US Counter-Terrorism Strategy and Al-Qaeda by Geltzer Joshua A.;Gow James;Kerr Rachel;

Author:Geltzer, Joshua A.;Gow, James;Kerr, Rachel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Sciences
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Byman similarly explained, ‘We have some sense that [after] the Cole attack, bin Laden was disappointed that there wasn’t a response. And to me, September 11th, part of it was clearly designed to suck the United States into Afghanistan.’22 Hence, after the attack on the Cole failed to provoke America, plans already underway for the 9/11 attacks continued.

Those attacks emerged not for the reasons assumed by the Bush administration. It was not, as the Bush team claimed, that America had invited further attacks from al-Qaeda because the group thought that it could launch such attacks without generating an American response. Instead, 9/11 came about because al-Qaeda thought that it could launch such an attack in order to generate an American response of the type elicited by the 1998 bombings but of a far greater magnitude. The mildness of America’s 1998 response and the absence of a response in 2000 disappointed, rather than encouraged, al-Qaeda. The 1998 and 2000 attacks, while failing to arouse America as al-Qaeda hoped, instead served as something of a test of the group’s strategy: ‘The attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, along with the attack on the USS Cole, were designed to measure the reaction of the U.S.’23 That reaction was not too little to deter al-Qaeda; rather, it was enough to lead al-Qaeda to continue escalating its attacks until it provoked the desired American retaliation.

In sum, there is a broad consensus among counter-terrorist experts that the lessons learned by the Bush administration from interactions between al-Qaeda and America during the preceding administration were not in accord with a thorough assessment of al-Qaeda and its strategy. Al-Qaeda did not seek to attack America with impunity.24 To the contrary, beginning with al-Qaeda’s first attacks, ‘[b]in Laden wanted to lure the United States into Afghanistan, which was already being called the graveyard of empires’.25 That was a central impetus behind al-Qaeda’s terrorist campaign—and it was one that would come to fruition only after 9/11. Hence, the Bush administration learned lessons from al-Qaeda’s 1998 and 2000 attacks at odds with the group’s actual strategy and world-view. As Wright remarked, ‘All along, those attacks were meant to provoke an American response’—a response of the magnitude unleashed by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11.26

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