- One of the leading questions of the War on Terrorism
is: How much do we credit al Qaida with the global pattern of terrorism
today? The answer has much to do with the required future focus of the
War on Terrorism. Rarely has a recent incident escaped being labeled the
work of al Qaida, but the group per se has yet to be caught red-handed
in any attacks except 9-11, Kenya and Tanzania. In some cases there may
be good reasons for attributing attacks to al Qaida. However, giving Osama
bin Laden credit too often only helps build his organization, while blurring
real responsibility for terrorist incidents around the globe.
-
- Regarding 9-11, the evidence against al Qaida appears
substantial, although convicting Osama bin Laden of direct involvement
does not look like a prosecutor dream case. The habit of Islamic groups
of crowing over any successful Islamic event makes it difficult to know
for sure who actually did the work, but if the evidence is truly solid,
one can ask why a straightforward criminal justice proceeding would not
suffice to bring the culprits to book. Proceeding in secrecy against suspects
who are treated as gray area or illegal combatants-neither civil nor military
malefactors-makes the cases appear weak. Weak cases undermine charges that
al Qaida is guilt.
-
- Other cases do not stand up well. Bin Laden is said to
have been involved in numerous attacks going back into the 1980s, but real
proof in a case was not obtained until the August 7, 1998 bombing of American
embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. The key witness in the Kenya and
Tanzania bombings, a Palestinian named Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, said that bin
Laden has operatives in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen, Ethiopia and
Somalia, as well as in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Bin Laden affiliated groups
are credited with attacks in most of these countries. Whether Odeh was
telling the truth or merely deflecting guilt away from himself is unclear,
but US authorities now link al Qaida to attacks on Americans abroad as
early as a 1992 attack on a hotel in Yemen.
-
- Some confusion arises because bin Laden tends to help
local groups pursue their own agendas. Moreover, he seems to have worked
so far only with Sunni groups. An early example of this was the attack
by the Egyptian Islamic Group at the Dir Al-Bahri temple in Upper Egypt.
The recent bombings in Bali, Indonesia may also be al Qaida linked as
investigators say, but a long established Indonesian group (Jemaah Islamiah)
that has carried out other attacks on Indonesian Christians appears to
have done the work.
-
- The Indonesia attacks may be al Qaida-like, but the details
of the attacks are not signature ones. For example, early in the investigation,
the reported bomb maker was said to have been an ex Indonesian military
officer who used plastic explosives enhanced with cylinder gas, a combination
that was used in 1984 by Hezbollah with devastating effect on the US Marine
barracks in Lebanon. This report suggested that C4 has become the explosive
of choice for terrorists since the supply of simtex, a Cold War era explosive
from Czechoslovakia, has become scarce. Terrorists or associates in a number
of countries where the United States has military forces could find ways
to acquire C4. Thus the explosive or the bomb itself would not link an
event to al Qaida. However, the use of C4 could shed a depressing light
on the availability of US plastic explosives to terrorists.
-
- Eight perpetrators were reported to be on scene in the
Bali attacks. That is hardly a display of professionalism, al Qaida or
otherwise, because such a crowd is not needed and increases risks of detection.
As Timothy McVeigh showed us, the creation of the devices takes few people,
and once planned, the attacks require little manpower to execute. It is
even simpler when plastic explosives and cylinder gas are used instead
of fertilizer and racing fuel as used at Oklahoma city. Thus having so
many people at the scene is not indicative of either a well-trained or
experienced team.
-
- Neither the scale nor the execution of these attacks
necessarily links them to al Qaida. Rather, the apparent purposes of
the attacks-to promote Islamic separatism, to embarrass the government
or to get its attention to the dire circumstances of many Muslims in Indonesia-links
them to long standing grievances of Jemaah Islamiah. This group has peer
groups in Egypt and Pakistan as well as pan-Asian aspirations, hoping to
bring together Islamic groups from Malaysia to the Philippines. That ambition
and those affiliations existed before al Qaida became such front-page news.
-
- Abu Sayaff, the Philippine Moro group, also is called
an affiliate of al Qaida. However, this group grew out of long-standing
grievances the Moros have against leadership and the elites in Manila.
The inability to either separate from the Philippines or to get any real
participatory concessions out of Manila provides an adequate reason for
this group to seek outside affiliations. Al Qaida can capitalize on that
situation as it also can on many parallel situations in the failed and
failing states of Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
-
- Al Qaida has rich resources to work with in any country
where there is an out-group Islamic minority or where a secular Islamic
government is ignoring or repressing its Islamic fundamentalists. Affiliations
in Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia fit this
model. Attacks typically fit local terrorist agendas and are carried out
by local groups. These groups in turn, at least the real professionals
in them, may become recruits for international attacks that serve the al
Qaida agenda.
-
- Putting the blame on al Qaida thus misses an import fact
of life about the global terrorism environment. Bin Laden is smart enough
to see that most of the Islamic out groups do not have the resources to
be effective against their governments, but their agendas make them likely
recruits for future attacks. Moreover, since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, such groups have had meager pickings from outside sources of support.
By facilitating attacks by local groups, providing supplemental resources,
maybe even by selecting targets, and certainly providing inspiration, bin
Laden takes on a role that was credited previously only to terrorism sponsoring
states. He clearly qualifies as, if not the unique example, then the first
significant example of a non-state actor running a global terrorist network,
even though his network involves mainly Sunni Muslim states of the Middle
East. His strategy works because he capitalizes on local grievances and
gets the locals to do the work wherever possible.
-
- Bin Laden alliances with fundamentalists in Sunni countries
put him at odds with leadership of those countries in many cases. Afghanistan
and Sudan were the only ones so far where he was officially welcome, but
that welcome evaporated at least at top levels in Afghanistan with the
fall of the Taliban. Still, his support for the Palestinian cause, his
sponsorship of attacks that at least embarrass secular Islamic governments,
and his hostility to the West, especially the United States, resonate with
a growing number of Muslims and make it unlikely that he will be roundly
condemned in Muslim societies.
-
- Being labeled by the United States and other western
governments as the targeted enemy of the War on Terrorism, and being touted
by the media as public enemy number one are best possible al Qaida recruitment
posters. The role carries some burdens in that al Qaida will be charged
with incidents it did not even know about until they happened. But it
has some advantages in that al Qaida is currently the best known and thereby
bin Laden is the leader of the most important terrorist group in the world.
Bin Laden has taken over from Abu Nidal (now dead) and Carlos the Jackal
(likewise). Both of them found the role perhaps exhilarating for a while,
but on the whole burdensome, and ultimately disabling. One can hope bin
Laden,s experience will be no exception.
-
- While they are in the limelight, however, bin Laden and
al Qaida are not only the central figures in the War on Terrorism, but
major impediments to its effective conduct. The signs of that are hardly
subtle. There were more than sixty terrorist groups, 36 of them international,
who were active in 2001, but hardly a 2002 news story has mentioned any
group but al Qaida. The link of any group to al Qaida has become a mantra.
Both US officials and media appeared fixated on bin Laden.
-
- The effects of that fixation are very damaging to the
War on Terrorism. Any government, such as that of Indonesia, which faces
a terrorist attack that can be attributed to al Qaida, has cover for going
easy on local culprits, as President Megawati Soukarnosutri has been doing.
Kenya and Tanzania leaders managed to escape major blame for not having
detected the plots or diverted the attacks on US embassies, because those
attacks were immediately blamed on Osama bin Laden. The same escape hatch
has been left open again for Kenya, because attacks on an Israeli tourist
hotel in Mombassa and an attempted missile attack on an Israeli airliner
have been blamed on al Qaida. This tends to transfer the task of fighting
back to the United States or any others who wish to fight the War on Terrorism.
Al Qaida becomes a convenience for national leaders. The perpetrator
is an outsider. Therefore, outsiders can deal with it.
-
- Also damaging to the War on Terrorism in a perverse way
is the US encouragement to participating states to go after their domestic
groups. Those out-groups, which exist in many more countries than the home
bases of the sixty or so most active terrorist groups, are a major reason
the terrorist groups exist. Created over time by patterns of government
and /or elite, exclusion, repression and neglect, these groups are about
to be repressed even more in the name of the War on Terrorism. Such repression
will increase the desperation of these groups and will enhance al Qaida
opportunities to recruit them as allies. The War on Terrorism thus serves
as an organizing principle for the enemy.
-
- Knee-jerk blaming of al Qaida also creates a ready-made
zone for false flag events. Any government that chooses to can conduct
a covert operation against a local or foreign enemy, fabricate or plant
evidence of al Qaida involvement, and avoid charges of guilt or at least
muddy the waters. The Israelis appear to have tried this in Gaza, using
the alleged presence of a so-called al Qaida cell to justify continuing
harsh and repressive acts against the Palestinians. However, Palestinians
say the alleged al Qaida cell has been identified as a Mossad plant. Whether
or not that is true, the Israeli use of al Qaida to justify months of Israeli
Defense Force excesses in Palestine is at best another crude attempt to
disguise Israeli repression and expulsion of the Palestinians as a war
on terrorism.
-
- The bottom line of this discussion is that in the interest
of assuring a global war on terrorism that seriously engages every government,
there are two important and in some ways contradictory tasks. One task
is to assure that the local terrorist groups who carry out attacks are
not let off the hook because al Qaida is said to be involved in or responsible
for an attack. Even when a link to al Qaida is clear, the local groups
should be held fully accountable for their actions. If they are not, then
al Qaida has a way of doing real mischief in various countries without
harm to its affiliates. That itself could be a powerful recruitment tool.
-
- The second task, however, is to assure that governments
who are encouraged and even assisted in going after the terrorists do not
also continue to repress the out-groups. Such repression will generate
more terrorists while perpetuating long-standing patterns of injustice.
In the long run, this task will be much more important than dealing with
the current generation of terrorists. The War on Terrorism cannot be won
without attacking the causes that generate new terrorists and provide the
will of most terrorist groups to go on fighting.
-
- It is essential to remind everyone that Osama bin Laden
did not invent terrorism. Nor did he invent the patterns of repression
that sustain the 75 or more terrorist groups who threaten global peace.
Thus most of the pattern of international terrorism would exist without
bin Laden or al Qaida. Enough new terrorists are being generated virtually
every day in Palestine to keep the region perpetually unstable. Osama bin
Laden brings to the table the will and the ability to help small groups
express their disaffection. His networking is based in ties to Sunni Islamic
dissidents, but his concept has appeal even to terrorist groups who do
not share his Islamic vision. Che Guevara defined this vision for Latinos.
There will be others.
-
- We should be trying to discredit that appeal. Bin Laden
brands the United States as public enemy number one. By giving him credit
for a growing number of attacks, often without real evidence, we make him
a popular hero for world dissidents. Blaming him for every attack that
occurs serves his purposes. It does not serve ours, unless, as some critics
assert, all we want out of the deal is a credible, well-known enemy.
-
- The writer is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer
of the US Department of State. He will welcome your comments at wecanstopit@hotmail.com
|
