Politics Essays

Politics Essays: Al Qaeda

The Essence of al-Qaeda

The attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 are widely believed to have heralded a new form of terrorism.

In the same vein the response to those attacks, coming in the form of a U.S. declaration of war on terrorism, was unprecedented in both scope and ambition.

However the slogan: “War on Terrorism” is not only vague, but downright misleading.

It is clear that neither the United States nor its principal allies are intent on tackling every terrorist organisation in the world.

Indeed if this were really the case the U.S. would be bombing the jungles of eastern Sri Lanka and the mountains of north-western Spain to undermine Tamil Tiger and ETA fighters, respectively.

The “War on Terrorism” is effectively a struggle against a particular strain of Islamic militancy; namely the global terror spearheaded by al-Qaeda.

Therefore in the first instance the United States needs to re-phrase the “War on Terrorism” to “War on Islamic Terrorism”.

This will entail costs in so far as it might alienate some sections of Islamic opinion. Nevertheless it is a cost well worth paying as it clarifies the enemy and should promote greater cooperation between the intelligence and the academic communities.

From the information readily available in the public domain it is clear that the academic and journalistic communities have not developed a penetrating insight into the al-Qaeda phenomenon.

The best book on this subject is arguably Jason Burke’s: Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror. However even this book, impressive as it is in the amount of desk and field research that it displays, betrays certain fundamental misunderstandings.

Most of the cutting edge research into Islamic terrorism is being carried out by specialist journals in the United States. The best journal is arguably the Jamestown’s Foundation’s fortnightly Terrorism Monitor and its spin-off the Spotlight on Terror.

The title of this extract (i.e. the Essence of al-Qaeda) is borrowed from an interview with Dr. Saad al-Faqih (a leading London-based Saudi Arabian dissident and expert on al-Qaeda) that appeared in the early February 2004 edition of the Spotlight on Terror.

The emergence of al-Qaeda is rooted in a triangular relationship between the Saudi regime, the official clerical establishment in that country and dissident Islamic activism in the Kingdom.

Therefore any long-term solution to the serious challenge posed by al-Qaeda needs to address some of the pernicious features of the Saudi regime.

This will not be easy as the Saudi monarchy constitutes one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East. Nevertheless the seriousness of the situation is likely to lead to a strategic shift in U.S.-Saudi relations in the decisive years ahead.

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