In late January, Osama bin Laden released an
audiotape praising the Nigerian who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound
airliner on Christmas Day 2009. "The message delivered to you through
the plane of the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a
confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes of [September]
11th," he said.
While the tape was proof that Al Qaeda's leader was
still alive, it also raised the question of whether he's now only an
irrelevant militant seeking to associate himself with even failed
attacks originated by groups he doesn't control. After all, the
organization behind the botched bombing was Al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula, headquartered in Yemen, thousands of miles from bin Laden's
presumed base on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Bin Laden's
irrelevance seemed further confirmed in June, when CIA Director Leon
Panetta told ABC News that Al Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan is now
"relatively small...I think at most we're looking at maybe 50 to 100."
For some, these small numbers suggest that bin
Laden's organization is fading away, and that the war against it is
largely won. But the fact is that Al Qaeda has always been a small
organization. According to the FBI, there were only 200 sworn members at
the time of the 9/11 attacks, and the group has always seen itself
primarily as an ideological and military vanguard seeking to influence
and train other jihadist groups.
To read the rest of this article, visit Newsweek, where this was
originally published.
Peter Bergen, the editor of the AfPak Channel, is a senior fellow at the
New America Foundation and at New York University's Center on Law and Security,
and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's
Leader. He is a national security analyst for CNN.
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