By Hassan Mneimneh
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
1st part of 2
Understanding al Qaeda's true character, structure, and strategy provides
important clues about why the organization has not been able to ignite a global
jihad. Still, the organization poses a grave threat to international stability
and to the United States in particular. The next generation of al Qaeda leaders
may be able to deliver more localized sporadic deadly attacks.
Seven years after the worst lethal attack against the U.S. mainland, the
leadership of the group that claimed responsibility continues to survive with
impunity. Since 2001, al Qaeda, a loosely defined organization, has had a
volatile history. It has lost, then partially recovered, its main launch pad in
the Afghan plateau; precariously secured, then been substantially beaten out
of, a new base of operations in Iraq; claimed credit for a series of terrorist
acts across the globe--shattering lives and confidence in security and state
authority in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; and initiated a failed
insurgency in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of its principal, Osama bin Laden.
But its hopes of igniting a global jihad have not materialized. Instead, its
efforts have been effectively curtailed in many locales, it has suffered
considerable setbacks in others, and it has had to confront ideological and
dogmatic challenges.[1] Most significantly, al Qaeda has so far failed to
deliver on its declared goal of inflicting on the United States another
spectacular terrorist attack. Still, al Qaeda remains a threat to international
stability in general and to the United States in particular. The nature of the
danger it represents is best understood in the context of its character,
structure, and strategy.
Character and Structure
Al Qaeda is not a cohesive organization with centralized governance. Instead,
it is a diffuse network of "franchises" bound primarily by a rigid
reductionist ideology and broad strategic outlook. The franchises offer
allegiance to a global nominal charismatic leadership that, through direct
involvement or through the endorsement of local initiatives, has an arbitrage
function, redirecting resources--human and financial--in order to optimize
impact and effect. This function, however, tends to be ad hoc and opportunistic
and not aligned with a consistent and detailed strategy. In the absence of a
sophisticated strategy, al Qaeda adheres to a wholesale rejection of the world
order: states, governments, and international organizations are deemed
illegitimate.
The combination of ideology and loyalty allows al Qaeda to compensate for the
general absence of conventional institutional structures worldwide. Local
affiliates--notably in Iraq, where a bureaucracy of oppression was well
anchored--have exhibited complex administrative structures. But the global
organization has preserved the ephemeral and virtual aspects of the original
database (the literal meaning of "al Qaeda" in Arabic) compiled by
bin Laden for coordinating with like-minded "activists."
The true character of al Qaeda has often been lost amid alarmist portrayals
that paint it as the harbinger of an inevitable totalitarian caliphate and
dismissive assessments that reduce it to little more than a figment of the
imagination of the uninformed or the politically motivated. The lack of
institutional capacity for sustained action, inherent to the nature of the diffuse
network, drastically limits the likelihood of al Qaeda translating its ultimate
utopian (or dystopian) dream into reality, but the carnage and dislocation it
has inflicted in recent years demonstrate amply that the problem cannot be
reduced to one of law and order.
Al Qaeda is not a cohesive organization with centralized governance. Instead,
it is a diffuse network of "franchises" bound primarily by a rigid
reductionist ideology and broad strategic outlook.
Al Qaeda may be quixotic in its pursuits, but it is none-theless waging a
global war against the United States and the current world order. If war is
defined as actions aimed at reducing the assets--physical, human, and
financial--of one's enemy while limiting the loss of, preserving, or increasing
one's own assets, al Qaeda's assault on the United States seven years ago may
be ranked as one of the prime examples of asymmetrical warfare in modern
history. With little expenditure and with the easy sacrifice of nineteen of its
foot soldiers, al Qaeda forced the United States into a conflict with rules of
engagement dramatically different from any previous battles in which the United
States has taken part. While the United States is bound in its conduct of war
by both international conventions and its own codes of ethics, al Qaeda
displays no such limitations, targeting noncombatants and other conventionally
protected categories solely on the basis of their vulnerability.[2] Al Qaeda
uses the resulting imbalance to force the United States into an onerous, almost
prohibitive, adherence to principles--or into the ultimately even more costly
departure from these principles for the purpose of containing and eliminating
the continuous threat.
Two Major Currents
Al Qaeda is not solely responsible for the degeneration in the interpretation
of the Islamic corpus that gives religious sanction to acts of terrorism.
Through omission and commission, Arab and Muslim intellectuals and religious
leaders have condoned or endorsed statements and actions that served as building
blocks for the extreme positions espoused by al Qaeda. If suicide bombing and
the killing of civilians is justified in one context--as an "act of
resistance" by Palestinians in Israel,[3] for example--the justification
can easily be extended to acts directed at the global hegemon, local
potentates, and "complicit" populations.
Ideology, against the backdrop of an acquiescing culture, is the main component
in al Qaeda's operational model. Arab culture might have despaired about the
promises of nationalists and leftists, but its acceptance of their diagnosis of
societal and political ills as the ultimate responsibility of Zionism and U.S.
imperialism has lingered. The al Qaeda brand of militancy is a phenomenon at
the confluence of two major currents in modern Arab and Islamic cultural
evolution: first, the gradual expansion of Salafism, an undeclared
"reformation" within Sunni Islam seeking the return of Muslims to the
original faith, traceable to the fourteenth century literalist scholar Ibn
Taymiyyah and applied as a restrictive socio-religious regimentation by the
clerical establishment in Saudi Arabia, and second, a paradigm shift cascading
from the Arab Nahdah ("renaissance") of the nineteenth century,
replacing piety with proselytism and quietism with political activism as
normative values in Muslim life and positing Islam as a "total"
system and solution for all political discontent, as promoted by the Muslim
Brotherhood--a movement born in Egypt in the late 1920s--and other "Islamist"
formations. Both currents have adopted a sociocultural, behavior-altering
approach in their host societies, relegating economic necessities and
developmental needs to a nebulous background.
In the 1980s, the Afghan jihad incubator enabled the fusion of the main elements
of both currents, producing the ideological framework of the uncompromising
totalitarian regimentation implemented by al Qaeda and sister organizations
whenever and wherever possible. The parochial character of the concerns of most
militants persisted even with the creation of a de facto "jihadist
international." Whether in Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or elsewhere,
jihadists returning from Afghanistan were not able to articulate an attractive
message for their respective societies. Instead, their brutal actions often
resulted in further alienation from mainstream society. Only with the attack on
the United States on September 11, 2001--an act that created visual parity with
the Superpower--was the leadership of al Qaeda able to transcend parochialism,
reinvigorate jihadists, and present itself as the flag-bearer of a capable,
transnational, Ummah-wide movement.
Ideological Framework
The ideological underpinnings of this movement are its adherence to Salafist
religious irredentism and Islamist vanguard activism--i.e., an activism
cleansed of the populist dilutions introduced by the Muslim Brotherhood and
restored to its elitist character. "Ideological purity" is a sine qua
non for any group seeking affiliation. The commitment to an action-oriented, unequivocal
rejection of any existing order is the other prerequisite. From North Africa to
the Levant, and from Yemen to Iraq, the al Qaeda imprimatur is made available
only to groups that satisfy these dual requirements. The Salafist concept of
al-wala' wa-l-bara' (allegiance to true Muslims and repudiation of all
others),[4] in belief and in practice, is presented as the foundation for a
relationship with the al Qaeda leadership and the subsequent authorization of
an al Qaeda franchise. And ideological purity serves as the common denominator,
ensuring compatible views with limited coordination.
But even rigid literalism is capable of yielding multiple interpretations, and
the textual corpus (the Quran and the Sunnah) is frequently nuanced and has
tolerant inclinations. To compensate for this potential pitfall, al Qaeda
ideologues have instituted a "maximalist" approach that always errs
on the side of severity and austerity. Applied to the political realm,
maximalism depicts all political players as strategic enemies and identifies
religious justifications, however tenuous, for all hostile actions taken
against them. Through this "no holds barred" approach, maximalism
creates the illusion of an al Qaeda that is centralized and strategically minded.
The career of Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Iraq is an illustration of both the power
of the ideology-based model and its pitfalls--from an al Qaeda perspective.
Zarqawi, a Jordanian veteran of the Afghan jihad, sought and ultimately
received the endorsement of the al Qaeda leadership for his actions in
post-Saddam Iraq. He nonetheless preserved operational autonomy, determined the
local strategy, and engaged in an effective genocide against Shiite Iraqis.
While phrasing his objections in utilitarian terms (and hence preserving the
maximalist stance), Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second-in-command, cautioned
Zarqawi against the harshness of his methods.[5] Zarqawi did not heed the
(half-hearted) message. The Islamic State of Iraq, an al Qaeda affiliate that
emerged as a result of Zarqawi's efforts, later collapsed as a result, mutatis
mutandis, of the widespread discontent of its "subjects" against the
oppressive and arbitrary measures it implemented in the form of religious and
social maximalism. The failure of al Qaeda in Iraq today seems irreversible;
even the admission to mistakes and excesses on the part of the Islamic State of
Iraq by bin Laden himself[6] could not mitigate the counterproductive effects
of its maximalism. The Sunni insurgency in Iraq is not over; it is, however, no
longer a tool in the al Qaeda global jihad.
The "surge" of U.S. forces in Iraq enabled the transformation of the
popular discontent in Sunni Iraqi society over the al Qaeda presence into an
active force that inflicted on the global organization one of several setbacks
that are ultimately the result of its dogmatic maximalism.[7] The most
important such setback, for the symbolism associated with it, was the apparent
failure of the al Qaeda insurgency in Saudi Arabia. A primary supplier of
suicide bombers to Iraq, through underground jihadist networks, Saudi Arabia
was the ultimate prize sought by al Qaeda, both for its symbolic value as host
to the two holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina, and for the ideological
affiliation between its clerical establishment and the al Qaeda doctrine.
Hassan Mneimneh
Copyright - Original materials
copyright (c) by the authors.
Posted by Harry at 2:08 AM
http://israelagainstterror.blogspot.com/2008/09/seven-years-later-jihadist_16.html
