Al Qaeda plots to influence US elections?

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0810/dailyUpdate.html?s=ent2
posted August 10, 2004, updated 11:00 a.m.

Al Qaeda plots to influence US elections?
But experts split over who terrorist group wants to 'help' win.
by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

Agence France-Presse reports on Tuesday that Pakistani intelligence 
officials say they have uncovered evidence which shows Al Qaeda was 
plotting a series of attacks in order to influence the 2004 US 
presidential elections.

     'The network was looking to strike a major blow ahead of the 
elections. Al-Qaeda was looking to strike in the United States or its 
chief allies Great Britain and Pakistan,' said the official, asking to 
remain anonymous. 'The period before the US presidential elections was 
very critical,' said the official, who has played a key role in a 
crackdown against Al-Qaeda in Pakistan over the past month which has 
netted over 20 suspected operatives.

And Time magazine on Monday quoted a top Homeland Security official as 
saying that intelligence agencies have "... a number of times picked up 
information that Al Qaeda wants to attack us before the election, and 
some of the communications attribute that desire to Osama Bin Laden.

But security experts and political commentators have been split over 
whom Al Qaeda wants to win the 2004 US presidential elections: US 
President George Bush or his Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry.

In June CIA officer Michael Scheuer, who writes under the pseudonym 
"Anonymous," told the British newspaper the Guardian that Al Qaeda 
couldn't have a better administration in place in terms of achieving its 
goals. Mr. Scheuer believes that the president is "taking the US in 
exactly the direction Bin Laden wants, towards all-out confrontation 
with Islam under the banner of spreading democracy."

     'I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them 
than the one they have now,' he said. 'One way to keep the Republicans 
in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the 
president.'

Asia Times reporter and commentator Pepe Escobar argued earlier this 
year that Al Qaeda wants President Bush to remain in office because he 
has become such a lightning rod for many Muslims that his reelection 
would help the terror group continue to raise funds and new recruits.

     Al Qaeda wants the Iraq occupation to be prolonged, with or without 
a puppet government: there could not be a better advertisement for 
rallying Muslims against the arrogance of the West. Al Qaeda's and the 
Bush administration's future are interlocked anyway.

National Public Radio's All Things Considered (audio) also looks at Al 
Qaeda's election threat, and reports it's not clear which candidate the 
group wants to see in the White House. Reporter Mary Louise Kelly 
interviews National Review columnist Michael Ledeen, who believes that 
Al Qaeda wants a Kerry presidency. Daniel Byman, columnist for Slate and 
a senior fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, tells 
Ms. Kelly he thinks Al Qaeda favors a renewed Bush presidency, for 
similar reasons to those mentioned above.

But Mr. Byman says he isn't convinced a pre-election attack is in the 
works at all. In fact, he wrote last week in Slate, the US is much safer 
these days than at any time. National Security, he writes, is in fact 
better than we might think it is.

Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland, who is also a senior 
fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, wrote in late 
July that the idea that Al Qaeda wants to influence the elections is 
probably not true because it works against Al Qaeda's best interests. He 
argues that Al Qaeda is more interested in affecting US foreign policy, 
which is unlikely to change dramatically if Mr. Kerry is elected, 
because "US policy is thus essential in affecting the extent to which 
Muslims resent the United States more than they hate Al Qaeda."

Meanwhile The New York Times reports Tuesday that while the capture of 
computer expert Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan has resulted in a treasure 
trove of information about Al Qaeda, it also shows that the organization 
is much stronger and more resilient than many believed.

     For the past several months, the president has claimed that much of 
Al Qaeda's leadership has been killed or captured; the new evidence 
suggests that the organization is regenerating and bringing in new blood.

The Sunday Independent of South Africa reported Sunday on how for all 
the attention paid to the border region of Pakistan by US and local 
troops, and despite the recent captures of Al Qaeda members, it seems 
that "Osama bin Laden has pulled off one of the greatest disappearing 
acts in history." The paper also quotes members of the Pakistani 
opposition parties who allege that Pakistan President General Pervez 
Musharraf doesn't really want to capture the Al Qaeda leader.

     "There is a view among some that they don't really want to pick OBL 
[Osama bin Laden] up, because if they do, then Musharraf would lose his 
utility to the US," says Sherry Rehman, an opposition member of parliament.

Pakistan government officials say the are not even focusing on Bin 
Laden, who they claim is not able to operate effectively. AFP reports 
that they are more interested in two other Al Qaeda members that they 
believe are still in their country.

     "Now we are more focussed in eliminating the group and using all 
our resources to track down the two real masterminds, Libyan Abu Fajr 
and the Egyptian called Hamza. The information that we have gathered now 
does not point to OBL's involvement in current attack planning of the 
group."

The Daily Times of Pakistan also reports on how smaller terror groups 
that have grown from a common belief in Al Qaeda's militant ideology are 
acting like "terror franchises" and making the war on terror much harder 
to fight.

     "It's like McDonald's giving out franchises," said Dia'a Rashwan, 
an Egyptian expert on militant groups. "All they have to do is follow 
the company's manual. They don't consult with headquarters every time 
they want to produce a meal."

Finally, retired US Army Colonel Robert Killebrew writes in the 
Washington Post that as serious a threat as Al Qaeda poses in 2004, that 
threat could grow even more dangerous if Al Qaeda follow the trajectory 
of similar terrorist groups in the past and becomes a political movement 
in the Middle East.

     To carry out short-term plans for regional terrorism, Al-Qaeda has 
an almost limitless pool of manpower. But its emerging leaders will soon 
realize – if they have not already – that their higher objectives cannot 
be achieved by hit-and-run attacks, no matter how devastating. For 
ambitions this vast, they need to transmute terror into political 
legitimacy in the same way that Fatah transformed itself into the 
quasigovernment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), leading 
to the sight of a gun-toting Yasser Arafat at the podium of the United 
Nations. Hezbollah is acquiring political legitimacy in Syrian-dominated 
Lebanon, as is Hamas in Palestine and Gaza. "Legitimacy" doesn’t matter 
to Al-Qaeda today, but it must have it tomorrow if it wants to stay in 
the game.
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