Go on the offensive against terror

The bombings in London demonstrate the perils of playing defense, rather than offense, in the war on terrorism. Yet almost four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, many of our political leaders have become complacent. Prominent Democrats, such as Jimmy Carter and once-again presidential candidate Joe Biden, demand the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, but they have no idea where the Al Qaeda prisoners should go. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin compares American guards there to Nazis or Soviets and wants terrorists treated as civilians, not enemy combatants.

For its part, the administration has emphasized its successes in capturing Al Qaeda leaders and disrupting cells, such as the recent arrests of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists in California.

Our problem is that we still think of Al Qaeda as organized along the lines of a national army or an organized crime family, with a top-down hierarchy, chains of command and officers and foot soldiers. Unfortunately, however, Al Qaeda does not resemble the Corleone family or the Sopranos.

A pyramid-shaped hierarchy would have collapsed after suffering the kinds of losses inflicting by the armed forces and the CIA -- thousands of operatives killed, two-thirds of its leadership killed or captured and its bases and infrastructure in Afghanistan destroyed. But Al Qaeda has demonstrated astounding resiliency. Fallen leaders seem to be quickly replaced by junior members, and the attacks continue.

These are the characteristics not of an army but of a network. A human network does not form randomly -- its nodes connect to each other for some purpose. But decentralization allows it to collect and process information from myriad sources and gather the collective efforts of thousands located in different places. If a node or hub disappears, new ones take its place, making networks resistant to attack.

Al Qaeda is just such a network. Its nodes are terrorists brought together through violent Islamic fundamentalism, and its hubs are planners like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or Ramzi Binalshibh.

While Osama bin Laden is its symbolic or even spiritual leader, Al Qaeda's cells appear to have the authority to plan and launch terrorist attacks on their own. Understanding terrorist organizations as networks provides us with new ways to go on the offensive.

Most directly, the U.S. should destroy the hubs of the network. Only a coordinated, simultaneous attack on several major hubs will leave a network in isolated and relatively harmless pieces.