Are they more like Dr. No or Dr. Evil? Thursday’s arrests of three al Qaeda operatives in Norway and Germany, who are linked to a plot to bomb the New York City subway system and a shopping mall in northern England, have reignited the debate among terrorism analysts about whether our enemies are coldly proficient professionals or camel-humping imbeciles.
In “The Case for Calling Them Nitwits,” published in the Atlantic, Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Christine Fair, an assistant professor at Georgetown University, make the case that today’s generation of al Qaeda recruits are bumblers who “blow each other up by mistake” and “get intimate with cows and donkeys.” The more serious point that Byman and Fair are making is that today’s generation of terrorists hardly seems capable of a September 11-style attack or even a Bali bombing (which killed 202 people and wounded another 240 in 2002) or Madrid train massacre (which killed 191 people and wounded 1,800). They cite the case of the underpants bomber who couldn’t get himself to explode, as well as the Miami cell that the FBI arrested before they could get their hands on explosives.
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