Thursday, 16 June 2011
A highly intelligent, multi-lingual 59-year old Egyptian physician who traces his roots as a militant jihadist to his teenage years, Zawahiri represents Al Qaeda’s old guard. (File Photo)
If Al Qaeda wanted to signal its ability to adjust to change in the Middle East and North Africa, it missed the plank with the appointment of Ayman al-Zawahiri as Osama Bin Laden’s successor.
A highly intelligent, multi-lingual 59-year old Egyptian physician who traces his roots as a militant jihadist to his teenage years, Zawahiri represents Al Qaeda’s old guard.
He like others of the old guard, including Bin Laden who was killed last month by US Navy Seals in Pakistan, was formed in countries with autocratic regimes that cut off all opportunity for the expression of pent-up anger and frustration. Islam, including its militant forms was the only release valve alongside soccer, a frequent battleground for opponents of autocratic rule that they knew. They are also a generation that tasted the heady power of succesful jihad with the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
A highly intelligent, multi-lingual 59-year old Egyptian physician who traces his roots as a militant jihadist to his teenage years, Zawahiri represents Al Qaeda’s old guard.
He like others of the old guard, including Bin Laden who was killed last month by US Navy Seals in Pakistan, was formed in countries with autocratic regimes that cut off all opportunity for the expression of pent-up anger and frustration. Islam, including its militant forms was the only release valve alongside soccer, a frequent battleground for opponents of autocratic rule that they knew. They are also a generation that tasted the heady power of succesful jihad with the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
As a result, if judged by a series of statements he released this year to clarify Al Qaeda’s position on the massive, peaceful anti-government protests that have swept the Middle East and North Africa in the past six months and side lined the group, Zawahiri seems unlikely to be the man capable of adjusting Al Qaeda’s ideology, strategy and tactics in ways that would make the group relevant again.
The challenge Zawahiri faces is exemplified by the fact that Bin Laden’s death failed to become a jihadist rallying call for the tens of thousands demanding political and economic reform despite brutal crackdowns in countries like Libya, Syria and Yemen. It also is unlikely to inspire the emergence of a new generation of Middle Eastern or North African jihadists whose numbers would rival those when Al Qaeda was at its peak or that would contribute to the revival of a popular sentiment that is empathetic to their existence.
The protests, that toppled the presidents of Egypt and Tunisia, demonstrated the power of peaceful protest and underlined popular aspirations for a pluralistic society that ensured greater political freedom and economic opportunity. Many protesters may want their future constitutions to recognize Islam as a source of inspiration, but they do not long for the kind of puritan Islamic rule that Zawahiri advocates. Nor are they seeking to achieve their goals through terrorism despite the brutal crackdowns in various countries.
The change in mood across the Middle East and North Africa is reflected in the fact that Al Qaeda’s post 9/11 appeal began to wane long before the anti-government protests erupted in December of 2010. Attacks on expatriate residential compounds in Saudi Arabia in 2003 and 2004 in which not only Westerners but also Arabs and Muslims were killed and in 2005 on luxury hotels in the Jordanian capital Amman horrified many across the region. The attacks marked the beginning of a steady decline in empathy for Al Qaeda as well as public sympathy for the group and kick started its marginalization.
The toppling of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine Abedine Ben Ali in early 2011 in effect sealed the side lining of Al Qaeda by providing an alternative to jihad and radical interpretations of Islam as the way to throw off the region’s yoke of dictatorship. While the ousting of Messrs. Mubarak and Ben Ali was relatively bloodless, escalating violence and casuals that increasingly threaten to morph into civil wars have done nothing to boost jihadist appeal.
For Zawahiri to exploit the protests to his advantage he would have to break with Al Qaeda’s past approach by adapting to a popular movement that opts for peaceful rather than violent resistance and does not embrace puritan interpretations of religion as key drivers of its strategy. Zawahiri sought to do exactly that in five audio and video statements issued in the course of this year. They constitute Al Qaeda’s most comprehensive response to the uprising to date.
Mr. Zawahiri’s problem is that he failed to recognize that by the time the Arab revolt erupted empathy for jihadist tactics had evaporated to a degree that his adjustments of Al Qaeda’s position attracted little attention and even fewer takers. Protesters across the region ignored his attempt to align Al Qaeda with them despite the fact that he recognized that the baton of change had been passed to the “free and the noble people” who were confronting the same enemy as Al Qaeda: the US and its regional allies, including the ousted presidents of Egypt and Tunisia, the president of Yemen and the king of Jordan.
In the statements, Zawahiri initially refrained from backing off the group’s advocacy of terror tactics, in part because the group was late to recognize the tectonic shift that the mass protests represented. Although all the statements were issued after the eruption of the protests, Zawahiri referred for the first time to the protests only in the third one.
Nonetheless, if Zawahiri missed the plank by advocating terrorist attacks, he also did so by insisting on the replacement of autocratic rulers by an Islamic government rather than by a pluralist system. Public opinion polls that give Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood at most 30 per cent of the post-revolution vote effectively rejected Zawahiri’s call for an Islamic state to ensure that Egyptians were not deprived of the fruits of their revolution.
In a stab at the Brotherhood as well as Saudi Arabia, Zawahiri argued that the United States was concerned that post- as well as pre-revolution Middle Eastern and North African governments served its purpose whether they were democratic, autocratic, or Islamic. He insisted that this was the reason why the US rejected the kind of Islamic government he advocated that would serve the community of the faithful, oppose foreign occupation of Muslim lands, counter Israeli expansionism and hold its rulers accountable.
Zawahiri accompanied his call for an Islamic state with the exemption of Egypt and Tunisia from the need to employ jihadist tactics because they had toppled their autocratic leaders. In a clear bid to ingratiate Al Qaeda with populations that had demonstrated that peaceful protest could achieve goals, he insisted that his call for Islamic government was not an appeal to resort to violence.
Zawahiri’s efforts implicitly recognized that his group fares best in a world of autocratic regimes that close off virtually all valves for the release of pent-up anger and frustration. Once protesters take to the streets, irrespective of whether regimes fold or employ brutal crackdowns to quash a revolt, Al Qaeda’s already tarnished image takes a further considerable dip.
Ironically, Libya, racked by virtual civil war between NATO-backed opponents of Qaddafi and Qaddafi loyalists, spotlights at least two of the key changes Zawahiri would have to make for Al Qaeda to be considered by protesters as a partner in resisting brutal crackdowns by autocratic regimes: the dropping of its aspirations for global jihad and its targeting of the West. Those are changes in the group’s ideology and strategy that would effectively call its raison d’etre and very existence into question.
The need for those changes is highlighted by the participation in the Libyan rebellion of fighters of Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). LIFG was formed in the 1990s in Afghanistan as an Al Qaeda adjunct. It later however broke with Al Qaeda as fighters abandoned the global jihad and aspiration to hit Western targets and returned to Libya to fight against the regime of Colonel Qaddafi.
Libya demonstrates that for Al Qaeda to regain ground in the Middle East and North Africa, it will have to understand the challenge it faces and confront them head on. It would mean recreating Al Qaeda in a mold diagonally opposed to what it is today: a softer, gentler organization that employs violence only in coordination with popular opposition forces and only when brutal crackdowns leave no other option.
That may be a tall order for Zawahiri. Outsiders who have met Zawahiri describe him as articulate, fluent in English and a gentleman. Within Al Qaeda, Zawahiri’s reputation is almost diametrically the opposite: a man who is dogmatic, brusque and authoritarian – hardly qualities that would project a softer, gentler image.
The crackdowns on protesters in the Arab world constitute a potential opportunity for Zawahiri. His record raises the question whether he is the man to exploit it.
(James M. Dorsey, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, is a senior researcher at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer. He can be reached via email at: questfze@gmail.com)
The challenge Zawahiri faces is exemplified by the fact that Bin Laden’s death failed to become a jihadist rallying call for the tens of thousands demanding political and economic reform despite brutal crackdowns in countries like Libya, Syria and Yemen. It also is unlikely to inspire the emergence of a new generation of Middle Eastern or North African jihadists whose numbers would rival those when Al Qaeda was at its peak or that would contribute to the revival of a popular sentiment that is empathetic to their existence.
The protests, that toppled the presidents of Egypt and Tunisia, demonstrated the power of peaceful protest and underlined popular aspirations for a pluralistic society that ensured greater political freedom and economic opportunity. Many protesters may want their future constitutions to recognize Islam as a source of inspiration, but they do not long for the kind of puritan Islamic rule that Zawahiri advocates. Nor are they seeking to achieve their goals through terrorism despite the brutal crackdowns in various countries.
The change in mood across the Middle East and North Africa is reflected in the fact that Al Qaeda’s post 9/11 appeal began to wane long before the anti-government protests erupted in December of 2010. Attacks on expatriate residential compounds in Saudi Arabia in 2003 and 2004 in which not only Westerners but also Arabs and Muslims were killed and in 2005 on luxury hotels in the Jordanian capital Amman horrified many across the region. The attacks marked the beginning of a steady decline in empathy for Al Qaeda as well as public sympathy for the group and kick started its marginalization.
The toppling of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine Abedine Ben Ali in early 2011 in effect sealed the side lining of Al Qaeda by providing an alternative to jihad and radical interpretations of Islam as the way to throw off the region’s yoke of dictatorship. While the ousting of Messrs. Mubarak and Ben Ali was relatively bloodless, escalating violence and casuals that increasingly threaten to morph into civil wars have done nothing to boost jihadist appeal.
For Zawahiri to exploit the protests to his advantage he would have to break with Al Qaeda’s past approach by adapting to a popular movement that opts for peaceful rather than violent resistance and does not embrace puritan interpretations of religion as key drivers of its strategy. Zawahiri sought to do exactly that in five audio and video statements issued in the course of this year. They constitute Al Qaeda’s most comprehensive response to the uprising to date.
Mr. Zawahiri’s problem is that he failed to recognize that by the time the Arab revolt erupted empathy for jihadist tactics had evaporated to a degree that his adjustments of Al Qaeda’s position attracted little attention and even fewer takers. Protesters across the region ignored his attempt to align Al Qaeda with them despite the fact that he recognized that the baton of change had been passed to the “free and the noble people” who were confronting the same enemy as Al Qaeda: the US and its regional allies, including the ousted presidents of Egypt and Tunisia, the president of Yemen and the king of Jordan.
In the statements, Zawahiri initially refrained from backing off the group’s advocacy of terror tactics, in part because the group was late to recognize the tectonic shift that the mass protests represented. Although all the statements were issued after the eruption of the protests, Zawahiri referred for the first time to the protests only in the third one.
Nonetheless, if Zawahiri missed the plank by advocating terrorist attacks, he also did so by insisting on the replacement of autocratic rulers by an Islamic government rather than by a pluralist system. Public opinion polls that give Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood at most 30 per cent of the post-revolution vote effectively rejected Zawahiri’s call for an Islamic state to ensure that Egyptians were not deprived of the fruits of their revolution.
In a stab at the Brotherhood as well as Saudi Arabia, Zawahiri argued that the United States was concerned that post- as well as pre-revolution Middle Eastern and North African governments served its purpose whether they were democratic, autocratic, or Islamic. He insisted that this was the reason why the US rejected the kind of Islamic government he advocated that would serve the community of the faithful, oppose foreign occupation of Muslim lands, counter Israeli expansionism and hold its rulers accountable.
Zawahiri accompanied his call for an Islamic state with the exemption of Egypt and Tunisia from the need to employ jihadist tactics because they had toppled their autocratic leaders. In a clear bid to ingratiate Al Qaeda with populations that had demonstrated that peaceful protest could achieve goals, he insisted that his call for Islamic government was not an appeal to resort to violence.
Zawahiri’s efforts implicitly recognized that his group fares best in a world of autocratic regimes that close off virtually all valves for the release of pent-up anger and frustration. Once protesters take to the streets, irrespective of whether regimes fold or employ brutal crackdowns to quash a revolt, Al Qaeda’s already tarnished image takes a further considerable dip.
Ironically, Libya, racked by virtual civil war between NATO-backed opponents of Qaddafi and Qaddafi loyalists, spotlights at least two of the key changes Zawahiri would have to make for Al Qaeda to be considered by protesters as a partner in resisting brutal crackdowns by autocratic regimes: the dropping of its aspirations for global jihad and its targeting of the West. Those are changes in the group’s ideology and strategy that would effectively call its raison d’etre and very existence into question.
The need for those changes is highlighted by the participation in the Libyan rebellion of fighters of Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). LIFG was formed in the 1990s in Afghanistan as an Al Qaeda adjunct. It later however broke with Al Qaeda as fighters abandoned the global jihad and aspiration to hit Western targets and returned to Libya to fight against the regime of Colonel Qaddafi.
Libya demonstrates that for Al Qaeda to regain ground in the Middle East and North Africa, it will have to understand the challenge it faces and confront them head on. It would mean recreating Al Qaeda in a mold diagonally opposed to what it is today: a softer, gentler organization that employs violence only in coordination with popular opposition forces and only when brutal crackdowns leave no other option.
That may be a tall order for Zawahiri. Outsiders who have met Zawahiri describe him as articulate, fluent in English and a gentleman. Within Al Qaeda, Zawahiri’s reputation is almost diametrically the opposite: a man who is dogmatic, brusque and authoritarian – hardly qualities that would project a softer, gentler image.
The crackdowns on protesters in the Arab world constitute a potential opportunity for Zawahiri. His record raises the question whether he is the man to exploit it.
(James M. Dorsey, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, is a senior researcher at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer. He can be reached via email at: questfze@gmail.com)
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