A Nuisance, Not a Strategic Threat

Responses to "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?"

Round 1 (posted September 7, 2006)

by Fawaz A. Gerges

Fawaz A. Gerges is the Christian A. Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and the author of Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy and The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global.

It is true that al Qaeda remains highly dangerous and its senior surviving leaders still want to strike inside the United States. But five years after 9/11, the organization does not seem capable of carrying out its repeated threats to do so, as John Mueller convincingly argues.

Far being a breakthrough for al Qaeda, 9/11 was a disaster for it. Transnationalist jihadists such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are now isolated, even within the Muslim world and among Islamists themselves. The balance of forces has shifted dramatically against global jihadists in favor of local ones and mainstream Islamists who are struggling, often against great odds and under enormous pressures, to accommodate themselves to gradual social and political change in their societies. Al Qaeda may dominate American thoughts and headlines, but its members constitute a tiny minority with much less power than is commonly believed.

The primary goal of the modern jihadist movement is and always has been the destruction of the secular political and social order in the activists' home countries and its replacement with authentic Islamic states. Over the last decade, however, the jihadists have fought bitterly among themselves, following the campaign launched by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to hijack the movement and change its direction from attacking al-Adou al-Qareeb, the "near enemy" (Muslim "apostates") to attacking al-Adou al-Baeed, the "far enemy" (the United States and its allies).

By taking on the United States -- responsible, in its eyes, for maintaining the grim status quo in the Arab world -- al Qaeda wanted to achieve two goals: ridding Muslim countries of Western cultural and political influences and American military presence, and destabilizing the countries' existing governments and ruling elites. 9/11 was bin Laden's attempt to turn the wheels of political fortune in his favor, by proving at one bold stroke that he and his brethren now represented the vanguard of the umma, the global Muslim community.

Their gamble did not pay off. The vast majority -- at least 95% -- of local jihadists did not join al Qaeda. When the United States invaded Afghanistan, the organization thus found itself facing the brunt of American power almost alone, with the help of only a modest trickle of recruits rather than a wave of seasoned jihadists and fresh volunteers. Instead of expressing solidarity with their besieged and entrapped associates on the Afghan-Pakistani border, prominent jihadist figures openly condemned al Qaeda for exacerbating the problems facing the movement elsewhere. They viewed 9/11 as a catastrophic blunder.

Jihadists are now engaged in a bitter quarrel. Instead of closing ranks against "the enemies of Islam," as bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had hoped, 9/11 destroyed the possibility of local and international jihadists working effectively together -- with the global wing of the movement being the real loser, for it desperately needs loyal allies and revolutionary legitimacy.

The social forces in the Muslim world now arrayed against al Qaeda range from former militant Islamists to mainstream Islamists to leftists and nationalists. Fault lines have even emerged within the bin Laden network itself. The multiple internal conflicts among jihadists call into question the functioning of the jihadist enterprise as a whole, and it is this more than anything else, I would argue, that has been the decisive factor in undermining al Qaeda's operational ability to wage war against the United States.

Unfortunately, this intra-Islamist tug-of-war has hardly been noticed in the West in general and in the United States in particular. U.S. policymakers have focused on al Qaeda's sleeper cells and sympathizers, saying little about all the other forces that could have joined al Qaeda but have not. This explains why the Bush administration wrongly portrays al Qaeda as a fundamental strategic threat to the U.S. homeland, rather than the dangerous nuisance it now is.

Contrary to the received wisdom in the United States, few activists and ordinary Muslims have embraced al Qaeda's global cause. Some may empathize with al Qaeda's grievances against the international order, particularly U.S. foreign policy, but they are unwilling to commit to war or fight on bin Laden's behalf.

The way forward now is not through a declaration of global war against an unconventional, paramilitary foe with little or no social base of support, nor through the re-embrace of traditional regional dictators. In fact, those are exactly the things bin Laden and his cohorts had hoped the United States would do.

If Washington understood the internal political and ideological dynamics of the Muslim world better, it would have second thoughts about militarizing the war on terror, thus causing further turmoil abroad and playing into al Qaeda's hands. It would also recognize that increasing the organization's internal encirclement is the most effective means of nailing its coffin shut.