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What if There's No Such Thing as "al-Qaeda"?

The world's most infamous terror group: global conspiracy, or just good friends?

Ten days ago you couldn't dip your toe in the world press without encountering fervid proclamations that the terrorist bombings in Riyadh and Casablanca were a) certainly connected and b) proof positive that a new wave of al-Qaeda bombings was imminent. 

So far, though, no more bombs. Why? Off the top I can see three or four possibilities:

1) There was in fact no significant connection between the attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, the latter having been undertaken by a local outfit that may or may not have been acting in concert with larger al-Qaeda goals. Remember one thing: None of the evidence popularly cited so far amounts to a definitive case that there is a new al-Qaeda-sponsored offensive in the offing. We're only supposing.

2) There was a connection between the Riyadh and Casablanca bombings, and the promised al-Qaeda offensive simply has yet to unfold.

3) The SA and Morocco bombings were intended as the kickoff of a new wave of attacks, but intervening events have disrupted the plan. According to one theory, al-Qaeda is regrouping now because of blowback in the Arab world after the Riyadh and Casablanca attacks. According to this line of thought, they may be shifting course from destabilizing US allies in the Middle East (a tricky business in itself) toward the safer and less complicated course of attacking the US directly. Conversely, the situation in Iran may be dictating al-Qaeda policy. It's possible, if unlikely, that the Iranian government really does control the movements of several key al-Qaeda operatives and has put the clamps on them since the US kicked up a fuss. (I emphasize that this is unlikely--according to a Washington Post dispatch quoted here a few days ago, it's probable that the Iranian government has no means of tracking, much less controlling, the handful of operatives in the north of Iran.)

There's another possibility lurking beneath all these, which is that US intelligence services have ever had only the vaguest sense of what al-Qaeda is and what they are or aren't up to.

Rightly or wrongly, my notion about al-Qaeda from the start has been that the American media and (so far as we can say from public signs) American intelligence has completely and willfully misunderstood the nature of the so-called network. They have approached it as though it's a single entity with a command/control structure analogous to the sort we're most familiar with--the top-down hierarchy of US corporations and the American military.

It always struck me as more ad hoc and opportunistic than that. I've always suspected that what we call "al-Qaeda" is really just the most prominent node in an emerging, loosely confederated network of insurgent anti-imperialist/anti-US cells the world over. If you want a more American frame of reference, say that they are one venture capital firm in a growing industry, rather than a company. This is certainly the tenor of what we've been hearing about the "new" al-Qaeda in recent weeks (see Asia Times, 5/17 and 5/20, a pair of accounts by Syed Saleem Shahzad that describe the radical decentralization of what had been known as al-Qaeda). 

I bring this up now because of a very interesting and little-noted interview with Syrian President Bashar Assad that appeared the other day at the GOPUSA site. Assad had this to say on the subject of al-Qaeda:

"Is there really an entity called al Qaeda? It was in Afghanistan, but is it there anymore?" Assad asked....

"We blame everything on al Qaeda but what happened is more dangerous than bin Laden or al Qaeda. We're talking about a certain ideological bloc. The issue is ideology, it's not an issue of organizations," Assad said regarding the recent terror attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco.

"Such an ideology cannot live without a certain social base. It has to convince people and strengthen its presence. Dealing with this issue should be through a social approach not through security," he added.

Read the rest.

First, let's be clear what he is not saying. Assad obviously does not mean that there is no such thing as an element that calls itself al-Qaeda; he doubts whether it exists in the sense ceaselessly touted by the West, as the head of the octopus. And I suspect he's entirely right.

This is not to say that there is no such thing as communication and planning between disparate groups. Rather, it suggests that their ranks are more varied and spotaneous, and their connections more fleeting and provisional, than the Bush administration has painted them to be. One corollary is that they are much harder to track than the US lets on; another is that even if you succeed in tracking down particular individuals, you will usually accomplish little by taking one factor out of the equation. Hunting the US's many enemies through intelligence ops is a little like trying to track particular drops of water through a roiling pool.

Related press clips

NYT: US presses Iran to hand over al-Qaeda suspects.

BBC: Iran rejects US pressure.

Newsweek (Isikoff et al.) on al-Qaeda's summer plans.

Posted by Steve Perry at May 28, 2003 9:13 AM

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