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3 - Al Qaeda in Europe: Today's Battlefield
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- By Steven Clemons, Senior Fellow, The New America Foundation, Rohan Gunaratna, Director, Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies, Ursula Mueller, Minister, Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany to the United States, Georg Mascolo, Washington Bureau Chief, Der Spiegel
- Edited by Karen J. Greenberg, New York University
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- Book:
- Al Qaeda Now
- Published online:
- 06 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 05 September 2005, pp 42-60
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- Chapter
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Summary
ROHAN GUNARATNA
Why did al Qaeda attack America's most iconic landmarks on 9/11? I ask this question of my American friends and they tell me that al Qaeda does not like our values. I want to tell you that al Qaeda has no problem at all with your values. Al Qaeda's problem is with your foreign policy. And if we look at the founding charter of al Qaeda, it was created as the pioneering vanguard of the Islamic movement.
Al Qaeda was created for the very purpose of leading this fight. The predecessor organization of al Qaeda, known as Makhtab al-Khidamat (MAK, the Afghan Services Bureau), played a very critical role in the anti-Soviet, multinational, Afghan Mujahideen campaign, a campaign that finally led to the defeat of the largest land army at that time in Afghanistan.
In many ways the battle that al Qaeda is conducting today is an attack on the remaining superpower. The strategic threat posed by al Qaeda has been underestimated by the Americans and by their allies and friends. Specifically, the Western response to fighting al Qaeda has been an event-driven response. It must be a campaign-driven one. The current response to al Qaeda has been largely a response that I would say is called a Rumsfeld approach.
Foreword
- Michael Richardson
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- Book:
- A Time Bomb for Global Trade
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 21 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2004, pp vi-x
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Summary
The threat of terrorism has escalated severalfold since terrorists struck the United States on 11 September 2001. Instead of an average of one attack by Al-Qaeda every year, post-9/11 Al-Qaeda and its associated groups stage an average of one attack every three months. Both before and after 9/11, Al-Qaeda successfully attacked or attempted to attack naval and commercial shipping of the US, its allies or its friends. After an aborted attempt to target USS The Sullivans in January 2000, Al-Qaeda nearly sank the state-of-the-art destroyer USS Cole in October 2000. Two years later, when a US warship failed to appear in a pre-designated kill zone of Al-Qaeda off Yemen, an explosives-laden boat piloted by an Al-Qaeda member struck a target of opportunity — the French oil supertanker Limburg.
As a learning organization, Al-Qaeda maximized its successes and minimized its failures. As the “pioneering vanguard of the Islamic movements”, Al-Qaeda also instilled in its associated groups the important belief that they must repeat its successes. The international alert and publicity generated by these two iconic attacks led Al- Qaeda and its associated groups to invest extensively in developing technologies, tactics and techniques for conducting maritime terrorist operations. This was confirmed by the recovery in Afghanistan of video tapes for Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Caucasian terrorist groups to study in depth both offensive and defensive maritime operations by governments as well as by other terrorist groups. The clips of US warships in the Gulf, marine police patrolling the Malacca Strait, and maritime attacks by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the masters of maritime guerrilla and terrorist operations, were among the 241 videos recovered from the Al-Qaeda registry in Afghanistan.
Our knowledge of terrorist intentions, capabilities, and their opportunities for attack, increased after the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. Terrorist training manuals and attack plans specifically targeting naval and commercial maritime shipping in Asia, the Gulf and in the Mediterranean were recovered from the caves of Afghanistan and safe houses in Pakistan. Some of the training manuals both of Al-Qaeda and its associated groups, especially Harkat-ul-Mujahidin, demonstrated that the contemporary terrorist had developed extensive knowledge for conducting surface and underwater maritime attacks.