ABSTRACT
Despite many plots, there has been no Al Qaeda-directed bloody success here in over a decade. Our intelligence services and military forces have killed or captured so many junior and mid-level Al Qaeda operatives and commanders that aspiring to be the senior military commander is now the most dangerous job on our planet. No sooner had newspapers of May 2011 speculated that the 45-year-old Pakistani terrorist Ilyas Kashmiri might take that post, the papers of the next month brought word of his death in a U.S. drone attack.2 A top Al Qaeda Central operator from Libya named Atiyah abd al-Rahman was also killed in August 2011. e next month saw a drone strike kill two of the most e ective Al Qaeda propagandists in the world, a pair of Americans resident in Yemen and responsible for INSPIRE magazine.3 Part of our national e ort is to break the links between the various Al Qaeda franchises-what David Kilcullen calls a strategy of “dis-articulation.” e United States and its allies have boxed in or chopped back certain Al Qaeda a liates. Filipinos, with American help, have decimated Abu Sayyaf terrorist strength. Some groups in Iraq, Al Shabab, and several other a liates of Al Qaeda, have not been contained. e international picture on nuclear proliferation is improved; the program named for former Senators Sam Nunn (Democrat, Georgia) and Richard Lugar (Republican, Indiana) monitors and restricts nuclear materials; smuggling of nuclear materials is way down. Al Qaeda probably lacks the money now to purchase a bomb, and even if it has, it might not be able to move its money to close a sale. at leaves lesser forms of nuclear attack conceivable and possible; but the risks of an Al Qaeda mass lethality nuclear attack are diminished today. And, nally, international organizations are helping our strategists and combatants. e United Nations and Interpol-both of which used to disdain anti-terrorist action-are nally moving, and they are tracking better with Washington. Over time, both of these powerful international actors will have good e ects on international opinion and coordinated action.
