The reinvented, more youthful
al-Qaeda By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - The arrest of several al-Qaeda
operatives in Pakistan and Britain in recent months is
reported to have provided US intelligence agencies with
considerable information about al-Qaeda's structure and
operations. The information, which reveals the immense
resilience of al-Qaeda and its remarkable ability to
reconstitute itself, negates yet again claims made by
the administration of US President George W Bush that
al-Qaeda has dispersed and is now on the run.
While it is true that al-Qaeda has lost several
of its operational commanders, such as the masterminds
of the September 11, 2001, attacks - Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Walid Muhammad Salih bin
Attash, who have been captured - al-Qaeda has been able
not just to survive this loss, but to thrive in
difficult circumstances. This is because it has quickly
adapted itself to the changed situation.
The
recent arrests have revealed that there has been an
infusion of young blood into al-Qaeda. At the same time,
the younger operatives have strong links with the old
guard. They are linked by blood and friendship to senior
al-Qaeda members. For instance, Abu Musab Baluchi, who
was captured in June, is a nephew of Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed and a cousin of Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted
for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New
York. Juliette Kayyem, head of the national-security
program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of
Government, has described the operatives arrested
recently as "descendants of the old guard".
The
most obvious feature of al-Qaeda's new operatives is
that they belong to a younger generation. The original
al-Qaeda network consisted of people in their 40s or
50s. That generation shares the experience of having
fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. This and
personal acquaintance appear to have bonded them
together. The new recruits - who seem to be rising fast
in the hierarchy to occupy posts left empty by leaders
arrested or killed - are in their 20s or 30s. Unlike
their seniors, they do not seem to have acquired their
fighting skills in one of the original al-Qaeda camps or
cut their teeth on a common battleground. Their skills
have been acquired on rather diverse battlegrounds -
Chechnya, the Balkans, and now Iraq.
Writing in
the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor, Sebastian
Gorka, adjunct professor of terrorism studies at the
George C Marshall European Center for Security Studies
in Germany, points out that the younger operatives in
al-Qaeda are "first and foremost an intellectual
network". He argues that they "have shared experience at
certain universities dotted across the Arab and Muslim
world, universities that are home to the more virulent
strains of the fundamentalist interpretations of Islam.
Most often, these are establishments located in
Pakistan."
A comparison of today's al-Qaeda with
that which existed before September 11, 2001, shows that
the group has transformed remarkably. In the past,
shared experience was the most important glue that
bonded the fighters. Today it is ideological - a fierce
anti-American agenda draws them together. The network
relies less on the person-to-person contact that was so
evident in the original group.
The al-Qaeda
operatives who carried out the September 11 attacks were
largely Arab and from educated backgrounds. This was not
so in the case of the Pakistani al-Qaeda operatives from
that period. Even a couple of years ago, Pakistani
al-Qaeda operatives were from relatively disadvantaged
backgrounds, mainly educated in madrassas
(religious schools). This has now changed. Pakistan's
al-Qaeda operatives who were arrested recently are from
middle-class backgrounds. They are highly qualified
professionals and university graduates, what Zahid
Hussain describes in an article in the Pakistani
newsmagazine Newsline as "children of opportunity rather
than deprivation".
Although terrorism experts
and reports in the media have picked up on the "new face
of al-Qaeda", counter-terrorism officials seem to be
stuck in a time warp. Their perception of al-Qaeda and
their response to it seem to be ignoring the immense
metamorphosis that has taken place in al-Qaeda. For one,
counter-terrorism strategists are still responding to
al-Qaeda as a group or a network, when it has morphed
into an ideological movement. Arrests weaken terrorist
outfits, but not an ideology. Paul Bergen, author of
Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin
Laden, points out: "Since September 11, al-Qaeda the
group has been morphing into al-Qaeda the ideological
movement, and although it is a relatively simple matter
to arrest people, it is altogether another thing to
arrest the spread of ideas."
Western
counter-terrorism officials have also misinterpreted the
growing autonomy of operatives in planning attacks as
evidence of Osama bin Laden's diminishing control over
al-Qaeda. While it is true that there is a visible
decentralization in the planning of al-Qaeda operations,
this must be seen as part of al-Qaeda's ability to adapt
and thrive in difficult conditions.
Terrorism
expert Bruce Hoffman, who heads the Rand Corp's
Washington office, has drawn parallels between Osama and
the chief executive officer of a multinational
corporation. "He has implemented for al-Qaeda the same
type of effective organizational framework adopted by
many corporate executives throughout much of the
industrialized world over the past decade. Just as
large, multinational business conglomerates moved during
the 1990s to flatter, networked structures, bin Laden
did the same with al-Qaeda."
Drawing attention
to bin Laden's "flexible strategy", Hoffman points out
that he uses "both top-down and bottom-up approaches. On
the one hand, he has functioned like the president or
CEO of a large multinational corporation by defining
specific goals, issuing orders, and ensuring their
implementation. This function applies mostly to the
al-Qaeda 'spectaculars' - those high-visibility, usually
high-value, and high-casualty operations like [September
11], the attack on the USS Cole [Yemen, 2000], and the
1998 East Africa embassy bombings.
"On the other
hand, he has operated as a venture capitalist by
soliciting ideas from below, by encouraging creative
approaches and out-of-the-box thinking, and by providing
funding to those proposals he finds promising."
Al-Qaeda's decentralization then is an asset in
its effort to survive the "war against terrorism".
Another al-Qaeda quality that counter-terrorism experts
have failed to interpret correctly is its patience. To
bolster their claim that al-Qaeda is severely weakened,
Western counter-terrorism officials point to al-Qaeda's
"failure to launch another September 11 attack" despite
its periodic warnings of "another September 11".
However, this is not so much because of al-Qaeda's
inability to strike, but that it is biding its time.
Commenting on al-Qaeda's "patience", Bergen says
it took al-Qaeda five years to plan the 1998 attacks on
US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and at least three
years to plan the September 11 attacks. He argues that
just because al-Qaeda has not struck in the United
States since 2001, it does not mean that they are not
plotting to do so. Drawing attention to the attack in
Madrid, he said: "Al-Qaeda struck in Madrid at the time
of its choosing - at a moment when it could cause the
largest number of fatalities and create the greatest
psychological effect."
The findings of the 9-11
Commission have prompted counter-terrorism experts to
put forward recommendations - many of them touted as new
and innovative responses - to tackle al-Qaeda. Several
of the recommendations are in fact responses to the
original al-Qaeda. It has morphed considerably since
then. Unless the Bush administration admits, at least to
itself, that its strategy has only contributed to the
metastasis of al-Qaeda, the threat posed by the latter
cannot be tackled.
Sudha Ramachandran
is an independent researcher/writer based in Bangalore,
India. She has a doctoral degree from the School of
International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi. Her areas of interest include terrorism, conflict
zones and gender and conflict. Formerly an assistant
editor at the Deccan Herald (Bangalore), she now teaches
at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.
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