Barack Obama Faces Specter of al-Qaida
A little more than a year ago in Cairo, the American president delivered his historical speech of reconciliation with Islam. In the name of values shared by the United States and by the Arabic and Muslim world, he called for a general mobilization against al-Qaida and its murderous intents. He opposed the disastrous habits of his predecessor with a new vision of an Islam as an integral part of the American faith as Christianity or Judaism. He took the opposite direction for the “global war against terror” by targeting with determination the tiny minority of the proponents of Bin Laden, who are enemies of the community of nations — not only the Western ones.
Twelve months after this outstretched hand, Barack Obama has restored a portion of the United States’ credit in the region, even though the absence of any tangible progress on the settlement of the Palestinian question continues to be his principal handicap. The visible stalemate of NATO in Afghanistan also plays in his disfavor, but the continuation of the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq is removing the principle stumbling block handed down by the Bush administration.
It is nevertheless Washington’s refusal to add war after war that has allowed it to take up the initiative against al-Qaida again. Never before has the United States been so close to turning the page on September 11, and the proximity of this possible conclusion adds yet more drama to the intense arm wrestling match between the U.S. and Bin Laden.
1. The Operational Decline
Al-Qaida is composed today of four poles of unequal importance: “Central al-Qaida,” the politico-military leadership that took refuge during the winter of 2001-2002 in the tribal zones of Pakistan; al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), founded in Saudi Arabia in 2003 under the instruction of Bin Laden and withdrawn to Yemen after the failure of its terrorist campaign against the regime of Riyadh; al-Qaida in Iraq, formed in 2004 from the network loyal to Jordanian Jihadist Zarkaoui and taken over after his death in 2006 by an Egyptian emissary of Bin Laden, Abou Hamza Al-Mouhajer; al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a new denomination in 2007 of the main Algerian Jihadist training.
Despite its global vocation, al-Qaida proves to be incapable of spreading out its network beyond its four installations: the organization has clearly abandoned Southeast Asia; it is coming up against implacable hostility from nationalist developments in the Middle East; it is losing interest in the Caucasus; it is even refraining from dealing with service offers from Somali Jihadists.
The majority of the victims of al-Qaida's terrorism remain Muslims killed in Islamic countries, particularly in Iraq and Pakistan. However, the wave of bloody attacks in Baghdad since August of 2009 has not succeeded in curbing the collapse of al-Qaida in Iraq, as witnessed by the Sunni population’s massive participation in the elections of March 2010, which served to repudiate al-Qaida and occurred a month before the elimination and death of Abu Hamza Al-Mouhajir and his assistant. In Algeria, the horror sparked by the terrorist massacres has forced AQIM to suspend suicide attacks. In Yemen, the tribal leaders gave their protection to the units of al-Qaida on the condition of halting blind attacks.
The organization of Bin Laden is all the same desperately attempting to revive anti-Western terrorism, but it mainly has at its disposal recruits trained too quickly and sent off to missions without true support structure or alternative plans. Because of this, there has been an impressive succession of fiascos (which al-Qaida nevertheless labels as victories), thus breaking with its operational exigencies of the past 20 years. The only success al-Qaida can truly boast of over the course of the past year is the suicide attack on the CIA outpost at Khost in eastern Afghanistan where a Jordanian double agent eliminated his commanding officer and a half dozen of his colleagues on December 30, 2009.
This spectacular blow, popularized in the media by a posthumous video of the kamikaze alongside Hakimullah Mehsud, the head of the Pakistani Taliban, nevertheless accentuates the “shadow war” between groups more than the promotional terrorism with which Al-Qaeda identifies itself.
2. The Muslim Counteroffensive
Today, al-Qaida only numbers between 1,00 and 2,000 members within all of its branches. Even so, this self-proclaimed and elitist vanguard intends to impose its totalitarian program on the masses of its supposed religious brethren, which the organization accuses of practicing an “American Islam” and therefore orders to take up its new dogma. The leaders of al-Qaida, like Bin Laden and his Egyptian adjunct Zawahiri, have no religious legitimacy to assert this, and its sectarian pretension has provoked a profound rejection on the part of traditional and popular Islam, and even in more militant ranks of radical Islam. Long confined to the inner circles of official Islam, the condemnations are now emanating from its former Salafi or Jihadist allies, who are harshly criticizing its thrown-together ideology and perhaps even its “betrayal” of Islam.
Al-Qaida is thus paying the price for its dialectic between the “nearby enemy” — who they view as false Muslims — and the “distant enemy” — America and its allies. Since the objective is to lure the “distant enemy” onto the territory of the “nearby enemy” in order to better destabilize the latter, the “distant enemy” is viewed as especially virulent. Al-Qaida wants to lure in this “distant enemy” because only an illegal military entry of such magnitude can allow the organization to overcome its structural weakness and thereby make good use of the chaos sparked by a Western intervention.
Zawahiri is now pinning his hopes on a war between the United States and Iran, on which he is relying for a revival of the terrorist dynamic at the heart of the Middle East. Al-Qaida in Iraq, with its civilian massacres, is trying its best (without success) to slow down the American retreat, since this would signal the organization’s ruin. And Bin Laden is not afraid to lay claim to the fiasco of Christmas 2009, in the (disappointed) hope that the United States would fall into a trap of massive retaliation in Yemen.
Such a horrible policy is naturally opposed by nationalist groups, who refuse to be the hostages of the cynical dialectic of al-Qaida. It is as if the Iraqi guerilla, despite his extreme Sunnism, has turned himself away from al-Qaida well before Gen. Petraeus began his 2007 “surge” and the progressive demolition of Bin Laden’s networks in the country.
It is in this same spirit that Lebanese Hezbollah or Palestinian Hamas have relentlessly opposed any attempt of infiltration by al-Qaida, forbidding the organization from taking a step on the highly symbolic theatre of the confrontation with Israel. As for Mullah Omar (the leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan), he has never repudiated any connection with Bin Laden; but the Afghan insurrection fundamentally relies only on its own native forces, and it is on the other side of the border with Pakistan that al-Qaida has fallen back.
3. The Virtual Seclusion
Al-Qaida is endeavoring to offset this series of politico-military reversals by investing in the Web as a virtual space of mobilization. The organization hammers out its arguments of jihad for jihad’s sake, which consequently causes it to be rejected even in the most radical circles. They view this argument as a corruption at best or a heresy at worse because the jihad is only a means to an end, obedient to the decision of the doctors of the law. Bin Laden is sweeping aside this imperative from the recourse of the Islamic clerics and is instead turning to the Internet as the privileged carrier for the diffusion of al-Qaida’s sectarian vulgate. Al-Qaida publishes an original document on the Web every two or three days, and it multiplies its calls for murder against “the Jews and the crusaders,” hoping that they will be heard here or there, that an isolated Internet surfer will commit a criminal act, thus reviving the vicious circle of terror and repression.
Al-Qaida has not achieved a hit on a Western country since the attacks on London in July 2005, and the Algerian Jihadists of AQIM have failed to arrange their terror attacks in the north Mediterranean. Because the crisis of Jihadist recruitment, aggravated by the effectiveness of the security services, has reached such a level, al-Qaida must rely on the Internet as a priority to radicalize and program potential terrorists. All of the recent affairs implicating AQIM in French territory reveal a major role of the Internet in operational planning. Since November 2009, al-Qaida’s propagation has been praising the massacre by an American Muslim officer of 13 other soldiers in the Texan base of Fort Hood.
Even at the center of Western societies, there is this basic transposition of the formidable dialectic between the “nearby enemy” and the “distant enemy”: There are Muslims in Europe and America who remain implacably hostile toward al-Qaida and its message, but an isolated yet very public provocation can spark racist retaliations and open a cycle of violence from which al-Qaida hopes to profit. This bet on communal hate was at the heart of the Madrid attacks of March 11, 2004, but the maturity of the Spanish society caused it to fail. The exaltation of the killings at Fort Hood therefore represents the reply of al-Qaida to the speech Obama made on America at peace with Islam. It is not too late to take into account the pernicious menace promoted by the cyber-jihad, which has long been concealed due to an idealization of the Internet’s virtues.
The neutralization of jihadist sites and of their homicidal propaganda does not pose insurmountable technical problems, as long as a minimal coordination exists between the different interveners of this virtual war. The Jordanian “mole” that the CIA had thought they recruited (and who finally turned against them in December 2009 at Khost) drew attention to himself by his online violence, supposedly to reinforce his “cover.” Even more seriously, an American agency was able to manipulate a seemingly genuine false jihadist site, one that a separate agency destroyed before being let in on the secret. Cyberspace is also a scene for friendly fire.
4. The Risk of “Pakistanization”
Under its bragging rhetoric, al-Qaida is an organization that is out of breath. Leaning up against the Afghan border, “central al-Qaida” is risking it all on the Pakistani terrain, where it enjoys the old protection from the warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin, powerful men in the Pakistani region of Waziristan as well as in the Afghan province of Khost. However, Bin Laden is betting above all on the revolutionary force of a new generation of Pushtan extremists who regrouped themselves in December 2007 in the TTP, the movement of the Pakistani Taliban.
Al-Qaida thus complements the static protection of the Haqqani network with the dynamic perspective of the TTP, which is engaged in a merciless terrorist campaign against the Islamabad regime. The organization can also count on the cooperation of Jihadist groups of the Punjabi and the Sindi peoples, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, who are responsible for the Bombay attack of November 2008 and who accuse the Pakistani government of having betrayed them for lessening tensions with India.
Commander Massoud, shortly before his assassination in 2001 by mercenaries of Bin Laden, described al-Qaida as the indispensable “glue” for the coherence of the Afghan Taliban. The same formula can apply itself to the Pakistani coalition of Jihadist training, with which al-Qaida is augmenting the revolutionary offensive against the “nearby enemy” — the Islamic Republic of Pakistan — in the name of the fight against the “distant enemy” and America. A number of prisoners captured during the governmental offensives in the tribal zones believed they were fighting American troops and not the Pakistani army.
Barack Obama describes the Jihadist risk in Pakistan as “cancer” and the CIA drones regularly lead deadly raids against al-Qaida and its allies in the tribal zones of Pakistan. Bin Laden has responded by dispatching one of his kamikazes against the staging ground of the CIA, on the other side of the border, and by encouraging the TTP to take aim at the territory as if it were the United States. Such is the meaning of the provocation in Times Square, taken on by Hakimullah Mehsud himself, in order to keep the “distant enemy” trapped in Pakistan.
The trail from all of the thwarted attacks these past months on American territory leads back up to “central al-Qaida” and to the tribal zones. For the Democratic president, it is no longer only about “finishing the work” left unfinished by George W. Bush, but preventing the “Pakistanization” of al-Qaida and the renewal of its global terror. The paradox taken on by the White House is that an increased intervention in Pakistan risks an acceleration of this process instead of neutralizing it. One year after the speech of Cairo, the road remains narrow in Obama’s double or nothing bet against al-Qaida.
Twelve months after this outstretched hand, Barack Obama has restored a portion of the United States’ credit in the region, even though the absence of any tangible progress on the settlement of the Palestinian question continues to be his principal handicap. The visible stalemate of NATO in Afghanistan also plays in his disfavor, but the continuation of the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq is removing the principle stumbling block handed down by the Bush administration.
It is nevertheless Washington’s refusal to add war after war that has allowed it to take up the initiative against al-Qaida again. Never before has the United States been so close to turning the page on September 11, and the proximity of this possible conclusion adds yet more drama to the intense arm wrestling match between the U.S. and Bin Laden.
1. The Operational Decline
Al-Qaida is composed today of four poles of unequal importance: “Central al-Qaida,” the politico-military leadership that took refuge during the winter of 2001-2002 in the tribal zones of Pakistan; al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), founded in Saudi Arabia in 2003 under the instruction of Bin Laden and withdrawn to Yemen after the failure of its terrorist campaign against the regime of Riyadh; al-Qaida in Iraq, formed in 2004 from the network loyal to Jordanian Jihadist Zarkaoui and taken over after his death in 2006 by an Egyptian emissary of Bin Laden, Abou Hamza Al-Mouhajer; al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a new denomination in 2007 of the main Algerian Jihadist training.
Despite its global vocation, al-Qaida proves to be incapable of spreading out its network beyond its four installations: the organization has clearly abandoned Southeast Asia; it is coming up against implacable hostility from nationalist developments in the Middle East; it is losing interest in the Caucasus; it is even refraining from dealing with service offers from Somali Jihadists.
The majority of the victims of al-Qaida's terrorism remain Muslims killed in Islamic countries, particularly in Iraq and Pakistan. However, the wave of bloody attacks in Baghdad since August of 2009 has not succeeded in curbing the collapse of al-Qaida in Iraq, as witnessed by the Sunni population’s massive participation in the elections of March 2010, which served to repudiate al-Qaida and occurred a month before the elimination and death of Abu Hamza Al-Mouhajir and his assistant. In Algeria, the horror sparked by the terrorist massacres has forced AQIM to suspend suicide attacks. In Yemen, the tribal leaders gave their protection to the units of al-Qaida on the condition of halting blind attacks.
The organization of Bin Laden is all the same desperately attempting to revive anti-Western terrorism, but it mainly has at its disposal recruits trained too quickly and sent off to missions without true support structure or alternative plans. Because of this, there has been an impressive succession of fiascos (which al-Qaida nevertheless labels as victories), thus breaking with its operational exigencies of the past 20 years. The only success al-Qaida can truly boast of over the course of the past year is the suicide attack on the CIA outpost at Khost in eastern Afghanistan where a Jordanian double agent eliminated his commanding officer and a half dozen of his colleagues on December 30, 2009.
This spectacular blow, popularized in the media by a posthumous video of the kamikaze alongside Hakimullah Mehsud, the head of the Pakistani Taliban, nevertheless accentuates the “shadow war” between groups more than the promotional terrorism with which Al-Qaeda identifies itself.
2. The Muslim Counteroffensive
Today, al-Qaida only numbers between 1,00 and 2,000 members within all of its branches. Even so, this self-proclaimed and elitist vanguard intends to impose its totalitarian program on the masses of its supposed religious brethren, which the organization accuses of practicing an “American Islam” and therefore orders to take up its new dogma. The leaders of al-Qaida, like Bin Laden and his Egyptian adjunct Zawahiri, have no religious legitimacy to assert this, and its sectarian pretension has provoked a profound rejection on the part of traditional and popular Islam, and even in more militant ranks of radical Islam. Long confined to the inner circles of official Islam, the condemnations are now emanating from its former Salafi or Jihadist allies, who are harshly criticizing its thrown-together ideology and perhaps even its “betrayal” of Islam.
Al-Qaida is thus paying the price for its dialectic between the “nearby enemy” — who they view as false Muslims — and the “distant enemy” — America and its allies. Since the objective is to lure the “distant enemy” onto the territory of the “nearby enemy” in order to better destabilize the latter, the “distant enemy” is viewed as especially virulent. Al-Qaida wants to lure in this “distant enemy” because only an illegal military entry of such magnitude can allow the organization to overcome its structural weakness and thereby make good use of the chaos sparked by a Western intervention.
Zawahiri is now pinning his hopes on a war between the United States and Iran, on which he is relying for a revival of the terrorist dynamic at the heart of the Middle East. Al-Qaida in Iraq, with its civilian massacres, is trying its best (without success) to slow down the American retreat, since this would signal the organization’s ruin. And Bin Laden is not afraid to lay claim to the fiasco of Christmas 2009, in the (disappointed) hope that the United States would fall into a trap of massive retaliation in Yemen.
Such a horrible policy is naturally opposed by nationalist groups, who refuse to be the hostages of the cynical dialectic of al-Qaida. It is as if the Iraqi guerilla, despite his extreme Sunnism, has turned himself away from al-Qaida well before Gen. Petraeus began his 2007 “surge” and the progressive demolition of Bin Laden’s networks in the country.
It is in this same spirit that Lebanese Hezbollah or Palestinian Hamas have relentlessly opposed any attempt of infiltration by al-Qaida, forbidding the organization from taking a step on the highly symbolic theatre of the confrontation with Israel. As for Mullah Omar (the leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan), he has never repudiated any connection with Bin Laden; but the Afghan insurrection fundamentally relies only on its own native forces, and it is on the other side of the border with Pakistan that al-Qaida has fallen back.
3. The Virtual Seclusion
Al-Qaida is endeavoring to offset this series of politico-military reversals by investing in the Web as a virtual space of mobilization. The organization hammers out its arguments of jihad for jihad’s sake, which consequently causes it to be rejected even in the most radical circles. They view this argument as a corruption at best or a heresy at worse because the jihad is only a means to an end, obedient to the decision of the doctors of the law. Bin Laden is sweeping aside this imperative from the recourse of the Islamic clerics and is instead turning to the Internet as the privileged carrier for the diffusion of al-Qaida’s sectarian vulgate. Al-Qaida publishes an original document on the Web every two or three days, and it multiplies its calls for murder against “the Jews and the crusaders,” hoping that they will be heard here or there, that an isolated Internet surfer will commit a criminal act, thus reviving the vicious circle of terror and repression.
Al-Qaida has not achieved a hit on a Western country since the attacks on London in July 2005, and the Algerian Jihadists of AQIM have failed to arrange their terror attacks in the north Mediterranean. Because the crisis of Jihadist recruitment, aggravated by the effectiveness of the security services, has reached such a level, al-Qaida must rely on the Internet as a priority to radicalize and program potential terrorists. All of the recent affairs implicating AQIM in French territory reveal a major role of the Internet in operational planning. Since November 2009, al-Qaida’s propagation has been praising the massacre by an American Muslim officer of 13 other soldiers in the Texan base of Fort Hood.
Even at the center of Western societies, there is this basic transposition of the formidable dialectic between the “nearby enemy” and the “distant enemy”: There are Muslims in Europe and America who remain implacably hostile toward al-Qaida and its message, but an isolated yet very public provocation can spark racist retaliations and open a cycle of violence from which al-Qaida hopes to profit. This bet on communal hate was at the heart of the Madrid attacks of March 11, 2004, but the maturity of the Spanish society caused it to fail. The exaltation of the killings at Fort Hood therefore represents the reply of al-Qaida to the speech Obama made on America at peace with Islam. It is not too late to take into account the pernicious menace promoted by the cyber-jihad, which has long been concealed due to an idealization of the Internet’s virtues.
The neutralization of jihadist sites and of their homicidal propaganda does not pose insurmountable technical problems, as long as a minimal coordination exists between the different interveners of this virtual war. The Jordanian “mole” that the CIA had thought they recruited (and who finally turned against them in December 2009 at Khost) drew attention to himself by his online violence, supposedly to reinforce his “cover.” Even more seriously, an American agency was able to manipulate a seemingly genuine false jihadist site, one that a separate agency destroyed before being let in on the secret. Cyberspace is also a scene for friendly fire.
4. The Risk of “Pakistanization”
Under its bragging rhetoric, al-Qaida is an organization that is out of breath. Leaning up against the Afghan border, “central al-Qaida” is risking it all on the Pakistani terrain, where it enjoys the old protection from the warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin, powerful men in the Pakistani region of Waziristan as well as in the Afghan province of Khost. However, Bin Laden is betting above all on the revolutionary force of a new generation of Pushtan extremists who regrouped themselves in December 2007 in the TTP, the movement of the Pakistani Taliban.
Al-Qaida thus complements the static protection of the Haqqani network with the dynamic perspective of the TTP, which is engaged in a merciless terrorist campaign against the Islamabad regime. The organization can also count on the cooperation of Jihadist groups of the Punjabi and the Sindi peoples, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, who are responsible for the Bombay attack of November 2008 and who accuse the Pakistani government of having betrayed them for lessening tensions with India.
Commander Massoud, shortly before his assassination in 2001 by mercenaries of Bin Laden, described al-Qaida as the indispensable “glue” for the coherence of the Afghan Taliban. The same formula can apply itself to the Pakistani coalition of Jihadist training, with which al-Qaida is augmenting the revolutionary offensive against the “nearby enemy” — the Islamic Republic of Pakistan — in the name of the fight against the “distant enemy” and America. A number of prisoners captured during the governmental offensives in the tribal zones believed they were fighting American troops and not the Pakistani army.
Barack Obama describes the Jihadist risk in Pakistan as “cancer” and the CIA drones regularly lead deadly raids against al-Qaida and its allies in the tribal zones of Pakistan. Bin Laden has responded by dispatching one of his kamikazes against the staging ground of the CIA, on the other side of the border, and by encouraging the TTP to take aim at the territory as if it were the United States. Such is the meaning of the provocation in Times Square, taken on by Hakimullah Mehsud himself, in order to keep the “distant enemy” trapped in Pakistan.
The trail from all of the thwarted attacks these past months on American territory leads back up to “central al-Qaida” and to the tribal zones. For the Democratic president, it is no longer only about “finishing the work” left unfinished by George W. Bush, but preventing the “Pakistanization” of al-Qaida and the renewal of its global terror. The paradox taken on by the White House is that an increased intervention in Pakistan risks an acceleration of this process instead of neutralizing it. One year after the speech of Cairo, the road remains narrow in Obama’s double or nothing bet against al-Qaida.