3 Lessons from London

By John Cloud

The name--al-Qaeda, the base--hasn't made sense in years, at least not since al-Qaeda training camps were incinerated in the post-9/11 strikes on Afghanistan. But jihadism is an especially centrifugal force, flinging adherents across borders until what we still notionally call al-Qaeda exists everywhere and nowhere, more an impulse than an organization. Men and boys with small lives and big hopes for the afterlife visit jihadist websites, meet like-minded rejects at the local mosque, pay a visit to one of the overseas imams known for radical preaching and then--well, no one can say for sure. Some return home--to Lodi, Calif.; to Casablanca; to London--each the site of recently captured jihadist suspects. Others go to Iraq to join the insurgency. Many are captured and killed; others resolve to sleep for a few years before striking. And so al-Qaeda seems--still--both fearsome and diaphanous.

Those who track jihadists can't tell you where or when the next strike will come, not least because the West's war on terrorism has deprived al-Qaeda's "leaders"--even Osama bin Laden (especially Osama bin Laden)--of the ability to move or communicate effectively. U.S. intelligence officials say 75% of al-Qaeda's top bosses have been killed or captured. Today, says French terrorism expert Roland Jacquard, "the most militant groups are forming on their own initiative, on the margins of the movement ... They certainly aren't going to wait for the fatwas permitting attacks on civilians. They figure the previous ones are all they need." It's a free-for-all.

After London, however--as after Madrid before it and Casablanca before that and Riyadh and Bali--we do know a bit more about the al-Qaeda movement's capabilities and priorities. A clear picture of who carried out the attacks may take days to come into focus. But the location, targets and timing of the 7/7 bombings do, to differing degrees, provide lessons about the nature of the threat posed by al-Qaeda today--and how it's changing. Here are three of the big ones:

Lesson #1

EUROPE IS BURNING

The attacks on 7/7 were a reminder that Europe is, more than ever, a center of the threat. That's partly because European nations like Britain have a tradition of welcoming immigrants from North Africa and Pakistan. The children of those immigrants--many of them jobless and ghettoized in insular suburban tracts or city centers--often feel alienated from the ambient permissiveness of London or Paris. Alienated and bored: Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc., wrote in the New York Times last week that the unemployment rate among 16- to 24-year-old Muslim men in Britain is 22%. He cited a British government report leaked to the Sunday Times in London last year that estimates between 10,000 and 15,000 British Muslims support al-Qaeda and similar groups.

They are the lumpen jihadists. "Today Europe is facing a Europeanized form of jihad," says Eric Denece, director of the French Center of Intelligence Research in Paris. "These are young men who were born and grew up in Europe. They look like normal Europeans; they sound like normal Europeans; and they harness this seething anger and sense of righteous outrage in a manner adapted to what they see as jihad in Europe." While there is some evidence that the bombing of four Madrid trains on "3/11"--March 11, 2004--was inspired by seasoned radicals who had been to al-Qaeda's Afghan camps before 9/11, those attacks were perpetrated mostly by Moroccans who had been living in Spain for years.

And yet even after Madrid, Europe has been slow to respond. The office of the European terrorist czar, created after 3/11, has just three employees. "Often we need attacks to get serious," says Stefano Dambruoso, Italy's top antiterrorism magistrate until last year. Until recently, the British were notoriously indulgent of hate-spewing imams and the fanatics who worshipped at their mosques. "It took years to convince the British authorities that they had a significant homegrown Islamic threat," says a recently retired FBI counterterrorism official. "I remember being there in 1999, and one of our guys joked, 'If you don't start paying attention to the radical elements in your country, the Queen's going to be living in Ireland.' They didn't think that was very funny." Just in March, the British released a detainee called Abu Qatada, considered the spiritual leader of al-Qaeda in Europe. The British are watching Abu Qatada carefully, but authorities in half a dozen countries would like to question him, and he was indicted by a Spanish antiterrorism judge in 2003.

For the U.S., it's the second-generation European Muslims--most of them European Union citizens--who are a security risk. "As E.U. citizens, they're eligible for U.S. visa waivers, which means they can represent a direct threat to the U.S.," says Robert Leiken of the Nixon Center, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank founded by the former President. "Local groups that are already in place, that grew up in Western Europe and can conduct surveillance for multiple bombings without arousing a great deal of suspicion--this can be an enormous problem." Right now the FBI has no evidence of any hard-core al-Qaeda operatives left in the U.S. But a senior U.S. intelligence official says American law enforcers have ramped up surveillance of what he called "possible facilitators" for terrorists. The official put the number of such "individuals of interest" at fewer than 100. Still, when FBI director Robert Mueller spoke to the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this year, he was worried about "the potential recruitment of radicalized American Muslim converts ... The process of recruitment is subtle and, many times, self-initiated, and radicalization tends to occur over long periods of time."

Lesson #2

THE ENEMY ADAPTS

Time, of course, works to the terrorists' advantage. The other lesson underscored by the London bombings is that despite losing their command-and-control structures, the terrorists have adjusted. After Richard Reid's foiled attempt to detonate the bomb in his shoe on an American Airlines flight in December 2001, jihadists have mostly avoided hard targets such as planes and government buildings. Instead they attack nightclubs, hotels--and commuter rails. The newer terrorist network has found that even in a war zone like Afghanistan, spending a little on motorcycles and satellite phones can make killing infidels that much easier.

Bin Laden, who is incommunicado anyway, isn't required to authorize such comparatively minor maleficence but merely to inspire it. "The Old Guard is all gone," says a German security official. "We are no longer dealing with the generation [that trained in Afghanistan], a close group of activists who knew each other. We are now dealing with a generation which has kept a low profile." A French official adds that this generation is "learning without leaving"--training to become jihadists right at home, through videos and the Internet. Some radical propaganda videos are now even shot or subtitled in English so Western Muslims who don't speak Arabic can understand them.

Supervising all this is a far more informal network of radical Islamists who facilitate contacts clandestinely from Europe to the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. "Previously, the rule always was networks were run by several jihad-hardened veterans of Bosnia, Afghanistan or Chechnya," says Denece, a former officer in French military intelligence. "Today officials are finding groups with no foreign-trained members, and only one or two external contacts with deeper al-Qaeda roots." Cells from England to Somalia manage their own ops. Consequently, says a European-based U.S. official, "their chances are low of taking over a plane again ... But they can obviously get down into the subway system. If you make yourself a harder target, you push them to softer targets."

It's inevitable that in the wake of the London attacks, authorities in major cities will step up security measures to guard against subway bombings. But it's just as inevitable that the terrorists will shift tactics in response. There is plenty of evidence, for instance, that al-Qaeda cells are interested in getting their hands on a small amount of biological, chemical or radiological weaponry, with the intent of producing a giant death toll from a soft target. Imagine if the London bombs were filled with anthrax or sarin.

Lesson #3

LOOK BEYOND IRAQ

If the London attack limned al-Qaeda's limitations and strengths, it has not yet helped clarify what role the Iraq war has played in helping or hurting the jihadist movement. We know that some of the Madrid terrorists had watched videotaped messages from Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq. Did he also help inspire the London attackers? Jihadist groups in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations say they have found it easier to lure new recruits because the American invasion has encouraged a climate of social approval for radical Islamism. And it's virtually certain that some terrorists are improving their homegrown skills with live combat training in Iraq. David Kay, who led the CIA's hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, says European intelligence officials told him at a meeting in May that their nations are seeing "episodic evidence" of jihadists who had returned from Iraq refulgent with anti-American hatred and well-versed in bombmaking. "There is all this opportunity in Iraq for them to learn how to counter our tactics," says a U.S. counterterrorism official.

On the other hand, the roots of Islamic extremism in Europe go back much further than the beginning of the Iraq war. After all, al-Qaeda was originally founded in the 1980s to depose the Saudi monarchy, and that goal remains very important. (Just last week a Qaeda leader was killed in a shoot-out in Riyadh.) In London, North African extremists were preaching at the Finsbury Park mosque well before 9/11. And France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe, has battled Muslim extremism for decades. Finally, as Bush Administration officials point out, every jihadist who gets killed in Iraq is one more who won't be plotting in Barcelona or Jakarta or Los Angeles. Denece describes the scores of European terrorists who have ended up in Iraq as "cannon fodder."

Now that extremists have attacked in both Madrid and London, one hope is that the larger, law-abiding Muslim communities in Europe will more effectively marginalize their radicals. A British intelligence expert says British Muslims seem to be hardening toward jihadists in their midst. Muslim leaders in Britain--including the new moderate imam who runs Finsbury Park--condemned last week's attacks and appealed for tips to help find the perpetrators.

But the most enduring lesson terrorism experts have learned is that a movement as far-flung as bin Ladenism can't easily be contained. "It's been a constant truth in this discipline that by the time you've figured out what Islamists are up to, they've already moved on to something else," the French official says. At another point, he says, "We work tirelessly. We use every means at our disposal to discover and avert attacks. And we work as much as possible with our partners." Sometimes, he adds, the work pays off and attacks are averted; he mentions the bust of a Paris-based cell a couple of years ago. "But when we see what it was these people had in store for us, it makes your hair stand on end. Fortunately, we got that group. It's virtually assured that one day, we will miss another like it." --Reported by Helen Gibson/London, Bruce Crumley/Paris, Brian Bennett, Timothy J. Burger, Douglas Waller and Adam Zagorin/Washington, Jeff Israely/ Rome, Scott MacLeod/Cairo, Nathan Thornburgh/New York and William Boston/Berlin

With reporting by Reported by Helen Gibson/London, Bruce Crumley/Paris, Brian Bennett, Timothy J. Burger, DOUGLAS WALLER, Adam Zagorin/Washington, Jeff Israely/ Rome, Scott MacLeod/Cairo, Nathan Thornburgh/New York, William Boston/Berlin