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Al Qaeda is Back

Bruce Hoffman, professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, has an extremely important opinion piece in today’s Los Angeles Times. The gist of the article is that Al Qaeda is regrouping and strengthening as the United States spends more and more resources immersing itself in Iraq’s civil war.

Mr. Hoffman doesn’t take long to get to his point:

But just as we underestimated Al Qaeda before 9/11, we risk making the same mistake now. Although Al Qaeda is often spoken of as if it is in retreat — a broken and beaten organization incapable of mounting attacks, its leadership cut off, living in caves somewhere in remotest Waziristan — the truth is that the organization is not on the run but on the march.

Listen to the words coming from the White House and both houses of Congress. They’re all talking about Iraq. President Bush’s plan to send more troops is being debated on a seemingly endless basis. The semantics of “civil war” versus “no civil war” are being parsed weekly. Not a word is being uttered about what the people who actually planned and carried out the attacks of September 11 are up to these days.

Here’s the central premise of Mr. Hoffman’s article:

Al Qaeda’s stunning resurrection, before the very eyes of American military forces stationed across the border in southern Afghanistan, begs the question of how the most powerful country in the world can launch a six-year, no-holds-barred, global war on terrorism — at great cost to its pocketbook and international standing — only to find the main target of these Herculean efforts still alive and kicking.

In retrospect, it appears that Iraq blinded us to the possibility of an Al Qaeda renaissance. The United States’ entanglement there has consumed the attention and resources of our country’s military and intelligence communities — at precisely the time that Osama bin Laden and other senior Al Qaeda commanders were in their most desperate straits and stood to benefit most from this distraction. What’s more, even as we took solace in the president’s argument that we were “fighting terrorists over there, so that we don’t have to fight them here,” Al Qaeda was regrouping.

Mr. Hoffman explains that Pakistan is playing a key role in this development. On one hand, Pakistan is offering to help the United States in particular areas. On the other hand, Pakistan is turning a blind eye toward Al Qaeda and its leadership as they regroup within its borders. Here is where we come to one of the greatest prices of the Iraq war: our lost moral standing in the world.

Remember what the world was like just after September 11? The United States could not imaginably have received more goodwill offerings from previously standoffish regimes. And what did we proceed to do? Embark on a destructive unilateral mission to target Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Most of the world, even most of our allies, knew how potentially destructive this path would be, not to mention the international legal issues involved. And while the United States is absolutely right to act in its own self interest if it deems such action necessary, it is important to realize prices will be paid, and sometimes these prices are not so obvious at first glance.

The United States government acted like the international bully when it pushed its way to war oh so quickly in the early parts of 2003. A lot of that goodwill from a year and a half earlier was dissipating. And why does that matter? Because these sorts of bonds are the stuff of which good diplomacy is made. We need help fighting this global war on terror. Other nations have a huge stake in our battle against the terrorists. But we need a lot in return from them, ranging from intelligence to permission to put people on the ground to investigate leads wherever they may turn up. What happens when you spit in the face of the world to target an individual ruler of a sovereign country? You lose the favors you need to wage the global war on terror in the most effective way possible.

And this is why the war on Iraq is so uniquely dangerous and destructive. The American lives lost and the hundreds of billions dollars spent are very obvious costs. But you also have a situation where the United States is acting against its own self interest, acting in a manner that is doing nothing but decreasing the safety of American citizens. Al Qaeda has empirically shown a desire to attack on United States soil. Saddam Hussein had not. Yet we’re spending so many precious intelligence, military, and financial resources in Iraq, we’re neglecting the enemy that flew airplanes into some of our largest buildings and killed thousands of innocent men, women, and children.

Why in the hell are we fighting this war in Iraq?