To me the big puzzle remains why Al Qaeda has not pulled off another successful attack on American soil. Look at the two snipers, they almost brought the Washington area to a standstill, and neither was close to an organizational genius. Over the last two weeks we have instead seen terrorist “chatter” leading to foiled plans.
One hypothesis is “terrorism as theater.” In this view the terrorist group consumes the very sense of acting like terrorists. They enjoy the planning, the feeling of being in a working group, the secret code words, and so on. They don’t admit it, but perhaps they enjoy the process more than they like killing people or achieving some political end. If this is the case, they will go ahead with their planning even if Uncle Sam is listening in, and they won’t move to less centralized, more anonymous forms of communication. They get to do what they love, and that means sticking around as an organized terrorist group or cell. Furthermore since they don’t actually end up having to attack and die, they will outlast those terrorists determined to be martyrs.
A second hypothesis is “terrorists as fundraisers.” Perhaps the terrorists in the field are manipulating their donors. In this view they cynically realize that they don’t want to attack at all. But they don’t want to have to get a real job either. They want to receive funding support, false passports, travel, and the other “benefits” of the terrorist lifestyle. They don’t want to be caught, but neither do they wish to succeed so much that they must attack and sacrifice their lives. They cannot do nothing, or they will have their funding cut off. So they continually half-plan a series of faux attacks, and then move on as they approach a high risk of detection.
I don’t have any hard evidence for either of these hypotheses. But at least they try to explain why there have been no further attacks. After all, haven’t you, like I, wondered why we have seen no “lone wolf” Al Qaeda attacks on American soil?
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