Newly released al Qaeda documents suggest GWOT is working

Andrew Cochran brings us some fascinating new info. Harmony document AFGP-2002-600080 recounts al-Qa’ida’s “lessons learned” from the Syrian jihad. It articulates the organization’s failure to balance the need for operational security with financial efficiency and tactical control. The experiences of the Muslim Brotherhood and the al-Tali’a al-Muqatila (The Fighting Vanguard) in Syria from 1976-1982 provide a textbook case of an organization that initially possessed little awareness of the agency problem that in retrospect likely doomed the effort from the start...These documents do not provide compelling evidence that U.S. counterterrorism policies to date have been misguided or have overlooked any major developments. To the contrary, the documents reflect ongoing jihadi concerns about operational security and sustainability in the midst of America’s counterterrorism efforts. Encouragingly, some of the documents even reflect al-Qa’ida’s fear that U.S. intelligence collection efforts are in some cases exceeding al-Qa’ida’s ability to enact countermeasures. Here's the link to the documents' summaries which has the links to the original documents as well. Lots of material, but interesting.