Saturday, September 11, 2004

Are the jihadists winning "hearts and minds"?

Gilles Kepel, a French author who is an authority on Islamist extremism, has a provocative essay in the Los Angeles Times arguing that the jihadists are not winning increasing support among Muslims generally.

Jihadists Failing to Win Muslim Minds by Gilles Kepel Los Angeles Times 09/08/04

Ayman Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's chief ideologue, reminded his readers that the "jihadist vanguard" was always at risk of being isolated from the "Muslim masses." He wrote that the jihadists needed to find ways of mobilizing those masses toward the supreme political goal: the triumph of the Islamic state and the implementation of Islamic law worldwide.

Zawahiri considered the 1990s a decade of failed opportunities. Jihad had been unsuccessful in Algeria, Bosnia, Egypt and Kashmir because militants had proved unable to galvanize civil society. To reverse this trend, he came up with the idea of using spectacular terrorism to shock the enemy and make the Muslim masses see the jihadists as knights. The Sept. 11 attacks were conceived by Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden as a way of "magnifying" jihad against Israel and "burning the hands of the U.S.," Islam's "faraway enemy" and ally of the Jewish state.

But three years on, this ideology has not achieved its goal. Although Al Qaeda has resisted Cold War-inspired U.S. military strategy (Bin Laden and Zawahiri remain on the run) and directed a succession of bloody terrorist attacks from Bali to Madrid, jihad activists have not seized power anywhere. They have lost their Afghan stronghold, and U.S.-led coalition troops have pursued the war on terror to Iraq, occupying Baghdad, erstwhile capital of the Muslim caliphate.

Kepel is almost certainly underestimating the degree to which Al Qaeda and jihadists have been able to exploit the American invasion of Iraq in particular to gain support for important parts of their ideology, as well as recruits.  Juan Cole presents a more troublesome picture:

September 11 and Its Aftermath 04/11/04

Bin Laden hoped the US would timidly withdraw from the Middle East [after the 9/11/01 attacks]. But he appears to have been aware that an aggressive US response to 9/11 was entirely possible. In that case, he had a Plan B: al-Qaeda hoped to draw the US into a debilitating guerrilla war in Afghanistan and do to the US military what they had earlier done to the Soviets. Al-Zawahiri's recent message shows that he still has faith in that strategy.

The US cleverly outfoxed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, using air power and local Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) to destroy the Taliban without many American boots on the ground.

Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason, where Americans faced the kind of wearing guerrilla war they had avoided in Afghanistan.

Actually, there is still a guerrilla war going on in Afghanistan/Pakistan that carries serious risks for the United States.  (Cole occasionally remarks on this, though his blog's focus is more Iraq.) Rohan Gunaratna wrote in Inside Al Qaeda (2002):

The destruction of Al Qaeda and Taliban infrastructure in Afghanistan has been pivotal to threat reduction.  In the first six months of this campaign, the US achieved this feat with minimal losses.  Al Qaeda, having merged its forces with the Taliban under Mullah Omar, it tactically repositioned its cadres on the Afghan-Pakistan border and is preparing to wage a protracted guerrilla campaign that might last at least a decade.

Since that writing, the guerrilla war in Afghanistan/Pakistan has escalated.  More US troops are involved than ever before.  And Gunaratna reminds us that the jihadists don't look at their struggle in terms that are (even yet) familiar to Americans and other Westerners:

In the Islamist mindset, Chechnya and Afghanistan are grounds already tested by jihad. Islamists claim that the erstwhile Soviet superpower was first defeated by them in Afghanistan and then its successor Russia was also defeated by Islamists in the first Chechen war.  However long it takes, Islamists worldwide will support the twin campaigns to defeat the US in Afghanistan and Russia in Chechnya. ... As long as [Pakistan and Georgia] remain friendly to the US, the Islamists cannot win either in Afghanistan or in Chechnya.  However, they will wage a protracted campaign until their leders are killed, supplies are exhausted and recruitment is disrupted.

As we know now, the Iraq War has diverted resources from the campaign to kill or capture Al Qaeda leaders.  And far from disrupting recruitment, it's been a bonanza for the jihadists.  Gunaratna also noted in this 2002 book:

The US has succeeded in creating a fragile international coalition to fight Al Qaeda by painstakingly building an international consensus against a common threat.  If, in order to oust Saddam Hussein, the US unilaterally targets Iraq, ... the citor will be Al Qaeda.  In addition to dividing and possibly splitting the coalition, it will create the conditions for a fresh wave of support for Islamists.

The next sentence in that paragraph is something we're likely to hear again and again if the Bush administration continues to push for war against Iran:

Iran, not Iraq, remains the main sponsor of both Shia and Sunni terrorism - including Al Qaeda and several of its associate groups.

It's also worth noting that Gilles Kepel's more optimistic view still sees the US intervention in Iraq as a problem:

The Muslim reaction to these incidents suggests that Al Qaeda could be beaten at its own hearts-and-minds game. Instead, by concentrating on the military option, Russia and the U.S. are missing an opportunity to mobilize Muslim civil society against Islamist terrorism and dry out the social swamps from which it springs.

And that is by no means the only opportunity missed thanks to the Iraq War.

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