LONDON: When CIA director Michael Hayden last week spoke of the imminent “strategic defeat” of Al Qaeda, he surprised many. Some, such as Professor Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University, immediately pointed out that Hayden is a political nominee speaking in election year and that the new optimistic analysis flew in the face of everything the intelligence community had been saying for months. Certainly Hayden’s view is not shared in the UK, where, though three years have elapsed without a successful terrorist strike, nobody feels speaking of victory or defeat is appropriate. Nor, presumably, is anyone talking about winning in Pakistan, following the attack on the Danish embassy in Islamabad.
However, Hayden’s words have more to them than mere electioneering. At senior levels in the American intelligence community, a few analysts have begun to suggest that things might not be going too badly in the war on terror.
The main argument is, apart from their failure to attack mainland US for seven years or strike successfully in Europe for three, Al Qaeda has failed to get any “traction” in Iraq. None of its offshoots in the Maghreb, the core Middle East or elsewhere look likely to overturn any of the hated “apostate” governments and, most important, the vast proportion of the world’s Muslim population have rejected Al Qaeda and have not risen up as Osama bin Laden and strategist Ayman al-Zawahiri hoped they would.
Hoffmann counters this argument in two ways. He argues that mass uprisings are not necessarily what Osama sought anyway. Terrorist groups do not need mass support but can rely on a hard core of supporters. “Appealing to this hardcore of like-minded radicals and extremists is arguably the movement's most important priority. Indeed, it is only when this core erodes that the beginning of the end of Al Qaeda can more confidently be proclaimed,” he says.
Interestingly, the analysts’ debate is echoed among the jihadis themselves. There is increasingly vocal criticism of Osama and al-Zawahiri. Some elements of this criticism, especially that coming out of Egypt, reflects old enmities as much as current doctrinal or strategic divergence. However, there are large numbers of militants who have been influenced by the thinking of Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian-born militant who posted voluminous strategic analyses on the internet before being taken into US custody in 2006.
Whereas al-Zawahiri believes that his organisation is leading the global Islamic community on a long, hard, but ultimately victorious path, al-Suri believes that the Pakistan-based hardcore leadership is being hopelessly optimistic. For al-Suri, a man steeped in decades of practical experience of violence and covert activism, the militants are merely fighting a last-ditch battle to avoid total defeat. In his view, 9/11 was a tactical success but a strategic error. In recent years jihadi militants have come under enormous pressure, he writes, leading to the loss of safe havens, the destruction of most networks and enormous practical difficulties in executing the strikes necessary to weaken the enemy and to recruit. For al-Suri a leaderless, diffused militant movement made up of autonomous cells is thus the only way to survive.
The question for both Hayden and for al-Suri is how many individuals are going to walk that path in the coming years. With no hard data on this, as on almost everything to do with Al Qaeda, it is, for the moment, impossible to say.—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service
Jason Burke is the author of Al Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam