The jihadi movement also draws from more conventional guerrilla movements, especially a loose coalition of jihadi-infected insurgencies from Southeast Asia to north Africa. Some of these groups seek national status in separatist causes.
Like government leaders throughout the atomic age, they may be reluctant to jeopardize their territory and political claims by involving themselves in a spectacular attack on the United States -- just as Hamas, for example, has been reluctant to target Americans even while endorsing much of bin Laden's creed. Yet in the long run, infected by Osama's ideology, some of these guerrilla groups may be difficult to deter.
(Al-jazeera Via Aptn /ap)
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The Post's opinion and commentary section runs every Sunday.
• Outlook Section
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_____Live Discussion_____
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Tuesday, Feb. 8, 10 a.m. ET: Washington Post Associate Editor Steve Coll discusses his article about the increasing risk of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons.
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In Pakistan today, some Islamist insurgents, such as those in the frontier territory where bin Laden is presumed to be hiding, receive almost-state sponsorship or failed-state sponsorship. Individual officials or sections of a corrupt bureaucracy join with these radicals for a variety of reasons -- cash payoffs, ideology, venality, or a blend of all three. These fluid relationships threaten to render irrelevant the traditional postures of nuclear deterrence, in which governments frighten other governments into nuclear restraint, usually by credible threats of massive retaliation.
President Bush's pledge after 9/11 to make "no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them" does not seem likely to intimidate a future jihadi nuclear cell. If it had been discovered that the A.Q. Khan network intended to carry out a direct attack on the United States, who in its ranks would be deterred by Bush's threat? The government of Pakistan, which today claims it did not know what Khan was doing? Khan himself, who seems to have been in it for money and glory? His business partners in Malaysia and Dubai, with no political assets to defend?
So it's not hard to play Chicken Little. The next question is: What to do?
A sustained campaign to contain the jihadi nuclear threat might draw on diverse approaches. More aggressive efforts to secure nuclear materials, a reformulation of deterrence strategy to address gray networks, and a broad reduction in the sources of jihadi radicalization would be places to start. National laboratories such as Los Alamos helped identify Soviet nuclear weapons scientists after the collapse of communism; they are needed now in the Middle East. Helpful above all would be to elevate all these issues to the prominence accorded Iran and North Korea.
Fear not: I haven't forgotten about those Los Alamos optimists, the ones who raised their hands to say that the chance of any nuclear fission attack on U.S. soil during the next few decades was less than 5 percent. Why are they hopeful?
They, too, do not doubt bin Laden's intent, but they question the tradecraft of his most committed followers. They read the history of terrorism in the atomic age and see no case where a nuclear cell has come as close to launching as governments repeatedly have done. They suspect jihadism has hit its high-water mark, that it is in decline even if we cannot see it clearly yet. They point out that too much focus on worst-case WMD scenarios may blind us to al Qaeda's potential to carry out catastrophic attacks by conventional means -- a problem that plagued American analysis of bin Laden in the run-up to 9/11.
And a few of the optimists joked about the greatest deterrent of all: The requirement, in the faculty lounge cell scenario, that half a dozen tenured, ornery and egotistical physicists cooperate with each other on a demanding project. ("Yeah -- but what about the graduate students?" one professor in our group quipped. "They're dangerous!") It's cheering to place one's faith with these optimists, to stop worrying and ignore the jihadi bomb. But it might be safer, and more reassuring, if the pessimists involved in our defense had some running room to chase the new enemies they see inexorably rising.
Author's e-mail: colls@washpost.com
Steve Coll, The Post's managing editor from 1998 to 2004 and now an associate editor, has written about nuclear proliferation issues for more than a decade. He is the author of "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001," published in paperback last month.
