Al-Qaeda has made terrorism truly global, to deadly effect. But it may yet prove to be its own worst enemy, says Anton La Guardia (interviewed here)
Jul 17th 2008
THESE days in Peshawar, where al-Qaeda was founded 20 years ago, the only glimpse of Osama bin Laden comes on little green packets of safety matches strewn around town by American officials (see picture). They bear the portrait of the world’s most wanted man, along with the promise that America will pay up to $5 million for information leading to his capture.
It is an appropriate image. Like one of these matches, Mr bin Laden caused a flash with the September 11th attacks on America in 2001, then vanished into smoke, leaving a burning trail of militancy stretching from Indonesia to Afghanistan, Iraq, north Africa and Europe. And despite the reward offered for his capture, now $25m, nobody has yet betrayed the whereabouts of “the Sheikh”, who periodically emerges on the internet to deliver some doom-laden warning to the West.
Nearly seven years into America’s “global war on terror”, the result remains inconclusive. Al-Qaeda lost a safe haven in Afghanistan, but is rebuilding another one in Pakistan; Mr bin Laden is at large, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who masterminded September 11th, has gone on trial in Guantánamo Bay; many leaders have been captured or killed, but others have taken their place; al-Qaeda faces an ideological backlash, but young Muslims still volunteer to blow themselves up.
True, America has not been struck since 2001, but European capitals have been bombed. A number of plots have been averted on both sides of the Atlantic. Al-Qaeda and its nebula of like-minded groups still pose the most direct threat to the security of Western countries, and of many others besides. Western intelligence agencies are convinced al-Qaeda still wants to develop non-conventional weapons, whether chemical or biological agents or “dirty bombs” that create a cloud of radioactivity. In Iraq bombs are already mixed with chlorine gas. Even a rudimentary nuclear bomb, say the spooks, might not be beyond the reach of terrorists.
Al-Qaeda has built on decades of Middle Eastern terrorism. Palestinian groups internationalised their violence in the 1970s; Hizbullah used suicide-bombers against the Americans in Lebanon back in 1983; Palestinian suicide-bombers sought to inflict maximum civilian casualties in Israel from 1994; and Algerians who hijacked a French airliner the same year tried to fly it into the Eiffel Tower but were foiled.
In those days, though, attacking Western targets was part of a local nationalist or sectarian fight. Al-Qaeda’s dark genius was to weave these strands together with the tools of globalisation to create a networked movement with a single worldwide cause: jihad against America. Conventional terrorist groups, such as the Basque ETA movement or even Lebanon’s Hizbullah, often keep their violence in bounds to avoid alienating their political supporters. But global jihadists, without a domestic constituency, seek to maximise civilian casualties for spectacular effect. Counting the victims is tricky. Attacks on Western civilians have dropped, but the routine use of suicide-bombings has raised the slaughter, mostly of Muslims, to appalling levels (see chart 1).
Al-Qaeda’s ideology was forged by one big victory and two decades of failures. Disparate Arab fighters who helped Afghan ones evict Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989 were initially elated, but became dejected by the ensuing civil war and the failure of violent campaigns in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere. Many extremists decided to end the bloodletting. But a cadre of wandering jihadists gathered in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban and decided to redirect their ire from the “near” enemy to the “far” one.
The rationale was explained by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s co-founder, in his memoirs, entitled “Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner”. The “Jewish-Crusader alliance”, as he called the West, would never allow its local allies to be toppled. The answer was to attack America directly.
Such tactics would have several advantages, Mr Zawahiri said. They would deal “a blow to the great master”. Given the depth of anti-Americanism across the Muslim world, they would “win over the nation”. And the attacks would sow discord between Western countries and their local allies, presenting America with a dilemma: withdraw support from its friends or become directly involved in the Middle East. If America took military action, Mr Zawahiri argued, “the battle will turn into clear-cut jihad against the infidels,” which Muslims were bound to support.
Seen in this light, one of the objectives of the September 11th attacks was to provoke the Americans into invading Muslim lands. But if al-Qaeda intended to trap America in Afghanistan, its plan went badly awry, at least initially. The Taliban fell quickly in 2001 and al-Qaeda’s followers were forced into hiding.
A hubristic America, however, then walked into a trap of its own making by invading Iraq in 2003. It got rid of a dangerous dictator but gave the jihadists a popular cause against American occupiers in the Muslim heartland. For a while the jihadists thought they could carve out a base in Iraq from which to destabilise the region. That danger may now have been averted. Helped by al-Qaeda’s excesses, a bloodied America seems to be fighting its way out of the worst of the troubles it created for itself.
The beginning of the end?
So terrorism experts are now debating whether al-Qaeda is starting to burn itself out. “On balance, we are doing pretty well,” Michael Hayden, the director of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, told the Washington Post in May. “Near strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaeda globally—and here I’m going to use the word ‘ideologically’—as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam.”
Many thought he was being overly optimistic. Had General Hayden himself not given warning two months earlier that the restoration of an al-Qaeda haven in Pakistan’s tribal belt constituted a “clear and present danger” to the West?
A related argument has been provoked by “Leaderless Jihad”, a book by Marc Sageman, a counter-terrorism consultant. He argues that al-Qaeda’s core leadership has been “neutralised operationally”. The bigger danger now comes from loose groups of Muslims in the West who radicalise each other and carry out autonomous, self-financed attacks.
This thesis has come in for strong criticism, particularly from Professor Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University. He notes that al-Qaeda’s imminent death has often been heralded in the past, only to be contradicted by the sound of new explosions. Many plots in Europe have direct connections back to Pakistan, he notes.
Part of the problem lies in al-Qaeda’s diffuse nature. Its core members may number only hundreds, but it has connections of all kinds to militant groups with thousands or even tens of thousands of fighters. Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organisation, a militant network and a subculture of rebellion all at the same time.
To explain the movement, many experts draw parallels with globalisation. Some describe it as a venture-capital firm that invests in promising terrorist projects. Others speak of it as a global “brand” maintained by its leaders through their propaganda, with its growing number of “franchises” carrying out attacks.
The rise of al-Qaeda’s stateless terrorism does not mean that the old state-sponsored variety has disappeared. Libya, which once supported the IRA and other violent causes, may now be co-operating with the West, but Iran, among others, supports both Palestinian militants and Lebanon’s Hizbullah movement. Should Iran redirect Hizbullah towards a global terrorist campaign against the West—for instance, if the country’s nuclear sites were bombed—the effect might be more devastating than any of al-Qaeda’s works.
For the moment, though, the most immediate global threat comes from the ungoverned, undergoverned and ungovernable areas of the Muslim world. These include the Afghan-Pakistani border, the parts of Iraq still in turmoil, the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and swathes of Yemen, Somalia, the western Sahara desert and the chain of islands between Indonesia and the Philippines (see map).
Just as important as any of these is the “virtual caliphate” of cyberspace. The internet binds together the amorphous cloud of jihadist groups, spreads the ideology, weaves together the “single narrative” that Islam is under attack, popularises militant acts and distributes terrorist know-how. Because al-Qaeda is so dispersed, the fight against it has strained an international order still based on sovereign states.
This special report will attempt to answer the impossible question posed in 2003 in a leaked memo from Donald Rumsfeld, then America’s defence secretary: “Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”
Jul 17th 2008
THESE days in Peshawar, where al-Qaeda was founded 20 years ago, the only glimpse of Osama bin Laden comes on little green packets of safety matches strewn around town by American officials (see picture). They bear the portrait of the world’s most wanted man, along with the promise that America will pay up to $5 million for information leading to his capture.
It is an appropriate image. Like one of these matches, Mr bin Laden caused a flash with the September 11th attacks on America in 2001, then vanished into smoke, leaving a burning trail of militancy stretching from Indonesia to Afghanistan, Iraq, north Africa and Europe. And despite the reward offered for his capture, now $25m, nobody has yet betrayed the whereabouts of “the Sheikh”, who periodically emerges on the internet to deliver some doom-laden warning to the West.
Nearly seven years into America’s “global war on terror”, the result remains inconclusive. Al-Qaeda lost a safe haven in Afghanistan, but is rebuilding another one in Pakistan; Mr bin Laden is at large, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who masterminded September 11th, has gone on trial in Guantánamo Bay; many leaders have been captured or killed, but others have taken their place; al-Qaeda faces an ideological backlash, but young Muslims still volunteer to blow themselves up.
True, America has not been struck since 2001, but European capitals have been bombed. A number of plots have been averted on both sides of the Atlantic. Al-Qaeda and its nebula of like-minded groups still pose the most direct threat to the security of Western countries, and of many others besides. Western intelligence agencies are convinced al-Qaeda still wants to develop non-conventional weapons, whether chemical or biological agents or “dirty bombs” that create a cloud of radioactivity. In Iraq bombs are already mixed with chlorine gas. Even a rudimentary nuclear bomb, say the spooks, might not be beyond the reach of terrorists.
Al-Qaeda has built on decades of Middle Eastern terrorism. Palestinian groups internationalised their violence in the 1970s; Hizbullah used suicide-bombers against the Americans in Lebanon back in 1983; Palestinian suicide-bombers sought to inflict maximum civilian casualties in Israel from 1994; and Algerians who hijacked a French airliner the same year tried to fly it into the Eiffel Tower but were foiled.
In those days, though, attacking Western targets was part of a local nationalist or sectarian fight. Al-Qaeda’s dark genius was to weave these strands together with the tools of globalisation to create a networked movement with a single worldwide cause: jihad against America. Conventional terrorist groups, such as the Basque ETA movement or even Lebanon’s Hizbullah, often keep their violence in bounds to avoid alienating their political supporters. But global jihadists, without a domestic constituency, seek to maximise civilian casualties for spectacular effect. Counting the victims is tricky. Attacks on Western civilians have dropped, but the routine use of suicide-bombings has raised the slaughter, mostly of Muslims, to appalling levels (see chart 1).
Al-Qaeda’s ideology was forged by one big victory and two decades of failures. Disparate Arab fighters who helped Afghan ones evict Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989 were initially elated, but became dejected by the ensuing civil war and the failure of violent campaigns in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere. Many extremists decided to end the bloodletting. But a cadre of wandering jihadists gathered in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban and decided to redirect their ire from the “near” enemy to the “far” one.
The rationale was explained by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s co-founder, in his memoirs, entitled “Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner”. The “Jewish-Crusader alliance”, as he called the West, would never allow its local allies to be toppled. The answer was to attack America directly.
Such tactics would have several advantages, Mr Zawahiri said. They would deal “a blow to the great master”. Given the depth of anti-Americanism across the Muslim world, they would “win over the nation”. And the attacks would sow discord between Western countries and their local allies, presenting America with a dilemma: withdraw support from its friends or become directly involved in the Middle East. If America took military action, Mr Zawahiri argued, “the battle will turn into clear-cut jihad against the infidels,” which Muslims were bound to support.
Seen in this light, one of the objectives of the September 11th attacks was to provoke the Americans into invading Muslim lands. But if al-Qaeda intended to trap America in Afghanistan, its plan went badly awry, at least initially. The Taliban fell quickly in 2001 and al-Qaeda’s followers were forced into hiding.
A hubristic America, however, then walked into a trap of its own making by invading Iraq in 2003. It got rid of a dangerous dictator but gave the jihadists a popular cause against American occupiers in the Muslim heartland. For a while the jihadists thought they could carve out a base in Iraq from which to destabilise the region. That danger may now have been averted. Helped by al-Qaeda’s excesses, a bloodied America seems to be fighting its way out of the worst of the troubles it created for itself.
The beginning of the end?
So terrorism experts are now debating whether al-Qaeda is starting to burn itself out. “On balance, we are doing pretty well,” Michael Hayden, the director of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, told the Washington Post in May. “Near strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaeda globally—and here I’m going to use the word ‘ideologically’—as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam.”
Many thought he was being overly optimistic. Had General Hayden himself not given warning two months earlier that the restoration of an al-Qaeda haven in Pakistan’s tribal belt constituted a “clear and present danger” to the West?
A related argument has been provoked by “Leaderless Jihad”, a book by Marc Sageman, a counter-terrorism consultant. He argues that al-Qaeda’s core leadership has been “neutralised operationally”. The bigger danger now comes from loose groups of Muslims in the West who radicalise each other and carry out autonomous, self-financed attacks.
This thesis has come in for strong criticism, particularly from Professor Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University. He notes that al-Qaeda’s imminent death has often been heralded in the past, only to be contradicted by the sound of new explosions. Many plots in Europe have direct connections back to Pakistan, he notes.
Part of the problem lies in al-Qaeda’s diffuse nature. Its core members may number only hundreds, but it has connections of all kinds to militant groups with thousands or even tens of thousands of fighters. Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organisation, a militant network and a subculture of rebellion all at the same time.
To explain the movement, many experts draw parallels with globalisation. Some describe it as a venture-capital firm that invests in promising terrorist projects. Others speak of it as a global “brand” maintained by its leaders through their propaganda, with its growing number of “franchises” carrying out attacks.
The rise of al-Qaeda’s stateless terrorism does not mean that the old state-sponsored variety has disappeared. Libya, which once supported the IRA and other violent causes, may now be co-operating with the West, but Iran, among others, supports both Palestinian militants and Lebanon’s Hizbullah movement. Should Iran redirect Hizbullah towards a global terrorist campaign against the West—for instance, if the country’s nuclear sites were bombed—the effect might be more devastating than any of al-Qaeda’s works.
For the moment, though, the most immediate global threat comes from the ungoverned, undergoverned and ungovernable areas of the Muslim world. These include the Afghan-Pakistani border, the parts of Iraq still in turmoil, the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and swathes of Yemen, Somalia, the western Sahara desert and the chain of islands between Indonesia and the Philippines (see map).
Just as important as any of these is the “virtual caliphate” of cyberspace. The internet binds together the amorphous cloud of jihadist groups, spreads the ideology, weaves together the “single narrative” that Islam is under attack, popularises militant acts and distributes terrorist know-how. Because al-Qaeda is so dispersed, the fight against it has strained an international order still based on sovereign states.
This special report will attempt to answer the impossible question posed in 2003 in a leaked memo from Donald Rumsfeld, then America’s defence secretary: “Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”
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