Al-Qaeda's real plan

Syed Saleem Shahzad gives us some insight on Al-Qaeda's unfinished work and tells us the US and the West still don't understand Al-Qaeda's goals and methods. The first part of the article gives us a history of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and is worth a look for that. In this post I will look at Al-Qaeda's future plans and intentions.

Shahzad warns us to make no mistake, the major target of Al-Qaeda is the United States.

In the mid-1990s, when then Afghan president Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani and his powerful minister of defense, Ahmed Shah Masoud, allowed bin Laden to move from Sudan to Afghanistan, the Egyptian camp drew many strategic community members from across the world to Afghanistan, where they headed maaskars (training camps) to teach strategies for their future fight.

By the time the Taliban had emerged as a force in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, the Egyptian camp had settled on its strategies, the most important being:

• To speak out against corrupt and despotic Muslim governments and make them targets, as this would destroy their image in the eyes of the common people, who interrelate state, rulers and nation.


• Focus on the US role, which is to support Israel and tyrant Middle Eastern countries, and make everyone understand this.

911 Planning Begins in 1998.

The 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, were the start of al-Qaeda's - as it was now known - offensive against US interests. In retaliation, though, the US launched cruise missiles on Kandahar and Khost in Afghanistan. Consequent to this, al-Qaeda formed a special task force to plan for the September 11 attacks.

It took three years for the plan to reach fruition, but discussions continued after September 11 among members of the Egyptian camp - who were now senior members of al-Qaeda - over broader plans to bring the world's superpower to its knees.

Of Ducks and Decoys

Before October 7, 2001, when the US invaded Afghanistan in retaliation for September 11, most of al-Qaeda's top minds had already left the country. Their mission involved several targets:

• To ideologically cultivate new faces from strategic communities, such as among armed forces and intelligence circles.


• Get these new recruits to establish cells.


• Each cell would be assigned to raise its own resources to chalk out a plan. However, only one of them would implement a plan, the others would serve as decoys to "misdirect" intelligence agencies.

Muslim regimes targeted

After September 11, Muslim governments were more active against al-Qaeda, and in Pakistan alone more than 400 of its members were arrested. The same happened in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Tunis and in Saudi Arabia. Yet al-Qaeda did not utter a word against Muslim governments until the US gave clear signals that it would attack Iraq.

The collaboration of Muslim governments with the US against Iraq was the ideal time to stir the resentment of the masses against their regimes by exploiting the US's strategic alliance with Muslim countries.

As can be seen the real goal of Al-Qaeda is to turn the general Muslim population against the United States and Muslim governments supporting them. Up to this point nearly everything the Bush administration has done has advanced this plan. This can be seen in polls taken in Muslim countries since the US invaded Iraq. The neo-cons in charge of US policy have no knowledge of Islamic culture and as a result play right into Al-Qaeda's plans.