldoings to another attack on the West? How was bombing their own people in Muslim countries supposed to put fear into the West? It wasn’t so much threatening as a demonstration of weakness. The fact is Al-Qaeda has been profoundly weakened, even if not yet given the coup de grace, by America’s remorseless pursuit of them. Michael Jennings is correct, they don’t have any weapons. I guess they could buy a nuclear bomb from N Korea (Iraq’s inventory having gone out the window), but then they’d had to deliver it. From where? How? With the West on heightened alert, and the one thing they had going for them on 9/11 – the element of surprise – now dispelled, the notion that Al-Qaeda is in a position to be attacking anything but Pakistani petrol stations holds absolutely no water.
A note at the end of the Spectator piece does not tell us who the author is or how he is qualified to comment on this subject, but does note that “This article draws on a paper by Rohan Gunaratna.”
Rohan Gunaratna has some serious qualifications and seems to be well throught of in intellectual academic circles. He’s Professor at the University of St Andrews Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence and presumably knows whereof he speaks.
Yet he seems not to speak with the same voice as Mr. Anand, who “drew from a paper” written by him.
In an interview with Columbia International Affairs online, Mr Gunaratna said: “Al-Qaeda will continue to mount these small to medium attacks [as in, presumably, the ones presented by Anand as precursors of massive violence] in the next one to two years. As long as US security agencies, law enforcement and the US public maintain a high state of alert, it cannot amount to large scale operations. They will be able to conduct small to mid-size attacks outside the United States.” [As in Chechnya and Morocco, for example?]
He also notes that destruction of Al-Qaeda’s training camps “will lower the quality of training for future Al-Qaeda members. The safe training zone for Al-Qaeda is gone.”
I fear that what someone said over on the Decline of The Spectator thread, that Boris Johnson lets his secretary edit the magazine, may not have been entirely in jest …
Radio news in the US this morning says we’re holding an American truck driver in the midwest someplace who was part of an al Qaeda plot to use acetylene torches to cut support cables on the Brooklyn Bridge. This is an idea of such fantastic goofiness that newsreaders are snickering over it.
The al Qaeda bunch are almost victims of their own success in this one. I don’t think they could possibly have realized in advance how photogenic slamming big planes into big buildings was going to be. Or that so many cameras would be positioned to catch it. Or that the four planes would hit about one every half hour, setting us up to think it would go on all day. Or that the US would shut down civil aviation entirely for days (I can’t express how eerie that was).
They could certainly manage a higher body count with some other sort of attack. But it’s hard to see how they’re ever going to come up with something so implausibly Hollywood ever again. Or how anything less would have the same effect.
Correction and apologies: Professor Gunaratna is with the St Andrews Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence in the US – not the University of St Andrews Centre for …
I’m pretty convinced Al Quaeda did know how photogenic the WTC attack would be – it wasn’t optimised for maximal casualties (attacking an hour later would have been far, far worse for a start), but it was probably the most news-grabbing thing they could have done.
As for the few good chemists, I would still be worried if I thought that it was mere chance that they didn’t happen to have the right people. What makes me less worried is the thought that organisations like al-quaeda depend on uneducated people for their support base, which implies that people who have the required skills are probably a whole lot less likely to join such a group than a mad cult.
I disagree on the ‘timing’ issue. I can’t believe for a moment that the 9/11 hijackers would not have loved to slaughter a great deal more people. My read on the timing is that they picked a daylight period (for the effect we mention), but had to pick a time with MINIMAL passenger traffic, such as pre-8am departures. No one likes schelpping to the airport at 6:00am.
Their thinking, obviously, was to preclude exactly what happened on Flight 93. The more passengers on board, the more possibility of unforseen reactions by them. And all four of those planes had a substantial number of empty seats, I believe.
Thus, their thinking was entirely operational. I cannot believe a single decision, or even thought, was given to minimizing casualties. Nor will it be in the future.
Andrew X, it’s also easier to hit what you are aiming at in the morning light. I doubt they bothered with getting an instrument rating.
As for terrorism warnings, when the head of the Security Service is giving out more press releases than bin Laden, she’s the dangerous one.
The intelligence services were silent until they had poltically to justify their existence after the Cold War. Only then the flashy headquarters, identified staff, need for involvement in dealing with ordinary “serious and organised” crime. Counterintelligence doesn’t require PR. More obvious intervention in our daily lives by the secret police just might.
Andrew X: I quite agree. What I was getting at is that if simply murdering the maximum number of people were their priority I think they would have planned differently. I think the reason they went for the easier time, knowing it wouldn’t kill as many thousands of people, was that they realised this was going to be the most headline-grabbing terrorist attack in history by a huge margin, so the greater risk of failure wasn’t a good trade off for the larger number of casualties if they attacked later.
One thing that stands in the way of dirty bombs is the physics. For enough radioactive material to have an effect, it would have to be packed so densely that its effect would be to neutralise the explosive. The US looked at using dirty bombs and found them to be unworkable.
Phat Bob: I think you may have different definition of dirty bomb. For most people some explosives in a container of radio-active material would form a dirty bomb – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2037056.stm
What really suprises me is Al Quaeda hasn’t mounted more high profile operations in the West. As the IRA demonstrated, a small group of people under constant pressure from security services can mount lots of attacks over long periods. So why hasn’t Al Quaeda?
I think it is a combination of limited/poor logistics, a lack of man-power and the Arab love of show over substance. Maybe I’m dead wrong here, but it looks like 911 was a one-shot deal. Gas and dirty bomb attacks, when you have the materials, don’t require a lot of logistics. I think Al Quaeda was/is concerned with the symbolism of buildings and bridges and completely failed to understand the psychological impact of terror. They simply don’t understand that their most potent weapon is fear and panic
Also suicide attackers does pose special problems in developing institutional capability – no experienced people left around.