The succession struggle in Al-Qaeda is over. According to an Islamist website, Egyptian doctor-turned-jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri is the new Al-Qaeda chief. The question now being asked is whether Zawahiri will be as effective and charismatic as bin Laden in keeping the various AQ factions together. Most analysts think he won’t be. Earlier, after bin Laden’s killing, people wondered how effective Al-Qaeda would be post-OBL. The question is, are these questions even relevant?
At a minimum these questions should first define what AQ is, what we mean by its effectiveness and against whom?
Some analysts argue that AQ has no political programme. It is not affiliated with any mass political or revolutionary movement; nor is it one in itself. There is no electoral campaign, no mass mobilisation, no socio-political programme or economic manifesto. There’s nothing beyond ressentiment. Therefore, they are akin to the Russian nihilists, who found in the character of Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons a prototype, “committed to political violence for its own sake”.
As I wrote back in November 2001, this is only partially correct. There are similarities between AQ and members of Alexander Herzen’s The Will of the People movement. But there are also important differences. Nihilism began with total negation and aspired to a value, in Albert Camus’ remarkable description, “still to come”. Camus argued that “A value to come is…a contradiction in terms, since it can neither explain an action nor furnish a principle of choice as long as it has not been formulated. But the men of 1905, tortured by contradictions, really did give birth, by their very negation and death, to a value which will henceforth be imperative and which they brought to light in the belief that they were only announcing its advent”.
AQ began with a clear manifesto. Evict foreign forces from Muslim lands and reclaim Palestine. These are the political objectives. But this is just the operational side. The appeal is made through and for a value whose advent no one can announce because it was revealed to the Prophet (PBUH). Today’s salafists negate historical accretions as well as the modern international security architecture, but only in confirmation of that value. This is regardless of whether their approach is right or wrong in exegetical terms. Today’s struggles and bloodshed has to be contextualised but for those who are fighting the message is rooted in a value that is both non-temporal and non-spatial.
It is wrong to assume that the message is apolitical or that AQ is committed to violence for its own sake. Just because these groups do not accept the known categories which we use to structure both our lives and thinking does not mean the AQ strategy is non-political. What did bin Laden do? He did not aim to negotiate with the West; he wanted to exploit the fault-lines within the Muslim world.
To this end, AQ’s military strategy is to draw the West into a conflict through spectacular attacks on its interests. The primary audience, as well as targets of AQ, are the Muslims, not America. Attacking the West is an attempt to deepen fault-lines within the Muslim world and pit the Muslim states against the West. AQ wants the West to attack with all the viciousness at its disposal. The greater the destruction, the better for forcing people in the Muslim world to rise and decide which side they are on. This can only be achieved through a sharpening of the internal conflict, the reasons for which transcend AQ but whose existence first bin Laden and now Zawahiri have employed brilliantly to their ends.
The success of AQ’s strategy is clear from what Washington has done and is doing. A long drawn-out war with no end in sight has already built pressure on the governments and that works to AQ’s advantage.
Like before, Zawahiri has talked about forcing the Americans out of Muslim lands; like before he has referred to the awakening. AQ does not have to be effective as an organisation with a strict hierarchy; its effectiveness lies in its protean nature and in becoming an idea.
One thing should be clear from America’s botched campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan: there is no military solution to address an idea. Moreover, this idea is contesting for space with other ideas within the Muslim world. The fractures are increasing, as is the violence. Seen from AQ’s perspective, this is just what the doctor (no pun) ordered.
This is a struggle to which America’s presence is both central and ancillary in the first phase. Central because American policies are deepening the divisions; ancillary because AQ is primarily addressing the Muslims while taking advantage of what America is doing. And what America is doing is a lot of tactics with no eye for strategy. It is the drone syndrome; the kick one gets out of being able to hell-fire a few while millions continue to turn against America. Winning tactical battles while losing the war.
The war relates to the multiple challenges to the global architecture; an architecture conceived and dominated by America. This architecture faces challenges from within (China and other rising powers) as well as from without. In seeking to replace America, China’s challenge reinforces the current paradigm. By comparison, AQ’s challenge does not to seek to substitute one dominant entity for another but in destroying that entire architecture from outside. AQ’s effectiveness is therefore to be seen and judged in terms of what it can do within the Muslim world than in terms of any physical harm it can do to America.
If American policies manage to lose a large part of the Muslim world to AQ, it would be a disastrous blow to America and its interests. That seems to me a smart AQ agenda and fairly political, as political goes.
The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.