When I heard about the Boston bombings, my heart sank -- but I also felt some part of my mind slip into battle mode. From past episodes, such as the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day in 2009, I can picture the way that my former colleagues at the National Counterterrorism Center, the CIA, the FBI, and many more are now rushing into action, moving swiftly and skillfully to sift the intelligence wheat from the collection chaff, pushing their own emotions aside or using them to fuel their efforts.
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Once upon a time, our first impulse would have been to blame al Qaeda. But soon after the attack, several respected experts suggested that the bombing smelled more like domestic terrorism, pointing to a venue of vast local significance, the timing, and the relatively low-tech pressure-cooker explosives. They may well be right -- and the FBI's announcement Thursday that it is looking for two men seen in photos and video footage before the attack means that we could soon know far more. Even so, the out-of-the-gates lean toward ascribing the Boston bombings to domestic terrorists seems to have been based not just on the fragmentary evidence at hand, but also on the conviction that the attack just didn't resemble what we think of when we imagine an al Qaeda attack. That image is no longer accurate -- it's based on what the group once was, not what's left of it today.
Years ago, when my former colleagues and I spoke about a "typical" al Qaeda assault, we all knew what we were describing. We meant a plot that was centrally coordinated, well planned, and carefully scoped out; a plot that was technically advanced, perhaps involving innovative technology; a plot that had an identified and ambitious goal -- one that would have made the planners of 9/11 proud. These are the plots described in the documents that SEAL Team Six found in Abbottabad with Osama bin Laden -- big, spectacular attacks that had massive economic consequences, such as hijacking oil tankers, attacking multiple aircraft over the Atlantic, targeting financial institutions, killing hundreds or even thousands of people. The al Qaeda of old -- and, almost certainly, bin Laden himself -- would probably have scoffed at the scale, the simplicity, the randomness, and the seeming lack of political purpose behind the bombings in Boston.
The United States has eliminated generations of al Qaeda's leadership, forced it out of one safe haven in Afghanistan, hammered it in another haven inside Pakistan, and driven the organization to decentralize itself. These successes have made it virtually impossible to accurately describe anymore what we mean by "an al Qaeda attack." These changes mean my former colleagues in the counterterrorism world must consider a limitless universe of potential al Qaeda attacks and tactics, with a scattered and shadowy leadership structure to monitor.
The fact that we're dealing today with a diversified, decentralized, and diminished al Qaeda core is both good news and bad: Good news because al Qaeda seemingly has been forced to resort to smaller, simpler, and less spectacular attacks -- but bad news because such plots are far more difficult to penetrate and prevent than the types of grand, theatrical attacks that bin Laden dreamed of from his lair in Abbottabad. We've been enormously successful in preventing al Qaeda attacks, but if Boston does, in the end, turn out to have been conducted or motivated by al Qaeda, we'll need a new framework for understanding its operations and guarding against them. We'll have to change our way of thinking about the group's threshold and targets -- and reconsider our understanding of the way al Qaeda thinks about its own operations.
Some "understandings" should be reevaluated right away. It's not easy to know what to make of the lack of any claims of responsibility thus far for the Boston bombings. (Indeed, the only public claim seems to have come from the Pakistani Taliban, which insisted that they were not responsible.) So we're left with a mystery: Why would any group conduct such an attack and not claim it as their own? We may know more soon enough. But for now, contrary to what some experts have said, we simply have no reason to believe that the lack of any public claims argues for or against al Qaeda's culpability.
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