Analysis / Jihadis focus on local agendas
October 29, 2012 12:04 am
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By Robert F. Worth / The New York Times
WASHINGTON -- One of the currents running through the presidential campaign
has been a tacit but fundamental question: After 11 years of the war on
terror, what kind of threat does al-Qaida pose to America?
The candidates offered profoundly different answers during their final
debate last week, with President Barack Obama repeating his triumphant
narrative of drone attacks and dead terrorists, and Mitt Romney warning
darkly about Islamists on the march in an increasingly hostile Middle East.
In a sense, both are true. The organization that planned the Sept. 11
attacks, based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is in shambles; dozens of its
top leaders have been killed since Mr. Obama assumed office, and those who
remain appear mostly inactive.
At the same time, jihadis of various kinds, some identifying themselves with
al-Qaida, are flourishing in Africa and the Middle East, where the chaos
that followed the Arab uprisings has often given them greater freedom to
organize and operate. The death of J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S.
ambassador to Libya, in September during an assault by armed Libyan jihadis
on the U.S. mission in Benghazi has driven that home to the American public.
But there is an important distinction: Most of the newer jihadi groups have
local agendas, and very few aspire to strike directly at the United States
as Osama bin Laden's core network did. They may interfere with U.S.
interests around the world -- as in Syria, where the presence of militant
Islamists among the rebels fighting the government of Bashar Assad has
inhibited U.S. efforts to support the uprising. But that is a far cry from
terrorist plots aimed at the United States itself.
"In a lot of ways, we've gone back to the way the world was before Sept.
11," said Brian Fishman, a research fellow in counterterrorism at the New
America Foundation. "It's local jihadi groups focused on projects within
their own countries, even if they sometimes maintain the rhetorical
framework of al-Qaida and its global struggle."
While these local groups may have benefited in the short term from the
turbulence that followed the Arab Spring uprisings, they have also suffered
an ideological blow that could make it far more difficult to recruit young
followers. Peaceful protest movements brought down dictatorships in Tunisia
and Egypt, and there, as in the more violent conflicts in Libya and Yemen,
the United States was on the side of change.
The idea of attacking the United States, "the far enemy" in jihadi parlance,
was always unpopular for many Islamic radicals, whose chief goal was
replacing their own governments with theocracies. The concept became more
unpopular after the Sept. 11 attacks when bin Laden and his followers were
driven out of their sanctuary in Afghanistan. In the following years,
al-Qaida's affiliates in Iraq and Saudi Arabia did the brand considerable
harm by killing large numbers of Muslims, although killing U.S. soldiers in
Iraq, where those troops were seen as Crusader-like occupiers, was still met
with wide approval.
What al-Qaida retains is a mystique, the legend of a small band of warriors
who took on an empire and struck a devastating blow. That mystique still has
tremendous appeal, even for insurgents who differ with al-Qaida's methods or
its focus on attacking America.
Recent years have seen the proliferation of jihadi movements that may take
some inspiration from al-Qaida, but have greatly divergent goals. In
Nigeria, the radical Islamist group Boko Haram has killed thousands of
people in the past few years in its struggle to overthrow the government and
establish an Islamic state. There, the struggle is largely sectarian; Boko
Haram has struck mostly at Christians and burned churches.
Jihadis now control Mali's vast north, as Mr. Romney mentioned more than
once in the last debate, and have links to an older group officially
affiliated with al-Qaida that grew out of Algeria's civil conflict in the
1990s. Although these groups are well-armed and dangerous, some appear to be
more criminal than ideological, focused on kidnapping and drug smuggling.
Jihadis have also gained strength in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, just across
the border from Israel.
At one point during the debate, Mr. Romney appeared to link these varied
threats with the Muslim Brotherhood's rise to power in Egypt. To some
terrorism analysts, this kind of talk is counterproductive, because it blurs
crucial distinctions between potential allies who profess to believe in
democracy and civic rights, like the Brotherhood, and more militant
Islamists who view those principles as heresy.
"There is still a tendency to talk about the enemy in grand terms, linking
them all together, because it makes you sound tough," said Mr. Fishman of
the New America Foundation.
"In fact, it does the opposite, because it obscures differences that should
be at the heart of our counterterrorism efforts."
The most dangerous al-Qaida movement, from an American perspective, is the
one in Yemen, which has tried repeatedly to plant bombs on airliners bound
for the United States. There, as in Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. drone
strikes have had a devastating effect, killing the U.S.-born cleric Anwar
al-Awlaki and many other top leaders. The group took over vast territories
of southern Yemen last year while the Yemeni government was distracted with
street protests in the capital; but the jihadis were driven back in June,
with U.S. military assistance.
At the same time, most of the political realities that inspired bin Laden's
organization are still in place, including America's support for Israel and
the rulers of the Persian Gulf states. The U.S. military is still fighting
in Afghanistan, and the Taliban, which hosted al-Qaida during the 1990s,
could gain greater power after a U.S. withdrawal.
Al-Qaida "was never a mass movement; it was always meant to be a vanguard,"
Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University,
said. "So even with the first generation of leaders largely gone, it's very
difficult to declare the movement dead."
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Received on Mon Oct 29 2012 - 19:04:46 EDT
