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The debate over the threat al-Qaida poses continues. But it is a much healthier, better informed debate than ever before
Last week saw the first anniversary of the American special forces raid on the compound in Abbottabad, a garrison town in northern Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden had spent the last five or so years of his life. The Saudi-born extremist, who founded the al-Qaida group in 1988, died from two gunshot wounds to the chest and head. His group did not die with him and the debate over the threat al-Qaida poses continues. But it is a much healthier, better informed debate than ever before. This is to be welcomed.
To coincide with the anniversary, the White House released hundreds of pages of documents seized in the raid on Abbottabad. The advantages of highlighting the undoubted achievement of successfully finding and killing the man responsible for the 9/11 attacks in an election year are evident. So too are the benefits of portraying Osama bin Laden in a negative light. The documents released were not simply vetted to avoid the publication of sensitive information, but were clearly selected to paint a picture of a demoralised, fragmented organisation with a tetchy, frustrated and far from omnipotent boss.
None the less, they are useful. We learned, for example, of bin Laden's irritation with members of al-Qaida's affiliate in the Yemen, who appeared to have forgotten his injunctions to avoid targeting local security forces and to strike against US interests instead; of his concern that a naturalised American citizen of Pakistani origin had broken his citizen's oath by trying to bomb New York; that "the brothers' political gaffes" were continuing despite his repeated admonishments. There too is his concern with the challenge of the "tremendous event" of the Arab Spring uprisings and whether al-Qaida should change its name in a bid to regain the "lost support" of Muslim communities.
More mundane matters worried the al-Qaida leader, cooped up in a three-storey house with three wives and 12 children and grandchildren. He sent a message via two intermediaries to his 21-year-old son Hamza: "Tell him to leave [the dangerous zones along the frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan]. Tell him his father says so."
What is striking about this portrait of bin Laden is how uncontroversial it now is. Ten years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the al-Qaida leader and the organisation he led were described very differently. From his heavily protected, fully equipped cave headquarters, the scion of the rich Saudi construction dynasty apparently used his vast fortune to run a global web of recruiters, bombers and sleeper cells. We now know that this vision of the man and the group revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of the phenomenon of modern Sunni Muslim militancy and bin Laden's role within it on the part of policymakers, the public and the media. It also vastly exaggerated the threat posed. Its dominance in the early years of the last decade goes some way to explaining the catastrophically counterproductive policies adopted at that time.
By around 2007, the nature of al-Qaida was much better understood. Analysts at the CIA described it, much more intelligently, as a "complex adaptive social movement". The adaptivity was not exclusively an attribute of the extremists. The western counterterrorist agencies also evolved rapidly, in terms of thinking, organisation and tactics. So, too, did policymakers and, most importantly, so too did the public. The generally negative reaction in Britain to the extraordinary security arrangements for the Olympics – with warships on the Thames and jet fighters based on London's outskirts – has shown how far we have come from the fear and ignorance of a decade ago. We have finally got the threat posed by al-Qaida, its offshoots and its ideology in perspective.
Huge problems remain. Yesterday, the military trial began of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the chief plotters of the 9/11 attacks, at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre. This newspaper would have vastly preferred Mohammed to be tried in a civilian court, not least because that would have allowed the world to hear in detail of his torture.
The continued existence of Guantánamo Bay and the discussion of Mohammed's torture – an utterly counterproductive tactic – should be a reminder of how badly policymakers and the intelligence agencies that advise them got things wrong a decade ago. If there is one lesson from the conflicts of the last years it is that though knowledge may be power, power does not mean knowledge. Now that we know much more, we have no excuse for making such mistakes in the future.