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The Many Faces of Al Qaeda

By Peter Zeihan

With all the talk about al Qaeda "leaders," al Qaeda "factions" and militants with "links" to al Qaeda, it is useful to take a step back and clarify precisely what al Qaeda actually is. Al Qaeda is a small core group of people who share strategic and operational characteristics that set them apart from all other militants -- Islamist or otherwise -- the world over. All signs indicate this group is no longer functional and cannot be replicated. Whether or not Osama bin Laden is still alive, al Qaeda as it once was is dead.

Strategically, these men envisioned a world in which the caliphate would rise anew as a consequence of events they would set into motion. The chief obstacle to this goal was not the United States but the panoply of secular, corrupt governments of the Middle East. Al Qaeda knew its limited numbers precluded it from defeating these governments, so it sought to provoke the Muslim masses into overthrowing them. Al Qaeda also knew it lacked the strength to do this provoking by itself so it sought to trick someone more powerful into doing it.

By al Qaeda's logic, an attack of sufficient force against the Americans would lure the United States to slam sideways into the Middle East on a mission of revenge, leading to direct and deep U.S. collaboration with those same secular, corrupt local governments. Al Qaeda's hope was that such collaboration with the Americans would lead to outrage -- and outrage would lead to revolution. Note that the 9/11 attacks were not al Qaeda's first attempt to light this flame. The 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings and the 2000 USS Cole bombing were also the work of this same al Qaeda cell, but the attacks lacked the strength to trigger what al Qaeda thought of as a sufficient U.S. response.

The Real Difference

But al Qaeda is hardly the first militant group to think big. What really set al Qaeda apart was its second characteristic -- its ability to evade detection. That ability was part and parcel of the way in which al Qaeda formed. Al Qaeda's roots are not merely within the various militant groups of the Arab Middle East but deep within the geopolitical struggles of the Cold War. Many of the mujahideen who relocated to Afghanistan to resist the Soviet invasion found themselves recruited and funded by Saudi intelligence, equipped and tasked by U.S. intelligence and managed and organized by Pakistani intelligence.

This exposure not only leveraged the Afghan resistance's paramilitary capabilities but also gave the mujahideen a deep appreciation for, and understanding of, the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. and Soviet intelligence systems. When the Cold War ended, some of those mujahideen reconstituted their efforts into what came to be known as al Qaeda, and those deep understandings became part of the organization's bedrock.

Such knowledge enables al Qaeda to operate beneath the radar of nearly all intelligence agencies. It knows how those agencies collect and analyze intelligence, where the blind spots are and, most important, how long it takes for an agency to turn raw information into actionable intelligence.

This characteristic is al Qaeda's greatest asset. Al Qaeda's standards of operation assume that intelligence agencies are always waiting and watching, and only al Qaeda's understanding of those operations keeps the "base" from being busted. Operational security -- not operational success -- is al Qaeda's paramount concern; its attacks are meticulously planned, fantastic in scope and sacrificed in a heartbeat if the leadership suspects a breach in security. This makes al Qaeda nearly impossible to track.

It also means that al Qaeda, by necessity, is a very small, close-knit group. The organization's core -- or the apex leadership, as we often call it -- consists of little more than Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and a double handful of trusted, heavily vetted relationships stretching back more than a decade. Disposable operatives with minimal training can be picked up for specific missions, but these people cannot do anything very complex (such as infiltrate a foreign country and hijack a civilian airliner).

Replacement of lost assets within this small group is negligible due to security concerns. Ultimately, the same security protocols that empowered al Qaeda to be a player of strategic scope are what removed al Qaeda from the chessboard.

Once the CIA and its affiliated allies named al Qaeda public enemy No. 1, al Qaeda's security instincts became its greatest liability. The rapid U.S. invasion of Afghanistan caught al Qaeda off guard -- the group had assumed it would have months of U.S. pre-mission staging before the invasion, a lesson it learned from watching the first Gulf War. The quick U.S. response meant al Qaeda was forced to go into hiding before it had fully secured redundant communication, funding and travel routes. Intelligence agency efforts to penetrate al Qaeda forced the group to constrict information flow, limit financial transfers, reduce recruiting and abandon operations. Once the United States succeeded in co-opting Saudi assistance against al Qaeda in 2003 -- something brought about both by a U.S. presence in Iraq and al Qaeda's own efforts to destabilize its ideological homeland -- al Qaeda's star stopped falling and started plummeting.

Al Qaeda has not only failed in its attempts to trigger region-wide uprisings against the Middle East's secular governments, it has also lost the ability to launch strategically meaningful attacks -- that is, attacks resulting in policy shifts by its targets. Al Qaeda can operate to a certain degree in regions where it has allies, many of whom flowed through its training camps in the 1990s, but the ability of the group that planned the 9/11 attacks to operate beyond the Middle East and South Asia seems to have disappeared. Attrition after years of confrontation with the Americans, coupled with self-imposed isolation, has rendered al Qaeda useless as a strategic actor. Not only is its ability to provide command and control nonexistent, but its self-enforced invisibility and inactivity have undermined its credibility.

Furthermore, al Qaeda has left no one truly capable of taking up its mantle. The training camps in the 1990s processed hundreds of would-be jihadists, but the quality of that training for the rank and file has been exaggerated. Most of it was a combination of poor conventional combat training and ideological indoctrination. Hence, most "veterans" of those camps have neither access to the core al Qaeda leadership nor the operational security or tactical training that would allow them to reconstitute a new elite core. They are no more members of the real "al Qaeda" than today's skinheads are members of the real Nazi party.

By the only criterion that matters -- successful attacks -- al Qaeda has slipped from readjusting global priorities (9/11) to contributing to the change in government of a middling U.S. ally (the March 2003 Spain attacks) to affecting nothing (the 2005 London bombings). No attacks since can be meaningfully linked to al Qaeda's control, or even its specific foreknown blessing. Al Qaeda had hoped for a conflagration of outrage that would sweep away the Middle East's political order; it only managed to raise a few sparks here and there, and now it is a prisoner of its own security.

Yet, public discussion of all things "al Qaeda," far from fading, has reached a fever pitch. But this talk -- all of it -- is about a fundamentally different beast.

Enter Al Qaeda the Franchise

It all started with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who put himself forward as the leader of the Iraqi node of al Qaeda in 2004. While one can argue that al-Zarqawi might have been through an al Qaeda training camp or shared many of bin Laden's ideological goals, no one seriously asserts he had the training, vetting or face time with bin Laden to qualify as an inner member of the al Qaeda leadership. He was a local leader of a local militant group who claimed an association with al Qaeda as a matter of establishing local gravitas and international credibility. Other groups, such as Southeast Asia's Jemaah Islamiyah, had associations with al Qaeda long before al-Zarqawi, but al-Zarqawi was the first to claim the name "al Qaeda" as his own.

For al Qaeda, prevented by its security concerns from engaging in its own attacks, repudiating al-Zarqawi would make the "base" come across as both impotent and out of touch. Accepting "association" with al-Zarqawi was the obvious choice, and bin Laden went so far as to issue an audio communique anointing al-Zarqawi as al Qaeda's point man in Iraq.