Behind Islamic terror: Syria and Iran are scorned in much of the Western world for supporting terrorism, but neither one is the puppeteer directing the worldwide terror network—Russia is

New American, The, Sept 3, 2007 by William F. Jasper

"Al-Qaeda Stronger than Ever." "U.S. Concern at Al-Qaeda Strength." These and similar titles accompanied news stories that began breaking during the second week of July, announcing leaks of a disturbing new classified intelligence report. Prepared for President Bush by the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC), the five-page report entitled Al-Qaeda Better Prepared to Strike the West paints a picture of a revived, more dangerous terror network led by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The Associated Press reported on July 11 that an unnamed counterterrorism official familiar with the still-unreleased report paraphrased the briefing paper as finding that al-Qaeda is "considerably operationally stronger than a year ago," and that it has "regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001." The terror group is "showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States," the same official reportedly said.

John Kringen, who heads the CIA's analysis directorate, echoed this same grim assessment of al-Qaeda's resurgence during his July 11 testimony to the House Armed Services Committee. "They seem to be fairly well settled into the safe haven and the ungoverned spaces of Pakistan," Kringen said concerning al-Qaeda. "We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications. We see that activity rising."

The same week, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff set off a political furor when he expressed a "gut feeling" that the United States faced a heightened risk of terror attacks from al-Qaeda this summer. Accentuating reports of a revitalized al-Qaeda is a noticeable upswing in the group's propaganda campaign over the Internet, radio, and television. As the Christian Science Monitor reported on July 16, there is "no question that Al-Qaeda propaganda outlets have been working at a high rate over the past year, with frequent and timely broadcasts from the group's No. 2, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri."

The Monitor story noted that al-Qaeda's media production unit, known as As-Sahab, has released at least 63 audio and video messages so far this year, compared with 58 in all of 2006. And in many of those messages, it points out, "Mr. Zawahiri has been able to respond to the news events within days," indicating not only a high level of technological sophistication by the media-savvy Zawahiri, but a high level of confidence in his ability to get his message out without giving away his location.

Thus, six years after the 9/11 terror attacks on America, and after enormous expenditures of U.S. military and economic resources in the "war on terror," we appear to be back to square one. At an October 25, 2006 White House press conference, President Bush was asked: "Are we winning?" He responded: "Absolutely, we're winning. Al-Qaeda is on the run." But as Georgetown University terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman noted recently, "Al-Qaeda is not on the run, it is on the march." The new National Counter Terrorism Center report appears to agree with Professor Hoffman's assessment.

Al-Qaeda, of course, is not the only kid on the terrorist block. Dozens of other groups are also very active and noteworthy players on the global terror stage: Hezbollah, Hamas, PLO/al-Fatah, Islamic Jihad Group, Taliban, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, Jamaat ul-Fuqra, Abu Sayyef--to name but a few.

And those are only the "Islamist" actors. There are other important terrorist groups as well, despite the fact that the "radical Muslim" or "Islamic fundamentalist" organizations appear to be the only ones that obtain the terrorist label or news mention these days. Communist-oriented terrorist organizations seem to be completely off the mental radar screen, even when they are murderously active (like the Basque ETA in Spain) or when they control a vast narcotics empire and a geographical area the size of Switzerland (like the FARC in Colombia).

Modern international terrorism, especially as it came to the fore in the 1960s and '70s, was exemplified by Marxist-Leninist "liberation" groups that more or less openly aligned themselves with Moscow and/or Beijing. They operated out of the Soviet-bloc countries or Moscow's surrogate Third World regimes in Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America. The Soviet KGB and its proxy intelligence services in East Germany, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Cuba were indispensable to the terrorists' existence, providing arms, money, training, explosives, passports, safe houses, coordination, and critical intelligence. Virtually all counterterrorist authorities recognized that, with few exceptions, terrorist organizations were merely cats' paws for the Soviet Union, which was both the primary benefactor and beneficiary of their violent campaigns.

However, a little over 15 years ago, conventional wisdom has it, a geopolitical paradigm shift occurred that changed all that. That 1991 sea-change event, usually referred to as the "collapse" of the Soviet Union, not only dramatically altered the East vs. West dimension that had dominated global political dynamics throughout the 20th century, but, supposedly, also brought an abrupt end to Russian sponsorship of terrorism worldwide.