Ten Years After 9/11 - Rethinking the Jihadist Threat

Arabinda Acharya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138950443
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135079048
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Ten years after the 9/11 attacks this book reassesses the effectiveness of the "War on Terror", considers how al-Qaeda and other jihadist movements are faring, explores the impact of wider developments in the Islamic world such as the Arab Spring, and discusses whether all this suggests that a new approach to containing international, especially jihadist, terrorism is needed. Among the book's many richly argued conclusions are that the "War on Terror" and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have brutalised the United States; that the jihadist threat is not one, but rather a wide range of separate, unconnected struggles; and that al-Qaeda's ideology contains the seeds of its own destruction, in that although many Muslims are content to see the United States worsted, they do not approve of al-Qaeda's violence and are not taken in by the jihadists' empty promises of utopia.

1 9/11 and globalization of violence

First, the supreme, most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and the commander have to make is to establish the kind of war on which they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, not trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its true nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.

(Carl von Clausewitz)¹

The 9/11 attacks in the United States of America did not introduce terrorism to the world. But the attacks marked a change in the nature of terrorism and influenced our response to that. This has resulted in what we witness today, “globalization of violence.”

The concept is not new. Robert Koehane talked about globalization of violence in his essay “The Globalization of Informal Violence, Theories of World Politics, and the ‘Liberalism of Fear.”’² Koehane was particularly careful to use a general category of action (informal violence) in place of “terrorism” because of what he believed were the negative connotations of the latter. To Koehane, informal violence is violence committed by non-state actors and different from “formal violence” wielded by state institutions. According to him, informal violence became globalized after 9/11, the same way as formal violence was globalized during the 1950s.³ While Koehane argues that informal violence is being carried out by networks of non-state actors, it would appear that both the terrorist threat and some aspects of our response to the same also implicate similar—in terms of nature and scope—violence on a global scale.

Thus, globalization of violence is the outcome of two distinct yet interconnected phenomena—the “universality of terror” being perpetuated by al-Qaeda and its associated or affiliated groups and the “universality of the war on terror” conducted by the US, its allies, and individual nation states. This has arisen from the duality of a global brand of radical Islamist terrorism (going by the name of “global jihadist movement”, among others) and a highly controversial global counterterrorism campaign. The former is a kind of terrorism characterized by ruthless and extreme brutality that is the trademark of al-Qaeda and its sub groups' tactics and methods. On the other hand, the overtly militaristic policies of the US and its allies to fight terrorism, as manifested particularly in the invasion of Iraq, have demonstrated extreme uses of hard power with very counterproductive consequences.

Thus, in both instances, when terrorism is top-down or bottoms-up (as in the case of attacks by groups like al-Qaeda and its affiliates or associates or those by homegrown jihadists, respectively) and when a state institution or the state itself uses disproportionate force and undermines due-process and rule of law norms, it is becoming increasingly clear that violence is being considered to be the most preferred means for addressing societal, political, and economic problems and injustice, as well as security issues.⁴ Moreover, mass-media depictions of fear, patriotism, consumption, and victimization following 9/11 attacks and the responses to the same have contributed to the emergence of identity/identities (them vs. us) and collective action (war on terror) that transformed the meaning of terrorism from a tactic to a condition, a worldview. Terrorism became a perspective, an orientation, and a discourse for “our time,” the “way things are today,” and “how the world has changed.”⁵

Universality of terror

The jihadist brand of terrorism is not entirely new to the world. The changing nature of the terrorist threat was already in academic discourse which predated 9/11 and even Osama bin Laden's declaration of total war against the US and its allies in 1996. For example, in 1985, Brian Jenkins discerned the emergence of new groups and new causes leading to an escalation of terrorist activity both in terms of volume and bloodshed.⁶ In a similar vein, Rae Corelli identified a “mobile, well-trained, suicidal and savagely unpredictable” band of Middle Eastern “Islamic fundamentalists,” prepared to wage a war against the “perceived decadence and immorality of the West.”⁷

Nevertheless, terror being perpetrated by the entities that brand themselves under the broader jihadist movement has a number of distinct characteristics which are discussed below:

Strategy of aggregation

One of the ways that the jihadist movement could globalize terror is what David Kilcullen calls the strategy of “aggregation” in which dispersed local groups, issues, and motivations have been aggregated through regional and global networks into a united global fight (jihad).⁸ The spectrum of the jihad-ists' fight was clearly set by bin Laden in his September 1996 “Declaration of Jihad against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques.” Though America was identified as the main enemy, bin Laden's construction of the adversary nevertheless encompassed the “alliance of Jews, Christians and their agents,”⁹ and included some of the Muslim regimes seen to be corrupt or apostate. This was a logical step given the fact that the grievances that prompted bin Laden to declare the war were not just about the presence of the US military forces in Saudi Arabia (following the 1991 Gulf War) or Washington's support for Israel, but also about what he claimed were massacres in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and other places.¹⁰ The idea was to make the grievances broad enough to organize a resistance of massive proportions which could draw the support of the widest Muslim community, irrespective of locations and the context.

This narrative has been reiterated by a number of jihadists in disparate theaters. For example, justifying the October 2002 bombings in Bali in Indonesia, Imam Samudra, one of the masterminds of the attacks, stated that globalization has changed the character of the conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims, with America and Israel being the main protagonists.¹¹ He contended that this attack on Islam is not limited to specific areas or zones of conflict. Rather, Imam Samudra claimed that Islam is currently being attacked on a global scale. Therefore, Muslim responses to this hostility should be in kind, and not restricted to occupied territories such as Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, or Iraq. Imam Samudra suggested that this position is divinely supported, exhorting Muslims to “Slay those … wherever you may come upon them, and take them captives and besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every conceivable place.”¹²

The key here is just not the construction of the grievances, but to inspire other co-religionists, even those who are not directly touched by the perceived inequities or grievances. This was accomplished by harnessing the instruments of modern communication, exploiting religion, and even individual psychological susceptibility.¹³ As Kilcullen emphasized, it is this “series of nested interactions; the ability to aggregate dozens of conflicts into a broad move-ment”¹⁴ that forms the foundation of the global jihad movement. This aggregation strategy was evident in many fronts—the so-called “Oplan Bojinka” in the Philippines in the mid-1990s, the 1998 East African embassy bombings, the December 2000 Christmas Eve bombings in Indonesia, the 9/11 attacks in the US, the October 2002 Bali bombings, the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London public-transport bombings, and November 2008 Mumbai attacks, to name a few. As an article in the al-Qaeda military journal Al-Battar asserted:

In the beginning of their war against Islam [the Crusaders'] had announced that one of their main goals was to destroy the al-Qaeda organization in Afghanistan; and now, look what happened? Thanks to God, instead of being limited to Afghanistan, al-Qaeda broke out into the entire Islamic world and was able to establish an international expansion, in several countries, sending its brigades into every Islamic country, destroying the Blasphemers' fortresses, and purifying the Muslims' countries.¹⁵

Thus the jihadist movement is a series of dispersed local conflicts—a collection of separate but interrelated militant groups and support networks.¹⁶ The jihadists were able to co-opt conflicts of different economic, political, or ethnic origin and create an ever expanding support base that strengthened the hardcore movement both materially and politically.¹⁷ The transfer of the jihadist ideology and the Afghan combat experience to local militant organizations raised the level of sophistication and the capacity for violence of these groups. This was evident in the re-orientation and upgrading of local military training camps—in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Chechnya, to name a few.¹⁸

Overall, the jihadist discourse has transformed discontents in the Muslim world into what Bernard Lewis calls a muscular religious offensive—a radical cult of violence and an unlimited war.¹⁹ This discourse has also become immensely appealing as it negates the existing order in quest of a more just society.²⁰ It purports to explain the loss of values and cultural disorientation facing Muslim societies confronting the challenges of globalization and modernization.²¹ The appeal is almost universal, which creates and sustains the psychic tensions that demand release “through a spasm of violence.”²²

Al-Qaeda is credited with this “grafting of entirely modern sensibilities and techniques to the most radical interpretation of holy war.”²³ This provides an ideal strategic platform for al-Qaeda to brand itself and claim the leadership of the global jihadist movement. However, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, al-Qaeda's vanguard role in the movement is not without challenges. Moreover, as Brian Jenkins notes, the strategy may not necessarily be one of active aggregation. Rather, al-Qaeda could just be playing the role of a collaborator between like-minded groups; inspiring rather than directly facilitating an attack.²⁴ In fact, as discussed in Chapter 2, due to breakdown of hierarchical structures, it is no longer possible for centralized recruitment, training, funding, and even planning and executing attacks, which are left to the initiative of local cells with al-Qaeda merely providing the ideological base (as its name suggests) to justify such attacks.

This position however is valid when one assesses al-Qaeda as a group rather than as a movement. The jihadists' aggregation strategy has a much wider canvass; it encompasses individual or group affiliations. This is based on a carefully crafted ideology as a surrogate for formal structures.²⁵ As discussed in Chapter 3, the ideology is the key, central to the aggregation strategy, which brings the community together, mobilizes members of the community to fight against perceived injustices, and keeps them together.

The outcome of this aggregation strategy is the “transformation of terrorism from a sub-national instrument of political change to one whose methods almost invariably and inescapably transcend national boundaries.”²⁶ As Paul Pillar observes, “terrorism's reach is now worldwide” and “terrorists have extended their reach by building globe-circling infrastructures.”²⁷ This has been made a lot easier with revolution in information and knowledge technology which has made terrorism—both its massage and the methods—easily accessible. The jihadists exploit the full spectrum of modern technology and the new media, which has given them the ability to communicate and plan attacks from different geographic locations. Thus, terrorism has escalated from a largely domestic security problem to a serious threat to the entire international community.²⁸

Use of exemplary violence

Though the use of terror as a means to achieve some objective is not new, i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge security in Asia Pacific series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 9/11 and globalization of violence
• 2 Construction of the adversary
• 3 Strategy of the global jihadist movement
• 4 Tactics of the jihadist movement
• 5 Fighting the jihadist threat
• 6 Ten years after: Bringing the conflict to an end
• Conclusion: Stealing the jihadists' playbook; exploiting the fissures within the jihadist movement
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index