Assessing Al-Qaeda (merged thread)

[CPT Holzbach]

How Al-Qaida may evolve, or end:

The war on terrorism might be perpetual, but the war on al-Qaida will end. Although the al-Qaida network is in many ways distinct from its terrorist predecessors, especially in its protean ability to transform itself from a physical to a virtual organization, it is not completely without precedent. And the challenges of devising an effective response over the long term to a well-established international group are by no means unique. Al-Qaida shares elements of continuity and discontinuity with other terrorist groups, and lessons to be learned from the successes and failures of past and present counterterrorist responses may be applicable to this case. Current research focuses on al-Qaida and its associates, with few serious attempts to analyze them within a broader historical and political context. Yet this context sheds light on crucial assumptions and unanswered questions in the campaign against al-Qaida. What do scholars know about how terrorist movements end? What has worked in previous campaigns? Which of those lessons are relevant to understanding how, and under what circumstances, al-Qaida will end?