Bin Laden Is Having Fun in Hell

Nineteen diplomatic offices are closed. Hundreds of Americans were evacuated from the Middle East. More than a dozen press conferences were held at the White House in just four days.

All that because of a call intercepted by Americans, in which an al-Qaida man orders another to quickly perform a terrorist attack. So how is al-Qaida doing? Is it “dead,” as Barack Obama said after Osama bin Laden was killed? Or is it reviving, as many U.S. experts believe?

Both, in fact. Al-Qaida, a global and hierarchical structure aiming to destroy “the West,” did not make it very long into the 21st century. Since the London bombings in 2005, it has not managed to make any attack on enemy territory. Today, al-Qaida is fragmented and focused on local targets. It has always lacked military discipline, but now it is a collection of loosely connected organizations of regional and national scope. In a sense, al-Qaida returned to its roots, attacking U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and a Navy ship in Yemen two years later. It does not mean al-Qaida is now less deadly, rather the opposite — its affiliates are more militant than 12 years ago, and it controls vaster territories. The only thing that has changed are its goals.

But what is striking here is the way Americans reacted to the threat of attack. What was the purpose of blowing the case in the media? Why didn’t America thwart the attack quietly after having acquired information that it was being prepared? After all, the costs of evacuating American citizens from the region reach tens of millions of dollars. And what’s worse, Americans were unmasked: Winston Churchill refused to use up-to-the-minute information obtained by deciphering Enigma about the planned air attack Germans wanted to execute on the British Isles. Had the British fighters been able to rightly predict every move Germans made, Berlin would have immediately altered the encryption and the British would lose access to much more important information. Al-Qaida leaders will never initiate a conference call via satellite phone.

A theory abounds that Washington blew the case to cover the embarrassment associated with the sensational information revealed by Edward Snowden and show that the National Security Agency is of some use because it has just saved one of the U.S. embassies. But there is a more accurate explanation: Obama overreacted because he does not want to be accused of further negligence towards the safety of American diplomats, as after last year’s attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where a U.S. ambassador was killed.

This otherwise reasonable behavior led to an absurd situation which was aptly described by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. If terrorists were able to close ten-odd embassies, they won because they again terrorized Americans — and quite cheaply as well, because they did not use bombs or hijacked planes. For the safety of its diplomats, Washington, D.C. has turned the U.S. embassies in the Middle East into bunkers. Now, however, he says that they are not safe. What would be the next step, then? Launching virtual embassies? Diplomats who will not go outside Washington? Bin Laden is having fun in hell.