Decrease of Osama Bin Laden’s effect on al Qaeda?

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a hearing today “Assessing the Fight against al Qaeda. The panel was consisted of Robert Grenier, managing director of Kroll Inc., Peter Bergen Schwartz senior fellow at the New American Foundation, and lastly Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

The fact that Osama Bin Laden is still at large does not surprise the panel. Peter Bergen touched upon the fact that Bin Laden has not been in a serious shoot out or close to getting arrested since the battle Of Tora Bora in Eastern Afghanistan in late 2001, where he “narrowly escaped being killed in massive American bombing raids”. He has learned not to communicate via satellite phones or internet so that he will not be the subject of the American Intelligence. This does not conclude that bin Laden has lost his power in the organization, on the contrary, now he communicates with his followers via video/audio tapes. As Peter Bergen said in his testimony, the people “love him” and the result is seen by the direct response of the young Islamists’ acts. Robert Grenier also emphasized the mentioned issue by saying that Bin Laden sends the message through the tapes and he has millions of followers, not necessarily directly linked to al Qaeda, who will carry some sort of a terrorist act. The increase in the Pakistani suicide bombings over the last year, for instance, proves the point of previously mentioned issue, since Bin Laden, in one of the tapes, said actions needs to be done against the Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Not to forget that Musharraf survived two deadly attempts.
Although Bin Laden’s effect on the organization is unquestionably high, Grenier believes that it is more important to capture the directly linked terrorists rather than the leaders, since the latter are in no way of moving and changing positions because they are scared of being captured.
Steven Emerson talked about the new government in Afghanistan and that it is in its “own best interest to be as aggressive as possible.”

However, the panelists believe that future al Qaeda attacks on the United States is very unlikely.