Is Al Qaeda Inc. bankrupt?

It is hard for me to imagine adding anything original to the flood of commentary on the Letters from Abbottabad, as West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center calls them. As the New York Times put it,

The frustrations expressed by Bin Laden as he issued instructions sometimes in vain might be familiar to any chief executive trying to keep tabs on a multinational corporation that had grown beyond its modest origins.

Osama even worried about which currencies to keep ransom proceeds in. Mario Draghi will be pleased to learn that Al Qaeda’s reserves were kept in euros as well as dollars.  I guess its only a matter of time before they add Chinese renminbi.

In what I’ve read so far, which is not much, Bin Laden’s advice on leadership stands out:

As you well know, the best people are the ones most agreed on by the people, and the key attributes that bring people together and preserve their staying behind their leader are his kindness, forgiveness, sense of fairness, patience, and good rapport with him, as well as showing care for them and not tax them beyond their ability.

What must always be in the forefront of our minds is:  managing people at such times calls for even greater wisdom, kindness, forgiveness, patience and deliberation, and is a complex task by most any measure.

This is quoted from the last of the letters, labelled no. 19 in the translations.

Getting people to do what Al Qaeda does obviously requires much more kindness than portrayed in American movies.  This is an important lesson.  The evil groups of people do is almost always done for some purpose the members of the group regard as good, not evil.  Leadership is what convinces them that they are acting for a good purpose, so it needs to behave well towards those it wants to rally.  At other points in the letters, it is clear that Bin Laden was unhappy with Al Qaeda and affiliated attacks on Muslims.  He wanted his cadres to focus on Americans, because they are the real enemy.

Americans hope to defeat Al Qaeda.  Certainly it has suffered a good deal of damage, self-inflicted as well as drone and special forces-inflicted in the last few years.  But it is unlikely to disappear entirely, any more than homegrown right-wing terrorism, much reduced from its heyday, has disappeared entirely from the United States.  The real question the Bin Laden papers pose is how much more effort we should put into what the Bush administration called the Global War on Terror, which we are still fighting in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and other places.

Only a closer examination of the entire trove of letters and other documents could enlighten us as to the answer.  I doubt the American public will ever get that privilege.  The published letters have presumably been carefully chosen.  They can give us only an incomplete picture of Al Qaeda.  We’ll have to rely on the assessments of our (not always) intelligence  community and the wisdom of our elected leaders to make the decision on whether Al Qaeda Inc. is bankrupt.