Al-Qaida is Defeated, but Our Work Has Just Begun

WORLD POLITICS REVIEW

2/26/10

Al-Qaida is Defeated, but Our Work Has Just Begun

Jon B. Alterman

As much as a military effort, the war against al-Qaida has been a battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. At one time, many Muslims admired al-Qaida for its brazen opposition to Western domination, and many Westerners feared that the organization might draw Muslim communities into a civilizational war with the West. Immediately after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, it was not always clear how that battle for Muslim hearts and minds would end up.

But with the passage of time, we now have a good idea. Al-Qaida has lost. And as a result, in an important way, al-Qaida itself has been defeated.

It is, perhaps, strange to proclaim al-Qaida's defeat so soon after an al-Qaida operative sought to bring down an international jetliner last Christmas day, and at a time when al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Qaida Central in the hills of Pakistan all continue to operate. It is true that al-Qaida continues to threaten Western interests, and the organization and its affiliates are likely to do so for some time.

But the task of containing the damage from perhaps a few thousand fighters is more achievable than that of defeating more than a billion people. We feared that we would have to fight the larger battle, but the battle we are fighting -- and which we will continue to commit billions of dollars to fight -- is the one against a few thousand.

Yet the ongoing smaller battle should not prevent us from seeing that al-Qaida has lost the larger one. After almost two decades of trying, al-Qaida's thirst for anarchic violence has failed to inspire the multitudes. Instead, authoritative clerics have picked apart al-Qaida's theology and removed the cloak of divine approval that the organization had appropriated. Even some leading jihadi clerics, such as Dr. Fadl (also known as Sayyid Imam al-Sharif) have repudiated al-Qaida's views. To be sure, there are still clerics who support al-Qaida, but they are a shrinking and increasingly isolated minority.

Jihad, of course, is not dead. It remains a prominent theme in Islamic thought, a topic that has occupied Muslim theologians for centuries. Yet, strict rules govern jihad, many of which narrow the bases on which it can be waged. Jihad developed as a way to rally the masses behind the political leadership. The idea that some would use jihad to rally the masses against the political leadership was an innovation of the last half-century.

The anti-establishment ethos of this new form of jihadism was one of the most important factors that doomed the movement. Over centuries, Muslim clerics had sought to maintain a difficult balance, acting as a check on government excess without threatening the government itself. Al-Qaida challenged that balance, and by consequence it questioned the legitimacy of legions of clerics who had maintained it. Those clerics fought back, with the support of their governments. Al-Qaida tried to overcome its lack of clerical support with the zealousness of its lay leadership, but it was no match. Over almost a decade, the clerics reasserted their traditional role and prevented their societies' slide toward radicalism.

The jihadists' performance in Iraq was another contributing factor to their failure. Not only were the bulk of their victims fellow Muslims, but they alienated the very Sunni tribes that were giving them refuge. The organization in Iraq revealed itself to be more a criminal gang than a millennialist movement, and its defeat at the hands of the U.S. military added little to its luster.

Finally, intelligence and law enforcement have taken a tremendous toll on al-Qaida. With so many governments seeing the group as an existential threat, the resources poured into disrupting the organization and its communications have had the desired effect. Operational communications have diminished considerably, and suspicion pervades the online chat rooms that previously provided such a robust avenue for jihadi communication. As one U.S. government contractor observed privately, "You never know if the guy you're carrying on a discussion with is a bad guy or just another contractor in the next cubicle." If that's true for the counterterrorists, it can only be worse for the terrorists.

Still, it would be a mistake to see al-Qaida's defeat wholly as a victory for the West. Religious conservatives in the Muslim world waged and won the bulk of the ideological battle against al-Qaida, and they did so with little interest in boosting the forces of secular liberalism. While tolerance and individual rights are cherished principles at the core of the Western liberal tradition, many conservative forces see them as the harbingers of atheism, amorality and social decay. Further, the conservative forces that are rising in the Muslim world tend to be strongly nationalist, scarcely more favorably disposed toward Western governments' policies than al-Qaida is. In Palestine, in Iraq and beyond, they see an unalloyed record of

Muslim suffering and a Western world that is either wholly indifferent to Muslims' plight, or is actively abetting their persecution.

These conservative forces have risen as al-Qaida has fallen, dealing a blow to the hopes many in the West had for the future of Muslim communities after al-Qaida's demise. Secularists are in retreat, and much of the creativity in these societies is contained in religious communities that seek to embrace modernity on their own terms. Religious television, for example, is far more popular than the news in the Arab world, and its most solid viewing audience is among women -- the very people whom many Western observers would seek to liberate from the patriarchy of Islamic tradition.

Even so, al-Qaida's failure is good news, for while rapprochement between the West and Muslim communities has become no less important than it appeared to be in years past, it has become less urgent. That rapprochement needs to be pursued with patience and creativity, and realistic goals. We do not need to conquer one another, but we do need to live together. On that basis, a great deal can be achieved.