Al Qaeda on elections

More than four years after the 9/11 attacks, after month after month of glorious victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Al Qaeda leadership is still sending out tapes and apparently still coordinating attacks.  The latest message is from Osama's #2: Al-Zawahiri criticises Afghan elections Al Jazeera 09/20/05.

In the tape, Al-Zawahiri played down US accomplishments in Afghanistan, saying it had just managed to move Taliban's government from Kabul to the mountains and countryside. ...

"What did they do, they drove Taliban's government out of Kabul, but it has been active in the mountains and countryside, where the real power of Afghanistan lies, " al-Zawahiri said. ...

"The elections have been conducted under the terror of [Afghanistan's] warlords," al-Zawahiri said.

He added that northern Afghanistan and Kabul had become "an area of chaos, plundering, theft, violations and drug business" under American occupation.

"The elections were a masquerade more than anything else, as various regions of the country are under the control of highwaymen and warlords, and international observers ... cannot cover more than one tenth of the (electoral) districts," al-Zawahiri said.

Al-Zawahiri again praised the London subway bombers:

"The London attack is one of the attacks that al-Qaida ... had the honour of carrying out against Zionist, British arrogance," al-Zawahiri said.

"This blessed attack revealed the real hypocritical face of the West," al-Zawahiri said in the tape in reference to British threats to deport anti-West Muslim clerics to their countries of origin.

He also railed against some recent democratic events that were considerably more genuine than those in Afghanistan and Egypt:

The Egyptian-born al-Qaida deputy also denounced US demands for political reforms around the world, including in Islamic countries, saying "there is no reform without jihad (holy war) for the sake of God and any call for reform without jihad will eventually be greeted by death and failure".

"Our enemies will not give us our rights without Jihad," he said.

"We should not be deceived by what had occurred in Georgia, Ukraine or Kyrgyzstan. Those were changes wanted by the Americans after they had prevented the Russians from interfering. Thus the Americans will never permit any Islamic regime to assume power in the middle of the Islamic world, unless such regime is in full collaboration with them, as the case is  in Iraq."

Al Qaeda tapes obviously aren't meant to be political science lectures or dispassionate news analyses.  But for people who are actually concerned to see the United States and other democracies to protect ourselves against the jihadist threat, these public statements are worth paying attention to.

Al Qaeda is evil and cruel and lots of other bad things.  But they aren't just random psychokillers who try to kill Americans because they "hate our freedoms".  They are the most notorious of the jidadist groups, and these are groups with religious and political goals.  And their words and actions are aimed at winning support among Muslim fundamentalists for their approach to Islam.

Joschka Fischer, the current German Foreign Minister (Green Party), in his book Die Rückkehr der Geschichte [The Return of History] (2005), puts the fight against jihadism above even nuclear arms control as the first priority challenge for the international system in this century.  He calls it "the new totalitarianism in the form of jihad-terrorism."  And he says:

Out of the Near and Middle East a rising totalitarian-revolutionary threat is growing, one that employs ruthless means of terror and also would not be afraid to use primitive weapons of mass destruction, if such were to come into the hands of these terrorist organizations.  A logic of the "balance of fear" [such as that between the US and the USSR during the Cold War] would not work against these groups, but instead only a successful fight against them can hinder such a development.