Al-Qaeda and the Ideological War
Assumptions about al-Qaeda have a bad tendency to turn out wrong. Too many US
security analysts underestimated the group before the 9/11 attacks, and then, not
surprisingly, perhaps overestimated it afterwards. In recent years, inside and outside the
US government, there was a new reigning assumption about al-Qaeda: that the appeal of
its Salafi-jihadi ideology would decline as its ability to conduct terrorist attacks was
eroded by intelligence, law enforcement and military operations. Amid what appeared to
be a rising backlash against bin Laden’s outfit among Muslims worldwide –seen most
vividly in the Sunni rebellion in Iraq and the denunciation of al-Qaeda by high-profile
former Salafist ideologues such as Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, alias Dr Fadl–, the assumption
that al-Qaeda was growing operationally weak and ideologically moribund seemed
sound.
It now seems that this assumption was quite wrong. In a closed session of international
intelligence and counterterrorism officials held in 2009, a very high-ranking US
intelligence officer provided a simple, counterintuitive observation. Bin Laden may now
be making infrequent filmed statements instead of planning and executing attacks, but
those statements and the ideology behind them have grown in importance. Consequently,
the US intelligence community is starting to see the ideological threat as potentially a
greater danger to US interests than actual al-Qaeda killers.
If true, this thesis renders moot a rather unseemly debate that continues to rage within the
counterterrorism community. On one side is Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and
former CIA case officer, and on the other Bruce Hoffman, a professor in the Security
Studies Program at Georgetown University. These two came to theoretical blows in 2008
over their assessments of the state of al-Qaeda. Sageman argues that the phenomenon of
‘leaderless jihad’, wherein individuals and groups become radicalised and commit
terrorism with no al-Qaeda guidance at all, has supplanted the group itself as a threat.23
Hoffman argues, to the contrary, that bin Laden and company still pose the gravest of
threats, that the operational core of al-Qaeda retains high levels of command and control,
and that leaderless jihad is but a myth.24
It now seems that both were mistaken. Open-source information, along with the US
intelligence community’s recent assessment, paints a different picture: al-Qaeda is
operationally degraded but ideologically ascendant, with ‘al-Qaeda Central’ continuing to
exercise a significant degree of control over the shaping and dissemination of its Salafi-
Jihadi message, and with the coordinated acts of violence against civilians that it does
manage to carry out continuing to play an important role. Al-Qaeda does not possess the