...some intelligence sources and experts outside government believe that Al Qaeda has been quiet by choice, not because its plans have been disrupted. ...intelligence officials and experts on terror also point out that Al Qaeda never carried out spectacular attacks, like the 9/11 attacks or the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, in less than two-year intervals. Many of those attacks were in planning stages for more than four years.Quiet by choice because 1) the Bush administration has been doing a good job of making the American people paranoid, and Al Qaeda doesn't need to bother; 2) Al Qaeda operates in a much longer time frame than America is used to; 3) the more ground America covers with its troops, the more thinly spread it will be, making a later attack harder to deal with than a sooner one. This is a big reason, I think, for Rummy's insistence on small troop deployments in Iraq. He wants to give the impression that we can do the maximum damage with the minimum resources and are therefore a very long ways away from our limits. But troop deployments are only one part of the equation; the PNAC folks are real big on the use of technology as a "force multiplier," which has worked out for them so far but is really expensive. Financial assets can be spread too thin as well. And 4) the economy is still looking shaky. I predicted a while ago that Al Qaeda would not attempt another major attack until after the fall of Iraq for propaganda reasons. I think it also may wait until the economy appears to be pulling out of its slump and American military adventurism appears to be slowing down.
...Al Qaeda has demonstrated it has a deep bench. The detentions of key operatives are setbacks, but 70,000 men have passed through Al Qaeda's training camps or fought with Arab freedom fighters in Afghanistan.Damn, we have 3,000 suspected Al Qaeda operatives in custody, and high estimates of global membership during the Afghan operation were never more than 10,000 or so.
70,000.
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