[A-List] Why al-Qaeda is winning, by Pepe Escobar

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Why al-Qaeda is winning
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times, September 11 2004

Three years after September 11, President George W Bush's crusade is a
failure. "War on terror" is a meaningless myth: you can't combat a supple
attack machine like al-Qaeda with shock and awe. What should have been a
long, meticulous police operation was turned by Bush - instigated by his
foreign policy adviser, God - into an illegal, preemptive attack on a nation
that had nothing to do with terror.

This policy has actually increased terror attacks around the world. Last
year in Cairo, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Sheikh Yamani, a man who
knows one or two things about Arabs, violence and oil, said the invasion
would produce "one hundred bin Ladens". They are here, and they have no one
else but Bush to thank.

Bush's mission from God
Bush's key perceived strength - apart from his dynastic family name and
extra-profitable connections - is his carefully polished image of a strong,
straight-shooting, tough-talking commander-in-chief during times of war.

It should be very easy for the slumbering John Kerry campaign to smash that
armory. Before Iraq turned into a quagmire - before the 1,000th dead
American soldier, the 7,000th wounded American soldier, the 14,000th or
maybe even 22,000th dead Iraqi civilian - Bush kept insisting that Iraq was
"the new front in the war on terror". Now Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney are doing everything in their power not to make the connection -
because a majority of Americans seem to view Bush as relatively strong on
terror, but a failure in Iraq.

Two related facts are undisputable: more Americans are facing death and
destruction in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was captured than before; and now
there are increasingly more global terrorist attacks than when Bush
proclaimed his "crusade", or "war on terror". The Bush administration always
sold the war on Iraq as part of the "war on terror". Reminding Americans
about it is to fully certify Bush's overall failure.

In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in New York, Bush said
that "the government of a free Afghanistan is fighting terror; Pakistan is
capturing terrorist leaders; Saudi Arabia is making raids and arrests; Libya
is dismantling its weapons programs; the army of a free Iraq is fighting for
freedom; and more than three-quarters of al-Qaeda's key members and
associates have been detained or killed".

But consider this: Osama bin Laden, his deputy Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri and
Taliban leader Mullah Omar have not been "smoked out" or captured - "dead or
alive", or otherwise - and most likely are still very much active in
Afghanistan. And now al-Qaeda, in its delocalized mutation, is thriving
around the world. There's nothing "free" about Afghanistan: the Taliban are
back, controlling vast areas of the country, in the south and southeast, and
the rest is controlled by warlords. In the Afghan presidential election next
month, Hamid Karzai will be certified, at most, as the mayor of Kabul. In
Pakistan, President General Pervez Musharraf - known as "Busharraf" - barely
survives multiple assassination attempts as dictator-in-charge.

And there's nothing "free" about Iraq. Shi'ite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani - who wants direct elections - and the militant Shi'ite leader
Muqtada al-Sadr - who wants the end of the occupation now - are the most
popular figures in the country. Former US asset turned American-imposed
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi barely controls a few Baghdad neighborhoods. The
1,000th dead American soldier pales in comparison with the Bush
administration losing the whole Sunni triangle to the Iraqi nationalist
resistance. This loss is proof that the war is unwinnable. It also reduces
the January 2005 Iraqi elections - if they ever happen - to a joke.

The bottom line: since Bush proclaimed his "crusade" or mission from God
against terror, the United States, the Middle East and the world are
immensely less safe.

Bush-Cheney '04 are afraid US voters will start making these connections as
the November elections draw closer. For the apocalyptic Cheney - as on the
campaign trail in Iowa - there's nothing left but the language of fear:
"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2, we
make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger
is that we'll get hit again." So this is how it works: If you vote Bush,
al-Qaeda won't strike. If you vote Kerry, al-Qaeda will strike. Kerry,
therefore, is a threat to the US. The problem is, bin Laden votes Bush.
Here's why.

The al-Qaeda makeover
Al-Qaeda is more of a multi-headed hydra than ever: the "global" head plus
the "local" heads. "Global" al-Qaeda includes groups of multinational
operatives striking in the US (as in September 11) or in Western Europe
(Madrid's train blasts). These are above all Arab-Afghans, remnants of the
jihad of the 1980s against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. "Local" al-Qaeda
on the other hand strike in their native countries against Western targets
(for example in Casablanca, Bali and Istanbul): these are all part of the
big al-Qaeda franchising.

The "historic" al-Qaeda is itself split in two: bin Laden's faithfuls, who
have followed him since the Peshawar, Pakistan, days for more than two
decades; and the new breed who "graduated" in Afghanistan from 1997 to 2001.
Many of bin Laden's faithful have been killed or captured - in essence by
Pakistani, not US, forces: they include Mohammed Atef, Abu Zubayda, Suleiman
Abu Graith and the alleged mastermind of September 11, Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed.

For a long time Western intelligence was prone to propagate the myth of
al-Qaeda as a pre-September 11 organization with many heads, with sleeping
cells occasionally galvanized into action. This is false. Al-Qaeda as a rule
waits for no one - unless technical glitches occur, and these usually
involve delays in recruitment, research, team-assembling and elaborate
counter-security measures. The delays also prove that al-Qaeda is much less
of a well-oiled organization than the Bush administration would like the
world to believe.

Al-Qaeda subscribes to no political strategy, other than the strategy of
total opportunism: as any kind of attack can happen any time, anywhere, it
rules by fear - while at the same time demonstrating it is immune to any
large-scale US war, from Afghanistan to Iraq. The rule-by-fear tactic also
serves the Bush administration well, as fear is constantly used as a
powerful political argument to justify the administration's policies ("Be
afraid, be very much afraid, but you can count on us to protect you").

Unlike the Bush administration's spin, European intelligence experts in
Brussels assured Asia Times Online that the Madrid bombing was only
accidentally tied to Spain's national elections. It was not the case that
"Spaniards had bowed to terror"  (Washington's version), but that Bush ally
Jose Maria Aznar's conservative government was mendacious enough to lie to
the country, blaming Basque separatists when it already had evidence to the
contrary.

The avant-garde brigades
The members of al-Qaeda's new elite were either born in Western Europe -
many hold a legitimate European Union passport - or came to the West while
still very young and then became radicalized. As Bush is a born-again
Christian, they are sort of born-again Islamists. The most important fact is
that this "return of the repressed" (Islam) is above all a political
radicalization. The new breed's brand of political Islam is much more
"political" than "Islam".

Very few of these new brigades come directly from Islamic countries. And
their exile is one-way: they never come back to where their families come
from. The classic itinerary was to sharpen the knives at a peripheral
jihad - Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya - to become widely respected
mujahideen, and then go back to Western Europe. They never went to fight in
the Maghreb or in the Middle East - although the war in Iraq started to
change this pattern.

In 1997, bin Laden obtained from his friend and admirer Mullah Omar monopoly
control over the Arab-Afghan training camps in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the
Pakistanis and the Uzbeks maintained their own training camps. This means
that every single jihadi who was not Pakistani or from Central Asia who went
to Afghanistan between 1997 and 2001 was trained at an al-Qaeda camp.

Unlike the faithful, none of the new breed of Arab-Afghans is close to bin
Laden. But they definitely inherited a legendary al-Qaeda esprit de corps.
The best and the brightest were trained to come back to Western Europe, wait
and then raise hell. But the majority stayed behind fighting alongside the
Taliban: among these were the hundreds captured by the forces of commander
Ahmad Shah Masoud, the Lion of the Panjshir, before he was assassinated
exactly three years ago, on September 9 - al-Qaeda's "signal" for September
11.

The best and the brightest of this new al-Qaeda elite form the current
backbone of bin Laden's organization - the people who have masterminded and
carried out global attacks for the past two years. They remain a very tight
bunch, although now thoroughly globalized; treason - and squealing - is out
of the question; and most astonishingly, there's nothing to it of a secret
society. They work as a band of brothers, sharing everything - apartments,
bank accounts - even in the open. Al-Qaeda's joint chiefs, the command and
control structure, the base cells and the complex networks, everything works
like some family enterprise in northern Italy, based on personal
relationships, be they nurtured in Afghanistan or in any other country. But
then a complex process of deterritorialization sets in, and the virus
spreads.

For al-Qaeda, this poses a tremendous problem. It's easy for Western
intelligence (or for the Pakistanis, when they're up to it) to grab a bunch
of operatives after identifying a single one of them - as with the recent
arrests in Pakistan timed to coincide with the Democratic convention. And
with no al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan anymore, there are no places
left to meet: Chechnya is too dangerous, the tribal areas in the
Pakistan-Afghan border are teeming with US troops, and the Shawal region
that straddles Pakistan and Afghanistan is too remote and under constant
satellite surveillance.

Brand recognition the name of the game
This is a key reason al-Qaeda mutated still further. To survive and prosper,
it needed more converts, and it needed to strike an array of strategic
alliances. An additional problem was that al-Qaeda was never a political
movement: it is basically an attack machine. Jihad yes, always. But the
local objectives involved could not be more disparate - from Chechens
fighting Russian occupation to Iraqis fighting US occupation.

Franchising, anyway, worked wonders. As more people in more countries - and
the Bush administration - started blaming al-Qaeda for any attack, the
desired cumulative effect was the same: al-Qaeda is everywhere.

Local al-Qaeda alliances now include everybody and his neighbor: Jemaah
Islamiya in Indonesia (the Bali bombing) and Southeast Asia; warlord
Gulbuddin Hekmatyr's jihadis in southeastern Afghanistan; the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan (responsible for the Tashkent bombings in July); and
perhaps even the mysterious, one-legged jack-of-all-trades, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, configured by the Bush administration as the new bin Laden in
the Iraqi Sunni triangle.

Old-style al-Qaeda might well be pulverized by the Pentagon any time. But
"al-Qaeda", the brand, lives, whatever the Bush administration spin. Zarqawi
is the best example: he may not even be directly linked to bin Laden
anymore, and he is now the sole boss of his own terrorist cottage industry.

Like a multinational product, "al-Qaeda" suits everybody. For President
Vladimir Putin in Russia, Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, even President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo in the Philippines, "al-Qaeda" is the ideal excuse for any
repressive or inept regime presenting its credentials as a full-fledged
member of the "war on terror". For al-Qaeda's purposes, bin Laden remaining
the supreme evil is an invaluable propaganda coup. And for al-Qaeda
franchises - free to pursue their own initiatives - using the brand means
guaranteed media impact.

"Al-Qaeda" the brand has now embarked on an inexorable logic of expansion -
in flagrant contradiction to Bush's assertion that the world is safer.
Al-Qaeda will keep deepening its alliances with ethnic and nationalist
movements - with Shamil Basayev, the emir of the mujahideen in Chechnya and
trainer of the Black Widow squadrons of female suicide bombers, or with
sectors of the Iraqi resistance in the Sunni triangle. "Global" al-Qaeda in
all these cases works and will continue to work as a sort of "Foreign
Legion", as French scholar Olivier Roy puts it, a capable military vanguard
that is useful for local purposes for a determined period of time.

"Global" al-Qaeda may also even profit from the fact that national
liberation movements, in desperation, decide to go on an all-out offensive,
improving their alliances of circumstance with al-Qaeda. The al-Qaeda brand
is also becoming attractive to scattered sectors of the extreme left,
because more than appealing to radical Islam, al-Qaeda has succeeded in
branding its image as the revolutionary vanguard in the fight against
American imperialism. The cross-fertilization between radical Islam and
disfranchised Muslim youth born and raised in the West is also performing
wonders: when young people convert to Islam in a dreary suburb of Brussels,
Paris, Hamburg or Madrid, it all has to do with political anger rather than
discovering a direct line to Allah.

A nihilistic big business
At the Republican convention, while the Republicans were harping on
September 11, Bush said the Iraq war was "his" war, part of a mission from
God to bring freedom to the repressed. "Terrorists hate America because they
hate freedom." Wrong: "terrorists" (in fact national resistance movements)
hate America because America's imperial policies are the antithesis of
freedom.

As nihilistic as it may be, al-Qaeda, from a business point of view, is a
major success: three years after September 11, it is a global brand and a
global movement. The Middle East, in this scenario, is just a regional base
station. This global brand does not have much to do with Islam. But it has
everything to do with the globalization of anti-imperialism. And the empire,
whatever its definition, has its center in Washington. Bin Laden is
laughing: Bush's crusade has legitimized an obscure sect as a worldwide
symbol of political revolt. How could bin Laden not vote for Bush?