I watched an excellent Frontline documentary last night: Al-Qaeda’s New Front. The show examines the changing nature of the al-Qaeda threat over the past few years, and includes some chilling footage of training videos and surveillance tapes.

Midway through the broadcast — which is available online — the producers played an audio tape of two young al-Qaeda recruits watching the tape of Nicholas Berg’s beheading.

Unlike many Americans, I had no interest in going anywhere near that video when it was released.

I have no interest in it now, either. The snippet that I heard on Frontline sent chills down my spine and an ache to my heart– I have never heard screams like that, and I hope that I never will hear such screams again. I hope against hope that no one will ever have reason to scream like that in the future.

The screams, and the accompanying Islamic chants of “God is Great,” brought all of the death and destruction that occurred yesterday in London into sharp focus, and made me question, again, how anyone can commit such disgusting acts of violence.

We are a horrible, horrible species to be capable of such things. I’m trying to be optimistic, and to remember that humans also do good, but I’m having a hard time. I can only imagine what sights and sounds haunt the dreams of our young soldiers.

But at the same time, I wonder whether our leaders understand the sights and sounds that haunt the dreams of our enemies.

Four years after September 11th, one day after July 7, are we any closer to understanding what motivates al-Qaeda?

Many would argue that the members of al-Qaeda do not deserve the benefit of our empathy. But the truth is that only by understanding the enemy we face will stand a chance of winning this war.

We need only turn to Sun Tzu’s Art of War for a reminder:

At one point in the PBS show, Spaniards sit in a bar soon after the Madrid attacks, shaking their heads in disbelief as they watch footage of President Bush saying triumphantly that “in a series of raids and actions around the world, nearly two-thirds of al-Qaeda’s known leaders have been captured or killed, and we continue on al-Qaeda’s trail.”

President Bush continues to talk about al-Qaeda as if it were a traditional enemy, even though it is clear that the al-Qaeda we face today is not the al-Qaeda we faced four years ago. As one commentator says in the PBS documentary, al-Qaeda is not a coherent organization in a traditional sense; its organizational structure resembles an amoeba more than anything else.

This battle will not be won with traditional warfare. Acts of aggression like Bush’s illegal War in Iraq only serve to confirm in the minds of al-Qaeda’s recruits everything that militant Islam has been saying about the U.S. over the past ten years.

At Informed Comment [via Lance], Juan Cole recalls seeing Michael Scheuer, the CIA’s former Bin Laden analyst, speak about the London attacks:

In the Frontline documentary, a moderate Islamic cleric opposed to violent Islam blames the radicalization of young Muslims in Paris on the difficult conditions that Islamic immigrants face there — a lack of education, a dearth of employment, a feeling of cultural dislocation, and a sense of rejection from mainstream French culture — and argues that radical Islamic sects offer meaning and identity to the lives of disaffected youth:

In the end, the war can only be won by embracing the goals of what conservatives deride as “the sensitive war on terror”: seeking out the root causes that drive new recruits to al-Qaeda, and working in a real way towards ending global poverty, educating Muslim youth, and integrating them into the societies in which they live.

The screams of Nicholas Berg, and the sights and sounds of innocent Londoners caught in the crossfire, continue to echo in my ears. But until we understand that ham-fisted military attacks on those who perpetrate such acts are not always the most effective means of preventing such attacks in the future, we risk creating ten new al-Qaeda recruits for every one we torture and kill.

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