AFTER MADRID.(The Talk of the Town)(Al Qaeda)

In less than a decade, the stateless soldiers of Al Qaeda, to say nothing of the many cells of like-minded yet unaligned fanatics hoping to die in assaults against liberal democracy, have changed the rules of global politics. Exploiting little more than crude weapons and the fluidity of contemporary life, they have waged an episodic war without borders: they have devastated embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, blown a hole through the U.S.S. Cole, and flown airplanes loaded with passengers into the World Trade towers and the Pentagon; they have bombed synagogues in Tunisia and Turkey, mosques in Baghdad and Karbala, a night club in Bali, apartment complexes and military barracks in Saudi Arabia, and, three days before a national election in Spain, commuter trains in Madrid.

The death toll is in the thousands. The statistics of carnage, however, are only a small part of terror's achievement. Al Qaeda and its ideological tributaries have aggravated animosities among governments in Europe and the United States and threatened the structures of mainstream Islam. The attacks have also afflicted countless cities with a need for hyper-vigilance and a sense of dread, to the degree where, in our daily lives, we conflate "dirty bomb" with "rush hour" and "midtown."

In recent years, Osama bin Laden has concealed his person from spies and Predator drones but has hidden his intentions and his sense of historical mission in plain sight. The recent bombings in Madrid are linked not only to the goals of undermining and unnerving states where secular pluralism reigns but also, by way of a kind of magical realism, to ancient resentments and fantasies, to bin Laden's desire, expressed in videotaped speeches and declarations, that his followers reverse what Al Qaeda's ideologist Ayman al-Zawahiri once called "the tragedy of Al-Andalus." In the United States, "The Moor's Last Sigh" is a novel by Salman Rushdie; for radical Islamists it is the memory of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelling Muslims from the Iberian peninsula and of King Boabdil fleeing Granada in tears while his mother says, "Do not weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man." That event, five centuries past, resonates in the fundamentalist imagination like the defeat of the Muslim armies in Vienna in 1683 and the end of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924.

In the hours and days following the bombings in Madrid, contemporary society--its commentators, politicians, and voters--processed the crime mainly in the most contemporary way: as a tragedy and then as an election story. The ruling conservative party, which was leading narrowly in the polls, despite having made the unpopular move of sending a small contingent of troops to Iraq, seemed to prevaricate about the evidence for political advantage. It refused to recognize the signs of an Al Qaeda-style operation--the high level of coordination and sophistication of the attack, the claims of responsibility, the discovery of a van carrying detonators and a tape with verses of the Koran--and suggested, instead, that the bombings were the work of the Basque separatist group, eta. The conservative prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, telephoned El Pais and other Spanish news outlets to insist that it was eta; his diplomats worked overtime to push a resolution through the U.N. Security Council blaming eta; the interior minister, Angel Acebes, denounced any speculation that al Qaeda might have been involved as "an attempt by malicious people to distort information." ...