2005 Year in Review

This is probably my last post before New Year's as I've been more than a little distracted over the holiday break but I noticed this article that 2005 is a good year for al-Qaeda and its allies and figured I'd post my own take on the good, the bad, and the ugly for 2005.

The Good

• A number of impressive victories on the law enforcement and intelligence fronts made it possible for events like 7/7 to be the exception rather than the rule in both Western Europe and the United States and the disruption of al-Qaeda cells internationally appears to be continuing at a pretty good pace.

• A number of senior al-Qaeda leaders including Abu Zaid (Abu Dzeit), Abu Faraj al-Libbi, Louai Sakra, Azahari bin Husin, Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, Abu Omar al-Saif, and Hamza Rabia have all been captured or killed in the course of 2005 through the efforts of the US and its allies.

• US and allied forces in Iraq have succeeded in at least partially disrupting the al-Qaeda infrastructure and "rat lines" in al-Anbar and adjacent provinces since the spring - the entire al-Qaeda network in Mosul appears to be seriously compromised at present. These successes have made it more difficult for Zarqawi to smuggle in suicide bombers, though his group continues to remain the most active and bloody terrorist organization inside Iraq. An impressive number of officer equivalents of al-Qaeda in Iraq were captured throughout 2005 including a number of key logistics, financial, and operational figures and the group's attempt to attack the January and December elections as well as the constitutional referendum were all unsuccessful.

• Progress in Afghanistan appears to be moving along fairly well despite continued attacks from both the Taliban and followers of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Neither the Taliban nor Hekmatyar's followers appear to be nearly as lethal or as well-financed as Zarqawi's fighters in Iraq and have been ineffectual at best in their efforts to overthrow the Afghan government.

• The Pan-Sahel Initiative and other US-backed efforts have helped to undercut the potential for a major al-Qaeda base in North Africa, while raids into Somalia have succeeded in capturing a number of mid-level al-Qaeda leaders in the anarchic country.

• Indonesia continues to engage in a serious domestic campaign against Jemaah Islamiyah and appears to now have at least some kind of serious political engagement with the Acehese GAM, a separatist group that al-Qaeda is known to have courted prior to 9/11. This increased Indonesian awareness combined with an internal schism within Jemaah Islamiyah itself over the wisdom of carrying out attacks in Indonesia has forced many of the group's surviving leaders to flee to Mindanao and left Hambali's successor Zulkarnaen with only a shadow of his predecessor's organization.

The Bad

• As the article notes, al-Qaeda remains active and a threat, as can be seen from the multiple mass casualty terrorist attacks that were noted. Apart from 7/7, Sharm el-Sheikh, the Amman bombings, the second Bali bombings, and the New Delhi bombings, al-Qaeda has carried out literally hundreds of attacks against US forces in Iraq and continues to act as the bloodiest insurgent group there. There are serious fears among counter-terrorism analysts of the threat posed by those al-Qaeda recruits who survive their jihad in Iraq and return to their home countries, though the actual number of such recruits varies considerably from analyst to analyst.

• Since Beslan, Shamil Basayev and his followers have been thankfully unable to conduct any mass casualty terrorist attacks inside Russia proper - their raid on Nalchik was apparently a failure. Russian brutality and political/religious oppression has given Basayev an already radicalized cadre of North Caucasus Wahhabis backed by al-Qaeda that he is now just as capable of carrying out attacks in any of Chechnya's adjacent republics as he is within Chechnya proper. While it has been overshadowed by Iraq lately, Chechnya remains a major cause for al-Qaeda and its allies - the eulogies posted in honor of Abu Omar al-Saif are testimony enough to how highly regarded the jihad there is internationally.

• While General Musharraf has cracked down on those jihadi groups that refuse to submit to his military regime, the Lashkar-e-Taiba continues to be active in Pakistan and appears to be flush with cash from all the donations that have flowed in since the South Asian earthquake. As a result, the organization appears to be in the process of rebuilding its infrastructure from the quake but appears to have made up for any serious losses and continues to train al-Qaeda and allied groups at training camps staffed in many cases by the same al-Qaeda instructors who worked for the network in Afghanistan.

• The GSPC has been seriously degraded thanks to the loss of Abderrazak el-Para and the Pan-Sahel Initiative but remains a threat to Africa as can be seen from its summer attack on a Mauritanian military base. Most of the group appears to have fled Algeria proper for the safety of northern Mali and appears to be in the process of networking with Malian, Moroccan, Nigerian, and Mauritanian Islamists in an effort to regain its strength.

• Bangladesh is currently undergoing a coordinated bombing campaign orchestrated by al-Qaeda's local allies in the Jamaat ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh and Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh that poses a serious threat to the poor country, where al-Qaeda training facilities appear to operate more or less openly thanks to the impotency of the central government and complicity of the local Islamist parties.

• The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) campaign against the Filippino government continues more or less despite the peace process as powerful commanders ally with members of Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah to train recruits, engage in banditry, and continue to carry out terrorist attacks.

• Somalia remains more or less anarchic, enabling it to continue to serve as a terrorist haven for the immediate future.

• The recent bombings in the Sinai and some tentative indicators from the situation in the Gaza Strip suggest that al-Qaeda is establishing a presence in the region, the size and extent of which are still unclear.

• The after-effects of the Andijon Massacre have prompted the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan to become more and more repressive. While the government's actions against suspected IMU and Hizb-ut-Tahrir members are theoretically legitimate, the means through which it has chosen to proceed in that campaign (as with Russia in Chechnya) have only served to amplify rather than contain the threat.

• The "theological deprogramming" methods for dealing with captured al-Qaeda fighters pioneered by Judge al-Hitar in Yemen appear to have failed miserably and I expect that the Saudi therapy approach is going to meet with similar prospects.

The Ugly

• In addition to bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and Zarqawi in Iraq, most of the al-Qaeda ruling council remains at large, with a majority of it being based out of eastern Iran under the direction of Saif al-Adel. As long as the global leadership remains intact and able to direct strategy, they can continue to coordinate and support international terrorism against the United States and its allies. Iran has refused to extradict these individuals back to their countries of origin or restrict their activities to the extent that they are unable to direct operations or even within the bounds of the disciplinary measures the Islamic Republic routinely uses for peaceful political dissidents like Akbar Ganji.

• In addition to the threat of those jihadis who receive combat experience in Iraq, al-Qaeda and allied training facilities continue to remain active in northern Mali, Bosnia, the North Caucasus, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Mindanao to one degree or another. As long as these facilities continue to remain active, Islamic terrorism is not going to appreciably decline no matter how much public support it obtains in any given area - if even %1 of %1 of the population of Saudi Arabia participates in training at these facilities, that's still thousands of terrorists. According to former Senator Graham of Florida and Dr. Rohan Gunaratna, al-Qaeda trained 70-120,000 terrorists prior to the US invasion of Afghanistan. A lot of these individuals are now dead, but as long the training facilities remain active they continue to be a terrifying replaceable phenomenon.

• North Waziristan and likely parts of South Waziristan appear to have fallen under the de facto control of al-Qaeda, Taliban remnants, allied Pashtun tribes, and their allies in the MMA coalition since the defeat of the Pakistani military in 2004. So far, they haven't launched any further plots directly against Musharraf, which suggests either some kind of quid pro quo similar to that enjoyed between the Pakistani government and groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba or that they are busy planning someone else. In strategic terms, this represents the greatest success for both al-Qaeda and the Taliban since their overthrow in 2001 - while Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders are making fantastical claims about having retaken much of southern or eastern Afghanistan, they have in truth established control over a sizeable chunk of northern Pakistan.

• The Golden Chain of largely Saudi magnates who bankroll al-Qaeda continue to operate more or less freely in the Kingdom, as does bin Laden's brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa. They and a number of other al-Qaeda financiers have made a number of impressive legal victories in 2005 and are no closer to having their activities or assets disrupted than they were in 2001. The combination of al-Qaeda continuing to possess its leadership, training camps, and cash more than 4 years after 9/11 is a Very Bad Thing.

• The Muslim population of Europe continues to remain in danger of serious radicalization. The French riots, while not a jihadi initiative in and of themselves, were like the Van Gogh murder a rather ominous harbringer of what may be yet to come. Londonistan also appears largely intact despite the 7/7 and failed 7/21 bombings.

Sorry if this sounds somewhat depressing, but that's basically the year in review as I see it. A number of impressive gains have been made, but there is also a lot of work that is yet to be done in terms of dismantling the terror network that attacked us on 9/11, not all of which can be accomplished by the US alone. Feel free to add anything that you think I may have missed or overlooked and I'll try to touch on it in the comments.