Why Has Al-Qaeda Lasted 20 Years? by Rami G. Khouri

Why Has Al-Qaeda Lasted 20 Years?
by Rami G. Khouri
17 Sep 2008

BEIRUT -- It was almost exactly 20 years ago this month that Al-Qaeda was born in Afghanistan, as a movement of zealous holy warriors that was prepared to fight and die to protect the Islamic umma, or community, from foreign assault. The Russian occupation of Afghanistan was the immediate catalyst that sparked its creation, though the formative motivations sending thousands of young men from Arab and Asian lands to join the jihad were usually anchored in local events and personal experiences.

The several phenomena that Al-Qaeda represents -- defensive jihad, militant self-assertion, a puritanical interpretation of religious doctrine, cosmic theological battle, and political struggle to purify tainted Islamic societies -- appeal to a wide variety of individuals who gravitate to its call in the same manner that zealots join any other such movement of true believers.

Coming to grips with the phenomena it represents -- especially the continuing threat of terrorism -- requires grasping the combination of social, economic and political conditions in local societies from which Al-Qaeda recruits emanate -- mainly in the Arab World, South Asia, and immigrant quarters of urban Europe.

Al-Qaeda 's 20th anniversary is an appropriate moment to do this, and the 20-year analytical frame is much more useful than the shorter time context commemorating the September 11, 2001 attack against the United States that has been Al-Qaeda 's hallmark signature event. Over the past two decades, Al-Qaeda seems to have evolved in line with trends impacting the wider world of Islamist movements, including local crackdowns in many countries, and the American-led "global war on terror" that has been defined heavily, but not exclusively, by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

These pressures to disrupt Al-Qaeda have been offset by a continuation of the stressful conditions at local and national levels in many Arab-Asian societies that nourish these Salafist jihadi movements in the first place. So a more useful question than "What is Al-Qaeda 's condition today?" concerns the wider trends in Arab-Asian societies that bolster Islamist radicalism by spurring five related forces:

1. The slow political fragmentation and fraying at the edges of once centralized nation-states like Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Sudan, Afghanistan and Algeria, creating vacuums of authority that Islamists and others quickly fill.

2. The continued sharp disparities in local delivery of basic social services, job opportunities and security throughout much of the Arab-Asian region, creating urgent needs that Islamists are very good at meeting.

3. The impact of major nationalist issues such as the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Anglo-American-led war on Iraq.

4. Police brutality and political oppression at the local level in many Arab-Asian countries (the birthplace of Al-Qaeda was both Afghanistan and the prisons of Egypt).

5. Occasional external and mostly Western stimuli to those who see themselves fighting a defensive jihad to protect both the honor and the physical existence of the threatened Islamic umma, such as the Danish cartoons, Pope Benedict's speech in August 2006, virulently anti-Islamic movies and books, and a tendency by leading politicians (such as John McCain and Sarah Palin today) to repeatedly speak of an undefined "Islamic radicalism" as a great threat to Western civilization that must be fought for decades, if not lifetimes.

The combination of these five factors has slowly but persistently fomented several generations of Islamist activists who have mostly joined peaceful movements like the Muslim Brotherhood. Small numbers have split off and embraced fringe militant and terrorist groups.

Much debate swirls around the condition and status of Al-Qaeda these days, which has clearly suffered operational setbacks with the loss of its Afghan bases, but seems to have regrouped in the northwestern frontier areas of Pakistan where it has widespread support among Taliban-friendly communities. While Al-Qaeda has been disrupted, other similar, smaller Salafist militant groups have sprung to life in Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Yemen and Algeria.

An important recent development has seen some of the founding fathers of contemporary jihadist militancy (such as Karam Zuhdi, Mohammed Derbala, and Sayyed Imam Abdelaziz Al Sharif, aka Dr Fadl) recant and reject their former embrace of Al-Qaeda-type terror attacks. (Interestingly, many did so in the same Egyptian jails where they were first radicalized…hmmm, perhaps closing many Arab jails and tempering Arab autocracy would be the fastest way to fight terrorism?).

Any militant movement that endures for 20 years and spurs dozens of smaller clones is not only a consequence of its own organizational prowess. It reflects the persistence of enabling conditions that breed militants and militancy. If we don't want to go through this again 20 years from now, we would do well to grasp and change the wider degrading conditions that feed recruits into terror movements, including Arab jails, socio-economic disparity and abuse of power, Israeli occupations, Anglo-American wars and Western Islamophobia.