It's my opinion that Zarqawi's legacy is legitimizing the concept of terror 'cells' that aren't necessarily generated from a single source, as classic terror cells are. A biological analogy might be cancer.
Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, said the PATH plot appears to part of that new trend of "leaderless" terror.
The trend would include, he goes on to say, the May 2003 Morocco bombings, the March 2004 Spain bombings, and the July 2005 London bombings. Also included would be the Seas of David group.
I don't believe leaderless terror is a new thing at all, nor do I find it disturbing, from the point of view of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda's core leadership had significant and public issues with bringing Zarqawi's Tawhid wa Jihad group into the AQ fold. It's to AQ's credit that new terror groups want to be associated with it's brand, but that desire also makes glaringly evident that Al Qaeda, itself, is marginalized and without the ability to generate operations of its own. This is a good thing, because it proves Al Qaeda's effectiveness is neutered and has moved on to a purely ideological mode. Combatting an ideological mode of a movement requires a different methodology than breaking up isolated pseudo-cells.
Zarqawi-esque "Al Qaeda copycats" tend to have their own twist on the Al Qaeda's demands - Zarqawi's was vehemently militant Salafist, anti-Shi'a, and anti-Jordanian, rather than the more anti-global, anti-Western first, pro-caliphate that AQ professes. These 'regionality' wrinkles are grippy handles for intelligence and enforcement operatives to grab onto and exploit. At the logical end of this spectrum, we come back to locally disgruntled terrorists - basque/eta, ira, timothy mcveigh.
There's a question of motive for these new cells which is a good and bad thing for the intelligence community. It's possible they're trying to gain AQ's attention to receive some sort of legitimacy from AQ, but it's just as possible that AQ's message has gone "mainstream" as it were and is causing spontaneous cells. Of the ones that have emerged, regardless of their "success," their tradecraft has been weaker than previous missions attributed to core Al Qaeda. For the enforcement community, that's also a good thing - bungling cells are easier to catch.
The real question is what a real "sleeper cell" looks like. Well trained and prepared cells would not look like the Seas of David or Assem Hammoud, the Lebanese man caught in April 2006, and being compared to the Lebanese 9/11 hijacker Ziyad Jarrah.
The tangential question is why are we hearing about "Kramer Jihadists" (a phrase used by Stratfor to describe opsec-poor terrorist wannabes) at this point in time. If this sort of hero emulation's constantly going on why is this being played up in the press? Is there actually a significant upsurge or is it for domestic political consumption? Anniversaries of Madrid, London, and NYC are also always good times to focus more on foiled plots, too.