In the winter of 2004, a treatise called da'wat al-muqawamah al-Islamiyyah al-alamiyya (The Call of Global Islamic Resistance) first appeared on jihadi forums. The 1,600-page document, written by al Qaeda's arch-strategist Abu Musab al-Suri, called for a radical restructuring of global jihadism. Suri, having observed that the post-9/11 era was distinctly uncharitable toward organized and hierarchical jihadi groups, wanted to transform al Qaeda into a diffuse international movement connected mainly through Islamic solidarity and ideology.

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The terrorist network, Suri had already written in 2000, "is not an organization.… It is a call, a reference, a methodology." Accordingly, he now recommended that al Qaeda focus on projecting its ideas and solutions around the globe. By encouraging this new, decentralized version of al Qaeda, Suri hoped to see the creation of numerous "self-starter" individuals and terrorist cells with no organizational connections to the group. These self-starters, he hoped, would be just as eager to kill as any well-trained terrorist and would also be better protected from detection by enemy security services.

For Suri's strategy to work in the West, where there are a significant number of people potentially receptive to al Qaeda's message but nonetheless uninformed about its worldview, it required an effective interpreter. That role is now being successfully filled by the Yemeni-American preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, currently living in hiding in Yemen. More effectively than any of his English-speaking predecessors, Awlaki has given ideas originally formulated for an Arab and South Asian audience immediate and culturally specific relevance to Western Muslims, inspiring terrorists such as Nidal Malik Hasan, Faisal Shahzad, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Counterterrorism analysts have debated Awlaki's significance in the world of global jihadism since he rose to prominence in late 2009. In November, Gregory Johnsen argued in the New York Times that his importance has been greatly exaggerated and that pursuing Awlaki only distracts from some of the truly dangerous and more directly operational leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Thomas Hegghammer, on the other hand, recently made the case in Foreign Policy that Awlaki plays a direct role in organizing and executing attacks on Western targets.

But both of these arguments miss Awlaki's true significance: his ability to radicalize those, particularly in the West, who may never come into contact with him.

This fact has been recognized by senior officials within the U.S. counterterrorism community. Howard Gambrill Clark, a former senior intelligence analyst for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and author of Revolt Against Al-Qa'ida, told me that by 2008 he had informed his superiors that Awlaki's greatest threat "was not of any operational nature, but instead the radicalizing thrust of his lectures and absolutist ideology."

But Clark bemoaned the failure of U.S. authorities to understand quickly enough the changes in al Qaeda's strategy, saying that "the FBI and DHS analytic branch and division chiefs failed to properly assess" the new nature of the threat posed by figures such as Awlaki.

AQAP's efforts to carry out large-scale attacks against the United States are not the sole extent of its mission -- nor even the most potentially dangerous. The organization also produces the English-language Inspire magazine, an online publication thought to be edited by Awlaki's propagandist sidekick, the Saudi-American Samir Khan. Awlaki has authored articles for the first two and fourth issues, and Hegghammer lays out strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that Awlaki wrote for the third issue under the title of AQAP's "Head of Foreign Operations." This issue also includes a list of almost all the incarcerated jihadists who have been specifically linked to Awlaki -- many of whom were apparently included in the place of higher profile al Qaeda figures, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

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