And now, al Qaeda is looking to another battlefield:
Islamic terrorism killed 491 people in 2007, up sharply from 126 in 2006. In reaction to their defeat in Iraq (where 500 terrorism deaths a month is a low figure), many al Qaeda operators are moving to North Africa, where it's safer (American soldiers and marines are farther away). December saw a spike in terrorism related deaths; 56 (versus six in November).
The way they are scattering it is looking less like a command decision to seek another place to wage their offensive as we hammer them in Iraq and more like just plain running from Iraq.
Yet despite their claim to fight for true Islam, Moslems react badly to the jihadis in their midst. Al Qaeda is losing hearts and minds in the Moslem world:
The conventional wisdom is that al-Qaeda is making a comeback from its rout in Afghanistan. Many point to its success in killing Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan and to its support of Islamic insurgents there as evidence. Not so. Al-Qaeda is waning. Its decline has less to do with our success than with the institutional limitations of the al-Qaeda organization. Simply stated, to know al-Qaeda closely is not to love it.
Everyplace where al-Qaeda has gained some measure of control over a civilian population, it has quickly worn out its welcome. This happened in Kabul and in Anbar province in western Iraq. It may well happen in Pakistan as a reaction to the killing of Bhutto.
No one likes to be brutalized and dominated by foreigners. The weakness of al-Qaeda is that everywhere it goes its people are strangers. This is no way to build a worldwide caliphate.
It helps that Anderson attacks the silly conventional wisdom that al Qaeda is winning, with Iraq usually cited as the reason for this failure of our fight. (You know, the silly "distraction" argument?) But Anderson discounts our fight for this al Qaeda defeat and gives the "credit" to al Qaeda's brutality. He has a point. But he also misses the impact of our fight against al Qaeda in highlighting that self-defeating brutality.
Before we counter-attacked al Qaeda after 9/11, local jihadis managed to alienate local Moslems by their terror campaigns. But al Qaeda remained popular among Moslems because al Qaeda targetted America. There was always some satisfaction among a certain percentage of Moslems in reading about this jihad taking on the world's superpower. Local economic failure that depressed self esteem was raised by tales of terrorists hitting America. And even larger numbers of Moslems weren't worked up about the terror directed at us enough to actively fight al Qaeda even if in theory they didn't approve of al Qaeda terror.
America's fight in Afghanistan and Iraq against al Qaeda has led al Qaeda to kill Moslems more than Americans in those theaters of war. Second, when they've had difficulty killing American troops or hitting America at home, al Qaeda has turned on other Moslem civilians even outside Iraq and Afghanistan, which has further spoiled their image among Moslems. And worse, local jihadis who in the past only spoiled the image of local jihadis are now hurting al Qaeda's image by signing up with al Qaeda to get the bin Laden "brand" for their own jihad.
And even better from our point of view, with rats fleeing their sinking ship in Iraq to flee to a number of countries rather than focusing on one target, al Qaeda forces more countries to essentially fight as our allies by killing and arresting terrorists we'd have to kill or arrest anyway.
I'm sure somebody in the West will manage to spin this ongoing defeat into a cunning enemy plan that we are "falling for" by fighting.
