Lawrence Wright is one of the best journalists writing about al-Qaeda today. In addition to his outstanding book The Looming Tower, he has written a number of excellent pieces for The New Yorker (such as this one on Ayman al-Zawahiri and this one on the next generation of al-Qaeda strategists).
He recently posted some thoughts on al-Qaeda on a private listserve,
and kindly agreed to let me post them here. As with all guest posts,
the arguments are his, not mine, and I might or might not agree.
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Underestimating al-Qaeda
Lawrence Wright
I think it's a terrible mistake to discount al-Qaeda's operational abilities, now and in the future.
If you read the accounts of al-Qaeda insiders, the war on terror was essentially over in December 2001, after U.S. and Coalition forces swept aside the Taliban and pummeled al-Qaeda. According to al-Qaeda's own inner circle, 80% of its members were captured or killed. Yes, the leaders escaped, but they were scattered, destitute, and unable to communicate with each other. The organization lived a kind of zombie existence, neither dead nor fully alive.
Iraq brought it back to life.
Al-Qaeda now has four major branches: Europe, Iraq, North Africa, and the old mother ship. Obviously, most of AQ's effort is in Iraq, but when the U.S. inevitably begins to withdraw from that country, AQ will be able to boast of an extraordinary victory over the last remaining superpower. The jihadis who went to Iraq will begin to return to their own countries, empowering the local cells, which have been proliferating in the Arab world and the west and which have only lacked a degree of high-level training to make them really lethal. These veterans, with their experience, their networks, and their resolve will become leaders of this new generation of jihadis. There is every reason to expect that they will be as cunning and dangerous as their predecessors, if not moreso.
Nor is the old AQ inoperable. Clearly, the leadership, bin Laden and Zawahiri, are able to direct their followers through their very active media organization, al-Sahab. The loss of their sanctuary in Afghanistan proved to be a temporary inconvenience; now AQ enjoys training facilities in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan, the Sunni provinces of Iraq, in Mali, and probably still in Afghanistan and Somalia.
Al-Qaeda's ideologues and planners, such as Abu Bakr Naji, foresaw the need as early as 1998 to reorganize AQ in a more horizontal fashion, more like street gangs, as we have seen in Madrid and London. Yet we are learning that even these supposedly ad-hoc, indigenous groups had contact with AQ proper and may have received training in AQ camps.
There is a bitter irony in the fact that the Bush Adminstration resurrected its defeated foe by carrying the war to Iraq, a country that bin Laden had never placed on his list of profitable regions to wage jihad, simply because he knew it was a Shia-majority country. His rival and eventual protege, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, took that decision out of bin Laden's hands and forced a shift in al-Qaeda's strategy.
The lessons I draw from this are that AQ is stronger now than at any time since 9/11; that the war in Iraq has given AQ a tremendous propaganda victory; that the movement is both vast and nimble; that it will survive the deaths of any particular individuals; and that the prospects for long-term conflict with the U.S. and Europe are almost certain.
This is so very important. Thanks for publishing it.
How many times do we need to hear the same message before it catches on?
Posted by: John Ballard | February 15, 2007 at 08:35 AM
From what we know, how active is al-Qa'ida in Mali, and how strong is their support there? Mali's pluralistic religious society isn't what I would consider fertile ground for Salafist ideology, the U.S. military has a longstanding and strong relationship with the Malian armed forces, and I'd expect the Tuareg to have a vested interest in keeping interlopers out of their part of the country (between Qadhdhafi, the rebellion, and the post-rebellion military compromise, your average Tuareg family probably has more combat training and gear than most GSPC cells).
Posted by: WatchfulBabbler | February 15, 2007 at 10:08 AM
for what it's worth: i was in mali in october 2001. it was only about 3 weeks after 9/11 when i arrived, but i did see photos of bin laden for sale at the bamako market that is by that saudi financed mosque. on the other hand, malians (at least all the ones i spoke to) uniformly expressed sympathy to me as an american because of what happened the month before. it seemed like while bin laden photos were for sale, the population wasn't all that receptive.
a couple of week later i was in timbuktu. by then the campaign in afghanistan was well under way. some locals told me that some "afghans" (by which they meant arabs) had fled afghanistan and recently appeared in timbuktu. no one seemed to like them and by telling me, a greasy american independent traveler, they seemed to think that they were ratting the guys out and that i would call in the special forces or something. timbuktu is a really small place and i never saw the people they were talking about. but everyone claimed to have seen them. it's the kind of town that's small enough so that everyone notices when newcomers show up.
the above all took place almost 6 years ago before, for example, the iraq war. so a lot could have changed.
Posted by: upyernoz | February 15, 2007 at 01:14 PM
Let's not forget that there was no such thing as a group that called itself al-qaeda until the Bush administration started using the term and applying it indiscriminately to all Islamic opposition to US policies. We created it by giving it a name. That started a chain reaction in which unrelated groups started cooperating and using the term in their press anouncements because we had given it the ultimate name recognition.
Posted by: Leroy | February 16, 2007 at 11:01 AM
briefly speaking, Wright foresees the comeback of
"al-Afghan al-Arab" phenomena?
The same happened when Arab jihadists came back to their native coutries from Afganistan.
Posted by: mustashriq | February 18, 2007 at 05:16 AM
"Let's not forget that there was no such thing as a group that called itself al-qaeda until the Bush administration started using the term and applying it indiscriminately to all Islamic opposition to US policies."
Probably we should forget that, since it isn't true, actually.
Posted by: Gary Farber | February 18, 2007 at 03:06 PM