>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>> That's why we must invade Iraq to further the war against terrorism,
>> because otherwise we won't have more terrorists agisnt whom to
>> fight, right? jks
>
> Yeah, what about the Saudi & German intelligence dudes at Davos that
> Laurie Garrett quoted as saying there are only 200 AQ members left?
>
> Doug
But what does that mean? First you'd have to wonder what the numbers mean. The Rote Armee Fraction and June 2nd never got far past twenty cadres, the Italian red brigades a little over that - but they caused all sorts of headaches. The Abu Nidal gang was again around two dozen people. The Shining Path is thought to have been in the low hundreds, and it took a major military operation to rout them. And these guys are small potatoes next to AQ - both financially and in terms of the lethality of their ideology. Secondly, you'd have to wonder what an "AQ member is" - are they talking about active cadres, or funders, sympathisers and non-clandestine supporters? Are they including only the AQ network command or also the affiliate orgs? Something like Abu Saiaf has got well over 200 members all of its own; Laskar Jihad (which has now been 'turned off' by the Indonesian army faction that ran it when it proved too embarrassing) had several thousand, as well as a good slice of the Indonesian state.
There is no question these guys are out there and are extremely dangerous, though usually not to Americans and Australians. The bulk of AQ-related deaths around here occur in Indonesia, though there is little evidence the US is all that concerned about it. In Ambon, Borneo, the Molluccas and in West Papua, thousands of people were killed last year by AQ affiliates, not that you would ever find this out through the NY Times. In West Papua there are rumours of bacteriological warfare against the indigenous infidels. It is very grim, and completely irrelevant to US foreign policy. (Similar issues could be raised re: Pakistan in Kashmir.)
Thiago
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