Al-Qaeda in a Changing Region

NNoottee ddee ll’’IIffrrii ______________________________________________________________________ Al-Qaeda in a Changing Region ______________________________________________________________________ Alia Brahimi Septembre 2012 . Programme Moyen-Orient et Méditerranée (MOM) L’Ifri est, en France, le principal centre indépendant de recherche, d’information et de débat sur les grandes questions internationales. Créé en 1979 par Thierry de Montbrial, l’Ifri est une association reconnue d’utilité publique (loi de 1901). Il n’est soumis à aucune tutelle administrative, définit librement ses activités et publie régulièrement ses travaux. L’Ifri associe, au travers de ses études et de ses débats, dans une démarche interdisciplinaire, décideurs politiques et experts à l’échelle internationale. Avec son antenne de Bruxelles (Ifri-Bruxelles), l’Ifri s’impose comme un des rares think tanks français à se positionner au cœur même du débat européen. Les opinions exprimées dans ce texte n’engagent que la responsabilité de l’auteur. ISBN : 978-2-36567-059-3 © Ifri – 2012 – Tous droits réservés Ifri Ifri-Bruxelles 27 rue de la Procession Rue Marie-Thérèse, 21 75740 Paris Cedex 15 – FRANCE 1000 – Bruxelles – BELGIQUE Tel : +33 (0)1 40 61 60 00 Tel : +32 (0)2 238 51 10 Fax : +33 (0)1 40 61 60 60 Fax : +32 (0)2 238 51 15 Email : [email protected] Email : [email protected] Site Internet : Ifri.org About the author Dr Alia Brahimi is a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror (OUP, 2010). 1 © Ifri Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 3 ON THE ROPES ................................................................................... 4 THE FIGHT BACK? ............................................................................... 7 1. Capitalising on chaos ............................................................. 8 2. A common consciousness................................................... 10 3. The Yemeni Crucible ............................................................ 13 4. Civilian casualties ................................................................. 15 CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 17 2 © Ifri Introduction On Tuesday 10 April 2012, Osama bin Laden was finally replaced on the FBI’s most wanted list by a fugitive schoolteacher accused of possessing child pornography. As the United States’ perception of threat has shifted, so too has the broader national security discourse. The prominent al-Qaeda analyst Peter Bergen observed that the terrorist group which launched the 9/11 attacks is now more or less out of business.1 He argued, too, that it is time to declare al-Qaeda defeated and “move on to focus on the essential challenges now facing America”: fixing the country’s economy, containing a rising China, managing the rogue regime in North Korea, and continuing to delay Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.2 This change represents more than perspective regained inside the United States; it is also a reflection of the significant reversals suffered by al-Qaeda in the last five years. These wounds were, in many ways, self-inflicted – arising, as they did, from one essential and undeniable fact: most of al-Qaeda’s victims, since 9/11, have been Muslim civilians. The impact of this reality was, in the words of Osama bin Laden taken from a letter written in 2010, “the alienation of most of the [Muslim] nation from the muhajidin”.3 In that same correspondence, captured by US Special Forces during the raid on his Abbottabad hideout in 2011, bin Laden called for a “new phase of amendment and development” in order to regain the trust of the Muslims masses.4 Al-Qaeda does indeed find itself at the threshold of a new era, thrust upon it by its strategic crisis as well as by the dramatically changing regional landscape. But do these shifting sands work to al-Qaeda advantage, or will they only guarantee its decline? 1 P. Bergen, “And Now, Only One Senior Al-Qaeda Leader Left”, CNN Opinion, 5 June 2012. 2 P. Bergen, “Time to Declare Victory: Al-Qaeda Is Defeated”, CNN Security Clearance, 27 June 2012. 3 Document “SOCOM-2012-0000019”, p. 9, made available by the Combating Terrorism Centre at Westpoint, at <http://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/letters-from- abbottabad-bin-ladin-sidelined>. 4 Ibid., p. 15. 3 © Ifri On the ropes In recent years, al-Qaeda has suffered three major setbacks. In the first place, the predominantly Muslim death toll from terrorist attacks, estimated as between 82 and 97 per cent over the last five years,5 plunged al-Qaeda in to strategic and ideological disarray. After 9/11 and the destruction of its headquarters in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda fractured into a moving target, a global cadre of autonomous cells which enabled it to continue to both elude and fight its enemies. However, with the globalisation of his jihad, bin Laden’s authority was at once far-reaching and fragmented. Ceding command-and-control to self-defined “al-Qaeda” franchises exacted a high cost. Bin Laden portrayed al-Qaeda as a vanguard group with a clear and simple mandate: to defend Muslims. Every one of his statements made clear that his was a defensive jihad to protect the innocent blood of Muslims from a Crusader onslaught. All of his legal, moral and political arguments rested on this premise. Yet the credibility of bin Laden's claim to be defending Muslims exploded alongside the scores of suicide bombers dispatched to civilian centres with the direct intention of massacring swathes of (Muslim) civilians. On the run in Pakistan, bin Laden and his colleagues at "al-Qaeda central" were unable to control their over-zealous offspring in places like Algiers, Amman, and the Al-Anbar Province. Each of al-Qaeda’s tight political and theological arguments justifying attacks against civilians assumed that the targets were non-Muslims who voted for western governments which allegedly perpetrated aggression against Muslims. As a result, these tens of thousands of Muslim deaths were left with no ideological cover – even from within the jihadi’s moral universe. The onset of the so-called ‘Arab Awakening’ in late 2010 dealt a second body blow to al-Qaeda’s ideology. One of the fundamental assumptions of the global jihad strategy was dramatically undercut. For years, al-Qaeda’s ideologists had argued that changes to the status quo “can only be achieved through jihad”6 – and yet it was rainbow coalitions of demonstrators who, within a few months and with a predominantly secular discourse, claimed the political scalps of the region’s most notorious strongmen. In Libya, where the 5 See “National Counterterrorism Centre: 2011 Report on Terrorism”. The report also noted that Muslim majority countries bore the greatest number of attacks involving ten or more deaths. 6 Interview with Rahimullah Yousafsai (ABC), 22 December 1998. 4 © Ifri A. Brahimi / Al-Qaeda in a Changing Region revolutionary process was decidedly bloodier, it was NATO-backed military forces which toppled the tyrant. Al-Qaeda is as much threatened by the boon which the revolutions have provided to Islamism, as by the end of the tired and unstable binary opposition between secular kleptocracies and violent ‘Islamic’ movements (the autocratic regimes argued that they were the guarantors of stability and the only bulwark against a jihadi takeover, while the jihadis maintained that the only way to remove those autocracies was through violence). For indeed, as Islamists integrate themselves into a democratic process and throw off decades of political impotence, they offer a viable and effective alternative to al-Qaeda when it comes to the question of Islam and governance. As the Islamists of al-Nahda in Tunisia and the Ikhwan in Egypt seek to promote Islamic norms within the framework of democratic politics, they simultaneously embody the strongest counter-argument to al-Qaeda’s political philosophy. The awkwardness, for al-Qaeda, of these developments has been palpable in many of its statements. While some preachers, such as Sheikh Abu Hayyan of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), continue to argue simplistically that the Arab Awakening heralds the establishment of the Islamic Caliphate, al-Qaeda’s spokesmen have attempted to interject some nuance into their analyses of the uprisings, arguing variously that al-Qaeda prepared the ground for the revolutions by cultivating a spirit of defiance (Abdullah al-Adam); that the protests were not in fact peaceful and people were not so much demanding democracy as Islamic notions of freedom and opposition to tyranny (Atiyeh Abdulrahman); that because of al-Qaeda’s war on America, US governments pressured local tyrants to clamp down on their subjects and this created the popular anger which triggered the revolts (Zawahiri).7 More than anything, the tenuousness of these ownership claims emphasises the ever-widening chasm between al- Qaeda and the constituency it seeks to represent. Beyond the ideological wound inflicted by the Arab Awakening, al-Qaeda has also had to contend with the rapid disappearance of the established order. Most of the pioneers of the global jihad against the West cut their teeth fighting local tyrants. One of the reasons they threw down the gauntlet to the ‘far’ enemy in the first place, was because western governments helped to prop up the godless ‘near’

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