Al Qaeda's Grand Strategy in Its War with the World

FEBRUARY 2014 The Annual Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs ATTACKING AMERICA: AL QAEDA’S GRAND STRATEGY IN ITS WAR WITH THE WORLD By Mary Habeck Mary Habeck is a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She has been an Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins-SAIS and taught for 11 years in the Yale University History Department. She served on the National Security Council 2008-2009. A member of the Editorial Board of FPRI’s quarterly journal Orbis, she is also now a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. This essay is a revised version of the 17th Annual Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs that she delivered in Philadelphia on October 3, 2013. For previous lectures in this series, visit: http://www.fpri.org/event-lecture- series/templeton Defining what precisely is meant by grand strategy and how al Qaeda, in particular, views grand strategy is vital for our national security. In fact, grand strategy is intertwined with every policy debate over al Qaeda that is currently ongoing in Washington, D.C. The questions of what is al Qaeda, and who is al Qaeda have been debated since 2001. More recently, questions have arisen about affiliates and what is their relationship with al Qaeda. Is there any command and control between al Qaeda and its affiliates? What is the proper way to deal with these groups? And can we actually win against them? This talk will seek to add to this debate by offering answers to the questions of what al Qaeda is and what the group hopes to achieve. WHAT IS GRAND STRATEGY? We must begin by defining “grand strategy” and by defending the existence of this concept. Grand strategy is the highest level strategy that an organization or country possesses for dealing with a specific problem. Given this definition, grand strategy is related to policy, but policy often is simply a set of objectives. For instance, under the George W. Bush Administration, a policy objective was to spread democracy or democratization around the Middle East. Yet, stating this objective does not detail how the country would go about achieving it. A grand strategy has much more to it than just an objective. Rather, it sets a variety of ways and means—the plans that one might use to achieve those policy objectives. Specific strategies are then subordinate to, and seek to support and fulfill, this top- level plan. These strategies would encompass military, political, economic, and diplomatic aspects, among others that are necessary to achieve the over-all grand strategy. Under the specific strategies would be operational art and tactics as well—working out the plans, ways, and means in far greater detail, theoretically all the way down to specific groups, units, or even individuals, perhaps on a particular battlefield or in one embassy and what each is supposed to do on a daily or weekly basis in order to achieve the grand strategy. Given this level of detail, some observers are skeptical about whether grand strategy can even exist. Can an entire nation really have bold ideas about what they are going to achieve, work out a finely detailed plan and then implement it in any serious way? Yet, if one looks at the United States, it is possible to tease out the existence of several grand strategies. There was Manifest Destiny, which was the grand strategy for expansion of the country. During the Cold War there was a grand strategy that included deterrence and containment. But other experts and scholars contend that these were simply pieces of a real grand strategy; they did not include a fully worked out concept about economics, scientific knowledge, industry, and other important concerns, nor did they include the finely worked-out details for operational art or tactics that were actually followed by the United States as a whole. Others would argue that the United States has at times developed a grand strategy but it has been implemented very poorly. As we can see, grand strategies, in general, are contested. Thus, there is a significant disagreement amongst experts about whether al Qaeda, as a non-state actor, with no real territory under its control, can have a grand strategy. Based on my research, I contend that al Qaeda not only has a theoretical grand strategy that they have discussed in statements, speeches, and written documents, but that since the 1990s, al Qaeda has been seeking to achieve parts of their grand strategy. And they plan to achieve the rest of it over the next 200 years, their grand strategic time frame. Most experts believe that in grand strategic planning, one must begin with an objective—the ends that one wants to achieve known today, in general, as policy objectives. At the very highest level, what do we want to accomplish as an organization or a nation? But in order to achieve the objectives, an organization actually needs to start somewhere more basic and understand certain key starting points: Where are we starting from? What are we? What are our strengths, our weaknesses? Who are our friends, our allies? And who are our opponents or enemies? There is, as well, an important set of assumptions that must be made explicit rather than implicit so that they can be questioned and critiqued. Then to get from the starting point to the objective one must elaborate a pathway called the plan. This plan will include the means that will be used in order to progress from the starting point to the objective. It is important to note that assumptions are always adjusted along the way. The organization (or nation) should have a mechanism that convenes on a regular basis to consider what was done right and wrong; what can be learned from experiences; and what should be changed about the organization or its way of doing business so that it will be better at achieving its objectives. Al Qaeda is, above all else, a learning organization. It has gone through a tremendous evolution since its formation in 1988 to its current incarnation. This shows an impressive ability to adjust, to learn, and to evolve over time in reaction to what the United States and others have been doing to stop it. HOW WILL WE KNOW IF AL QAEDA HAS A GRAND STRATEGY? Having laid out this elaborate vision for a grand strategy, perhaps we need to ask an even more basic question: how will we know if our enemy has a grand strategy? At times the U.S. has been very lucky and had an enemy who is eager to share its grand strategy with the world. For instance, Adolf Hitler had a grand strategy that he was perfectly happy to share. In fact, he wrote an entire book about it, which was widely distributed and available for any government to buy and read. Unfortunately, few people read this book outside Germany or thought that anybody would be crazy enough to seek to achieve these insane objectives using such violent ways and means. Basically, the book was ignored until far too late. In the same way, al Qaeda has been perfectly happy to publish books and issue written statements about their grand strategy. In fact, there are multiple such “Mein Kampfs” in which they go into great detail about what they hope to achieve and how they are going to achieve it. But not many people are paying attention to what the enemy itself is writing about what they want to achieve and how they are going to go about doing it. Another way that one can know if an enemy has a grand strategy is through speeches, lectures, and so on, as Hitler gave during the 1920s and 1930s. As with its writing, al Qaeda has been very willing to give hundreds of public audio and video statements since the 1990s about their grand strategy. The reason that they have been so verbose is because they are hoping to convince people to join them, and these lectures and speeches are an attempt to persuade them that their objectives are sound and can be achieved, and that their ways and means can be supported. They also believe that they are starting from a very strong position with a firm idea about who they are and who the enemy is that shows that they can achieve their objectives. This is why they have been happy to share their grand strategy with the world. Beyond this, it is also possible to compare what people are saying with what they actually do. After all, it is entirely possible that the organization could just be insane or braggarts spouting nonsense, and they either do not really mean to achieve all these goals, or they simply do not have the capabilities to do so. To understand if a nation or organization has a grand strategy, one must always compare what their public documents and statements say with what they are actually doing in the real world. Finally, if a company, for example, is going to spread globally, open affiliates or branches all over the world and they seek a uniform strategy that every one of these affiliates will follow, then one could look at these affiliates around the world and analyze whether these branches are following uniform ways and means to achieve the same ends. On a global scale, one would seek to understand if it is just here in the United States that they are following this playbook or if it is guiding their actions in every country that has a branch of the company.

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