[ LOOKING AHEAD ]


AMIR KHAN, A YOUNG, SAUDI- born, American terrorist, was leaving on a trip to Yemen with his fellow holy warriors when he heard that Osama bin Laden was dead. He was devastated.


A Scary Post-bin Laden S


By Judith Miller


Pulitzer Prize- winning investigative reporter Judith Miller, formerly of The New York Times, is currently an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an expert on national security issues.


“All of a sudden, the world felt a bit empty,” he lamented in the most recent issue of Inspire, the slick English-language online magazine he edits for al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Inspire pres- ents a hip version of militant Islam to attract young English- speaking believers. “Was


it really his time?” Khan carried


on. “Did Allah really take the soul of the lion?”


Khan, nevertheless, was stalwart. Bin Laden’s death would not “in any way” reverse or limit his movement’s struggle to impose Islamic law “in all Muslim lands.” The “holy war” would go on. A fi erce debate has erupted among counterterrorism analysts over how badly bin Laden’s killing and the Arab Spring revolts against Arab gov- ernments have hurt al-Qaida and the violent movement he helped spawn. Some say that threat of militant Islamism, of terrorism in general, has long been, as scholar John Mueller warned in his 2006 book, Overblown. Since the late 1960s, Mueller argues, Americans have been as likely to be killed by international terrorism as they are by getting struck by light- ning, hitting a deer, or suffering an allergic reaction to peanuts.


80 9|11: A DECADE LATER / NEWSMAX / SEPTEMBER 2011


“Al-Qaida no longer poses a national security threat to the American homeland of the type that could result in a mass-casualty attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11,” said Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert in testimony last May on Capitol Hill after bin Laden’s death. Analysts such as Bergen, however, warn against declaring victory over al-Qaida and the militant Islamic jihad too soon, or repudiating the notion that America will have to con- tinue combating Islamist terror. Militant Islamic extremism, if not the al-Qaida “core” organiza- tion, is likely to remain America’s principle enemy for the foreseeable future, they warn. “Bin Laden’s great achievement was transforming an organization into a worldwide move- ment that continues to attract thou- sands of adherents from through- out the world,” says William Braniff, a terrorism expert at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. Others see new threats emerg- ing, some only indirectly related to al-Qaida or militant Islam, including new dangers posed by familiar foes, such as China and Russia, and insta- bility arising from Mexico, Pakistan, Yemen, and other poorer countries. Still others fear the intermingling of such foes and militant Islamists.


he Obama administration is optimistic that al-Qaida’s core is on the decline, but wary of claiming victory prematurely. Its caution is evi- dent in a 69-page “Progress Report” issued in July by the Department of Homeland Security, the leviathan that Congress created in 2003 at the behest of the 9/11 Commission. The merger fused 22 separate agencies and offi ces, each with its own specifi c culture and procedures,


T


into a single, Cabinet-level depart- ment with a mind-boggling 240,000 employees, most of whom live out- side of D.C.


Though America is “stronger, safer, and more resilient than ever before” a decade after 9/11 and has made “signifi cant progress” reduc- ing the vulnerabilities that enabled the terrorists to strike, wrote DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, “threats from terrorism persist” — ranging from crude homemade bombs to sophisticated biological or cyberat- tacks — “and challenges remain.” Strikingly, although the report never mentions the word “Islamic” or “Muslim,” it concludes that al-Qai-


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