U.S. officials say they have al Qaeda on the ropes in Pakistan. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for al Qaeda’s homicidal ideology, which is spreading to extremists in other Muslim countries. This poses new risks for Americans, and highlights a big hole in President Obama’s counter-terrorism policies.
According to The Washington Post, the Central Intelligence Agency now rates al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based offshoot, as an even greater threat than Osama bin Laden’s original. Under the “spiritual” guidance of Anwar a-Aulaqi, a cleric and U.S. citizen, AQAP is busy plotting attacks on America, including a failed attempt earlier this year to set off a car bomb in Times Square.
As my colleague Jim Arkedis pointed out yesterday, this doesn’t mean AQAP is capable of staging 9/11-scale attacks on our country. But since Aulaqi also counseled Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army major accused of gunning down 13 Americans at Fort Hood last year, the AQAP threat seems real enough.
Meanwhile, in the Hobbesian nightmare that is Somalia, another al Qaeda affiliate, Al Shabab, launched a suicide attack this week that killed 32 people at a Mogadishu hotel. Last month, the group claimed responsibility for a massacre of over 70 people watching the World Cup at a bar in neighboring Uganda.
And just last week, al Qaeda’s Iraq franchise launched a suicide attack that killed 57 job seekers at an army recruitment center in Baghdad.
What’s the message in all this carnage? That al Qaeda continues to offer the brand of choice to aspiring jihadists, who are more than willing to use its gruesome tactics to advance their local ambitions.
What can our government do to stop this contagion of suicide and mass casualty terror attacks?
Self-defense requires that we shift some military and intelligence resources to these new hot spots. But unless we want to be drawn into a never-ending game of terrorist whack-a-mole, we also need to do a better job of discrediting the ideology that motivates al Qaeda and its affiliates to kill in Islam’s name.
A trenchant strategy for doing just than is detailed in Fighting the Ideological Battle, an excellent study by the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. It begins with a step that the Obama administration unfortunately has been reluctant to take, for fear of conflating violent extremism and Islam: acknowledging the essentially ideological nature of the terrorist threat. We need to openly contest and challenge the Islamist catalogue of grievances, the better to drive the wedge deeper between them and the decent majority of Muslims who no part of their apocalyptic visions.
Our government also needs an explicit strategy for shoring up failing or fragile states that are particularly vulnerable to extremist violence. It’s no accident that al Qaeda and its offshoots flourish in ungoverned spaces within countries like Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Finally, we need to keep driving home the essential point about al Qaeda’s growing global franchise: its victims are overwhelmingly civilians, and Muslim civilians at that. That’s why, even as al Qaeda franchises have cropped up, support for terror attacks on civilians has fallen among Muslim publics. And al Qaeda’s vicious tactics have sparked a backlash even from some of the organization’s founders and leading theoreticians. Rather than being overly sensitive about lending credence to the Islamists’ “clash of civilizations” rhetoric, our government should miss no chance to stand in solidarity with the victims of Islamist ideology.
Photo credit: U.S. Army photostream
