By Matt Korade, CQ Staff

It may seem like the epitome of government incompetence: In the face of incalculable evil, sit back and do nothing, because the evil will be its own undoing.

As a recommendation in a town known for its abundance of free advice, this one from a panel of terrorism experts might have provoked skepticism from its Capitol Hill audience. But the suggestion came with a number of caveats.

First, doing nothing was only possible because the evil in question was al Qaeda, which has done so much to alienate militant Islamists that it is probably incapable of resurrecting itself.

Thus, doing nothing really means allowing nature to take its course, as difficult as this can be for an action-oriented center of national power; but discretion is the better part of valor, as they say, and in this case discretion means inaction, because these days the United States’ unpopularity in the Middle East and southwest Asia makes any of its activities the kiss of death for Western goals, such as de-radicalization in extremist hotbeds in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya and other parts of North Africa.

“Islam will defeat al Qaeda, we won’t,” said Peter Bergen, a scholar with the New America Foundation and noted writer on al Qaeda.

Don’t believe him? Consider, Bergen says, al Qaeda’s strategic errors: the bombings in Indonesia in 2002 and 2005, which killed about 222 and wounded 338; the bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2003, which killed about 35 and wounded more than 160; the hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan, in 2005, which killed about 60 and wounded 115; and, of course, Sept. 11, which killed nearly 3,000. Al Qaeda’s attacks have been so egregious, even Osama bin Laden’s spiritual mentor, Salman al-Awda, took, to the airwaves in 2007 to denounce the al Qaeda leader, and his tactics, by name.

Now, al Qaeda is suspected of being involved in the Marriott Hotel bombings in Pakistan this past weekend, which so far has killed 53 and wounded more than 260.

What all these attacks have in common is the condemnation of not only the mostly Islamic governments of the countries where they occurred but also other Islamists. Al Qaeda’s indiscriminate killing of innocent Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere has only intensified the jihad from within.

Because of this, it is inevitable that al Qaeda will find itself increasingly isolated, Bergen said. What happened with the so-called Sunni awakening in Iraq, for example, was the equivalent of an “assisted suicide,” in which the U.S. military and inhabitants of Anbar province were complicit. Al Qaeda created its own problems through a combination of extremely poor leadership, the lack of a positive vision, the inability to compromise the way a true political movement would, and an ever-growing list of the group’s enemies. Writ large, these flaws hold the seeds of the group’s undoing.

“This is not a winning strategy,” Bergen said. In fact, if the strategy was to rally popular support for overthrowing Middle East governments by first attacking the United States, “the strategy has been a complete dud,” he said. Not only is the United States devoting its considerable resources to obliterating the terrorist group, but those secular governments are more entrenched than they were before the attacks.

In Iraq, al Qaeda has succeeded in making U.S. and coalition forces seem merciful and humane by comparison, according to Sunnis there, said Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism expert and senior investigator with the Nine/Eleven Finding Answers Foundation. Even groups such as the Islamic Army in Iraq and the Army of Ansar al-Sunnah – which was al Qaeda’s last remaining ally, have split off from the group, he said.

The Islamic Army in Iraq, for example, said it broke with al Qaeda over “the continuous mistakes which the Al-Qaida organization has perpetrated against the operations of the insurgency in Iraq — such as forcing others to swear allegiance to the so-called Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), and carrying out crimes targeting both our men and innocent people.”

Ansar al-Sunnah proposed the most drastic of remedies, saying in an intercepted communiqué, “the greatest action that Shayk bin Laden could perform today would be the disbanding of the al Qaida organization in Iraq, because it has fallen into disgrace and has become a cover for anyone with twisted goals in order for them to achieve these goals through this infiltrated organization. The only treatment for its condition is to disband it.”