Cracks in the Jihad
by
Thomas Rid
“Get ready for all Muslims to join the holy war against you,” the jihadi leader Abd el-Kader
warned his Western enemies. The year was 1839, and nine years into
France’s occupation of Algeria the resistance had grown
self-confident. Only weeks earlier, Arab fighters had wiped out a convoy of
30 French soldiers en route from Boufarik to Oued-el-Alèg. Insurgent
attacks on the slow-moving French columns were steadily increasing, and the
army’s fortified blockhouses in the Atlas Mountains were under
frequent assault.
Paris pinned its hopes on an energetic general who
had already served a successful tour in Algeria, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud. In
January 1840, shortly before leaving to take command in Algiers, he
addressed the French Chamber of Deputies: “In Europe, gentlemen, we
don’t just make war against armies; we make war against
interests.” The key to victory in European wars, he explained, was to
penetrate the enemy country’s interior. Seize the centers of
population, commerce, and industry, “and soon the interests are
forced to capitulate.” Not so at the foot of the Atlas, he conceded.
Instead, he would focus the army’s effort on the tribal population.
Later that year, a well-known military thinker from
Prussia traveled to Algeria to observe Bugeaud’s new approach. Major
General Carl von Decker, who had taught under the famed Carl von Clausewitz
at the War Academy in Berlin, was more forthright than his French
counterpart. The fight against fanatical tribal warriors, he foresaw,
“will throw all European theory of war into the trash
heap.”
One hundred and seventy years later, jihad is again a
major threat—and Decker’s dire analysis more relevant than
ever. War, in Clausewitz’s eminent theory, was a clash of collective
wills, “a continuation of politics by other means.” When states
went to war, the adversary was a political entity with the ability to act
as one body, able to end hostilities by declaring victory or admitting
defeat. Even Abd el-Kader eventually capitulated. But jihad in the 21st
century, especially during the past few years, has fundamentally changed
its anatomy: Al Qaeda is no longer a collective political actor. It is no
longer an adversary that can articulate a will, capitulate, and be
defeated. But the jihad’s new weakness is also its new strength:
Because of its transformation, Islamist militancy is politically impaired
yet fitter to survive its present crisis.
In the years since late 2001, when U.S. and coalition
forces toppled the Taliban regime and all but destroyed Al Qaeda’s
core organization in Afghanistan, the bin Laden brand has been
bleeding popularity across the Muslim world. The global jihad, as a result,
has been torn by mounting internal tensions. Today, the holy war is set to
slip into three distinct ideological and organizational niches. The U.S.
surge in Afghanistan, whether successful or not, is likely to affect this
development only marginally.
The first niche is occupied by local Islamist
insurgencies, fueled by grievances against “apostate” regimes
that are authoritarian, corrupt, or backed by “infidel” outside
powers (or any combination of the three). Filling the second niche is
terrorism-cum–organized crime, most visible in Afghanistan and
Indonesia but also seen in Europe, fueled by narcotics, extortion,
and other ordinary illicit activities. In the final niche are people who
barely qualify as a group: young second- and third-generation Muslims in
the diaspora who are engaged in a more amateurish but persistent holy war,
fueled by their own complex personal discontents. Al Qaeda’s
challenge is to encompass the jihadis who drift to the criminal and
eccentric fringe while keeping alive its appeal to the Muslim mainstream
and a rhetoric of high aspiration and promise.
The most visible divide
separates the local and global jihadis. Historically, Islamist groups
tended to bud locally, and assumed a global outlook only later, if
they did so at all. All the groups that have been affiliated with Al Qaeda
either predate the birth of the global jihad in the early 1990s or grew
later out of local causes and concerns, only subsequently attaching the bin
Laden logo. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, for example, started out in
1998 as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, an offshoot of another
militant group that had roots in Algeria’s vicious civil war during
the early 1990s. Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba, the force allegedly
behind the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, that killed more than 170 people,
was formed in the 1990s to fight for a united Kashmir under Pakistani rule.
In Somalia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other countries, the Al Qaeda brand
has been attractive to groups born out of local concerns.
By joining Al Qaeda and stepping up violence, local
insurgents have long risked placing themselves on the target lists of
governments and law enforcement organizations. More recently, however, they
have run what may be an even more consequential risk, that of removing
themselves from the social mainstream and losing popular support. This is
what happened to Al Qaeda in Iraq during the Sunni Awakening, which began
in 2005 in violence-ridden al-Anbar Province and its principal city,
Ramadi. Al Qaeda had declared Ramadi the future capital of its Iraqi
“caliphate,” and by late 2005 it had the entire city under its
control. But even conservative Sunni elders became alienated by the
group’s brutality and violence. One prominent local leader, Sheikh
Sattar Abdul Abu Risha, lost several brothers and his father in
assassinations. Others were agitated by the loss of prestige and power to
the insurgents in their traditional homelands. In early 2006, Sattar and
his sheikhs decided to cooperate with American forces, and by the end of
the year they had helped recruit nearly 4,000 men to local police units.
“They brought us nothing but destruction and we finally said, enough
is enough,” Sattar explained.
The awakening (sahwa in Arabic) was not limited to al-Anbar. One after another,
former firebrand imams, in so-called revisions, have started questioning
the theological justifications of holy war. The trend may have begun with
Gamaa al-Islamiya, Egypt’s most brutal terrorist group, which was
responsible for the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat in
1981 and the slaughter of 58 foreign tourists in Luxor in 1997. As the Iraq
war intensified during the summer of 2003, several of Gamaa
al-Islamiya’s leaders advised young men not to participate in Al
Qaeda operations and accused the organization of “splitting Muslim
ranks” by provoking hostile reactions against Islam “and
wrongly interpreting the meaning of jihad in a violent way.”
Another notable revision came in September 2007, when
Salman al-Awda, an influential Saudi cleric who had previously declared
that fighting Americans in Iraq was a religious duty, spoke out against Al
Qaeda. He accused bin Laden in an open making terror a synonym for
Islam.” Speaking on a popular Saudi TV show on the sixth anniversary
of 9/11, al-Awda asked, “My brother Osama, how much blood has been
spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been
killed . . . in the name of Al Qaeda?”
Other ideologues have followed, including Sajjid Imam
al-Shareef, one of Al Qaeda’s founding leaders, who used the nom de
guerre Dr. Fadl. “Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed
in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and
their followers,” he wrote in the London-based newspaper Asharq Al Awsat.
In Afghanistan, coalition soldiers see the
global-local split replicated as a fissure between what they call
“big T” Taliban and “small t” Taliban. The
“big T” ideologues fight for more global spiritual or political
reasons; the “little t” opportunists fight for power, for
money, or just to survive, to hedge their bets. A family might have one son
fighting for the Taliban and another in the Afghan National Army; no matter
which side prevails, they will have one son in the right place. U.S.
Marines in Helmand Province say that 80 to 85 percent of all those they
fight are “small t” Taliban. The U.S. counterinsurgency
campaign aims to co-opt and reintegrate many of these rebels by creating
secure population centers and new economic opportunities, spreading cleared
areas like “inkblots.” But the Taliban have long been keen to
spread their own inkblots, with a similar rationale: attracting more and
more “accidental” guerrillas, in the famous phrase of
counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen, not just hardliners.
Yet even Afghanistan’s “big T”
Taliban, the ideologues, cannot simply be equated with Al Qaeda. Last fall,
Abu Walid, once an Al Qaeda accomplice and now a Taliban propagandist,
ridiculed bin Laden in the Taliban’s official monthly magazine al-Sumud, for, among other
things, his do-it-yourself approach to Islamic jurisprudence. A number of
veterans had criticized bin Laden in the past, among them such towering
figures as Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, one of the key architects of the
global jihad. But Abu Walid’s criticism was more biting. Bin
Laden’s organization lacks strategic vision and relies on
“shiny slogans,” he told Leah Farrall, an Australian
counterterrorism specialist, in a much-noted dialogue she reported on her
blog. Consequently the Taliban would no longer welcome the terrorists in
Afghanistan, he said, because “the majority of the population is
against Al Qaeda.”
At the root of the
disagreement between the two groups is the question of a local, or even
national, popular base. Last September, Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s
founding figure and spiritual overlord, issued a message in several
languages. He called the Taliban a “robust Islamic and nationalist
movement” that had “assumed the shape of a popular
movement.” Probably realizing that pragmatism and a certain amount of
moderation offer the best chance of a return to power, Omar vowed “to
maintain good and positive relations with all neighbors based on mutual respect.”
Al Qaeda’s reaction was swift and harsh. Turning
the jihad into a “national cause,” in the purists’ view,
was selling it out. Prominent radicals, in a remarkable move, compared the
Taliban’s turnabout to the efforts by Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas
in Gaza to distance themselves from Al Qaeda. Hamas in particular, perhaps
because it is, like Al Qaeda, a Sunni organization, has been the subject of “relentless”
criticism in Al Qaeda circles, says Thomas Hegghammer of the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. When a self-proclaimed Al Qaeda
faction appeared in Gaza, Hamas executed one of its leading imams and many
of his armed followers. Jihadi ideologues were aghast. The globalists
shuddered at the thought that local interests could compromise their
pan-Islamic ambitions. “Nationalism,” declared Ayman
al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s number two, “must be rejected by the umma [Muslim community], because
it is a model which makes jihad subject to the market of political
compromises and distracts the umma from the liberation of Islamic lands and the
establishment of the Caliphate.”
A few weeks later, Mullah Omar pointedly reiterated
his promise of good neighborliness and future cooperation with
Afghanistan’s neighbors, including China, Uzbekistan, and
Turkmenistan—all of whom face their own jihadi insurgencies and are
on Al Qaeda’s target list.
The Taliban’s new tactics are throwing an
“ideological bridge” not only to nearby countries but to parts
of the current Kabul elite, most notably politically mobilized university
students, notes Thomas Ruttig of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. Even the
newly moderate Taliban, it should be clear, remains wedded to inhumane and
medieval moral principles. Yet Omar’s pragmatism immediately affects
the question of who and what is a desirable target of attacks.
Perhaps the greatest tension between the local and
global levels of the jihad grows out of a divide over appropriate targets
and tactics. Classical Islamic legal doctrine sees armed jihad as a
defensive struggle against persecution, oppression, and incursions into
Muslim lands. In an attempt to mobilize Muslims around the world to fight
the Soviets in Afghanistan, Abdallah Azzam, an influential radical cleric
who was assassinated in 1989, helped expand the doctrine of jihad into a
transnational struggle by declaring the Afghan jihad an individual duty for
all Muslims. Azzam also advocated takfir, a practice of designating fellow Muslims as infidels (kaffir) by remote
excommunication in order to justify their slaughter. Al Qaeda ideologues
upped the aggressive potential of such arguments and expanded the defensive
jihad into a global struggle, effectively blurring the line between the
“near” enemy—the Arab regimes deemed illegitimate
“apostates” by the purists—and the “far”
enemy, these regimes’ Western supporters.
In the remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan that
produce many of today’s radicals, however, local and tribal
affiliations are powerful. One U.S. political adviser who worked in
Afghanistan’s Zabul Province, a hotbed of the insurgency, describes
prevailing local sentiment as “valleyism” rather than
nationalism. It is a force that drives the tribes to oppose anybody who
threatens their traditional power base, foreign or not—a problem not
just for the Taliban and Al Qaeda but for any Afghan government.
Al-Zawahiri complained of this in a Even the students (talib) themselves had stronger affiliations to their tribes and
villages . . . than to the Islamic emirate.” The provincial
valleyists, to the distress of Al Qaeda’s more cosmopolitan
agitators, are selfishly eyeing their own interests, with little appetite
for international aggression and globe-spanning terrorist operations.
The contrast with the
character of jihad in the Muslim diaspora could not be starker. For radical
Islamists in Europe, the local jihad doesn’t exist. And they
understand that toppling governments in, say, London or Amsterdam is a
fantasy. These radicals are less interest driven
than identity driven. Many young European Muslims are out of touch with
their ancestral countries, yet not fully at home in France or Sweden or
Denmark. For some, the resulting identity crisis creates a hunger for clear
spiritual guidelines. The ideology of global jihad, according to a report
by EUROPOL, the European Union’s police agency, “gives meaning
to the feeling of exclusion” prevalent among the second- and
third-generation descendants of Muslim immigrants. For these alienated youth, the idea of
becoming “citizens” of the virtual worldwide Islamic community
may be more attractive than it is for first-generation immigrants, who tend
to retain strong roots in their native countries.
The identity problems of these young people seem to
have affected the character of the jihad itself. Like the disoriented
Muslim youth of the diaspora, the global jihad has loose residential roots
and numb political fingertips. One sign of this disconnection from the
local is that Al Qaeda’s rank and file does not include many men who
could otherwise join a jihad at home: There seem to be few Palestinians,
Chechens, Iraqis, or Afghans among the traveling jihadis, who tend to come
from countries where jihad has failed, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya,
and Syria.
Al Qaeda’s identity crisis is also illustrated
by how it treats radicalized converts, often people without religious
schooling and consolidated personalities. Olivier Roy, one of
France’s leading specialists on radical Islamism, has pointed out
that convert groups assume responsibilities “beyond all comparison
with any other Islamic organization.” Roy has put the proportion of
converts in Al Qaeda at between 10 and 25 percent, an indicator that the
movement has become “de-culturalized.”
These contrary trends, in turn, create chinks in Al
Qaeda’s recruitment system. The most extreme Salafists, deprived of
identity and cultural orientation, have an appetite for utopia, for extreme
views that appeal to the margin of society, be it in Holland or Helmand.
Recruitment in the diaspora, as a result, follows a distinctive pattern,
not partisan and political but offbeat and outré. The grievances and
motivations of European extremists and the rare American militants tend to
be idiosyncratic, the product of unstable individual personalities and a
history of personal discrimination. Many take the initiative to join the
movement themselves, and because they are not recruited by a member of the
existing organization, their ties to it may remain loose. In 2008 alone,
190 individuals were sentenced for Islamist terrorist activities in Europe,
most of them in Britain, France, and Spain. “A majority of the
arrested individuals belonged to small autonomous cells rather than to
known terrorist organizations,” EUROPOL reports.
As a result of the change in its membership, the
global Al Qaeda movement is encountering strong centrifugal forces. The
rank and file and the center are losing touch with each other. The vision
of Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, who laid much of the ideological foundation
for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, blends a Marxist-inspired focus on
popular mass support with 21st-century ideas of networked, individual
action. Al-Suri’s aim was to devise a method “for transforming
excellent individual initiatives, performed over the past decades, from
emotional pulse beats and scattered reactions into a phenomenon which is
guided and utilized, and whereby the project of jihad is advanced so that
it becomes the Islamic Nation’s battle, and not a struggle of an
elite.” The global jihad was to function like an “operative
system,” without vulnerable, old-fashioned organizational
hierarchies. That method is intuitively attractive for a Facebook
generation of well-connected young sympathizers, but the theory contains an
internal contradiction. Self-recruited and “homegrown”
terrorists present a wicked problem for Al Qaeda. As a bizarre type of
self-appointed elite, they undermine the movement’s ambition to
represent the Muslim “masses.”
The problem is embodied in the online jihad. For Al
Qaeda, Web forums operated by unaffiliated Islamists have been the most
important distribution platform for jihadi materials. But after the arrest
of a top-tier online activist in London two years ago, the connection
between the forums and Al Qaeda’s official media center, al-Sahab,
began to loosen. Al Qaeda has lost more and more control of the online
jihad. And, just like others online, jihadi Web administrators face
increasingly tough competition for visibility. Within the forums the tone
has become harsher. Brynjar Lia, a specialist on Salafism at the Norwegian
Defense Research Establishment, says that “interjihadi quarrels seem
to have become more common and less ‘brotherly’ in tone in
recent years.”
Some far-flung jihadi groups are enjoying newfound
independence of another kind, as a result of criminal ventures they have
established to fund their efforts. This too is intensifying the centrifugal
forces within the global movement. Some groups are tipping into a more
purely criminal mode.
A cause is what distinguishes an insurgency from
organized crime, as David Galula, an influential French author on
counterinsurgency, noted decades ago. Organized crime does not have to be
incompatible with jihad. It may even be justified in religious terms: Baz
Mohammed, an Afghan heroin kingpin and the first criminal ever extradited
from Afghanistan, bragged to his co-conspirators that selling heroin in the
United States was jihad because it killed Americans while taking their
money.
A budding insurgency has
only a limited window of opportunity to grow into a serious political
force. If the cause withers and loses its popular gloss, what remains as a
rump may be nothing but a criminal organization, attracting a following
with criminal energy rather than religious zeal, thus further damaging
jihad’s status in the eyes of the broader public. For some groups,
this already appears to be happening. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb funds
itself through the drug trade, smuggling, extortion, and kidnappings in
southern Algeria and northern Mali. Indonesia’s Abu Sayyaf Group and
the Philippines’ Jamiyah Islamiyah engage in a variety of criminal
activities, including credit card fraud. The terrorist cell behind the 2004
Madrid bombings earned most of its money from criminal activities; when
Spanish police raided the home of one of the plotters, they seized close to
$2 million in drugs and cash, including more than 125,000 Ecstasy tablets,
according to U.S. News and World Report. The Madrid bombings had cost the terrorists just
$50,000.
The goal of leading Islamists has always been to turn
their battle into “the Islamic Nation’s battle,” as
al-Suri wrote. Far from reaching this goal, the jihad is veering the other
way. Eight years after 9/11, support for Islamic extremism in the Muslim
world is at its lowest point. Support for Al Qaeda has slipped most
dramatically in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Jordan. In 2003, more than 50
percent of those surveyed in these countries agreed that bin Laden would
“do the right thing regarding world affairs,” the Pew Global
Attitudes Project found. By 2009 the overall level of support had dropped
by half, to about 25 percent. In Pakistan, traditionally a stronghold of
extremism, only nine percent of Muslims have a favorable view of Al Qaeda,
down from 25 percent in 2008. Even an American failure to stabilize
Afghanistan and its terror-ridden neighborhood would be unlikely to ease Al
Qaeda’s crisis of legitimacy.
But it would be naive to conclude that the cracks in
Al Qaeda’s ideological shell mean that the movement’s end is
near. Far from it. Islamist ideology may be losing broad appeal, and the
recent global crop of extremists may be disunited and drifting apart. Yet
in the fanatics’ own view, the ideology remains a crucial cohesive
force that binds together an extraordinarily diverse extremist elite.
Salafism, despite its crisis, continues to be attractive to those at the
social margins. One of the ideology’s most vital functions appears to
be to resolve the contradictions of jihad in the 21st century: being a
pious Muslim, yet attacking women and children; upholding the authority of
the Qur’an, yet prospering from crime; depending on Western welfare
states, yet plotting against them; having no personal ties to any Islamic
group, yet believing oneself to be part of one.
Al Qaeda’s altered design has a number of
immediate consequences. The global jihad is losing what David Galula called
a strong cause, and with it its political character. This change is making
it increasingly difficult to distinguish jihad from organized crime on the
one side and rudderless fanaticism on the other. This calls into question
the notion that war is still, as Clausewitz said, “a continuation of
politics by other means,” and therefore whether it can be
discontinued politically. Second, coerced by adversaries and enabled by the
Internet, the global jihadi movement has dismantled and disrupted its own
ability to act as one coherent entity. No leader is in a position to
articulate the movement’s will, let alone enforce it. It is doubtful,
to quote Clausewitz again, whether war can still be “an act of force
to compel the enemy to do our will.” And because jihad has no single
center of gravity, it has no single critical vulnerability. No matter what
the outcome of U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan and other places, a
general risk of terrorist attacks will persist for the foreseeable future.
In combating terrorism, therefore, quantity matters
as much as quality. But some numbers matter more than others. How many
additional American and European troops are sent to Afghanistan matters
less than the number of terrorist plots that don’t happen. Success
will be found subtly in statistics, in data curves that slope down or level
off, not in one particular action, one capitulation, or even one
leader’s death. It will be marked not by military campaigns and other
events but by decisions not taken and attacks
not launched. Because participation in the holy war in both its local and
global forms is an individual decision, these choices have to be the unit
of analysis, and influencing them must be the goal of policy and strategy.
As in crime prevention, measuring success—how many potential
terrorists did not join an armed group or commit a terrorist act—is
nearly impossible. Success against Islamic militancy may wear a veil.
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Thomas
Rid is a visiting scholar at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and coauthor of War 2.0 (2009). He was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2009.
Reprinted from Winter
2010 Wilson Quarterly
![[quant_book]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PT-AN596_quant__DV_20100122150752.jpg)
