I hesitate to disagree with Phil Mudd, who has forgotten more about al-Qaeda than I’ll ever know, but I don’t really get the utility of this analogy:

[Recent terrorist plots in the U.S.] may seem episodic and detached, particularly if we look at them as separate operations by individuals who may have had some vague connection to Al Qaeda. They make more sense, however, if we understand them as offshoots of a revolution that Al Qaeda aimed to inspire at its inception 20 years ago. Like communism during the Cold War, this is an ideology to be contained, not defeated.

If Phil’s point is just that we’re setting ourselves up for a fall if we hew to martial fantasies of ultimate capital-V Victory that no one has a clue how to produce, then fine. “If we overreact to plots and attacks, we risk playing into Al Qaeda’s hands,” Phil writes. “But we also can’t forget the lessons of 9/11 and drop our guard.” Hard to argue with. (Literally! We don’t have a basis here for distinguishing between overreaction and underreaction, however much I want to agree with the point.)

But Communism was so dangerous because of its universalism. al-Qaeda and its affiliates are hyper-sectarian takfiri purists who adjudicate quotidian theological disputes with a butcher knife or a scimitar. al-Qaeda will never again be in control of a single state, let alone two giant nuclear-armed countries simultaneously. I think there’s a case to be made for literally containing al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in northern Waziristan. But in terms of containing al-Qaedism, the right strategy is to discredit it as the millennial conspiracy theory that it is through highlighting all the Muslims it kills and all the Infidels it fails to kill.