Over the past two years, US and other
Western commentators have concluded that Osama bin
Laden is largely irrelevant as the leader of the
worldwide Sunni insurgency. Newsweek's Fareed
Zakaria, for example, has said that "by now it is
surely clear that al-Qaeda can produce videotapes
but not terrorism ... And the bad guys are
losing."
James S Dobbins at The National
Review said that bin Laden "made many threats of
course, but was never able to back them up,
creating an unbridgeable credibility gap". The new
US Central Intelligence Agency chief, General
Michael Hayden, has described bin Laden's recent
audio tapes as a public relations campaign to
prove he is still alive. "These attempts," Hayden
said,
"may be an attempt on their part [bin Laden and
Ayman al-Zawahiri] to kind of re-establish
authenticity with their followers."
Finally, from Sarah Lawrence College,
Fawaz Gerges all but dismisses bin Laden's
relevance, arguing that "we are in the throes of
the beginning of a new wave [in the Muslim world]
- the freedom generation - in which civil society
is asserting itself". In short, these arguments
assert that the situation has improved.
Well, maybe. The issue of bin Laden's
continued relevance as a major leader of Sunni
militancy - and as an enemy of the West - can
surely be assessed through the lens these authors
used. Put most simply, this lens is built on the
assumptions that bin Laden leads a gang of
criminals who have hijacked Islam and is
nihilistically attacking the US because they hate
democracy, freedom, elections and gender equality.
Based on this analysis, the above-noted
quotations suggest that a US-led victory over
al-Qaeda is in the offing because bin Laden's
popularity is withering and because there has been
no al-Qaeda attack inside the United States since
September 11, 2001.
The purpose of this
article is not to attack either the distinguished
individuals quoted or the views and analyses they
put forth. The tent under which attempts are made
to understand bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the threat
they pose must be a large one that accommodates a
broad range of heated but civil debate.
The point of this piece is to examine
where bin Laden might believe he and al-Qaeda
stand vis-a-vis his primary goals today, nearly 10
years after his late-August 1996 declaration of
war on the US.
This is an opportune moment
to try to view the war from bin Laden's
perspective, as the West is sorting out the
broader meaning of last week's major police
actions against al-Qaeda-inspired Islamists in the
United Kingdom and Canada.
It often comes
as a surprise to people to discover that bin Laden
has never claimed that al-Qaeda can or would
defeat the US, much less that al-Qaeda's goal was
to destroy the "American way of life" or "Western
civilization". He is not a man given to grandiose
pronouncements and has limited his goal to
incrementally increasing the pain inflicted on the
US and its allies to force them to disengage from
the Middle East to the greatest extent possible.
If achieved, bin Laden believes, this
would then allow al-Qaeda and its allies to focus
on its main targets: the tyrannies that rule most
Arab states, and the State of Israel.
In
examining where bin Laden thinks he stands in
attaining this goal, it is also vital to
understand that he has never claimed that al-Qaeda
could achieve this goal by itself. Quite the
contrary, he has consistently maintained that
al-Qaeda is only the vanguard of the large-scale
movement that is needed to achieve this goal. The
working title of my first book on al-Qaeda was
Allah's Humble Incendiary. That title was
not used, but I believe that it remains a useful
shorthand summary of the role bin Laden seeks for
himself and al-Qaeda in the present war.
He intends to be the instigator and
inspirer of Muslims to follow the path of jihad
and aims to agitate their souls until they do so.
Even in this, he claims no original role for
himself, explaining that he is honored to "provide
our ummah [community] with the inspiration
it requires" [1] because "Allah asked it from the
best of humans, the Prophet". [2]
It is in
this context that bin Laden assesses the current
status of the effort he publicly launched in 1996.
"I must say," bin Laden re-emphasized just after
the September 11 attacks in the US, "that my duty
is just to awaken Muslims, to tell them what is
good for them and what is not ... Al-Qaeda was set
up to wage jihad against infidelity, particularly
to encounter the onslaught of infidel countries
against the Islamic states. Jihad is the sixth
undeclared element of Islam. Every anti-Islamic
element is afraid of it. Al-Qaeda wants to keep
this element alive and active and make it part of
the daily lives of Muslims. It wants to give it
the status of worship." [3]
If bin Laden
is taken at his word - that his goal is to incite
Muslims to jihad and that he and al-Qaeda will not
and cannot be the sole agent forcing substantial
US disengagement from the Middle East - some of
the judgments of the individuals quoted above
become problematic. It also makes irrelevant the
argument by some commentators and government
officials that bin Laden is losing control of
international Sunni militancy.
The reality
is that he has never sought universal
command-and-control and has always tried to foment
widespread, anti-Western Islamist violence that
would need nothing from al-Qaeda except
inspiration. Indeed, the data surfacing since last
week's disruption of what appears to have been
preparations for major terrorist attacks in
Britain and Canada - perhaps a chemical attack in
the UK - strongly suggest that bin Laden's
unrelenting focus on instigation and agitation is
having an impact among Muslims worldwide.
Some will correctly argue that last week's
events are not enough to validate the contention
that bin Laden is succeeding in his main goal of
instigation. The aborted operations in London and
Toronto, however, are both said to have been
inspired by bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Moreover, they are two more in a series of
events that now stretch back over more than three
years. Kuwaiti Islamists, for example, said that
the attack that killed one US marine and wounded
another before the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a
gift to bin Laden.
In the same period, a
Yemeni cleric killed a senior member of Yemen's
socialist party and announced the same motivation
as the Kuwaitis. More recently, the bombers who
hit Madrid's Atocha train station in March 2003
and London's transit system last July, as well as
the Islamist militant cell taken down by
Australian authorities in late 2005, are said to
have been inspired by al-Qaeda's example.
Even in such places as Nigeria's oil-rich
Niger Delta and the teeming cities of Bangladesh,
Islamist leaders claim to have been inspired by
bin Laden. In each of these events and places,
national authorities have yet to document direct
training, financial or command-and-control links
to al-Qaeda; indeed, in the case of the actual and
thwarted attacks, the required training appears to
have been done in the country where the attack
occurred.
In addition, Islamist leaders in
Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan and
Jerusalem in 2005-06 declared the formation of
insurgent organizations that have pledged their
allegiance to al-Qaeda and the goals enunciated by
bin Laden.
Other incidents also suggest
the viability of bin Laden's clear intention to
incite Muslims by keeping them focused on what the
US and Europe do in the Muslim world, and not on
how they conduct their domestic political and
social affairs.
Islamist networks
established to recruit Muslims to fight US-led
forces in Iraq, for example, have been found in
France, Belgium, Australia, Germany, Switzerland
and elsewhere. European intelligence officers have
said that up to 1,000 European Muslims have been
sent to fight in Iraq; British officials claim
that up to 150 Muslims from the UK alone have gone
to Iraq.
In these cases, Europe-born
Muslims - some third-generation - and local
converts have been attracted and motivated by the
Iraqi jihad, a cause that for Islamists pivots on
the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, and
not on opposition to elections, democracy and
liberty. They will return home, moreover, with
significant military skills and imbued with the
jihadi spirit. [4]
Taken at his own word,
then, it seems likely that bin Laden is quite
pleased with where he and al-Qaeda stand a decade
after declaring war. This is not to say that US
military and intelligence forces have not hurt
al-Qaeda; they have, although not to the
catastrophic extent some claim.
It is to
say, however, that bin Laden's main goal of using
his words, al-Qaeda's actions and a tight focus on
what the US does in the Islamic world to instigate
Muslims to join the anti-US jihad has not only
found traction, but is increasingly successful
worldwide.
Today, the US and Europe are
not only confronted by a still undefeated
al-Qaeda, but by an increasing number of Muslims
in their own populations who - inspired and
religiously agitated by bin Laden - are prepared
to pick up arms and spend their lives to act on
that inspiration.
Notes 1. "Exclusive
Transcript of Previously Unaired Interview with
Osama bin Laden", Qoqaz (Internet), May 23,
2002. 2. "Exposing the New Crusader War - Osama
bin Laden - February 2003", Waaqiah (Internet),
February 14, 2003. 3. "Interview with Osama
bin Laden", Ummat, September 28, 2001. 4.
Sydney Morning Herald, January 7; BBC News,
January 12; Washington Post, February 18; The
Sunday Times, June 4.
Michael
Scheuer served in the CIA for 22 years before
resigning in 2004. He served as the chief of the
bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center from
1996 to 1999. He is the once-anonymous author
of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the
War on Terror and Through Our Enemies'
Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the
Future of America.
