Is bin Laden's Jihad succeeding?
Mary Habeck has an interesting post on why there's been a spike in attempted terror attacks:
Now that administration officials have announced that the Pakistani Taliban (the TTP) were behind the recent attempted bombing of Times Square, we can turn to the question of why there have been so many threatened and actual attacks on the United States inspired by, or actually emanating from, places where the United States is not involved in an active war. A look at arrests in the United States from May 2009 to the present shows dozens of such cases -- many involving multiple suspects -- linked to places like Somalia, Yemen, and of course Pakistan. Four of the plotters (Abulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (Yemen), Nidal Malik Hasan (Yemen), Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (Yemen), and Faisal Shahzad (Pakistan) managed to carry out attacks, although only two were "successful."
Her answer is actually quite interesting but there's something amiss with the description above. First, while it's technically correct that we're not actively at war with Pakistan, we're pretty clearly waging a war inside Pakistan that's killing a fair number of Pakistanis. Second, it could be the that Yemen and Somalia are opportunistic and accessible stopovers for terrorists (and their radicalizers), just as Afghanistan and Sudan served as incubators of jihad in the 1990s even though the U.S. was not at war with them, either.
Still, Habeck's point is that bin Laden may finally be achieving what he set out to do years ago, which was (is) to unite various groups of jihadists and convince them to direct their fire toward the U.S. homeland. The fact that several American citizens have recently been lured by the call is certainly cause for alarm.
