EDITORIAL: Al Qaeda threat and responses
The US government has determined on the authority of a tape aired by Al Jazeera TV on November 12 that Osama bin Laden is alive. A number of terrorist attacks from Tunisia to Bali are being linked to Al Qaeda. Most observers agree that Al Qaeda “has re-launched itself”. The man on the Al Jazeera tape, presumably Bin Laden, does indeed warn the West: “You will be killed just as you kill, and will be bombed just as you bomb”. Should the world brace itself for Al Qaeda “take two”, which as one US newspaper put it, will be a “greater threat”?
Although doubts have been recently cast on whether or not the voice in the latest tape belongs to OBL, there is no reason to dismiss the threat. Events have proved that Al Qaeda does have the capability to move and strike stealthily. There is also evidence that it is reorganising and working towards a new strategy: getting new recruits, launching a fresh PR campaign for hearts and minds in the Muslim world, vigorously targeting the fault-lines within the Islamic world, working out new strategies of networking, communication and identifying and engaging targets and generally adapting to counter-terrorism measures.
But there is also no reason to “package” and present the threat in exaggerated terms. This serves Al Qaeda’s purpose which feeds off this fear. The problems of tackling a threat like Al Qaeda are many, but the most obvious are the two extremes of either rejecting or excessively highlighting it. Recent arrests and other attempts through the year to track down Al Qaeda members have shown that determined, multinational efforts to tackle the threat can actually produce a fairly high rate of success. There are many examples — the capture in Pakistan of Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi Binalshibh, besides hundreds of other Al Qaeda operatives, and the arrests of Al Qaeda-Jemmah Islamiyah activists in Singapore and Malaysia plotting to bomb US targets, and so on. Just last month a CIA drone successfully tracked and then targeted a vehicle carrying Al Qaeda activists in Yemen. Most terrorism experts agree these successes can be replicated if the multinational efforts to crush Al Qaeda continue apace and the will to do so does not slacken.
But that is also where the problem begins. The will of the states to hunt down Al Qaeda can never be consistent. The phenomenon is rooted, directly and indirectly, in issues and ideologies that are global and regional and domestic and external and overlap in bewildering combinations. In Pakistan, for instance, the state recruited its proxies for Kashmir from the same breeding ground that Al Qaeda did even as both had a different agenda. Since the change of policy, popular will has partly translated into electoral success for some parties that are opposed to the war on Al Qaeda because they either do not look at Bin Laden as a terrorist or are equally opposed to a range of US policies.
While in operational terms Al Qaeda can work out a number of scenarios and find a range of targets and methods to mount attacks, its essential strength (also its basic strategy) is linked to its ability to rejuvenate. And it draws its cadres and its strength because it is ideologically located in the Muslim world and can find new recruits until such time that a successful strategy can actually dislocate it from the context in which it grows and sustains itself. Such a strategy would necessarily have to make Al Qaeda irrelevant to the interests of the Muslims. But that is the tough part and the real challenge. At the least, it requires a non-linear response that goes beyond treating the issue merely as a terrorist threat. Over time, the value of current intelligence based on tapes and documents left behind by fleeing Al Qaeda operatives will be reduced and Al Qaeda will get new recruits and evolve new strategies to communicate, network and mount attacks.
One of the most crucial factors is the ability of Al Qaeda to increase the number of its sympathisers in the Muslim world. More than attacking the West it aims at targeting the split within the Muslim states; indeed, the attacks themselves aim at drawing a response from the West that can force Muslims across the Islamic world to decide, in almost binary terms, which side they are on. More than its organisational structure, it is its ideological composition and outreach that gives it a multi-layered structure and makes it so hard to identify it. This is also what makes it draw upon the increasing strength of Islamist elements within the Muslim countries. Pakistan, Turkey and Bahrain have seen, in recent weeks, gains by the Islamists. This trend will catch on in the absence of constructive and just policies by the United States on the one hand and the inability of the elites in these countries to disburse the fruits of economic growth more rapidly and equitably. Meanwhile, suppression alone, or the forced exclusion of Islamists from the political process, are poor strategies. The essential point is to change the domestic and international context in which Al Qaeda operates. That is almost impossible without the US fairly addressing the Middle East conflict. *