My thoughts on the future threat of al-Qaida include three kinds of potential motivations for attacking the U.S. in some major way in the coming months.
\n1) There is the oft-cited concern about retaliation, avenging the death of bin Laden. A group or even an individual somewhere is already thinking about this, and considering how they would “make a name for themselves” by carrying out an attack like this in the name of bin Laden.
\n2) There is also a real possibility that a future terrorist attack will be the product of senior individuals within al-Qaida trying to position themselves to claim the mantle of lead philosopher-warrior that is left behind by bin Laden’s death. Possible culprits include Abu Yahya al-Libi, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Adnan Shukrijuma, or even Anwar al-Awlaki.
\n3) Finally, I am convinced that al-Qaida members are generally going to feel increasing pressure to “do something” in the near future, for the simple reason that the absence of an AQ-attributed attack will speak volumes in terms of the network’s capabilities, or lack thereof.
\nWe must be vigilant. A storm is coming . . .
\n– James Forest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My thoughts on the future threat of al-Qaida include three kinds of potential motivations for attacking the U.S. in some major way in the coming months. 1) There is the oft-cited concern about retaliation, avenging the death of bin Laden. A group or even an individual somewhere is already thinking Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terrorist-groups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesforest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesforest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesforest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesforest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesforest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesforest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesforest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesforest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesforest.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}