WHAT NEXT FOR AL-QA'IDA?

A year after Osama bin Laden was killed how relevant is alQarsquoida In the decade since 911 Bin Laden was always a symbol rather than an operational commander His death did not do much to disrupt the group as an organisation Occasional recordings of his voice that surfaced over the years contained no new ideas and were primarily a way for alQarsquoida to show that he was still alive In death such a symbolic but inactive leader can exercise as much influence as when he lived so his killing by US commandos has not inflicted fatal damage to his organisation A Pakistani man stands against a wall bearing the graffiti lsquoOsama bin Townrsquo near the hideout house of slain al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following his death by US Special Forces in a ground operation in Abbottabad in May 2011 Pic AFP Photo Yet his death was very important less because of its impact on alQarsquoida than because of Bin Ladenrsquos unique position in American demonology after 911 It is difficult to think of anybody else in US history with the same Satanic status President Barack Obama trumpets as one of his main achievements his administrationrsquos success in tracking Bin Laden down and eliminating him With him dead it became easier for the White House to proceed with the withdrawal from Afghanistan where the presence of a few hundred alQarsquoida fighters was used to justify the presence of 90000 US soldiers The shock to Americans of the 911 attacks may be diminishing but it is still there As a result any act by alQarsquoida will go on having an impact out of all proportion to its size or capacity in future just as it had done over the last decadeu00a0 No US administration can afford to be seen by American voters as derelict in pursuing alQarsquoida whenever it shows the slightest signs of life Few Americans pay attention to the turmoil in Yemen but any stirring by alQarsquoida in the Arabian Peninsula AQAP headquartered there attracts immediate official and media attention It was from Yemen that two botched plots the underpants bomber and explosives packed inside ink cartridges were launched Both failed but as an alQarsquoida statement pointed out these failures were a success in grabbing the attention of the world Aside from the killing of Bin Laden have the Arab Spring uprisings and protests over the last year knocked away one of alQarsquoidarsquos main ideological justifications This was that dictatorships in the Muslim world could not be peacefully overthrown and the priority was to attack the US as their chief sponsor In 1998 claiming that the US had declared war on God and his messenger Bin Laden and Ayman alZawahiri his Egyptian second in command called for the murder of Americans anywhere in the world as the ldquoindividual duty for every Muslimrdquo This made limited impact at the time but did resonate in the Muslim world after President George W Bush intervened militarily in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 It is a bit glib to imagine alQarsquoida becoming a back number in the wake of the Arab Spring In Tunisia Egypt and Libya Islamic and secular opponents combined their efforts to overthrow police states But the belief that Islamic fundamentalism is passeacute may be exaggerated Firstly alQarsquoida was always a small minority and was never planning to run for election It will not go out of business because there are other effective methods of agitation though its appeal may be more limited The Israeli conflict with the Palestinians festers as the US makes no effective efforts to restrict Israeli settlements on the West Bank and may soon explode The political temperature of the whole region is rising and this cannot be to the disadvantage of alQarsquoida Islamic militants in eastern Libya once a recruiting ground for alQarsquoida suicide bombers going to Iraq were last year closely cooperating with the NATO to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi They included such leaders as Abdelhakim Belhadj former head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group who was notoriously handed over to Gaddafirsquos torturers by MI6 and the CIA Such people are now publicly distancing themselves from the alQarsquoida Likewise in Egypt the Salafists hardliners who used to denounce democracy as unIslamic run successfully for parliament are seeking to broaden their appeal and last weekend surprisingly adopted a liberal former Muslim Brother as their presidential candidate But all the news is not bad for alQarsquoida because tightlyrun police states have collapsed across the region There is room for small groups of militants to organise without being under constant pressure of state security forces Whatever happens in Tunisia Egypt Libya Yemen and Syria over the next year the states there will be weaker than before Moreover the near civil wars in Syria and Yemen are not over AlQarsquoida guerrilla fighters seasoned in Iraq are now making their way to Syria mdash according to the CIA mdash and have started launching suicide bomb attacks in Damascus and Aleppo There are two other reasons why alQarsquoida has survived the death of Bin Laden and other leaders over the last year US security officials speak of it as if it was structured like the Pentagon with ranking officers whose killing by drones or death squads would disrupt the organisation It was always much more ramshackle than this Few of the alQarsquoida militants killed over the last year are irreplaceable an exception being perhaps Anwar alAwlaki in Yemen An intelligent eloquent Englishspeaking fundamentalist and one of the few effective alQarsquoida propagandists he was killed by a US drone on September 30 last year A further reason is that its most powerful elements have always been franchisees not under the control of any core group This was true of alQarsquoida in Mesopotamia led by Abu Musab alZarqawi which starting in 2003 became a lethally effective organisation in Iraq until much of the Sunni community turned against it It still has the capacity to bomb Shia civilians and though it may be weaker it is far from being eradicated But alQarsquoida in Mesopotamia was always distinct from the core group of leaders around Bin Laden From the beginning it focused primarily on a sectarian war against the Shia targeting day labourers in the markets and pilgrims and worshippers leaving mosques For all their ferocity alQarsquoida suicide bombers infrequently attacked US troops in the years before the final US withdrawal Similarly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan where the core of alQarsquoida is supposedly based there are plenty of people who have experience in guerrilla warfare Hatred of foreigners and infidels of all sorts is a Pashtun tradition A kidnapped British aid worker Khalil Rasjed Dale was killed there at the weekend But the local Pakistani Taliban periodic allies of alQarsquoida are involved in their own struggles and closely monitored by Pakistani and foreign intelligence services u00a0As a base Yemen has the advantage of being a mosaic of different power centres and with a weak central state President Ali Abdullah Saleh now removed from power used to play an elaborate game with the US whereby he would present himself as Americarsquos loyal ally against alQarsquoida offering even to take responsibility for their drone attacks But this also gave him an incentive to make sure that AQAP was never destroyed Unlike Iraq AQAP has tried to launch attacks on the US which might just have succeeded It controls much of Abyan province east of Aden and made a show of strength in the last few days by arranging to release 73 government soldiers it had capturedu00a0 A problem for alQarsquoida is that being associated with the organisation in any way immediately creates a host of enemies In 20034 when alQarsquoida grew in strength in Iraq it brought in money and foreign suicide bombers Today it brings few resources to embattled groups like alShabaab in Somalia The same is true of alQarsquoida in the Maghreb AQIM which operates in the wastes of the Sahara kidnapping foreigners but whose motives are largely criminal Weakened though it may be alQarsquoida will not fade from the headlines This is partly because headline writers have got used to its existence as a universal bogeyman The ldquowar against alQarsquoidardquo since 911 has also produced selfdeclared experts thinktanks intelligence officers and army generals who all have budgets to defend They are never likely to declare the alQarsquoida threat over while emphasising as one counterterrorism expert said that ldquowersquove made progress towards defeating alQarsquoida the organisationrdquo US counterterrorism and intelligence officers say that alQarsquoida could never again carry out an onslaught as devastating as 911 They may well be right On the other hand the very length of time it took for the US to find Bin Laden and his family though they had been living in the same house for years may show that their own level of competence in contrast to their numbers and budgets has not improved much since the World Trade Centre was destroyed