CHAPTER IV - QUESTIONS
What is happening with Al Qaeda? Are its leaders hiding in Pakistan's tribal areas? Can they communicate orders to cells claiming allegiance to them? Is the organization still capable of striking the West or is it morphing into something different? How will President Mubarak's succession unfold in Egypt? Will the regime's stability be jeopardized? Can Syria be reintegrated into the Arab fold and will it loosen its ties to Iran?
I. WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH AL QAEDA?
Al Qaeda and its founder have been the focus of many analyses concentrating on its history and detailed its motives 51 ( * ) . We will recall some points that seem important before considering the movement's development and future.
A. A BRIEF HISTORICAL OUTLINE
1. The origins of Al Qaeda and its war aims
Al Qaeda emerged in the mountains of Afghanistan between 1996 and 1998. Its founder, Usama bin Laden, belongs to a dynasty of extremely wealthy Saudi businessmen that originated in Yemen. Bin Laden knew Afghanistan very well because he played a role alongside Abdallah Azzam, a key figure in the jihad against the Soviet occupiers. He returned to Saudi Arabia during the winter of 1989-1990. Basking in the glow of his prestige as a leader of the Afghan resistance, he is a moral and financial touchstone for thousands of Afghanistan veterans from the Arabian Peninsula. Bin Laden helped the Yemeni "Afghans" and urged them to fight a holy war against the Marxist regime in Aden. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 he offered the Saudi defense minister, Prince Sultan, his services to mobilize Afghanistan veterans to defend the kingdom. Bin Laden loathed Saddam Hussein, who was guilty in his eyes of apostasy, the most serious crime in Islam. Prince Sultan courteously showed him out of his office: the royal family had already decided to ask the United States for military protection. For bin Laden, the deployment of hundreds of thousands of "infidel" soldiers in Saudi Arabia violated the holiness of the land where Mecca and Medina are located. Deeply troubled by the stationing of US troops on Saudi soil after the liberation of Kuwait, bin Laden launched a barrage of virulent criticism against the royal family, accusing them of compromising with "infidels". Riyadh's ruling circles reacted by "authorizing" him to leave for Peshawar on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which look more like an expulsion. He eventually settled in Sudan, where an Islamic junta that offered Afghanistan veterans asylum had ruled since 1989. There he devoted himself to ambitious agricultural development projects and the building of strategic roads. But he also embellished the legend of an Arabic jihad in Afghanistan responsible for toppling the Soviet Union and called the United States a "paper tiger", citing its humiliation in Somalia in October 1993 as proof. After being stripped of his Saudi citizenship in March 1994, bin Laden became a generous, experienced benefactor of a jihad without borders. His second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian citizen, breathed new life into Egypt's jihad organization and its terrorist activities, including an unsuccessful attempt on President Mubarak's life in Addis Ababa in June 1995. Five months later bin Laden was blamed for two spectacular attacks: one against US military advisors in Riyadh, the other against the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad.
The United States, Saudi Arabia and Egypt joined forces to pressure Sudan into expelling bin Laden in May 1996. He went to Jalalabad, in southern Afghanistan, with the consent of Pakistan's army and intelligence services (ISI). He was joined there by al-Zawhiri, who contributed his know-how as well as the resources and militants of his organization, Al Djihad.
In a mountainous province on the border with Pakistan, bin Laden thought the time and place were ripe to challenge his adversaries, the United States and the Saud family. He returned to the tradition of the early Islamic conquerors, who ordered the infidel enemy to either submit or convert before the opening of hostilities. Bin Laden released a "declaration of jihad against the Americans, who are occupying the country of two holy mosques". That proclamation, the founding statement of a global jihad, came from a "safe base ( qâ'ida )" in "these peaks where the world's mightiest atheistic military power crashed". It mentioned Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kashmir, Tajikistan, Burma, the Philippines and Somalia but the top priority was to drive the "infidel" occupier out of Saudi Arabia.
That declaration of jihad is Al Qaeda's founding act . Soon after throwing down the gauntlet bin Laden joined forces with Mullah Omar, who had just proclaimed himself "commander of the believers" in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan. Pakistan's special services facilitated the alliance and organized the first meeting between them. Bin Laden urged Omar "to order good and pursue evil" and said he backed the mullah's plan to set up the " Islamic emirate of Afghanistan" . The crude, mistrustful Taliban leader was receptive to "Sheikh Usama's" flattery and generosity. "Nothing suggested that the stateless conspirator and the hot-tempered Taliban would collaborate one day," wrote Jean-Pierre Filiu. "Both had just started an incredible distortion of Islam's values, bin Laden by calling for global jihad, Omar by donning the Prophet's mantle. 52 ( * ) In March 1997 the Afghan Taliban officially announced that bin Laden was their "guest". The declaration was not only taken very seriously abroad but also in Kandahar, where the Pashtun tribal code considers guests sacred.
In the next 18 months bin Laden methodically consolidated his "base" in the Taliban emirate. He and Zawahiri aspired to spread a global terrorist jihad. In February 1998 they created the " World Islamic Front of Jihad against Jews and Crusaders" , which is the real name of what we call Al Qaeda. The "liberation" of the holy places of Jerusalem and Mecca was still the priority but the target became global: "to kill Americans and their allies, both civilians and military, is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible".
On August 7, 1998 two blasts simultaneously struck the US embassies in Dar es-Salam and Nairobi, slaughtering many people. The "Islamic Army for the Liberation of the Holy Places" claimed responsibility for the attacks, which were quickly attributed to bin Laden and terrorists recruited in Afghanistan. Washington and Riyadh demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden and dismantle Al Qaeda but Mullah Omar flatly refused in the name of sacrosanct Pashtun hospitality. In spring 1999 bin Laden and his operational mastermind, Mohammed Atef, an Egyptian, planned a complex operation involving the coordinated hijacking of jetliners in the United States. They entrusted the project to Khaled Cheikh Mohammed, who was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the USS Cole in Yemen on 12 October 2000, for which bin Laden claimed responsibility on February 26, 2001. The same day, Mullah Omar decided to blow up the giant statues of Buddha in Bamyan.
Mullah Omar did not know bin Laden had chosen September 11, 2001 for an "apocalyptic" attack. The Al Qaeda leader targeted the United States alone and may not have imagined that the attack would cause an international outcry. The next day the UN Security Council announced it was "ready to take the necessary measures to respond to terrorist attacks" . The United States began bombing Afghanistan on the night of October 7 to 8, 2001. Bin Laden, who had been silent until then, appeared alongside al-Zawahiri on the Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite network, where he said he " swears before Allah that America will not have peace until peace reigns in Palestine and the army of infidels leaves the land of Mohammed ".
2. Al Qaeda and the concept of jihad
Jean-Pierre Filiu writes that few concepts have been as distorted as jihad. Usually translated as "holy war", "jihad on the way to God" refers to the Muslim community's mobilization on a war footing to defend itself or conquer new lands. But whether it is defensive or offensive, military jihad is less noble than the "great jihad", which refers to the Muslim's pietist, if not mystical, effort to deepen his faith.
Contrary to popular belief, jihad is not one of the five pillars of Islam, which are the profession of faith, prayer, alms-giving, fasting during Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
The modern-day association between jihad and terrorism dates back to October 6, 1981 and the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat, whose killers said they belonged to a group called " jihad" and boasted of having punished the first Arab head of State to sign a peace treaty with Israel.
In 1983 the mysterious " Islamic Jihad Organization" appeared in Beirut, harassing the multinational force deployed in Lebanon and committing two simultaneous suicide attacks on October 23, 1981 that killed and wounded hundreds of French and US troops.
As the terrorist jihad spread in the Middle East, another kind of jihad emerged in Afghanistan: resistance to Soviet occupation. A loose Arab group originating in Egypt and Saudi Arabia swelled its ranks forged its legend, taking credit for defeating the USSR, which was actually the work of Afghan resistance fighters, the mujahideen. The "nomads" of global jihad also fought in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir, but everywhere they clashed with the proponents of national struggle and eventually found themselves back in Afghanistan, where they set up their base.
The international mobilization against terrorism starting in autumn 2001 deprived the global jihad of its Afghan sanctuary but did not wipe out Al Qaeda, which started looking for a new safe haven. It seized the opportunity offered by the US-UK invasion of Iraq to gain a new lease on life in the heart of Islam and establish itself on the borders of Saudi Arabia. At first, the Sunni Iraqi jihad, in the hatred and confusion of the resistance to US occupation, accepted help from Al Qaeda to oust the "infidels" but the alliance foundered on the Shiite jihad. After all, Iraq is where Islam's great schism took place
There is a fundamental difference between Al Qaeda's jihadism, which borderless and has global goals, and "Islamic-nationalist" movements such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban, whose demands are national.
3. Jihadism and Islamic nationalism
As Olivier Roy shows, Al Qaeda is a global, decentralized, borderless organization relatively cut off from Middle East issues. It has no political roots in the Muslim population. Al Qaeda radicals are "deterritorialized": the country where they were born is not where they go into action. The hijackers who crashed planes in the World Trade Center and the terrorist doctors in Great Britain in June 2007 had very different profiles.
Al Qaeda does not seek to control a territory but to ignite a "clash of civilizations" by inflicting damage on the Western powers, especially the United States, that will make headline news, amplifying its image. That is more important than the reality of the damage. "Al Qaeda needs those it demonizes because perception leads to political action," writes Olivier Roy. 53 ( * )
The same cannot be said for Islamic-nationalist movements. Islam may be at the heart of their struggle, but it is limited to well-defined areas--Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Pakistan--and their goal is not just the Islamization of society but also the liberation of their country. There are disagreements, if not clashes, within these movements between those who argue that society must be Islamisized before a country is liberated--Sheikh Yassine's position before the creation of Hamas--and those who assert that Islamization will come only after an area has been freed of direct or indirect foreign control. The differences of opinion matter little. These groups are always "national liberation movements" whose goals are very different from Al Qaeda's, even if the operating methods, in particular suicide attacks, and the invocation of Islam are the same.
B. THE END OF AL QAEDA?
1. The mistakes of the "all-out war on terror"
In response to the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush's administration set up a strategy based on "the global war on terror" (or terrorism). The military intervention in Iraq was portrayed as one of the battles.
The very concept of a global war against terrorism was a mistake. Terrorism is merely a method. The groups and men that implement it are what must be fought. War was declared on Hitler, not on the blitzkrieg . Declaring war on a method--terrorism--or a feeling--terror--shifts the focus away from the enemy that should have been named: the "international jihadists", Usama bin Laden or "the Islamic front against Jews and crusaders".
It is easy to understand why the United States was reluctant to launch a manhunt for what was just a loosely organized band of a few hundred fanatics, not an international organization. It was probably hard to admit that such a small group, working with such primitive means, could inflict such damage on the world's leading power. The United States did not have much to gain from such a manhunt, if not a few small successes out of all proportion to the means deployed.
It was necessary to attack not just men--terrorist groups--but also the "rogue States" that shelter them. The United States quickly and easily took control of Afghanistan in late 2001, but the operation did not suffice to wash away the humiliation Al Qaeda had wrought. It was necessary to strike a country putting up enough resistance that its surrender would show the world no State could attack the United States with impunity. Iraq was perfect for the part of scapegoat, especially since the neo-conservatives and their Republican allies, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, wanted the "finish the job" George H. W. Bush had started during the Gulf War, when US troops stopped at the Iraqi border.
The focus on terrorism and Iraq became a doctrine in President George W. Bush's "national security strategy" published in autumn 2002. Too much stress has probably been put on the "preventive" military strikes the "Bush doctrine" advocated when the United States' interests were threatened and too little on the fact that it also emphasized international cooperation and the defense of human rights and freedoms. The "Bush doctrine" pursued the ambitious goal of remolding the Arab-Muslim world, by regime change if necessary. As Olivier Roy wrote, "the neoconservatives pushed to the limit the idea that Western values are universal and must be promoted, by direct intervention if need be" 54 ( * ) . That policy broke with the West's traditional policy of backing the regimes in place, whether or not they were authoritarian. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be settled in order to stamp out the roots of hatred, but that is just a particular aspect of a much broader problem: the region will spawn men and movements that threaten the security of Americans and their allies as long as it is plagued by tyranny, despair and anger. 55 ( * )
Unfortunately, the global war on terror mainly involved police and military actions carried out by the US government and supported by its NATO allies against organizations close to Islamist terrorism. It combines direct struggle--dismantling terrorist cells and destroying training camps--and indirect action: investigating and putting pressure on governments, groups and people backing terrorist movements; and freezing assets suspected of belonging to terrorist groups or of being used on their behalf. The global war also includes financial aid to countries participating in the fight against terrorism and the development of international cooperation in intelligence, police and justice.
The policy has had meager results. The United States, traditional defenders of the rule of law and civil liberties, lost sight of those values, and especially of due process, by resorting to torture and imprisonment without trial. The prisons at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have become sad symbols of that. Following the United States' example, the United Kingdom is the only European country to set up a procedure that flouts the European Convention on Human Rights, allowing the detention without trial of "presumed international terrorists" who could not be expelled for a practically unlimited period of time (chapter IV of the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act). The European Court of Human Rights condemned the procedure, which has since been abolished. Meanwhile Al Qaeda, which had no presence in Iraq, was able to become a force there, recruiting and training members until blind attacks on the civilian population turned the Sunni tribes against it.
2. Al Qaeda's mutations
Al Qaeda's astounding ability to mutate and adjust to circumstances explains its resilience after 2001. It is decentralized and opportunistic. Its strategy consists of slipping through cracks in Western security systems or in countries where the State is weak, if not inexistent, to set up training camps and stage global operations from a safe haven. Al Qaeda's use of the Internet helps maintain the impression that the movement is more active than it actually is and gives it an international presence.
Al Qaeda draws its recruits from the heterogeneous pool that intelligence experts call the " community of resentment" . In most cases there is no recruitment. Converts enlist, individually or in small groups, under the organization's banner to boost their visibility. Saudi journalist and bin Laden expert Jamal Khashoggi says Al Qaeda is above all a state of mind that can be maintained in many ways, from an exclusively religious education to television broadcasts, Internet and fiery sermons in mosques exalting Islamic identity. In the context of fierce hostility to the West and its values, the mere presence of tourists in Muslim countries can provoke a terrorist act.
One of Al Qaeda's most frightening specificities is that it tends to position itself on a virtual register in order to become a "reference" or a "label" and keep alive the myth of the clash of civilizations between the West, perceived as Christian, and the Muslim world, thought of as essentially Sunni. Al Qaeda views Shiites as heretics, relegating them to the same rank as Jews and Christians and committing mass attacks against Shiite pilgrimage sites.
Extremists use the Al Qaeda label and references to bin Laden to seem stronger than they actually are, while some States do likewise in order to obtain help in their fight against local rebellions and justify repression.
3. Assessing the fight against Al Qaeda
The fight against Al Qaeda has had mixed results, especially in light of the fact that no other terrorist group has ever been combated with so much effort. It is necessary to specify which part of Al Qaeda is being referred to before taking stock of the situation. Experts tend to identify three circles:
- the inner circle, which could be called central Al Qaeda , is based on the Afghan-Pakistani border and comprises the organization's "old guard" and leadership ;
- the second circle includes "franchises" such as AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) or AQAP (Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula), which stem from local movements that spontaneously claim to be part of Al Qaeda;
- the outer circle is made up of autonomous movements that try to acquire the Al Qaeda label through violent actions.
The first circle seems to have survived with its central leadership and ideology intact and its intentions unchanged. Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still at large, although many cadres such as Mohamed Atef or Khaled Cheikh Mohammed, the September 11 mastermind, are dead or in jail. Bin Laden's survival fuels the myth, which is alarming in that the fight against Al Qaeda is largely a matter of perception.
The second circle is noticeably weaker on the operational level. It has not committed an attack in the West since 2005 and its involvement in the Afghan conflict remains marginal. Signs of weakness--internal disagreements, defections and failures--are increasing. Al Qaeda has been unable to federate the Islamic struggle and to wrest control of some theaters of strategic operations, such as Palestine. But its main failure is the inability to rally widespread popular and political support. That is why it seems confined to a very small number of sanctuaries: the Afghan-Pakistani border zone and Yemen. Other areas, such as the Horn of Africa's failed States and certain sub-Sahara countries, including Mali or Niger, which are incapable of controlling their vast areas, offer possible sanctuaries.
The "community of resentment" and the state of relations between the West and the Arab world fuel the growth of totally autonomous cells. Putting out those embers will weaken Al Qaeda and its satellite groups.
In conclusion, it should be recalled that the Afghanistan war's main goal was to deprive Al Qaeda and its allies of a safe haven, not to set up a democratic State. Instead of convincing tomorrow's Afghan leaders, whoever they may be, of the danger of sheltering Al Qaeda on their soil as the Taliban did, the aim should be to create and train Afghan security forces strong enough to fight the Taliban and restore the people's trust. The ultimate goal is to build a State from security zones. Have we given ourselves the resources to do that?
Al Qaeda's fight is mainly ideological. It uses modern mass communication techniques, which is why the reasons for anti-Western hatred must be understood in order to intelligently combat it.
* 51 The literature on this topic is abundant. See Gilles Kepel, Jihad, expansion et déclin de l'islamisme , Gallimard 2000, Olivier Roy, L'Islam mondialisé , Le Seuil 2002, Jean-Pierre Filiu, Les frontières du Jihad , Fayard 2006, Ian Hamel L'énigme Oussama Ben Laden , Payot 2008, François Heisbourg Après Al-Qaïda , Stock 2009, Michel Guérin and Jean-Luc Marret, Histoires de Djihad , Éditions des équateurs 2009.
* 52 Jean-Pierre Filiu, op. cit, p. 132
* 53 Olivier Roy, Le Croissant et le Chaos , p 169.
* 54 Olivier Roy, op. cit p. 10
* 55 Speech by President George W. Bush on 4 February 2004