Society for Internet Research::SoFIR

23 August 2005

Between ideology and strategy

By Reuven Paz

Suicide or martyrdom operations, most recently in Europe but most intensively in Israel and in growing numbers in Iraq, leave the western world astonished. The terrorist attacks in London and Sharm al-Sheikh in July 2005, like other attacks by al-Qaeda or affiliated Jihadi groups worldwide, raise the unsolved question, "what does al-Qaeda really want?" What is its ultimate goal, besides the apocalyptic views and wishful thinking of its younger supporters, who seek to see Islamic rule and law spread throughout the world, or at least across the huge Arab and Muslim world? And what is the real effect, weight, and role of the war in Iraq? To answer these questions it is necessary to distinguish clearly between the ideology and the strategy of al-Qaeda or Global Jihad.

In August 1998, al-Qaeda carried out its first major double attack against two US embassies in East Africa. Seven years later the hard core of its leadership is still at large; there is a new generation of younger operatives who are not "Arab Afghans;" Iraq and Afghanistan, occupied by the United States and its allies, are suffering an intensive Jihadi insurgency of 2-3 suicide operations per day; and large cities around the globe are exposed to indiscriminate terrorist attacks against civilians, including Muslims as well as "infidel crusaders".

Three observations are in order. First, western intelligence communities have been unable to map the decision-making process within al-Qaeda or between the organization and its affiliated groups. Some of these groups are active only in the field of terrorism and are composed of well-educated, politically aware, middle class yet angry Muslim youngsters. They might be ad-hoc groupings with no other field of activity, and hence, very difficult to locate or keep under surveillance.

Second, the West in general has difficulty differing between al-Qaeda's ideology and its strategy. Therefore it is puzzled regarding the necessary means to counter this unfamiliar and unprecedented phenomenon. Past terrorism was different. Even Marxist-anarchist terrorism, which also had a global nature, was in fact based upon local groups with only a vague common ideology and strategy. Nationalist terrorism, even in ethnic-religious conflicts, was local. The PLO, IRA, ETA, or PKK were separate groups. Even the Palestinian Islamic Hamas or the Lebanese Hizballah are local movements with limited aims. Other Islamic movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb al-Tahrir (Islamic Liberation Party), or Dawah wa-Tabligh, which have a global nature and aspirations too, prefer to remain non-violent and focus on local issues, even though they project an Islamist aura of globalization.

Third, the ability of al-Qaeda to recruit, influence, incite, and appeal to many Muslim youngsters, primarily in the Arab world, is impressive. It has succeeded in creating apocalyptic visions that turn the imagination of several millions of Muslim youngsters and are supported and legitimized by a new class of Muslim clerics, scholars, and even intellectuals. The response by the vast majority of Arab and Muslim governments, publics, and Islamic establishments, which is crucial, is slow, uncoordinated, and in most cases hesitant.

In April 1988, Dr. Abdallah Azzam, the spiritual father of al-Qaeda, wrote an article entitled "The solid base," which sketched the lines of what would later become al-Qaeda. Azzam described a movement with two significant doctrines: a long period of education or indoctrination--Tarbiyyah; and redefining Jihad from a means to fulfill a religious-political target into the target itself. Azzam was an Islamic ideologue, yet the organizational phase of al-Qaeda and affiliated groups of Global Jihad has been in the hands of leaders with a much more operational than ideological mind--Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, Muhammad Atef, and nowadays Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Moreover, the second generation of al-Qaeda members, supporters, and sympathizers is emerging in Islamist battlegrounds other than Afghanistan and Bosnia--Iraq, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the entire globe. The modus operandi of al-Qaeda--to move the battle to enemy soil, martyrdom operations, and killing of Muslims, all legitimized by clerics--is led by the operatives and affects the imagination of Muslim youth worldwide, thereby giving priority to new strategies over the basic ideology. Even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no longer a crucial issue and has become less important in the priorities of Global Jihad. Ayman Zawahiri has written several times that he has adopted the traditional position of Egyptian Jihad that "the road to the liberation of Jerusalem moves through the liberation of Cairo and Damascus."

The present strategy of al-Qaeda and its global Jihad is mostly the result of processes and developments in the core of the Arab world: oppression by Arab governments, the war in Iraq and the American occupation there, the inability to infiltrate into the Palestinian territories because of traditional opposition by Hamas with its very different agenda, the weakness of the Saudi regime, and rising support in Saudi Arabian society as well as in other parts of the Arab world for the insurgency in Iraq. The relative operational freedom of activity in Europe has also contributed to this development.

The basic ideology remains the same: the liberation of the entire Muslim world from western/Zionist/crusader colonialism, both in its physical presence in the Muslim world and its cultural influence, in order to create a Muslim state or states that are totally ruled by the Islamic Shari'ah and are liberated from man-made laws. All this, by way of a long Jihad led by well-indoctrinated avant-garde groups, more eager to reach the world to come than to live in this "worthless" one.

By contrast, the strategy changes in accordance with developments in the field, primarily Iraq and the Arab world. Iraq has become one of the most important elements in al-Qaeda strategy, a kind of jewel in the Jihadi crown. Iraq and the insurgency there are also a model of Global Jihad's ability to mutate itself, as independent groups of Moroccan immigrants in Spain, Pakistanis in the United Kingdom, Jamaican converts to Islam, Somalian immigrants to Europe, etc., prove willing to sacrifice themselves for the global strategy of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Iraq is not an ideological target, yet it is the most important catalyst for directing the rage of Arab or Muslim youngsters toward terrorism.

Jihadi-Salafi ideologues of the first generation of Global Jihad might not approve of it, but control is in the hands of the strategists, who by their indoctrination and incitement have become the heroes of these angry and humiliated groups. The latter are a generation of Muslims whose knowledge of Islam is usually poor, but their apocalyptic notions lead them to blindly follow the strategists, believing that this is true religion and faith.

Dr. Ajai Sahni, an Indian scholar, wrote in March 2004 that

The Islamist terrorist agenda is more inflexible than most of us imagine, and its ends are defined, not in terms of the transient political parameters of the discourse of international relations, but by a perspective rooted in religious absolutisms that will endure long after the reverberations of the crises of transition in Afghanistan or in Iraq have come to an end.

Meanwhile the crises in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq are far from ending, and could be prolonged. The operatives do not possess the same endurance as the ideologues, but their strategy currently dominates the ideology.

Published 18/8/2005 at bitterlemons-international.org

Reuven Paz is founder and director of the Project for the Research of Islamist Movements (PRISM) in the GLORIA Center, Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center.