Don't ever expect the heads of the U.S.' 16-agency spy apparatus to say it outright. But the testimony they provided Tuesday morning to a Senate panel described al-Qaida, the scourge of the U.S. for 12 years, as a threat that's on the verge of becoming a spent force, if they're not already.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and his colleagues at the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Counterterrorism Center and State Department, never made that contention outright to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday. But in their annual public briefing on the threats America faces, they focused on their budgets and on cyber attacks more than they did terrorism. Not only was that itself a big change in the annual exercise, what they said about the threat from al-Qaida was mostly cheerful news.
Al-Qaida's core in Pakistan is so degraded that it is "probably unable to carry out complex, large-scale attacks in the West," Clapper testified. (.pdf) Its regional affiliates, in Iraq, Somalia and northern Africa, are focused on local attacks. Despite all the online propaganda seeking to radicalize American Muslim, homegrown jihadis will attempt "fewer than ten domestic plots per year."
Last year, the plots hit the single digits; no one died from them. Matt Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, testified that those attempts are and are likely to remain "unsophisticated." Those al-Qaida manages to inspire may be "wayward knuckleheads," Olsen said, but they'll remain a challenge for the spy apparatus to monitor and disrupt.
The exception is al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen affiliate of the organization, which remains the one most inclined to attack the U.S. at home. FBI director Robert Mueller said the threat to U.S. airliners from that affiliate is "undiminished." Attacking outside Yemen remains a priority for the organization. But Clapper said they'll have to balance that agenda with both their aspirations in Yemen and the degree to which "they have individuals who can manage, train, and deploy operatives for U.S. operations."
To be clear, not a single spy chief said that al-Qaida is no longer a big deal. Not a single spy chief said that al-Qaida no longer threatens the United States. And not a single spy chief so much as hinted that it's time for U.S. officials to consider the global war on terrorism finished. Ever since the Benghazi attack of September, those officials and their spy chiefs have stopped predicting that al-Qaida is on the verge of defeat. If anything, Clapper warned that the budget crunch he's under might make it harder to spot and prevent the next al-Qaida attack.
Yet the picture they presented of al-Qaida is no longer one of a determined global movement growing in strength; seeking the world's deadliest weapons; and capable of pulling off complex, mass-casualty assaults. Benghazi, and the January attack on an Algerian oil field, look like models for the terrorist threats of the future: ones that occur far from U.S. soil, launched by unaffiliated groups that are primarily focused on a local agenda, yet sufficiently inspired by al-Qaida's rhetoric or sympathetic to its worldview that unsecured western targets of opportunity are in its cross-hairs.
Left unsaid and un-debated at the hearing: whether that diminished threat means it's time to roll back the U.S. global wartime apparatus; or whether it's only diminished because of an aggressive wartime apparatus that needs to keep doing what it's doing, lest the threat re-emerge.
