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by Derek Flood
On December 5th, the Jamestown Foundation hosted a major conference at the Capital Hilton in Washington entitled “The al-Qaeda Triangle: Iraq, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia”. The thrust of the conference was a frank and detailed discussion of al-Qaeda’s ideology, its aims both strategic and tactical and prospects for the group’s future and whether that future was seen as in decline or gaining momentum.
A range of experts from the United States and Europe as well as Iraq and Pakistan were brought together by Jamestown’s President Glen Howard to present their varying approaches to this necessarily nuanced subject matter. The primary focus of the event was al-Qaeda in the ultra violent present tense rather than past such events which tended to focus on its history and formation.
Much of the difference of opinion was centered on whether bin Laden’s organization was still driven by its ideological and theological roots or whether it had devolved into an amorphous, tactically driven movement in a leaderless, unjust war.
Marc Sageman presented the case that al-Qaeda had morphed into what he termed a “leaderless jihad” in the post-Iraq generation of militancy where its original organizational aspects had declined in importance. Iraq, Sageman said, has replaced the causes in the Balkans, the Caucasus and conflicts in South Asia as the unique symbol of the militant Islamic struggle. His focus was on the nuts and bolts elements of al-Qaeda’s operational methods and the recruitment of its foot soldiers in Europe and throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Jane’s Stephen Ulph approached the conflict from a top-down theological perspective citing the massive intellectual depth of the sources that al-Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere uses to justify its actions and intentions. Al-Qaeda is flourishing in the absence of any central Islamic authority such as the Abassid Caliphate in ancient Baghdad or the Ummayad one in Damascus. It seems that in Iraq, both theories are at work and are not mutually exclusive. Zarqawi is the preeminent example of both strains of thought by being described as both a “thug” and a crude, irredentist ideologue.
Most in attendance agreed on one pivotal point: the American and British invasion of Iraq has greatly metastasized the War on Terror and endangered regional governments friendly to U.S. interests and those at least somewhat cooperative of them.
Many of the panelists pointed to the 3/11 Madrid and 7/7 London attacks as the inklings of blowback to come for the European Union that has only Turkey standing in the way of itself and Iraq’s myriad failures. Jamestown’s Michael Scheurer pointed out that the American policy of late has been to destroy our “allies”. By hanging President Saddam Hussein, constantly humiliating President Bashar al-Assad and inadvertently escalating tension between Ankara and the Kurds near the point of no return, the United States has acted to greatly degrade the region’s most relatively stable state actors. Meanwhile, Scheuer stated that al-Qaeda’s positions have advanced greatly despite the tactical and ideological blunders of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. While Zarqawi helped to greatly expand al-Qaeda as a franchise and demonstrated its ability to openly confront first world militaries, his legacy was greatly divisive in al-Qaeda’s vision of uniting disaffected Sunni populations throughout the Middle East and beyond. The coordinated suicide attacks alleged to Zarqawi and carried out by a group of Iraqi militants at a set of Amman hotels in the fall of 2005 is one of many examples. There is a palpable feeling amongst analysts and intelligence experts alike that there was a relief among al-Qaeda’s senior leadership along the Durand Line at Zarqawi’s inevitable violent demise in June of 2006.
The most notorious aspect of Zarqawi’s legacy is the fitna or intra-Islamic violence in which he vigorously advocated fomenting against both the indigenous Shia and the silent majority of moderate Sunnis. In his death, it does not seem that he is a widely admired martyr as it is often posited bin Laden would be if eventually killed, but rather the end of his personal reign of terror in Iraq helped to actually consolidate al-Qaeda’s “Grand Strategy”. Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that bin Laden appeared regretful about events in Iraq and that al-Qaeda in Iraq had been so extreme in its measures as to alienate the indigenous Sunni tribes and push them into the arms if the Americans. Being that one of the primary aims of al-Qaeda was to drive the Americans and their allies out of the Middle East, many of Zarqawi’s al-Tawhid wa’l-Jihad (later AQI) actions helped to further entrench the United States in the nihilistic maelstrom that is Iraq’s civil war.
In Norwegian researcher Reider Visser’s view of Iraq’s historic religious and ethnic relations, the “soft partition” plan proposed by Senator Joseph Biden and Council on Foreign Relations Emeritus President Leslie Gelb is actually antithetical to Iraq’s past and likely its future. While Iraq may never have been a cohesive nation-state on the Westphalian sense of the term, it did exist an aggregate geographical entity where populations with differing ethnic, linguistic and religious affiliations coexisted with a degree of respective peace. While Iraq does have a history of sectarian atrocities, reconciliation was still an achievable goal. Visser’s primary concern was that the actions of a minority in the insurgency led by the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the corresponding counterinsurgency methods employed by the U.S. and its Iraqi clients may have helped to inextricably divide Iraq. The Biden-Gelb plan could help to accelerate the re-territorialization of al-Qaeda in western or central Iraq after the loss of its permanent Afghan camps and safe houses in the fall of 2001. While al-Qaeda may be a fluid movement that is rapidly adaptable and able to regroup and retrofit it stated aims, Iraq, indeed, may never be put back together again.
