Understanding Al Qaeda

Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou

Description

This book controversially argues that Al Qaeda has clear aims, and that the only way to defeat it is to engage with its arguments in a serious way.



Since the publication of the first edition in 2006, Mohamedou has brought the text right up-to-date. Starting with Al Qaeda's creation almost twenty years ago, and sketching its global mutation, Mohamedou explains that there is a cogent strategy to Al Qaeda's actions. He shows that the 'war on terror' is failing, only serving to recruit more terrorists to Al Qaeda's cause. He also puts forward a case for how the international community can best respond.



Arguing that it is dangerous to dismiss Al Qaeda as illogical and irrational, this incisive and original book is important for policy-makers and ideal for undergraduates in international relations, Middle East studies and peace/conflict studies.
List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Casus Belli

2. Changed Context

3. Purpose and Pattern

4. Fallacies and Primacies

5. Depth of Engagement

Appendices

Chronology

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Political Science
• Terrorism

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 03 juin 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781783714384
• Langue: English

Extrait

Understanding Al Qaeda
Also by Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou
Societal Transition to Democracy
Iraq and the Second Gulf War – State-Building and Regime Security
Contre-Croisade – Le 11 Septembre et le Retournement du Monde
UNDERSTANDING AL QAEDA
Changing War and Global Politics
Second Edition
Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou
First published 2007 as Understanding Al Qaeda: The Transformation of War Second edition published 2011 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, 2007, 2011
The right of Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780745331683 Hardback ISBN 9780745331676 Paperback ISBN 9781849645980 PDF eBook ISBN 9781783714391 Kindle eBook ISBN 9781783714384 EPUB eBook
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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
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For my beloved children, Bahiya, Kemal and Zaynab
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Casus Belli
The Seriousness of Injustice
Misrepresentations and Distortions
2 Changed Context
Classical War
Western War, Western Law
Bellum Novae
The Limits of the Law
A New Type of Actor
3 Purpose and Pattern
Rebellion as Export: The Emergence of Al Qaeda
1989–95: Strategy Development
1996–2001: Transnational War Plans
2002–03: Regrouping and Globalising
2004–06: War and Diplomacy
2007–11: Regionalisation and Hybridisation
Towards ‘the Real’ Al Qaeda
4 Fallacies and Primacies
Misleading Explanations
The Primacy of the Political
The Problem of Terrorism
5 Depth of Engagement
Ending the Deadlock
Reassessment and Recomposition
The Way Forward
Appendix
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Figures and Tables
FIGURES
3.1
Al Qaeda in the 1990s
3.2
Al Qaeda in the 2000s and 2010s
TABLES
2.1
Traditional Conflict Paradigm
2.2
New Conflict Paradigm
2.3
Al Qaeda’s Non-linear War
5.1
Major Al Qaeda Operations against the United States and Allies
Acknowledgements
This book originated with a monograph entitled Non-Linearity of Engagement: Transnational Armed Groups, International Law and the War between Al Qaeda and the United States, which I researched and wrote in 2005. That essay had been published by the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research at Harvard University, of which I was the Associate Director from 2004 to 2008. I wish to thank my former colleagues at Harvard for their assistance, in particular Lynsey Fitzpatrick, Cindy Smith and Vincenzo Bolletino.
The opening chapter expands on an earlier version of an article entitled ‘Responsibility, Injustice and the American Dilemma’, published in the Buffalo Journal of Human Rights , which is reworked here and to which Roger Kaplan, Morris Lipson and Makau Mutua had made greatly appreciated contributions.
François Burgat, Paul Gilbert, Martin Van Creveld and George Abi-Saab offered insightful comments on the argument in Chapter 2 for which I am grateful. I have also benefited from the input of fellow faculty colleagues during various lectureships on this topic delivered between 2005 and 2011 at Harvard University, New York University, Tufts University, Exeter University, the University of Geneva, the Asser Institute in the Hague, La Casa Árabe in Madrid, the International Diplomatic Academy in Paris and the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
These rich exchanges as well as the invigorating engagement of the students of my courses on terrorism and political violence and on the contemporary Middle East at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva allowed me invariably to deepen my thoughts on the questions at hand. A heartfelt thanks to all these friends, colleagues and students, and to my respective hosts at these institutions, in particular Phillipe Burrin, Fred Tanner, Robert Roth, Gerd Nonneman, Keith Krause, Riccardo Bocco, Jean-Claude Cousseran, Allen Zerkin, Patrick Meier and Gema Martín-Muñoz.
Finally, I would like to record my gratitude to my friend Yves Loffredo for his steadfast support, and to Mahmood Mamdani and Abdullahi An-na’im for their inspiring encouragement, as well as my appreciation to Roger van Zwanenberg, my editor at Pluto Press, Yaël Reinharz Hazan and Laurence Boisson de Chazournes for their generous support and wise advice.
This revised and augmented edition incorporates reworked materials previously published in parts in different works I contributed in recent years to the website opendemocracy.net , the journal The Muslim World and the volume Violent Non-State Actors in Contemporary World Politics , for which I thank, respectively, David Hayes, Laurent Bonnefoy and Klejda Mulaj.
‘Let me ask you one more thing: can it be that any man has the right to decide about the rest of mankind, who is worthy to live and who is more unworthy?’
‘But why bring worth into it? The question is most often decided in the hearts of men not at all on the basis of worth, but for quite different reasons, much more natural ones. As for rights, tell me, who has no right to wish?’
‘But surely not for another’s death?’
‘Maybe even for another’s death. Why lie to yourself when everyone lives like that, and perhaps even cannot live any other way?’
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Introduction
By the early 2010s, Al Qaeda had essentially completed the mission it set out to achieve some 20 years earlier. For all practical purposes and against all odds, the envisioned subsequent phases in the conflict with its foes – outliving the George W. Bush administration; engineering further political decrepitude in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan; attempting new attacks on Western targets around the world; and expanding into new territories such as the Sahel and Sub-Saharan Africa – were in effect but additional opportunities to the group’s existing global gains.
The conventional wisdom rehearsed from 2004 onwards held that it was the transformation of Al Qaeda that had been the key reason for its survival and resurgence in the face of the massive international War on Terror campaign. Close examination of the group’s history reveals that the strength of Al Qaeda has lain, in point of fact, not so much in its post-11 September mutation – a logical evasive step which many other terrorist or insurgent groups had enacted previously in the modern history of terrorism – but more so in its inherent adaptability and demonstrated faculty to innovate constantly. In contradistinction to its state adversaries who professed to be on the offensive in conducting the War on Terror but were more often than not confined to a structurally defensive position, not knowing how, where, when and under what guise to expect an assault, this transnational non-state armed group has been writing its own story all along.
The staying power and uniqueness of Al Qaeda cannot then be overstated. More than two decades since its creation and ten years into its stalemated conflict with the world’s superpower, the group reached, however, a paradoxical milestone in that narrative. By virtue of its very ability to escape defeat at the hands of the United States, and in spite of the constant augmentation of its global impact, the organisation ultimately found itself immersed increasingly in the local management of conflicts with regional states. Since the 11 September 2001 attacks it conducted on the United States, this strategic about-face and proactive design have played out on evolving parallel tracks with a common and urgent concern, namely the avoidance of predictability. Whereas the fourfold ghazzou (raid) on New York and Washington had endowed them overnight with global notoriety status, the group’s leaders, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al Dhawahiri, did not seek reflexively to replicate those strikes by immediately engineering further operations on the United States. Expectations for a second wave of attacks had been high in the United States during the autumn of 2001 and throughout 2002, and the country had braced itself for such a follow-up assault. Rather, blurring the picture, the group opted to shift its attention to Europe where it targeted those states – Spain on 11 March 2004 and the United Kingdom on 7 July 2005 – whose leaders had actively assisted the United States in its war in Iraq.
When that pattern proved successful, putting on high alert other European states (Italy, Norway, Germany and France, notably) that had been warned by the group for their military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan or their perceived hostility to Muslim populations, Al Qaeda did not expand it. Ushering a third phase in its post-11 September strategy, it proceeded instead to concentrate on the conflict in Iraq, where it had been dealing blows to the United States and coalition forces since mid-2003. After spearheading the insurgency in that country and setting it in motion dramatically under the local leadership of Abu Musab al Zarqawi – notably with an uptempo series of attacks in the second half of 2004 – the organisation