Al Qaeda rose and fell between 1989 and 2011. Ten years after it
conducted its most lethal operation in New York and Washington on 11
September 2001, it had mutated into a movement that no longer resembled
what it started as. From a hierarchical and centralised group, led by
the bicephalous leadership of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al Dhawahiri, it
had become a regionalised and decentralised organisation with several
competing leaders following the death of Bin Laden in May 2011.
The
impact of Al Qaeda on global politics is then a long standing affair.
Its inception reaches back decades to the contemporary emergence and
transformation of a non-state armed group which has sought to create
unprecedented regional and international dynamics anchored in a
privatised usage of force for a political purpose. Beyond solely
triggering domestic or foreign crises, this organisation has aimed, in
particular, to adapt, achieve and prosper open-endedly as it pursued
such novel strategy. It is in that sense that the metamorphosis of Al
Qaeda was planned for all along. From the very beginning, this was an
inevitable way for the group to ensure its perennation and set it apart
from previous and subsequent Islamist factions.
Whereas
traditional Islamist groups began establishing themselves through a
combination of religious preaching, political discourse and, most
importantly, networks of domestic social services, Al Qaeda’s first
embodiment was to serve as a welfare service provider originating in the
rentier state Arabian Gulf but one whose action was fundamentally
oriented outwardly and militarily with the Jihad against the Soviet
Union in the 1980s. The ascendancy of this rationale meant not the
premorse of a frustrated local ambition but, rather, that domestic
opposition to the “near enemy” should be separated strategically from
the “far enemy”.
In such a general context of failed Arab and
Islamic state-building, Al Qaeda sprang forth as a politico-religious
project built upon (i) the relocation of authority, (ii) the
circumventing of the state, and (iii) the militaristic empowerment of a
non-state actor.
However, the early “successes” of Al Qaeda masked
a self-inflicted structural defeat. If initially the rapid
proliferation of the five regional representations of Al Qaeda were
arguably an added indication of the organisation’s impressive global
reach (in Europe, the Nile Valley, the Levant, the Maghreb and the Gulf)
and its ability to operate transnationally years after a War on Terror
had been launched against it, it gradually emerged that the regional
entities differed significantly and their relationship to the mother Al
Qaeda was, at best, tenuous.
Whereas in its first fifteen years Al
Qaeda had been able to advance globally, cumulatively, and against
important odds – for each tactical loss, Al Qaeda came to earn a
strategic gain: retreat in Afghanistan but advance in Iraq; confined
leadership but proliferating cells; curtailed physical movement but
global, transnational impact; additional enemies but expanding recruits –
in the period 2006-2011, its leadership had morphed into a
meta-commandment ultimately offering only politico-religious and
militaro-strategic commentary, not operational direction.
All in
all, what can be read as a regionalisation strategy of Al Qaeda ended up
confusing the global picture of the organisation. The necessary
elasticity the group adopted, partly voluntarily, partly as a way to
adapt to the international counter-terrorism campaign, created an
ever-growing distance with already independent units.
Osama Bin
Laden’s disappearance from Al Qaeda and the War on Terror scene marks
therefore the end of the era of the original group set up in
Afghanistan. It opens a new phase in which the regional franchises will
enact further their existing independence and in so doing endow the
conflict with a new configuration by stretching the centre of gravity of
transnational terrorism.
By Dr Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou
Source:
http://www.gcsp.ch/Regional-Capacity-Development/Publications/GCSP-Publications/Geneva-Papers/Research-Series/The-Rise-and-Fall-of-Al-Qaeda-Lessons-in-Post-September-11-Transnational-Terrorism
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