The
rise of al-Qaeda's franchises By Sreeram Chaulia
The recent series
of deadly bombings in Baghdad and Damascus that
killed scores of civilians and agents of state
have brought the phrase "al-Qaeda" back into the
reckoning.
The attacks occurred at the
tail-end of 2011, a year in which the
organization's original kernel was deemed
pulverized to irrelevance through American-led
global military and financial efforts.
The
United States military-bereft Iraqi government
blamed "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" for ghastly
serialized explosions that killed scores of
citizens, mainly Shi'ites, on December 22.
Syrian authorities labeled the suicide car
blasts, which claimed
over 40 lives and ripped
apart top intelligence offices manned by Alawite
Shi'ite elites on December 24, as the handiwork of
"the al-Qaeda terrorist network".
These
incidents, along with evidence of ongoing acts of
violence being perpetrated by other radical Sunni
Islamist outfits that carry the al-Qaeda tag such
as "al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula' (Yemen and
Saudi Arabia) and "al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb" (Mali, Mauritania, Libya and Algeria)
suggest that the franchises spawned from the slain
Osama bin Laden's original unit are rising, not
losing.
While there is reason to doubt the
attribution of terrorist attacks in some countries
to phoney "al-Qaedas", it would be strategic
blindness to assume that the real al-Qaeda's
vision and appeal are passe just because of the
Arab Spring. Complete democratization in the
Muslim world is far from achieved, leaving fertile
ground for jihadi elements to recruit and
terrorize.
Al-Qaeda-inspired and
affiliated terrorist groups such as the al-Shabaab
in Somalia, the Haqqani network and the Afghan
Taliban in Afghanistan, the Tehreek-e-Taliban and
the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba in Pakistan are not just
pinpricks with nuisance value but flourishing
entities commanding vast political economies of
societal and state support. They are capable of
capturing political power or even nuclear weapons
systems in some fragile states.
The
assessments emerging from various US governmental
agencies last year stressed how much al-Qaeda's
core body had been "severely weakened" (Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta) and was "on a path of
decline" (State Department Counter-Terrorism
Coordinator Daniel Benjamin).
But it is
obvious now that the so-called al-Qaeda of the
peripheries is on the ascendant and presents a
much more obstinate challenge to peace and
security than the tight knit al-Qaeda parent
pioneered by Egyptians and Saudis such as Ayman al
Zawahiri and Bin Laden.
That progenitor
al-Qaeda had a global vision of rolling back US
and Israeli imperialism in the post-Cold War era,
but the offshoots which are now causing havoc are
more localized in their grievances and hit lists.
The latter derive support from
longstanding territorial disputes, illegitimate
regimes, sectarian hatreds and regional rivalries
that predate Bin Laden's internationalist grudges
and are rooted in local histories. If the US can
take credit for downgrading the strike
capabilities of "al-Qaeda central" in one decade,
no state or even alliance of states is today in a
position to eviscerate Sunni jihadi poisons that
are flavored in specific hues and shades of
different parts of the world.
Al-Qaeda's
franchises and branches in North Africa, West
Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia share broad
Salafist ideological tenets and often train and
practise coordinated terrorist attacks, but they
can ultimately be tackled only at the grassroots
in their respective societies and regions.
Broad multilateral cooperation at the
international level is still required to confine
them to their points of origin, but the main
solution has to come from societies and states
that face their own respective jihadi demons.
In cases such as Syria, Iraq, Algeria and
Saudi Arabia, the existance of regimes that are
democratic and politically free could be the sole
condition needed for local al-Qaeda franchises to
be snuffed out. The idea of armed resistance for
an Islamist-defined "just cause" is a powerful one
that Bin Laden bequeathed to inspire would-be
terrorists.
The al-Qaeda branches ramming
car bombs into the sanctum sanctorums of state
institutions of authoritarian regimes and socially
vulnerable urban neighborhoods cannot be reduced
to pulp through force. They will arise again and
again in one form or the other, giving the
al-Qaeda franchises an eternal, "never-say-die"
character, unless political freedom and social
equality dawn in tyrannical lands.
Another
type of al-Qaeda branch and affiliate is that
which is nurtured and coddled by states like
Pakistan and aimed at democracies like India and
fledgling states like Afghanistan. Such terrorist
outfits are conservative, not radical, in the
sense that they are pawns of military-dominated
state establishments.
Their targets are
not politically repressive regimes, but enemies
designated by their paymasters, who are ironically
undemocratic and sometimes un-Islamic in their
alliances.
How can al-Qaeda branches
dotting the urban and rural length and breadth of
a volatile country like Pakistan be made to close
shop? Here, the onus falls not on changing the
democratic and pluralistic "infidels" like India,
whom the jihadis keep wounding through spectacular
terrorist attacks such as the "26/11" attacks in
Mumbai in November 2008.
Rather, the way
out lies in regime transformation in the power
centers that sponsor and harbor al-Qaeda
sympathizers as instruments to advance strategic
state interests.
Can there be concerted
multilateral as well as local exertions to
democratize an epicenter of al-Qaeda franchises
like Pakistan? The acceptability of radical Islam
as a mainstream philosophy of life and a guide for
militant action is at its pinnacle in Pakistan
today.
This is quietly abetted by the
country's almighty military and intelligence
apparatus. A whole generation of Pakistanis has
grown up believing that Sunni jihadists are
"freedom fighters" and anti-imperialists, although
the reality is that these terrorists are
byproducts of a repressive military-intelligence
state.
Admittedly, some terrorist
organizations in Pakistan have morphed into
Frankensteins that are targeting the military for
allying with the United States, but this is likely
to be a temporary phenomenon. Once Washington
downsizes its operations in Afghanistan after
2014, the Pakistani military-intelligence
establishment will wear no Scarlet Letter of
sinful collusion with "Judeo-Christian" powers.
All Sunni jihadi outfits will then revert
to the protection and munificence of the Pakistani
military and continue to remain a menace in South
Asia and beyond.
Al-Qaeda's reincarnations
in franchises connected to specific, parochial
issues mean that local wars and disputes are going
to be more lethal in the future. The manipulation
of terrorist minds and bodies by some vicious
state apparatuses has outlived the American "war
on terror" and is increasing the impunity with
which jihadis are conducting daring attacks that
claim scores of lives.
Just because the US
has survived without a successful terrorist attack
on its soil in the past 10 years does not permit
writing off al-Qaeda as a red herring or an
illusion. Its offspring and ancestors are both in
the reckoning due to regional insecurity spirals.
Full democratization and sweeping regime
replacements in the Middle East and South Asia are
antidotes to the hydra-headed phenomenon of
al-Qaeda.
While it is fashionable both in
the US and elsewhere to tout "political solutions"
over military ones to terrorism in the Af-Pak
theater, the scope of political solutions has been
limited to power-sharing deals with leaders of
terrorist movements.
This discourse has
not moved to more drastic terrain such as ushering
out conservative, illegitimate and despotic
regimes. But the obstinate persistence of the
al-Qaeda brand of terrorism shows that token
"political solutions" that do not alter ruling
dispensations are doomed.
Besides
democratization of ruling systems, solutions also
lie in painstaking attitudinal changes in
jihad-saturated societies, which cannot happen
overnight or fall in our laps without sacrifices.
In the coming decade of long struggle with
al-Qaeda's branches, we may have to just learn to
live with routinised terrorist violence until new
political orders slowly supplant old one.
Sreeram Chaulia is a Professor
and Vice Dean at the Jindal School of
International Affairs in Sonipat, India, and the
first ever B Raman Fellow for Geopolitical
Analysis at the strategic affairs think-tank, the
Takshashila Institution. He is the author of the
recent book International Organizations and
Civilian Protection: Power, Ideas and Humanitarian
Aid in Conflict Zones (IB Tauris, London).
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