Reviewed by Anne C. Heller

Seth Jones’s highly detailed and illuminating ten-year history of al-Qaeda comes exactly a year after the death of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a hundred miles from where the movement was founded in 1988. This is apropos, if ironic, because Hunting in the Shadows presents al-Qaeda’s limited though brutal successes and many setbacks as a series of three waves and counter-waves that have depended less on the wiliness of jihadists than on how rapidly and wisely the West has responded.

In fact, according to Jones, the first great wave of centralized al-Qaeda violence — beginning with the 1998 assaults against American embassies in Africa and cresting on 9/11 — was over by 2003, with no successful new attacks against the United States and with leaders captured or in hiding. From then on, he shows, the movement fragmented, leaving bin Laden a “vagabond,” an object of discord among Muslims and, at his death, “a prisoner, starved for information,” and largely irrelevant to the terrorist network he still personified.

If the first great wave of al-Qaeda-guided terror ended months after the invasion of Afghanistan, however, Jones’ second wave, “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” arose almost immediately with U.S. entry into that country. Jones, a former U.S. Special Operations Command advisor, a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation, and the author of 2009’s In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan, is not a fan of that invasion.

In Graveyard, he argued that the Bush administration squandered early successes in Afghanistan by diverting arms, money and attention to Iraq and allowing the Taliban to re-emerge. In Hunting in the Shadows, he traces the rapid and barbarous growth of Jordanian terrorist Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi’s loosely affiliated Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda directly to the invasion, which made global recruitment easy and provided plentiful opportunities to attack Westerners with car bombs, roadside devices, kidnappings and beheadings.

The invasion so infuriated previously unradicalized young European Muslims that some launched horrific attacks in their home countries, most notably in Madrid and London; Jones gives particularly riveting, if not new, accounts of the commission of these crimes. This wave ended with al-Zarqawi’s death in 2006 and, perhaps more important, according to Jones, because of the determination of local chieftains in Anbar Province to drive al-Qaeda in Iraq out of existence.

The last few months — and indeed, the last few weeks — have brought news of multiple drone strikes targeting and killing a dozen leaders of al-Qaeda’s third wave in Yemen, called “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” Founded in 2007 and masterminded by Fahd al-Quso, who died on May 6, and a charismatic figure called Anwar al-Awlaki, killed last September, this final wave was the least centralized and, from an American perspective, the least deadly, expressed in the U.S. mainly by foiled homemade plots to bomb Fort Dix, JFK International Airport and the New York City subway system.

Jones attributes its brief duration and quick diminishment not only to what he calls a “light-footprint” military drone-strike strategy and the withdrawal of conventional military forces from Iraq and now Afghanistan, but also to al-Qaeda’s own repetitive missteps, foremost among them corruption and the use of terror against Muslims in host countries. “They extort money from the people and deal with them against the teaching of Islam,” explained a Somali defector in 2009.

It’s hard to read Hunting in the Shadows without feeling that many al-Qaeda operatives — and most of their European and American imitators — are technological primitives, temperamental thugs and natural bunglers. (According to Jones, even the Madrid and London mass-transit suicide bombers who ended or damaged hundreds of lives with, in one case, industrial-grade explosives and, in the other, peroxide-based devices, were amateurs who succeeded largely by trial and error and as a result of as-yet unwary national intelligence services.) Therefore, if there’s a flaw in the author’s approach to his subject, it is to take the danger of al-Qaeda as seriously as do both the terrorists themselves and many of Jones’ official sources.

Yet there is great value in the author’s prescription for preventing a fourth wave of al- Qaeda violence. Based on the official interviews and the extensive review of legal and intelligence documents that produced this book, Jones strongly warns against the surefire incitement that an invasion of another Muslim country would bring. Instead, he urges the kind of “light-footprint” strategy of covert intelligence, special operations and law enforcement that has worked so far.

Jones would combine these measures with efforts to cement the rule of law in unstable countries, such as in the Arab peninsula and North Africa, which are likely future havens for terrorism. Further, he advocates a battle of ideas conducted through social media and in chat rooms for the minds of moderate Muslims who may not like Western power and influence in their homelands but who, once they learn of it, also dislike al-Qaeda’s descent into ruthlessness, irreligiosity, brutality and corruption.

Anne C. Heller is the author of Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Nan Talese/ Doubleday, 2010).