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Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has been described as "a rising star in the counterterrorism community" by the International Herald Tribune. He is often featured as a speaker at conferences sponsored by prestigious academic institutions, policy institutes, and the U.S. military, and has been called upon as a consultant to deal with problems ranging from hostage negotiations and border security to story development for major media companies. Gartenstein-Ross frequently leads training for the U.S. military and domestic law enforcement and has designed an educational curriculum dealing with terrorism for the U.S. Department of State. His writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, Reader's Digest, and the Review of Faith and International Affairs, among other publications. He is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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Despite the death of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda remains a significant threat because bin Laden's strategy for combating the United States?sapping its economic and military strength while expanding the battlefield on which America has to fight?lives on. In fact, this strategy has evolved over the past decade, it's working, and because U.S. planners never took the time to understand it, many of our responses have actually helped al Qaeda achieve its goals while undermining our own.

In Bin Laden's Legacy, counterterrorism expert Daveed Gartenstein-Ross explains why al Qaeda's "death by a thousand cuts" strategy has been effective. He shows how such well-publicized plots as the "underwear bomber" and printer cartridge bombs achieved their primary goals, despite being foiled. He notes how we have played into al Qaeda's hands with two costly, unpopular wars and by setting up an expensive homeland security bureaucracy that has difficulty dealing with a nimble, adaptive foe. He explains how many of our antiterrorism efforts are inefficient by design, suffer from a lack of coordination between the government and an array of contractors, and lack any obvious means to evaluate the return on our enormous investment in them. He explores how domestic politicization of the terrorist threat has skewed U.S. priorities, led to the misallocation of counterterrorism resources, and created flawed counterterrorism paradigms and bad policies. Meanwhile, public morale has been weakened by measures ranging from color-coded terror alerts to invasive, full-body searches in airports.

If bin Laden's death is to truly represent a turning point in the war on terror, it won't be due just to his importance to al Qaeda. It will be because his death allowed the United States to reevaluate its paradigms for protecting itself from and defeating this adversary. But to do so, it is first necessary to understand the key errors that the country has made along the way and why these mistakes occurred. Gartenstein-Ross shows what we've done wrong, then proposes a practical plan to start doing right.

For if we mistakenly believe that bin Laden's death signifies the end of al Qaeda's threat, or that it vindicates our previous policies, bin Laden may well experience even greater success in death than he ever did while among us.

Aus dem Klappentext

Despite the death of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda remains a significant threat because bin Laden's strategy for combating the United States?sapping its economic and military strength while expanding the battlefield on which America has to fight?lives on. In fact, this strategy has evolved over the past decade, it's working, and because U.S. planners never took the time to understand it, many of our responses have actually helped al Qaeda achieve its goals while undermining our own.

In Bin Laden's Legacy, counterterrorism expert Daveed Gartenstein-Ross explains why al Qaeda's "death by a thousand cuts" strategy has been effective. He shows how such well-publicized plots as the "underwear bomber" and printer cartridge bombs achieved their primary goals, despite being foiled. He notes how we have played into al Qaeda's hands with two costly, unpopular wars and by setting up an expensive homeland security bureaucracy that has difficulty dealing with a nimble, adaptive foe. He explains how many of our antiterrorism efforts are inefficient by design, suffer from a lack of coordination between the government and an array of contractors, and lack any obvious means to evaluate the return on our enormous investment in them. He explores how domestic politicization of the terrorist threat has skewed U.S. priorities, led to the misallocation of counterterrorism resources, and created flawed counterterrorism paradigms and bad policies. Meanwhile, public morale has been weakened by measures ranging from color-coded terror alerts to invasive, full-body searches in airports.

If bin Laden's death is to truly represent a turning point in the war on terror, it won't be due just to his importance to al Qaeda. It will be because his death allowed the United States to reevaluate its paradigms for protecting itself from and defeating this adversary. But to do so, it is first necessary to understand the key errors that the country has made along the way and why these mistakes occurred. Gartenstein-Ross shows what we've done wrong, then proposes a practical plan to start doing right.

For if we mistakenly believe that bin Laden's death signifies the end of al Qaeda's threat, or that it vindicates our previous policies, bin Laden may well experience even greater success in death than he ever did while among us.

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Bin Laden's Legacy

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

In the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, a number of people are saying that this does not mean that al Qaeda has been destroyed. Some argue that the organization may, in fact, be thriving.... I understand why officials have to say this. They want to be cautious. They don't want to overpromise. But the truth is this is a huge, devastating blow to al Qaeda, which had already been crippled by the Arab Spring. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is the end of al Qaeda in any meaningful sense of the word.

—Fareed Zakaria, May 2, 2011

On May 1, 2011, President Barack Obama delivered a rare Sunday night address to the nation. "Good evening," he began. "Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children."

Killing bin Laden was a significant accomplishment. The hunt for the terrorist mastermind, led by Navy SEAL Team Six, will surely become, justifiably, the stuff of American legend. Spontaneous celebration erupted after President Obama's announcement, as citizens flocked to the perimeter of the White House and to ground zero in New York City, where bin Laden had struck U.S. soil almost a decade earlier. One D.C.-based website described the festivities outside the White House as a "massive gathering, drawing hundreds of others in a boisterous, sign-waving, lamppost-climbing, anthem-filled display of happiness." Members of the crowd waved American flags and smoked victory cigars well into the wee hours of the morning.

But what did bin Laden's death actually mean? Did killing one man end the so-called war on terrorism? Was bin Laden actually important to al Qaeda, or had he been relegated to the role of an operationally irrelevant figurehead?

Even if bin Laden had been only a figurehead, he performed that role with deadly competence. Islamist militants who knew bin Laden personally spoke of their love and reverence for him. The fact that he had been able to survive the most expensive manhunt in human history for so long had turned him into a worldwide legend. But the early stream of information that has been released, based on the computer hard drives and other data seized from bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, suggests that bin Laden was more than a mere figurehead. As an Associated Press report published within a week of his death noted, analysts who examined this information came to believe that bin Laden "was a lot more involved in directing al Qaeda personnel and operations than sometimes thought over the last decade" and that he had been providing strategic guidance to al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia. So the view that bin Laden's death had no operational relevance seems overstated.

Yet at the same time, the threat posed by Islamist militancy hasn't passed. The threat posed by al Qaeda hasn't passed. And even though Osama bin Laden is dead, his strategy for combating the United States lives on. This strategy has adapted and evolved over the past decade, and—although many observers are loathe to admit it—the strategy has been working. If we mistakenly believe that bin Laden's death signifies the end of the fight against Islamic militancy, or that it vindicates our previous policies and obviates the need to change our approach to counterterrorism, bin Laden may well experience even greater success in death than he ever did while among us.

The "Foiled Plots"

In trying to understand the strategy to which bin Laden helped lead al Qaeda, a good starting point is al Qaeda's own words. For example, the centerpiece article in the November 2010 issue of Inspire, the English-language online magazine produced by the militant group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), began as follows:

Two Nokia phones, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all that Operation Hemorrhage cost us.... On the other hand this supposedly "foiled plot," as some of our enemies would like to call it, will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures.

The publication's cover featured a somewhat blurry photograph of a United Parcel Service plane on a runway, along with the crisp headline "$4,200." This was an unmistakable reference to a terrorist plot that the Yemen-based AQAP had launched the previous month, involving bombs hidden in printer cartridges.

In the plot, AQAP militants shipped these explosive devices via UPS and Federal Express in Yemen. Both packages were addressed to synagogues in Chicago. Investigators seized the explosive device sent via FedEx in Dubai; it contained three hundred grams of the military-grade explosive pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) hidden in a Hewlett-Packard desktop printer cartridge. Although it never left the Middle East, that device had been loaded onto, and subsequently flown on, two different passenger jets—first on a Qatar Airways Airbus A320 to Doha, then on a second flight from Doha to Dubai.

Finding the second bomb, a PETN device sent via UPS, proved disturbingly difficult. As Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan would later recount, it was truly a "race against the clock." A call from Saudi Arabian intelligence originally alerted U.S. officials to the danger. The Americans then notified the German federal police, because the bomb-carrying plane was to make its first stop at Germany's Cologne-Bonn airport, a UPS hub, before continuing to Britain and ultimately the United States. But by the time the German police learned of the suspicious package, it was already too late. The plane had taken off again.

When it landed at Britain's East Midlands Airport, officials cordoned off the cargo area and emptied the plane. They conducted a thorough search but found nothing out of the ordinary. Even the seemingly innocuous printer cartridge hiding four hundred grams of PETN was cleared by security, and the authorities removed the cordon around 10 a.m. British authorities had inadvertently given a green light to tragedy, for the bomb might have exploded over the U.S. eastern seaboard had the plane taken off.

Then officials called from Dubai. They had just discovered the PETN in the Hewlett-Packard cartridge that had been routed through their country. These officials instructed their British colleagues on how to locate the explosives, which were carefully disguised to avoid detection by an X-ray machine. The British authorities again cordoned off the area, and this time they found the bomb.

After the 9/11 attacks, the United States poured enormous sums of money into bolstering aviation security. Yet time and again, terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda have shown how just a bit of technical ingenuity can thwart these expensive defenses. About three months after 9/11—on December 22, 2001—a British ex-con named Richard Reid boarded the Miami-bound American Airlines flight 63 in Paris with enough...