In a recent poll of 16,000 people in 17 countries, only in nine did a majority of respondents say al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, its leader, were behind the attacks. Overall some 46% said the group was to blame, with Kenyans and Nigerians most convinced. Alarmingly, 23% of Germans subscribe to the conspiracy theory that the American government plotted the attack. In the Middle East, many point to Israel.
Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man vanished into smoke, leaving a burning trail of militancy stretching from Indonesia to Afghanistan, Iraq, north Africa and Europe. And despite the reward offered for his capture, now $25m, nobody has yet betrayed the whereabouts of “the Sheikh”, who periodically emerges on the internet to deliver some warning to the West.
Al-Qaeda lost a safe haven in Afghanistan, but is rebuilding another one in Pakistan.
On the contrary, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who masterminded September 11th, has gone on trial in Guantánamo Bay and many other leaders have been captured or killed, but others have taken their place. Even if America has not been struck since 2001, European capitals have been bombed.
Western intelligence agencies are convinced al-Qaeda still wants to develop non-conventional weapons, whether chemical or biological agents or “dirty bombs” that create a cloud of radioactivity. Al-Qaeda has built on decades of Middle Eastern terrorism. Palestinian groups internationalised their violence in the 1970s; Hizbullah used suicide-bombers against the Americans in Lebanon back in 1983; Palestinian suicide-bombers sought to inflict maximum civilian casualties in Israel from 1994; and Algerians who hijacked a French airliner the same year tried to fly it into the Eiffel Tower but were foiled.
In those days attacking Western targets was part of a local nationalist or sectarian fight.
Al-Qaeda’s genius was to weave these strands together with globalisation to create a networked movement with a single worldwide cause: jihad against America. Conventional terrorist groups, such as the Basque ETA movement or even Lebanon’s Hizbullah, often keep their violence in bounds to avoid alienating their political supporters. But global jihadists seek to maximise civilian casualties for spectacular effect. Disparate Arab fighters who helped Afghan ones evict Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989 were initially elated, but became dejected by the ensuing civil war and the failure of violent campaigns in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere. A cadre of wandering jihadists gathered in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban and decided to redirect their ire from the “near” enemy to the “far” one.
Seen in this light, one of the objectives of the September 11th attacks was to provoke the Americans into invading Muslim lands. But if al-Qaeda intended to trap America in Afghanistan, its plan went badly, at least initially. The Taliban fell quickly in 2001 and al-Qaeda’s followers were forced into hiding. A hubristic America, however, then walked into a trap of its own making by invading Iraq in 2003. It gave the jihadists a popular cause against American occupiers in the Muslim heartland..
So terrorism experts are now debating whether al-Qaeda is starting to burn itself out. Many thought he was being overly optimistic. The bigger danger now comes from loose groups of Muslims in the West who radicalise each other and carry out autonomous, self-financed attacks. Part of the problem lies in al-Qaeda’s diffuse nature, its members number only hundreds. Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organisation, a militant network and a subculture of rebellion all at the same time.
The rise of al-Qaeda’s stateless terrorism does not mean that the old state-sponsored variety has disappeared.
Libya, which once supported the IRA and other violent causes, may now be co-operating with the West, but
Iran, among others, supports both Palestinian militants and Lebanon’s Hizbullah movement. Should Iran redirect Hizbullah towards a global terrorist campaign against the West—for instance, if the country’s nuclear sites were bombed—the effect might be more devastating than any of al-Qaeda’s works.
For the moment the most immediate global threat comes from the ungoverned and ungovernable areas of the Muslim world. (the Afghan-Pakistani border, the parts of Iraq still in turmoil, the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and swathes of Yemen, Somalia, the western Sahara desert and the chain of islands between Indonesia and the Philippines)
The internet binds together the cloud of jihadist groups, spreads the ideology, weaves together the idea that Islam is under attack, popularises militant acts and distributes terrorist know-how. Because al-Qaeda is so dispersed, the fight against it has strained an international order still based on sovereign states.
