Al-Qaida and the Arab Spring: After Bin Laden
6 May 2011
By Paul Rogers for openDemocracy
This national wound was revealed by President Obama’s differential arguments over Iraq and Afghanistan: the former was a bad war (of choice) which now demanded the withdrawal of US forces, whereas the latter was a good war (of necessity) because it connected directly with external page9/11call_made through the continuing presence of al-Qaida.
Osama bin Laden’s active leadership al-Qaida had long receded, though he remained anexternal pageiconiccall_made figure during a decade of the movement’s external pagedispersalcall_made. There is now too little residual connection between the Taliban and al-Qaida. The Obama administration’s signals of willingness to negotiate a progressive withdrawal from Afghanistan too, even if it external pageinvolvescall_made talking to the Taliban, may reflect its understanding of this reality.
The administration's problem in pursuing this strategy has been that the Republican right - sharing and (via the media) amplifying the view of many Americans that the Taliban and al-Qaida are interchangeable - would depict any lessening of military external pagecommitmentcall_made in Afghanistan as a sign of presidential weakness. Bin Laden’s death, in removing al-Qaida’s external pagefigureheadcall_madeand breaking the Afghanistan-9/11 connection, partially resolves that problem: Obama now has an opportunity to speed up the withdrawal before the presidential-election campaign for 2012 gets underway (see " external pageAfghanistan: between war and politicscall_made", 28 April 2011).
The predicament
This domestic American dimension throws light on the viability of al-Qaida after the death of a external pageleadercall_made whom the course of the campaign had made peripheral. It is worth at this point recalling the key external pageaimscall_made of the al-Qaida movement:
- to evict “crusader” forces from Islamic lands
- to terminate the House of Saud and replace with “true” Islamist rule
- to end and replace other unacceptable regimes, especially in Egypt
- to oppose and eliminate the “Zionist entity”
- to support local Islamist movements, such as in Thailand and Chechnya.
These are all short-term aims measured in decades and imply a century-long external pagestrugglecall_made to create a pure new Islamist caliphate.
In none of these aims - excepting the departure of the US uniformed military from Saudi Arabia - has al-Qaida made serious progress. At the same time, the movement was greatly aided by the George W Bush administration's excessive external pageconcentrationcall_made on military responses, especially the spectacularly counterproductive external pageoccupationcall_made of Iraq.
Barack Obama, inheriting the external pagetoxiccall_made legacy left by his predecessor, has followed a more cautious policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now also in external pageLibyacall_made. This has already posed difficulties for the diffuse al-Qaida movement; but a much greater problem for it, transcending the death of Osama bin Laden, is the external pageArab springcall_made.
The choice
In the al-Qaida cosmology, the corrupt regimes of the Arab Islamic world were to be humbled by the radical and violent actions of a determined vanguard. Instead, non-violent and courageous demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of citizens have ended autocracies in Tunisia and Egypt, and external pagethreatencall_made others.
The effect of these protests has been to external pagereducecall_made al-Qaida to a spectator in a way that is immensely disturbing to its ideologues. Its influence lingers, and it can yet make some external pageprogresscall_made in Yemen, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Maghreb; the anti-American mood in much of Pakistan may also bring more recruits. But even external pageYemencall_made is to an extent peripheral to al-Qaida's main areas of intended operation, and Afghanistan and Pakistan are hardly central to its worldview of a new caliphate centred on the holy places. In the long term this is a far greater problem for al-Qaida than the loss of Osama bin Laden, who now in any case can be represented as a martyr to the external pagefar enemycall_made.
Against this canvas, some of al-Qaida’s external pagestrategistscall_made feel both fear and hope. The fear is that the Arab spring is the prelude of real external pagechangecall_made - and that emancipation, equity and democracy combine to change the face of the Arab world. If that happens, al-Qaida will eventually external pagefadecall_made into mere memory.
The hope within al-Qaida is that the external pageaspirationscall_made embodied in the Arab spring are dashed, and that it can external pagebenefitcall_made from the ensuing deep disillusion. If autocratic rule is maintained in Syria, external pageSaudi Arabiacall_made, Bahrain and Yemen (and if it returns in Egypt) then the movement and its disparate associates will again have their day. After the failure of external pagedemocraticcall_made and non-violent protest, they will work strenuously to embed a core idea - that the only path to renewal is Islamist and it must be won by violence.
The future of the middle east, the livelihoods of millions of people there, al-Qaida’s chances of survival and all that entails - the Arab spring is carrying the world in its hands.