Al-Qaeda: A threat transformed
By James Blitz
Published: January 18 2010 20:43 | Last updated: January 18 2010 20:43
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| International incidents (clockwise from top left): alleged Christmas day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab; Khost suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi; the Somali man alleged to have attacked Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard; Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of the Fort Hood massacre |
Nearly a decade ago, Osama bin Laden and his acolytes stunned the world with their simultaneous attacks on America. The September 11 2001 assault, hatched in several nations, killed more than 3,000 people, involved 20 operatives and cost, according to counter-terrorism sources, more than half a million dollars.
Today, intelligence chiefs in western capitals doubt that al-Qaeda could pull off an attack on this scale. Its core followers have been harried in Afghanistan and the bordering Pakistani tribal areas while the resources of national intelligence agencies have been beefed up to counter the threat from jihadism worldwide.
But a series of recent attacks has renewed concern that, even if Mr bin Laden and his core group are weakened, the al-Qaeda brand is alive and well, and is finding willing and active supporters in many places around the globe.
Some of the events that have triggered renewed debate about the scale of the jihadist threat have been splashed across newspaper front pages for weeks. On Christmas day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian student, is alleged to have come within an ace of exploding a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit. On December 30, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year-old CIA informant with links to al-Qaeda, blew up seven CIA employees in the Afghan city of Khost, one of the most remarkable operations against US intelligence in many years. On January 1, a Somali man broke into the home of Kurt Westergaard and allegedly came close to killing him in revenge for Mr Westergaard’s depiction of the Prophet Mohammed in newspaper cartoons in 2005.
These are not the only events to have triggered anxiety. In the course of 2009, federal prosecutors charged 54 people with terrorist acts inside the US, more than in any year since 2001, according to figures published on Monday. Many of these acts appear to have been perpetrated by US citizens who are also Muslims. “The US has always tended to see Islamist terror as a problem that originates ‘out there’,” says Sir Paul Lever, former chairman of Britain’s joint intelligence committee. “It’s now finding that there is a home-grown problem, too, and this is getting people worried.”
Many terrorism experts today play down the idea that the global jihadist movement is powerfully driven at every level by Mr bin Laden and his acolytes, operating from the Pakistani tribal areas. Although Mr bin Laden still has huge ideological sway over some Muslim extremists, experts argue that al-Qaeda has fragmented over the years into a variety of disconnected regional movements that have little connection with each other.
The name “is now just a loose label for a movement that seems to target the west”, says Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist who has long studied terrorism networks. “There is no umbrella organisation. We like to create a mythical entity called [al-Qaeda] in our minds but that is not the reality we are dealing with.”
Others, however, still see it as an integrated network that is strongly led from the Pakistani tribal areas and has a powerful strategic purpose. Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, is among the vanguard of those who interpret al-Qaeda this way. “It amazes me that people don’t think there is a clear adversary out there, and that our adversary does not have a strategic approach,” he says.
Professor Hoffman views the Khost and Detroit attacks as serious blows aimed at the US by a network that is finding new vitality. “Frankly the threat from al-Qaeda is more serious today than at any time since 2001.”
Which of these views of al-Qaeda – a weak fragmented organisation or a strongly integrated network – is closest to reality? There is no doubt that global jihadism has what Statfor, the US-based global intelligence company, calls “three distinct entities”.
First, there is the al-Qaeda core in Waziristan in the Pakistani tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan. Western counter-terrorism sources are in no doubt that Mr bin Laden is alive and surrounded by a couple of hundred associates, bodyguards and fixers. There is also broad agreement that this core group is under huge pressure from US drone attacks and the Pakistani army’s offensive into south Waziristan. “Al-Qaeda central has been bloodied, its capabilities have been degraded,” said John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s most senior counter-terrorism expert, in a recent Financial Times interview. “It has been consumed with trying to ensure its security and stay out of harm’s way in northern Pakistan ... which has thankfully helped distract it from its terrorist activities.”
UK counter-terrorism
The Af-Pak threat within Britain’s borders
The recent attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up an airliner over Detroit may have put renewed focus on the growing strength of the al-Qaeda operation in Yemen. But for UK officials, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia continue to be the main regions of concern when assessing where any new attack in Britain might come from, writes James Blitz.
The importance of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a potential source of jihadist attacks is partly to do with the presence there of the core al-Qaeda group. But a no less significant factor is the huge flow of Britons to and from Pakistan.
UK officials have long been concerned that the perpetrators of the July 7 2001 attacks on London’s transport system were all British citizens, some of whom had travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan where they allegedly received military training.
Each year about 400,000 British residents travel to Pakistan, staying for an average of 42 days. Most travel for legitimate reasons, but the sheer size of this flow of travellers makes it hard for UK and Pakistani authorities to monitor the few who might seek jihadist training or indoctrination. In particular, Kashmir, to which a large proportion of Britain’s Pakistani population has connections, is seen as an important region to watch.
With Somalia, the challenge is not just that the country has ungoverned spaces where jihadist groups can thrive. There is also a considerable challenge to the British authorities because of the size of the ethnic Somali population inside the UK; some 43,000 Somalis live in the UK – predominantly in London – according to the 2001 census. This makes it difficult for the authorities to monitor the activities of the very few who might contemplate an attack.
Yemen is less of a concern to the UK than to other countries. Officials say the operation by Mr Abdulmutallab certainly underscores the growing power of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a local jihadist group. However, the number of Yemeni citizens living in – or travelling to – the UK is very small.
Even so, Mr Brennan warned that the al-Qaeda core “retains the capability to carry out attacks” and should not be underestimated. Bruce Riedel, who chaired an Obama administration review of Afghanistan and Pakistan last year, agrees. He was struck, he says, by the capability of the group’s core to mount the Khost attack on CIA officers.
“We put some pressure on them in the course of the past year and instead of folding they hit right back,” he says. The small size of the core is also deceptive. “The Red Army Faction in Germany never comprised more than 25 people,” says Prof Hoffman, “but it was able to terrorise the German people for more than a quarter of a century.”
While keeping their overwhelming focus on the al-Qaeda core, intelligence agencies have also for some time been looking at the second main driver of jihadism: the regional groups operating in a range of countries, most notably Yemen, Somalia and the Maghreb states of Morocco and Algeria. Some intelligence sources believe the core movement is in touch with these groups and assisting them. There have been reports, for example that leaders in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region have ordered their followers to travel to Yemen in the past year. What is not in doubt is that the failed Christmas day attack has underscored how significant these groups are becoming.
Yemen is clearly most in the public eye right now. The failed Christmas day attack was the first on a western target outside the country for which the Yemeni jihadist group – al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – has claimed responsibility. The projected attack underscores the way in which AQAP has grown in the past year, a result of the merger between al-Qaeda’s Yemeni and Saudi affiliates – the group now has as many as 300 jihadists. One of the things that has also shocked counter-terrorism experts is the speed with which Mr Abdulmutallab was apparently radicalised and trained by AQAP in the course of 2009.
Western governments are not taking their eyes off other regions, however. The threat from Somalia is seen as an issue of growing concern. Factionalism inside Somalia continues to hamper the local jihadist group, al-Shabaab, which has been concerned primarily with battling the nation’s weak government. But some intelligence analysts believe al-Shabaab could gain a significant foothold in the country from which to train militants. There have also been concerns that al-Qaeda-linked extremists have been migrating to the vast Saharan territories of southern Algeria, Mauritania, Mali and Niger, remote areas where the absence of any real state control has allowed them to build a new haven where they can gather and train.
The third layer of the jihadist movement is in some ways the most difficult to analyse. This is the grass-roots movement comprising thousands of Muslims across the world who are inspired by al-Qaeda and its regional franchises but may have little direct connection to those groups.
In the US, the growth of militancy among American Muslims has been one of the biggest concerns of counter-terrorism chiefs in recent months. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, US policymakers assumed that, given the strength of integration in their country, there was a far smaller threat of home-grown terrorism in the US than in Europe.
However, events in 2009 have raised new doubts about this. Major Nidal Malik Hasan is to go on trial for a murderous rampage he conducted through the Fort Hood army base in Texas, an operation allegedly inspired by an Islamist preacher. Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born US resident, was arrested last year for allegedly planning an attack in New York. David Headley of Chicago has been charged with aiding the 2008 plot in Mumbai.
Counter-terrorism experts in the US are debating why this flurry of attacks from within has suddenly emerged, but have as yet reached no clear answer. Some play down this apparent surge, saying the plots have no evident link to one another and little in common beyond their apparent ideological motive. But one western counter-terrorism official warns that the prospect of a significant surge in US military action in Afghanistan this year could lead to the radicalisation of more American Muslims, and that the phenomenon needs to be watched.
Despite such expressions of alarm, many experts warn that the biggest problem with the west’s approach to al-Qaeda is the degree to which the terrorist threat is exaggerated every time an attack happens. Mr Sageman insists that Islamist extremists are today turning to violence out of desperation, in much the same way that Europe’s radical left turned briefly in the 1970s to the extremism of Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades.
“All these things are the actions of individuals who are increasingly desperate and fragmented,” he says. “The appeal of jihad is diminishing, the ideology has less traction in the Muslim world, the ideologues have recanted. What we may well be seeing are the last spurts of a movement that is in its death throes.”
Others say that, although al-Qaeda is under huge pressure, it will mutate and adopt wholly different tactics. Sir David Omand, formerly security intelligence co-ordinator in the UK Cabinet Office, says it is at a strategic turning point and has clearly failed to reach the objectives it set itself at the start of the previous decade. “But their tactics will be capable of mutating in new ways,” he says.
“If you look at the history of the Provisional IRA in Britain, they were initially focused on carrying out bombing campaigns with mass casualties to attract attention to their cause. But when they got desperate, they changed direction and went in for assassination and shootings. It didn’t produce the dividend, and they then tried large city centre bombings to cause maximum commercial damage in an attempt to exercise political pressure.”
Ultimately, however, the worry that many counter-terrorism experts have is the asymmetric nature of the struggle between governments and jihadism. “There is no doubt that al-Qaeda today is weaker than it was, and that the movement created by Mr bin Laden is fragmented and has suffered major setbacks in Saudi Arabia and Iraq,” says one European government official. “However, western publics can be stunned by any fatalities incurred in an act of terrorism. Today’s terrorists still operate by the rule of the Provisional IRA. They know that we people in government have to be lucky all the time. They have to be lucky just once.
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