The 9/11 Wars (81 page)

Nearly a decade later, as the successive scares of 2010 revealed, the situation had clearly evolved drastically. In interviews, serving intelligence officers spoke of a ‘fragmented, chaotic’ picture that was ‘immensely difficult’ to track. The threat was ‘broader’ than it had ever been. Quite what the role of Osama bin Laden actually might be remained unclear. With every year that had passed since the 9/11 Wars had begun, the situation had become more complex, even as the threat of catastrophic violence itself had stabilized. By the end of the decade, the old analysis of al-Qaeda comprising a hardcore leadership, a network of affiliates and an ideology evidently needed revision.

THE HARDCORE, THE NETWORK OF NETWORKS, THE IDEOLOGY IN 2010 AND 2011

In 2010 and into early 2011 the al-Qaeda senior leadership continued to face a number of challenges. The most immediate was the continuing threat to their own personal security. The drone strikes in the FATA were more numerous than ever, and if bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had so far escaped the missiles falling on the tribal areas, many others did not. More than fifty strikes had been ordered by Obama in the first year of his administration, more than had ever been ordered by Bush, and 118 took place in 2010. One high-profile loss in May 2010 had been Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the senior al-Qaeda militant who had played a key liaison role with local groups and the Afghan Taliban. He was just one of several senior figures and scores of middle-ranking fighters killed by the drones, however.
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Given that most intelligence suggested that the number of Arabs comprising the main body of al-Qaeda in the FATA did not number more than 300, of whom three-quarters fulfilled relatively minor roles or were ‘footsoldiers’, these casualties were heavy.
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The strikes also had an evident impact on the capabilities of the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’. Interrogated militants said that the senior leadership had ordered that no groups of more than ten people remain together for more than ten minutes. Intercepted conversations between militants spoke of the difficulties of planning and meeting. It was obvious too that the systems which had once allowed fresh videos to be uploaded simultaneously on to dozens of servers remained significantly degraded.
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By late 2010, communications were taking lengthy and circuitous routes to reach mainstream media organizations, and instead of well-produced videos, al-Qaeda was forced to return to using audiotapes.
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Beyond the operational environment, the broader strategic problems that had been gathering for the al-Qaeda leadership since the middle years of the decade were becoming acute. Jihadi internet forums often featured comments recognizing that no major attack had successfully been executed by al-Qaeda in the West for many years. The deaths of two senior Iraqi al-Qaeda leaders in a joint operation of American and Iraqi forces near Tikrit in April 2010 provoked an extraordinary outburst of criticism directed at the senior leadership. ‘Al-Qaeda’s media wing is lying and spreading false information. Everyone is tired of al-Qaeda’s stupidity,’ argued one user of a known jihadist forum.
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In the ultra-competitive world of militancy, the risk for bin Laden and al-Zawahiri of being consigned to the role of pioneers whose best work was now behind them grew with every month that passed without a major attack for which they could convincingly claim the credit. In
The Vision
, a long treatise by an apparently experienced and senior militant that was published on the internet in 2010, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri’s approach was damned with faint praise as ‘useful at a particular time’.
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The threat to their influence from younger, more credible figures such as the English-speaking al-Awlaki, the cleric who had inspired Choudhry and others, continued to grow. Al-Awlaki had a Facebook page with 4,800 ‘friends’. Bin Laden, once so quick to master the potential of new communications technology and forms of networking, did not. The contributions of charismatic figures who had recently been inducted into the al-Qaeda senior leadership’s ranks such as the Bagram escapee Abu Yahya al-Libi could only go so far in maintaining al-Qaeda’s appeal among a generation for whom the 9/11 attacks were ancient history. Superficial gestures like al-Zawahiri appearing in videos without his thick glasses did not help much either. Then there was the ongoing revisionist challenge from within the movement. Some of the criticism was mild. Some was fièrce. One frequent theme was the mounting proportion of Muslims to Westerners killed in militant violence, an inevitable result of the increasingly indiscriminate nature of attacks.
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This was one reason, of course, for the continuing failure to gain real traction over significant masses of the population. The number of volunteers making their way to the FATA indicated that al-Qaeda still had the power to attract sufficient individuals to sustain its existence for the foreseeable future – the primary task of any clandestine militant outfit – but there was no indication through 2010 that the decline in support amid populations more generally in the Islamic world or in the West was going to be reversed. Attempts to make the al-Qaeda message more ‘locally specific’ appeared to have little effect.
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Nor did a sudden interest in new issues such as climate change. ‘The number of victims caused by climate change is very big … bigger than the victims of wars,’ bin Laden said in a video in October 2010. The al-Qaeda leader even proposed the creation of a new aid organization to help Muslims, an astonishing turnaround for the leader of a group founded with the explicit aim of forgoing social activism in favour of direct action. ‘The famine and drought in Africa that we see and the flooding in Pakistan and other parts of the world, with thousands dead along with millions of refugees, that’s why people with hearts should move quickly to save their brothers and sisters,’ bin Laden told his audience. But the sudden interest in global warming and humanitarianism merely reinforced the impression of an individual whose prime had passed trying, with almost painful artifice, to keep up with the times.
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Beyond the hardcore was what the early analysis of al-Qaeda had identified as the ‘network of networks’, or ‘affiliates’. This too had changed hugely over the course of the 9/11 Wars. By 2010, many of those groups once drawn into the mesh of alliances, fealty and shared obligations woven by bin Laden through the 1990s had simply ceased to exist, such as the smaller Kurdistan-based militant factions or the Singapore-based groups which had solicited logistic support from al-Qaeda back in 2000 and 2001. Others had abandoned the fight, such as the Indonesian Jemaa Islamiya. Never more than very tangentially linked to al-Qaeda, the leaders of the latter had decided by the end of the decade, in another example of how local considerations often trump global solidarity, that they should abandon the jihad ‘at home’. This, they said, was because conditions in Indonesia no longer justified armed struggle, though they still considered the jihad ‘abroad’ potentially legitimate.
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When the veteran Indonesian militant leader Noordin Top was killed in September 2009, his ‘al-Qoida of the Malayan Peninsula’, named in homage to his hero, Ayman al-Zawahiri, died too.
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There was no sign that the rapid decline of Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia and Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM), discussed in
Chapter 15
, had even slowed, let alone been reversed.

Nor were those groups which had joined the network, at least nominally, much help in restoring al-Qaeda’s fortunes. One was al-Shabab, a radical splinter from the Islamic Courts Union movement which had been able to briefly seize power in Somalia before being ejected from Mogadishu by Ethiopian troops in an American-backed offensive in 2006. A senior figure within al-Shabab, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, had suddenly pledged allegiance to bin Laden in September 2008 in a video released to the internet. As had been the case for the Algerians two years previously, the appeal to the al-Qaeda leadership was prompted by a loss of local popularity and legitimacy largely due to al-Shabab’s harshness and incompetence.
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However, again in a parallel with developments elsewhere, the enrolment of al-Shabab as supposed affiliates brought little real benefits for the al-Qaeda hardcore. When, in July 2010, al-Shabab blew up restaurants in Kampala, Uganda, and thus executed their first international attack, they did so following a purely regional strategic logic of threatening a local state on the point of reinforcing its contingent of peacekeepers in Somalia. The attack was not on the orders of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership and did not fit particularly with any broader strategic agenda. Indeed, it was criticized as counterproductive by a variety of senior core al-Qaeda figures both publicly on internet forums and privately in communications intercepted by American and other security agencies.
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By late 2010, the least one could say was that the ‘network of networks’ was battered and disjointed. In many ways, it had simply ceased to exist.

There was one area, however, where al-Qaeda had achieved undeniable success. What cases like that of Faisal Shahzad and Roshonara Choudhry showed was that bin Laden and his associates had been able to attain at least one of their major strategic aims: to disseminate the al-Qaeda worldview – the ideology, the third element of the post-2001 analysis – to a huge new audience, even if their own role within global Islamic militancy was now diminished. That worldview, increasingly relayed by stand-alone, independent poles of militant activity such as those constituted by al-Qaeda in the Yemen, by the Pakistani Taliban and increasingly by groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba, was more widespread than ever before. Shahzad told a court that he was a ‘
mujahid
’ acting to defend Muslims against aggression in which all the people in Times Square that night, even children, were complicit. ‘I am part of the answer to the US terrorising the Muslim nations,’ he said. ‘We Muslims are one community. We’re not divided.’
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Roshonara Choudhry had confessed immediately after her arrest, telling police she had stabbed the MP because ‘as Muslims we’re all brothers and sisters and we should all look out for each other and we shouldn’t sit back and do nothing while others suffer. We shouldn’t allow the people who oppress us to get away with it and to think that they can do whatever they want to us and we’re just gonna lie down and take it.’ Choudhry barely spoke at her trial, but after the sentence was passed, a group of men in the public gallery began shouting ‘Allahu akbar’, ‘British go to hell’, and ‘Curse the judge’.
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This phenomenon was particularly clear in the USA. As ever, the number of people actively involved in violent activism was minuscule in comparison with the general population but were nonetheless higher than it had been since 2001.
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Analysts spoke of signs that American Muslims, long considered immune to the radicalizing effects of the ongoing conflict and extreme ideologies due to their economic and social success in America and their high levels of education and wealthier origins, were finally following European Muslim communities towards a higher relative level of activism, radicalization and alienation. ‘Jihadism’ attracted a range of odd misfits too, drawn to militancy as to a cult. There were question marks over many of the investigations – not least because the FBI made liberal use of sting operations involving agents provocateurs – but nonetheless it was clear that many of those involved had indeed followed a similar route into radicalism to that of European, especially British, militants. The case of Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, was a classic example of self-radicalization by a deeply troubled individual who found in radical Islam the legitimization and encouragement for acts that he may well have already been contemplating. There were many others. One was the case of Nidal Hasan, an American army major at the military base of Fort Hood in Texas, who shot thirteen of his colleagues in November 2009. Michael Leiter, director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, described plots disrupted in New York, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alaska, Texas and Illinois during 2010 as ‘unrelated operationally but … indicative of a collective subculture and a common cause that rallies independent extremists to want to attack the Homeland’.
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A journey to the country of their or their parents’ birth was often a key element in the radicalization process of young Americans. By 2010, at least twenty Somali Americans were active in the ranks of al-Shabab, and one, Omar Hammami, had become a local field commander and jihadi internet celebrity.
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Most recruits showed the same low level of religious knowledge as their European counterparts too. Generational tensions within families also played a role for some.

Above all, it was the widely disseminated extremist worldview popularized by bin Laden but taken forward by al-Awlaki and others that was important. In the summer of 2010, al-Awlaki and al-Qaeda in the Yemen had launched an English-language internet magazine called
Inspire
. This had global penetration. From the Arabian peninsula to the USA to the UK, the range of the extremists’ propaganda machine remained impressive, even if the hardcore leadership of the network had met with serious reverses. Mentioned by US officials as a serious threat, downloaded copies of
Inspire
were found by police in the UK conducting searches after the arrests of twelve young Britons of Bangladeshi origin suspected of planning a series of bomb attacks in Britain over Christmas 2010. One article was entitled ‘How to make a pipe bomb in the kitchen of your mom’; others included ‘What to expect in jihad’ and ‘Tips for our brothers in the US’.
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The youngest of those arrested for the ‘Christmas terror plot’ was nineteen and thus only ten years old at the time of the 9/11 attacks. The youth of such suspects reinforced the sense that, though the hardcore and the network of networks were in some difficulty, the ‘al-Qaeda-ist’ ideology had created a movement with its own distinctive principles, modes of action and momentum. Beyond the major clusters of the well-known organizations, that movement was composed of individuals or small groups. These latter were too small to have a name, often well below the radar of security services, sometimes patched together by mutual association and often simply autonomous. At its most dispersed, but most widespread, level, this movement was little more than a way of thinking, a way of understanding the world, an identity with its own dress codes, ideas, values, rituals and prescribed behaviour, its own self-sustaining culture. Transmitted through peers, through the media, at schools, colleges, at sports clubs or prayer groups alike, from parents to children, from brothers to sisters, through internet magazines and carefully crafted videos, this movement was resilient and deeply rooted. This was not the ‘global Intifada’ that al-Suri had hoped for. Nor was it the mass mobilization that al-Qaeda leaders had set out to achieve – even if it assured them sufficient recruits to survive as a clandestine organization for the foreseeable future. But it was something that had not existed a decade before. It was one of the real – and worst – legacies of the 9/11 Wars.