Al-Qaeda's long march to war

[TomClash]

Al-Qaeda's long march to war
By Michael Scheuer

In recent weeks, media reports from both Iraq and Afghanistan have suggested the appearance of a slow evolution of the Islamist insurgents' tactics in the direction of the battlefield deployment of larger mujahideen units that attack "harder" facilities.

These attacks are not replacing small-unit attacks, ambushes, kidnappings, assassinations and suicide bombings in either country, but rather seem to be initial and tentative forays toward another stage of fighting.

In the past month, reports have suggested Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Iraqi resistance allies are trying to train semi-conventional units, and this month's large-unit action by the Taliban at the town of Musa Qala in southern Afghanistan may be straws in the wind in this regard.

Al-Qaeda believes that it and its allies can only defeat the United States in a "long war", one that allows the Islamists to capitalize on their extraordinary patience, as well as on their enemies' lack thereof. Before his death in a firefight with Saudi security forces, the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Abu Hajar Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin, wrote extensively about how al-Qaeda believed the military fight against the US and its allies would unfold. He envisioned a point at which the mujahideen would have to develop semi-conventional forces. He identified this period as the "Decisive Stage" <1>.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HE31Ak02.html

[Kipling]

1. That's worrying. Thank god our leaders are so wise, patient, and competent

[Igel]

2. But Scheuer misses the main point.

Which isn't that they're doing it, but how they're doing it.

And, on that matter, his intellectual self-castration is a common enough practice. But the solution is difficult, and while one aspect of it was briefly suggested in a country that *does* recognize and could discuss the problem--Pakistan--the partial solution was promptly squelched.

If you can't recognize the problem, you can't deal with it, except by accident.