Violent Non-State Actors in World Politics Edited by Klejda Mulaj HURST & COMPANY, LONDON 10 Al Qaeda From the Near to the Far Enemy and Back (1988-2008) Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou All hopes to the contrary notwithstanding, it seems as though the one argument that the Arabs are incapable of understanding isforce, - Hannah Arendt' By the mid-to-late 2000s, Al Qaeda had essentially completed the mission it set out to achieve twenty years earlier. For all practical purposes and against all odds, the subsequent phases that have been discerned in the conflict with its foes were in effect just additional opportunities for the group's existing global gains; it has outlived the George W, Bush administration, has engi- neered further political decrepitude in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and threatens to conduct potential new attacks on Western targets, The conven- tional wisdom, rehearsed from 2004 on, held that it was the transformation of Al Qaeda that had been the key reason for its survival and resurgence. Close examination of the group's history reveals that the strength of Al Qaeda lies, in point of fact, not so much in its post-September 11 mutation-a logical evasive step which many other terrorist or insurgent groups had enacted • 'Peace or Armistice in the Near East', Review of Politics, January 1950, p. 56. 207 VIOLENT NON-STATE ACTORS IN WORLD POLITICS AL QAEDA: FROM THE NEAR TO THE FAR ENEMY AND BACK previously-but more in its inherent adaptability and its faculty to innovate and setting it in motion dramatically under the local leadership of Abu Musab constantly. In contrast to its state adversaries who profess to be on the offen- Al Zarqawi-notably with an uptempo series of attacks in 2004-the organiza- sive in the 'war on terror' but are more often than not confined to a structur- tion in essence took a back seat in relation to that battlefront and moved on, ally defensive position, not knowing how, where, when, and under what guise in 2006, to support the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. By 2008, to expect an assault, this transnational non-state armed group has been writ- reports of Al Qaeda-supported Taliban units in near-total control of parts of ing its own story. Afghanistan as well as the Tribal Areas in Pakistan (known officially as the The staying power and uniqueness of the group cannot be overstated. But Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and the upheaval in that country fol- almost two decades since its creation and several years into its stalemated lowing the 27 December 2007 killing of the former Prime Minister Benazir conflict with the world's most powerful nation. Al Qaeda reached a paradoxi- Bhutto indicated the organization's revitalization in that region. cal milestone in that narrative. By virtue of its very ability to escape defeat at However, there has been an unexpected twist, illustrated by the return of the hands of the United States, and in spite of the constant increase in its Al Qaeda to its initial ground and to the very aim it had originally sought to global impact, the organization has found itself immersed increasingly in the steer away from: engaging local rulers. The historical implications of this local management of conflicts with states. Since the September 11 attacks it development for the countries of the Middle East and North Africa and that conducted on the United States, this strategic about-face and proactive design region's interaction with its neighbours are profound. have played out on evolving parallel tracks with a common and urgent con- cern, namely the avoidance of predictability. Whereas the fourfold ghazzou Rebellion as export: the emergence of Qaeda (raid) on New York and Washington endowed Al Qaeda overnight with glo- AI bal notoriety status, the group's leaders, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al If, by the late 2000s, the group led by Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al Dha- Dhawahiri (Zawahiri), I did not seek reflexively to replicate those strikes by wahiri had mutated into a sui generis powerful global private entity, the tran- immediately engineering further attacks on the United States. Expectations snational war inaugurated by Al Qaeda in the late 1980s represented initially of a second wave were high in the United States during the autumn of2001 merely a change of scale in the post-colonial struggle in the Arab and Muslim and throughout 2002, and the country braced itself for such a follow-up region. This ethnogenesis owed much to an original displacement of the focus assault. Instead, blurring the picture, the group opted to shift its attention to of opposition of several Islamist groups from battling local regimes, denounced Europe where it targeted those states-Spain on 11 March 2004 and the as authoritarian, corrupt, and repressive, to fighting the United States directly United Kingdom on 7 July 200S-which had actively assisted the United for its support of those regimes. Such a change-described as a move from al States in its war in Iraq. adou al qareeb (the near enemy) to al adou al baeed (the far enemy), in the When that pattern proved successful, putting on high alert other European literature of the Islamist groups-represented a conscious choice on the part states (Italy, Norway, and France notably) that had been warned by the group of a number ofIslamist leaders who had gathered in Afghanistan during the about their military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan or their perceived hostil- period of the Soviet invasion of that country. The strategic shift was also the ity to Muslim populations? Al Qaeda did not expand it. Ushering in a third objective result of the stalemated and at times counterproductive results of the phase in its post-September 11 strategy, it proceeded, instead, to concentrate campaigns which many of these Islamist groups had led in their respective on the conflict in Iraq, where it had been dealing blows to the US and coali- countries, notably in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, and Algeria. tion forces since mid-2003. After spearheading the insurgency in that country Historically, from the early 19S0s to the mid-1990s, the majority of Arab and Muslim states had been faced, to varying degrees, with steadily mounting I The common 'Zawahiri' spelling in English is due to me use of an Egyptian colloquia! Islamist opposition. The context of these conflicts was fourfold. First, in many mispronunciation of the Arabic letter 'dha' as 'za' AI Dhawahiri is an Egyptian national. of these places, the post-colonial governments that had inherited power fol- 2 France did not join the United States in Iraq, but, in a taped message aired on 24 Febru- ary 2004 it was threatened by Ayman a! Dhawahiri following its adoption oflegislation lowing the countries' respective independence had often simply imposed their banning Islamic headscarves in public schools. policies over existing religious options put forth by alternative (Islamist) 208 209 VIOLENT NON-STATE ACTORS IN WORLD POLITICS AL QAEDA: FROM THE NEAR TO THE FAR ENEMY AND BACK groups. Consequently, the initial contest fought around the founding of the practice, the latter occurs when claims of particular actors to exercise legiti- state persisted beyond the time of the induction of the nationalistic regimes: mate governmental authority remain fundamentally disputed, both in princi- an often violent engagement playing out at times underground, at other times ple and in practice, and there are no clearly agreed procedures for resolving on the front pages of newspapers. such disputes.' When the contemporary Islamist movements were set in Second, the new regimes rapidly, if not immediately, displayed authoritar- motion, such procedures did exist and the differences concerned merely the ian tendencies of which the Islamist groups, by virtue of their oppositional identity of those who would be allowed to capture the state to conduct the nature and their threatening potential, bore, first and foremost, the full brunt. 'building' work. In a situation like that in Iraq after the American and British Egypt, in particular, was the theatre of a violent struggle between the regime invasion, or indeed in Afghanistan for most of the second half of the 20th of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood. The wridngs of one of century and into the 21st, the contest was far more primal and encompassed the figures of that movement, Sayyid Qutb, executed in August 1966, would wider ethnic, tribal, and sectarian dimensions. in time become a leading ideological reference for Al Qaeda and an influence In contrast, state-building is an exercise mat cannot be posited in a vacuum." on many of its actors, Ayman al Dhawahiri in particular. It is also neither finite state-formation (concretization of statehood) nor the Third, those regimes' failed political performance and poor socioeconomic looser nation-building (the process by which the national consciousness record pushed many segments within these societies into the open arms of the appears and becomes institutionalized in the structures of society). State- Islamists. From being a peripheral option, the alternative choice (and social building is an open-ended set of tasks. To the extent that the state itself is an services) offered by the groups therefore gained ground, ultimately reaching abstract, continuous, survival-seeking, resource-gathering entity, and policy is mainstream appeal in many Muslim theatres. In Algeria, for instance, the the process that flows from its very existence, state-building has to be a politi- Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), better organized and more committed than the cal activity. There is, too, a radical difference between state-building as an ruling National Liberation Front (FLN), earned the support of many Algeri- internal mission (even when assisted from abroad) and external state-building ans in the period 1988-91, leading to a thwarted electoral victory in Decem- resulting from intervention (even when triggered by a mechanism like the ber 1991.