AL-QAEDA AND THE CHANGING FACE OF TERRORISM

On a Monday morning in the late summer of 2001, this writer got a phone call from a friend, telling him to turn on CNN. "Buddy, we're under attack," the friend said. What the writer and millions of other Americans saw in the following hours was for our generation what the Kennedy assassination and the attack on Pearl Harbor were for earlier generations: an uneraseable shock that would permanently change our understanding of the world.

Terrorism, once abstract and remote to most Americans, had suddenly become real and immediate. Understanding the full implications, however, has been an ongoing process, since the nature of the threat is itself evolving. As will be shown below, al-Queda no longer exists in the form it did on the morning of September 11, 2001. It has become not a "terrorist organization" but a terrorist idea, presenting no single target or even group of targets that can be attacked by conventional military means.

Al-Qaeda, so far as Western intelligence organizations can determine, was never a traditional, top-down terrorist political organization in the mold of militant Palestinian groups, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, or the Tamil Tigers. All of those latter groups have a specific and limited political agenda. Their actions, as the great 19th century German strategic thinker Clausewitz said of war, are politics by other means." Often, in fact, they are associated with political wings that oper

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Category: History - A