The terror

The likelihood that al-Qaeda will lose its Afghan base raises the question of whether practical sovereignty within contiguous territory is necessary for the terror-group's success, or whether advances in communications and encryption - coupled with increasingly good tradecraft - will over time obviate the need for a territorial base. This is a crucial question for the US and others who are fighting the network, because even complete success in Afghanistan will not destroy this terrorist threat. Nor will the terrorists be appeased by any conceivable change in US policies toward the Muslim world. Moreover, preemptive or preventive strikes against terrorist operations will not always be feasible. In this kind of world, a strategy dependent upon identification and elimination of specific threats will have to be combined with one focussed on remedying vulnerabilities to ill-defined, all-azimuth threats of potentially catastrophic scope.