Al-Qaeda survives and builds up a new strategic ideology

It was projected that a militarily weakened al-Qaeda, under extreme duress from the barrage of counter-terrorism measures from the West, would start to succumb, as evidence of which the increasing number of failed terrorist attempts were put forward. There also seemed to be an escalating backlash of public opinion amongst Muslims against the organisation, as evidenced by the Sunni rebellion in Iraq and the denunciation of al-Qaeda by high-profile former ideologues such as Sayyid Imam. These assumptions underestimated the ideological prowess of the organisation, which gravitated to the Internet and the thousands of al-Qaeda-inspired Internet forums it would help foster.

It is remarkable how little understood the organisation is in its ever-evolving forms; the counter-terrorism community continues to engage in the debate whether al-Qaeda still retains intact command structures, or as former CIA operations officer Marc Sageman asserts, that a phenomenon of “leaderless jihad” has taken primacy. This is the process wherein individuals and groups become radicalised and commit terrorism with no al-Qaeda guidance.

Other analysts champion the intact structure hypothesis, such as Bruce Hoffman. This has spawned a new term in counter-terrorism studies, what Brynjar Lia and Thomas Hegghammer have referred to as “jihadist strategic studies”. This is a combination of ideology and strategy, wherein divine sanctions are used as exhortations for the articulation of focused strategies, pertaining to military or strategic tactics.

Western strategic thought is readily assimilated within this ideologically inspired strategy as long as it can be used against the enemy. This symbiosis of ideology and tactics is driven by al-Qaeda ideologues at the forefront of global jihadism, and arguably remains an active danger even after Osama bin Laden’s death.

It now seems logical to assume that al-Qaeda is operationally degraded after Bin Laden but is ideologically ascendant, with “al-Qaeda central” continuing to exert a dominant appeal for millions of “jihobbyists”, people who may never commit an act of terror, but are mesmerised by al-Qaeda’s messages spread primarily through the Internet.

Al-Qaeda may not possess the organisational strength it had eight years ago, but its ideology has perhaps gained strength, as its “propaganda by deed” philosophy inspires new recruits, many outside the Arab world. This is supported by the incremental risks of terror attacks in places such as the Philippines, Russia, Somalia and Pakistan.

Al-Qaeda’s ideology has inspired strains of terrorism in places where Islamist violence was previously unknown, such as Chechnya, and to a lesser extent, neighbouring Dagestan. Here, Islam was again always influenced by the Sufism brand of Islam, which came to the Caucasus in the 18th century; it also seems pertinent that the Soviet totalitarian regimes never allowed any radical forms of Islam to flourish in these regions.

Even during the 1991 Dudayev coup, and Aslan Maskhadov’s propensity of embracing Islam as a state ideology, the Caucasian brand of Islam never really resembled al-Qaeda’s ideology. The Beslan school massacre of 156 children brought home the reality of how much al-Qaeda had managed to gain ideological inroads through Chechen mujahideen, who have since become regular players in terrorism theatres worldwide.

Similarly, in Somalia, the traditional Muslim faith is based upon the mysticism of the nomadic wadad, or holy man, which survived genocide and the international Islamic revivalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s; it would not survive al-Qaeda ideological indoctrination. Al Shabaab and its predecessor the Islamic Courts Union were led by Aden Hashi Ayro, an al-Qaeda-trained ideologue.

The Somali diaspora has already been indoctrinated into the al-Qaeda ideology, as evidenced by the arrest of a Somali terrorist cell in Australia, and Al Shabaab’s declaration that it wishes to become an al-Qaeda affiliate, which indicates the strong transnational organisational linkages the group continues to inculcate. Thus, al-Qaeda continues to inspire radicalisation of both kinds as espoused by Hoffman and Sageman.

It is intriguing how al-Qaeda has continued to survive in the face of an onslaught from a global war against it, where the might of billions of dollars in modern security infrastructure is arrayed against it. The key here is ideology; the organisation may be weakened, but with its typical ingenuity, has rallied millions of young impressionable Muslims to its cause by using ideology as a weapon.

How does this ideology work? It begins by articulating a set of grievances by one population against another – in this case the woes of the Muslim world brought on by the “West” and its Jewish allies, who are allegedly engaged in a global conspiracy to destroy Islam. This conspiracy has been extensively documented by many al-Qaeda ideologues – Bin Laden of course being the foremost, but many others as well.

These grievances are reduced by al-Qaeda ideologues into recurring themes of oppression, alienation and victimisation, which ultimately filter down cognitive dissonance into binary oppositions, wherein the grey areas are spliced out to leave only a reductionist dualism, a struggle between good and evil, between the evil and the oppressed.

Because this becomes a conflict between good and bad, the good has to necessarily triumph over the bad, since without an alternative vision for the future, no ideology can hope to succeed.

 

M Zaidi  is a security analyst.