The first question of the AQ Strategy Poll 2011-2012 asked 268 respondents the following question the week prior to Bin Laden’s death

Assuming 1) AQ’s Senior Leaders (UBL and Zawahiri) still have some directional authority over AQ affiliates and, 2) AQ is designing a strategy to survive and flourish based on recent events, what will be the primary focus of AQ’s strategy from the summer of 2011 through the end of 2012? (You can only pick one)
This goal of this question was to anticipate what al Qa’ida’s main effort would be through 2012. Reminder, respondents voted on this question the week prior to Bin Laden’s death.

Here are the findings I found most interesting:

-‘Attacks in Pakistan’ received the most votes followed closely behind by ‘Multiple attacks in the West’, ‘Strengthen AQAP in Yemen’ and ‘Repaint AQ’s role in the Arab Spring’. Overall, there was no strong preference for any one option.

-All professional groups voted in remarkably similar distributions across all responses. This is one of the only questions where groups did not significantly diverge in preference.

-‘Academic’ and ‘Government’ voters diverged in their preferences on almost all of the survey questions analyzed up to this point. However, in this question, ‘Academic’ and ‘Government’ voters were normally within 5% of each other for every response.

-‘Government’ respondents were the most likely group to pick ‘Strengthen AQAP in Yemen’. I wonder if all groups would pick this choice in larger numbers had the question been asked the week after Bin Laden’s death.

For Charts and Graphs see this link:
http://selectedwisdom.com/?p=391