The Unraveling
The jihadist revolt against bin Laden.
Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, The New Republic
Published: Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Courtesy of Noman Benotman
Noman Benotman on a Libyan government private jet bound for Tripoli on a secret mission in January 2007.Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman's arrival at the Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. The journey from Kabul had been hard, 17 hours in a Toyota pickup truck bumping along what passed as the main highway to southern Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2000, and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, had been invited by bin Laden to a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, the first of its kind since Al Qaeda had moved to Afghanistan in 1996. Benotman, the scion of an aristocratic family marginalized by Qaddafi, had known bin Laden from their days fighting the Afghan communist government in the early '90s, a period when Benotman established himself as a leader of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
The night of Benotman's arrival, bin Laden threw a lavish banquet in
the main hall of his compound, an unusual extravagance for the frugal
Al Qaeda leader. As bin Laden circulated, making small talk, large
dishes of rice and platters of whole roasted lamb were served to some
200 jihadists, many of whom had come from around the Middle East. "It
was one big reunification," Benotman recalls. "The leaders of most of
the jihadist groups in the Arab world were there and almost everybody
within Al Qaeda."
Bin Laden was trying to win over other militant groups to the global
jihad he had announced against the United States in 1998. Over the next
five days, bin Laden and his top aides, including Ayman Al Zawahiri,
met with a dozen or so jihadist leaders. They sat on the floor in a
circle with large cushions arrayed around them to discuss the future of
their movement. "This was a big strategy meeting," Benotman told one of
us late last year, in his first account of the meeting to a reporter.
"We talked about everything, where are we going, what are the lessons
of the past twenty years."
Despite the warm welcome, Benotman surprised his hosts with a bleak
assessment of their prospects. "I told them that the jihadist movement
had failed. That we had gone from one disaster to another, like in
Algeria, because we had not mobilized the people," recalls Benotman,
referring to the Algerian civil war launched by jihadists in the '90s
that left more than 100,000 dead and destroyed whatever local support
the militants had once enjoyed. Benotman also told bin Laden that the
Al Qaeda leader's decision to target the United States would only
sabotage attempts by groups like Benotman's to overthrow the secular
dictatorships in the Arab world. "We made a clear-cut request for him
to stop his campaign against the United States because it was going to
lead to nowhere," Benotman recalls, "but they laughed when I told them
that America would attack the whole region if they launched another
attack against it."
Benotman says that bin Laden tried to placate him with a promise: "I
have one more operation, and after that I will quit"--an apparent
reference to September 11. "I can't call this one back because that
would demoralize the whole organization," Benotman remembers bin Laden
saying.
After the attacks, Benotman, now living in London, resigned from the
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, realizing that the United States, in its
war on terrorism, would differentiate little between Al Qaeda and his
organization.
Benotman, however, did more than just retire. In January 2007, under a veil of secrecy, he flew to Tripoli in a private jet chartered by the Libyan government to try to persuade the imprisoned senior leadership of his former group to enter into peace negotiations with the regime. He was successful. This May, Benotman told us that the two parties could be as little as three months away from an agreement that would see the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group formally end its operations in Libya and denounce Al Qaeda's global jihad. At that point, the group would also publicly refute recent claims by Al Qaeda that the two organizations had joined forces.
This past November, Benotman went public with his own criticism of Al
Qaeda in an open letter to Zawahiri, absorbed and well-received, he
says, by the jihadist leaders in Tripoli. In the letter, Benotman
recalled his Kandahar warnings and called on Al Qaeda to end all
operations in Arab countries and in the West. The citizens of Western
countries were blameless and should not be the target of terrorist
attacks, argued Benotman, his refined English accent, smart suit,
trimmed beard, and easygoing demeanor making it hard to imagine that he
was once on the front lines in Afghanistan.
Although Benotman's public rebuke of Al Qaeda went unnoticed in the
United States, it received wide attention in the Arabic press. In
repudiating Al Qaeda, Benotman was adding his voice to a rising tide of
anger in the Islamic world toward Al Qaeda and its affiliates, whose
victims since September 11 have mostly been fellow Muslims.
Significantly, he was also joining a larger group of religious
scholars, former fighters, and militants who had once had great
influence over Al Qaeda's leaders, and who--alarmed by the targeting of
civilians in the West, the senseless killings in Muslim countries, and
Al Qaeda's barbaric tactics in Iraq--have turned against the
organization, many just in the past year.
After September 11, there was considerable fear in the West that we
were headed for a clash of civilizations with the Muslim world led by
bin Laden, who would entice masses of young Muslims into his jihadist
movement. But the religious leaders and former militants who are now
critiquing Al Qaeda's terrorist campaign--both in the Middle East and
in Muslim enclaves in the West-- make that less likely. The potential
repercussions for Al Qaeda cannot be underestimated because, unlike
most mainstream Muslim leaders, Al Qaeda's new critics have the
jihadist credentials to make their criticisms bite. "The starting point
has to be that jihad is legitimate, otherwise no one will listen, "
says Benotman, who sees the Iraqi insurgency as a legitimate jihad.
"The reaction [to my criticism of Al Qaeda] has been beyond
imagination. It has made the radicals very angry. They are very shaky
about it."
Why have clerics and militants once considered allies by Al Qaeda's
leaders turned against them? To a large extent, it is because Al Qaeda
and its affiliates have increasingly adopted the doctrine of takfir, by
which they claim the right to decide who is a "true" Muslim. Al Qaeda's
Muslim critics know what results from this takfiri view: First, the
radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals start
killing them. This fatal progression happened in both Algeria and Egypt
in the 1990s. It is now taking place even more dramatically in Iraq,
where Al Qaeda's suicide bombers have killed more than 10,000 Iraqis,
most of them targeted simply for being Shia. Recently, Al Qaeda in Iraq
has turned its fire on Sunnis who oppose its diktats, a fact not lost
on the Islamic world's Sunni majority.
Additionally, Al Qaeda and its affiliates have killed thousands of
Muslim civilians elsewhere since September 11: hundreds of ordinary
Afghans killed every year by the Taliban, dozens of Saudis killed by
terrorists since 2003, scores of Jordanians massacred at a wedding at a
U.S. hotel in Amman in November 2005. Even those sympathetic to Al
Qaeda have started to notice. "Excuse me Mr. Zawahiri but who is it who
is killing with Your Excellency's blessing, the innocents in Baghdad,
Morocco and Algeria?" one supporter asked in an online Q&A with Al
Qaeda's deputy leader in April that was posted widely on jihadist
websites. All this has created a dawning recognition among Muslims that
the ideological virus that unleashed September 11 and the terrorist
attacks in London and Madrid is the same virus now wreaking havoc in
the Muslim world.
Two months before Benotman's letter to Zawahiri was publicized in the Arab press, Al Qaeda received a blow from one of bin Laden's erstwhile heroes, Sheikh Salman Al Oudah, a Saudi religious scholar. Around the sixth anniversary of September 11, Al Oudah addressed Al Qaeda's leader on MBC, a widely watched Middle East TV network: "My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed ... in the name of Al Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions [of victims] on your back?"
What was noteworthy about Al Oudah's statement was that it was not
simply a condemnation of terrorism, or even of September 11, but that
it was a personal rebuke, which clerics in the Muslim world have shied
away from. In Saudi Arabia in February, one of us met with Al Oudah,
who rarely speaks to Western reporters. Dressed in the long black robe
fringed with gold that is worn by those accorded respect in Saudi
society, Al Oudah recalled meeting with bin Laden--a "simple man
without scholarly religious credentials, an attractive personality who
spoke well," he said--in the northern Saudi region of Qassim in 1990.
Al Oudah explained that he had criticized Al Qaeda for years but until
now had not directed it at bin Laden himself: "Most religious scholars
have directed criticism at acts of terrorism, not a particular person.
... I don't expect a positive effect on bin Laden personally as a
result of my statement. It's really a message to his followers."
Al Oudah's rebuke was also significant because he is considered one of
the fathers of the Sahwa, the fundamentalist awakening movement that
swept through Saudi Arabia in the '80s. His sermons against the U.S.
military presence in Saudi Arabia following Saddam Hussein's 1990
invasion of Kuwait helped turn bin Laden against the United States. And
bin Laden told one of us in 1997 that Al Oudah's 1994 imprisonment by
the Saudi regime was one of the reasons he was calling for attacks on
U.S. targets. Al Oudah is also one of 26 Saudi clerics who, in 2004,
handed down a religious ruling urging Iraqis to fight the U.S.
occupation of their country. He is, in short, not someone Al Qaeda can
paint as an American sympathizer or a tool of the Saudi government.
Tellingly, Al Qaeda has not responded to Al Oudah's critique, but the
research organization Political Islam Online tracked postings on six
Islamist websites and the websites of Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya TV
networks in the week after Al Oudah's statements; it found that more
than two-thirds of respondents reacted favorably. Al Oudah's large
youth following in the Muslim world has helped his anti-Al Qaeda
message resonate. In 2006, for instance, he addressed a gathering of
around 20,000 young British Muslims in London's East End. "Oudah is
well known by all the youth. It's almost a celebrity culture out there.
... He has definitely helped to offset Al Qaeda's rhetoric," one young
imam told us.
More doubt about Al Qaeda was planted in the Muslim world when Sayyid
Imam Al Sharif, the ideological godfather of Al Qaeda, sensationally
withdrew his support in a book written last year from his prison cell
in Cairo. Al Sharif, generally known as "Dr. Fadl," was an architect of
the doctrine of takfir, arguing that Muslims who did not support armed
jihad or who participated in elections were kuffar, unbelievers.
Although Dr. Fadl never explicitly called for such individuals to be
killed, his takfiri treatises from 1988 and 1993 gave theological cover
to jihadists targeting civilians.
Dr. Fadl was also Zawahiri's mentor. Like his protégé, he
is a skilled surgeon and moved in militant circles when he was a member
of Cairo University's medical faculty in the '70s. In 1981, when Anwar
Sadat was assassinated and Zawahiri was jailed in connection with the
plot, Dr. Fadl fled to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he operated on wounded
mujahedin fighting the Soviets. After Zawahiri's release from jail, he
joined Dr. Fadl in Peshawar, where they established a new branch of the
"Jihad group" that would later morph into Al Qaeda. Osama Rushdi, a
former Egyptian jihadist then living in Peshawar, recalls that there
was little doubt about Dr. Fadl's importance: "He was like the big boss
in the Mafia in Chicago." And bin Laden also owed a deeply personal
debt to Dr. Fadl; in Sudan in 1993, the doctor operated on Al Qaeda's
leader after he was hurt in an assassination attempt.
So it was an unwelcome surprise for Al Qaeda's leaders when Dr. Fadl's
new book, Rationalization of Jihad, was serialized in an independent
Egyptian newspaper in November. The incentive for writing the book, he
explained, was that "jihad ... was blemished with grave Sharia
violations during recent years. ... [N]ow there are those who kill
hundreds, including women and children, Muslims and non Muslims in the
name of Jihad!" Dr Fadl ruled that Al Qaeda's bombings in Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, and elsewhere were illegitimate and that terrorism against
civilians in Western countries was wrong. He also took on Al Qaeda's
leaders directly in an interview with the Al Hayat newspaper. "Zawahiri
and his Emir bin Laden [are] extremely immoral," he said. "I have
spoken about this in order to warn the youth against them, youth who
are seduced by them, and don't know them."
Dr. Fadl's harsh words attracted attention throughout the
Arabic-speaking world; even a majority of Zawahiri's own Jihad group
jailed in Egyptian prisons signed on and promised to end their armed
struggle. In December, Zawahiri released an audiotape lambasting his
former mentor, accusing him of being in league with the "bloodthirsty
betrayer" Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak; and, in a 200-page book
titled The Exoneration, published in March, he replied at greater
length, portraying Dr. Fadl as a prisoner trying to curry favor with
Egypt's security services and the author of "a desperate attempt (under
American sponsorship) to confront the high tide of the jihadist
awakening."
Ultimately, the ideological battle against Al Qaeda in the West may be won in places such as Leyton and Walthamstow, largely Muslim enclaves in east London, whose residents included five of the eight alleged British Al Qaeda operatives currently on trial for plotting to bring down U.S.-bound passenger jets in 2006. It is in Britain that many leaders of the jihadist movement have settled as political refugees, and "Londonistan" has long been a key barometer of future Islamist trends. There are probably more supporters of Al Qaeda in Britain than any other Western country, and, because most British Muslims are of Pakistani origin, British militants easily can obtain terrorist training in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Al Qaeda's main operational hub since September 11. And now, because it is difficult for Al Qaeda to send Middle Eastern passport holders to the United States, the organization has particularly targeted radicalized Muslims in Britain for recruitment. So the nexus between militant British Muslims, Pakistan, and Al Qaeda has become the leading terrorist threat to the United States.
Over the last half-year, we have made several trips to London to
interview militants who have defected from Al Qaeda, retired mujahedin,
Muslim community leaders, and members of the security services. Most
say that, when Al Qaeda's bombs went off in London in 2005, sympathy
for the terrorists evaporated.
In Leyton, the neighborhood mosque is on the main road, a street of
terraced houses, halal food joints, and South Asian hairdressers.
Around 1,000 people attend Friday prayers there each week.
Usama Hassan, one of the imams at the mosque, has a Ph.D. in artificial
intelligence from Imperial College in London, read theoretical physics
at Cambridge, and now teaches at Middlesex University. But he also
trained in a jihadist camp in Afghanistan in the '90s and, until a few
years ago, was openly supportive of bin Laden. And, in another unusual
twist, he is now one of the most prominent critics of Al Qaeda. Over
several cups of Earl Grey in the tea room next to the mosque,
Hassan--loquacious and intelligent, every bit the university
lecturer--explained how he had switched sides.
Raised in London by Pakistani parents, Hassan arrived in Cambridge in
1989 and, feeling culturally isolated, fell in with Jamiat Ihyaa
Minhaaj Al Sunnah (JIMAS), a student organization then supportive of
jihads in Palestine, Kashmir, and Afghanistan. In December 1990, Hassan
traveled to Afghanistan, where he briefly attended an Arab jihadist
camp. He was shown how to use Kalashnikovs and M-16s and was taken to
the front lines, where a shell landed near his group's position. "My
feeling was, if I was killed, then brilliant, I would be a martyr," he
recalls. Later, as a post-graduate student in London, Hassan played a
lead role in the student Islamic Society, then a hotbed of radical
activism. "At the time I was very anti-American. ... It was all black
and white for us. I used to be impressed with bin Laden. There was no
other leadership in the Muslim world standing up for Muslims." When
September 11 happened, Hassan says the view in his circle was that "Al
Qaeda had given one back to George Bush."
Still, as Al Qaeda continued to target civilians for attacks, Hassan
began to rethink. His employment by an artificial intelligence
consulting firm also integrated him back toward mainstream British
life. "It was a slow process and involved a lot of soul-searching. ...
Over time, I became convinced that bin Laden was dangerous and an
extremist." The July 2005 bombings in London were the clincher. "I was
devastated by the attack," he says. "My feeling was, how dare they
attack my city."
Three days after the London bombings, the Leyton mosque held an
emergency meeting; about 300 people attended. "We explained that these
acts were evil, that they were haram," recalls Hassan. It was not the
easiest of crowds; one youngster stormed out, shouting, "As far as I'm
concerned, fifty dead kuffar is not a problem."
In Friday sermons since then, Hassan says that he has hammered home the
difference between legitimate jihad and terrorism, despite a death
threat from pro-Al Qaeda militants: "I think I'm listened to by the
young because I have street cred from having spent time in a [jihadist]
training camp. ... Jihadist experience is especially important for
young kids because otherwise they tend to think he is just a sell-out
who is a lot of talk." This spring, Hassan helped launch the Quilliam
Foundation, an organization set up by former Islamist extremists to
counter radicalism by making speeches to young Muslims in Great Britain
about how they had been duped into embracing hatred of the West.
Such counter-radicalization efforts will help lower the pool of potential recruits for Al Qaeda--the only way the organization can be defeated in the long term. But the reality facing British counterterrorism officials, such as Detective Inspector Robert Lambert, the recently departed head of the Metropolitan police's Muslim Contact Unit, is that "Al Qaeda values dozens of recruits more than hundreds of supporters." In order to target the most radical extremists, the Metropolitan police have backed the efforts of a Muslim community group, the Active Change Foundation, based around a gym in Walthamstow run by Hanif and Imtiaz Qadir, two brothers of Kashmiri descent.
Hanif Qadir, now 42, revealed to us that he himself was recruited by Al
Qaeda after the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Jihadist
recruiters in east London, no doubt noting wealth, sought out Qadir,
who had earned enough money running a car repair shop to buy a
Rolls-Royce and live in some style. "The guy who handled me was a
Syrian called Abu Sufiyan. ... I'm sure he was from Al Qaeda," recalls
Qadir. "He was good at telling you what you wanted to hear ... he
touched all my emotional buttons." Qadir agreed to join. He drew up a
will and, in December 2002, bought a first-class ticket to Pakistan.
But, as the truck he was in crossed the dirt roads into Afghanistan, a
chance occurrence changed his life: A truck, carrying wounded fighters,
approached them from the other direction. Among them was a young
Punjabi boy whose white robes were stained with blood. "These are evil
people," another of the wounded shouted. "[W]e came here to fight
jihad, but they are just using us as cannon fodder." Qadir's truckload
of wannabe jihadists made a u-turn. "That kid, he was like an angel. He
kicked me back into reality," recalls Qadir. "When I landed back in the
U.K., I wanted to find [the Al Qaeda recruiters] and cut their heads
off."
Qadir never found them, but he became determined to stop others like
him from being recruited. In 2004, he and his brother opened the gym
and community center in the Walthamstow neighborhood of east London.
Soon, hundreds of young Muslims were attending.
The scale of the challenge was quickly clear. Soon after the center
opened, he got wind that pro-Al Qaeda militants were secretly booking
rooms there for their meetings. Worse, in the summer of 2006, several
of those arrested in connection with the Al Qaeda airlines plot,
including alleged ringleader Abdulla Ahmed Ali, were found to have
attended his gym. But, rather than shutting the radicals out, Qadir
continued to allow them to meet. "Sometimes our youngsters get into
debates with these people, for example on jihad, and make them look
ridiculous in front of their followers," he says. Qadir believes his
approach is finally starting to pay off: "The extremists are burning
out: The number of radicals in Walthamstow is diminishing, not growing."
At another mosque in London, the Muslim Brotherhood joined forces with
the British authorities to reclaim the institution from pro-Al Qaeda
militants. The Brotherhood is the most powerful Islamist group in the
Arab world, with chapters throughout Europe and North America. It has
long opposed Al Qaeda's jihad, a stance that so angered Zawahiri that
he published a book, The Bitter Harvest, condemning the organization in
1991. From the late '90s, the Finsbury Park mosque in London had been
dominated by the pro-Al Qaeda cleric Abu Hamza Al Masri. During that
time, few selfrespecting jihadists traveling through London passed up
the free accommodation in its basement. Visitors included Zacarias
Moussaoui, the so-called "twentieth hijacker" of the September 11 plot,
and Richard Reid, who tried to down a U.S.-bound airliner with a shoe
bomb in December 2001.
In 2003, British police shut the mosque, but Abu Hamza's followers
continued to have a strong presence in the area. In February 2005,
police helped broker a deal for the mosque to re-open under the
leadership of the local chapter of the Muslim Association of Britain
(MAB), a Muslim Brotherhood group. No sooner had the moderates gained
control of the Finsbury Park mosque than they were confronted by Abu
Hamza's angry followers, led by the pugnacious Atilla Ahmet, who calls
himself "the number-one Al Qaeda in Europe" and who, in October, pled
guilty to providing British Muslims with terrorist training. "They
brought sticks and knives with them," recalls Kamal El Helbawy,
spokesman for the new trustees at the mosque.
Undeterred, a few days later Helbawy gave the first Friday sermon,
explaining that this was a new start for the mosque and stressing how
important it was for Muslims to live in harmony with their neighbors.
Detective Inspector Lambert, the Metropolitan police officer who helped
broker the takeover, says that, because of its social welfare work and
its track record supporting the Palestinian cause, the MAB has "big
street cred in the area and [has] made an impact on Abu Hamza's young
followers."
Salman Al Oudah, the Saudi preacher, spoke at the re-opened mosque in
2006, as has Abdullah Anas, an Algerian former mujahedin fighter based
in London who has been a critic of Al Qaeda for years. Anas worked with
bin Laden in Pakistan during the '80s, fought in Afghanistan for almost
a decade against the communists, and married the daughter of a
Palestinian cleric who is still lionized as the spiritual godfather of
the jihadist movement, the most radical wing of which would morph into
Al Qaeda. Anas told us that his critiques of Al Qaeda were not
well-received in 2003, but that, "in the last two or three years, there
has been a change in opinion," citing the Madrid and London bombings as
turning points. In 2006, Anas went public with his criticisms of Al
Qaeda, in an interview with Asharq Al Awsat, one of the leading
newspapers in the Arab world, criticizing the London subway bombings as
"criminal deeds ... prohibited by the Sharia."
Detective Inspector Lambert told us preachers like Anas and Al Oudah
"can't be discounted. ... When you have Muslim leaders who are attacked
both by Al Qaeda supporters and by commentators who oppose engagement
[with Islamists], then they are in a useful position."
In December, Al Qaeda's campaign of violence reached new depths in the eyes of many Muslims, with a plot to launch attacks in Saudi Arabia while millions were gathered for the Hajj. Saudi security services arrested 28 Al Qaeda militants in Mecca, Medina, and Riyadh, whose targets allegedly included religious leaders critical of Al Qaeda, among them the Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abd Al Aziz Al Sheikh, who responded to the plot by ruling that Al Qaeda operatives should be punished by execution, crucifixion, or exile. Plotting such attacks during the Hajj could not have been more counterproductive to Al Qaeda's cause, says Abdullah Anas, who was making the pilgrimage to Mecca himself. "People over there ... were very angry. The feeling was, how was it possible for Muslims to do that? I still can't quite believe it myself. The mood was one of shock, real shock."
Is Al Qaeda going to dissipate as a result of the criticism from its
former mentors and allies? Despite the recent internal criticism,
probably not in the short term. As one of us reported in The New
Republic early last year, Al Qaeda, on the verge of defeat in 2002, has
regrouped and is now able to launch significant terrorist operations in
Europe ("Where You Bin?" January 29, 2007). And, last summer, U.S.
intelligence agencies judged that Al Qaeda had "regenerated its [U.S.]
Homeland attack capability" in Pakistan's tribal areas. Since then, Al
Qaeda and the Taliban have only entrenched their position further,
launching a record number of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past
year. Afghanistan, Algeria, and Iraq also saw record numbers of suicide
attacks in 2007 (though the group's capabilities have deteriorated in
Iraq of late). Meanwhile, Al Qaeda is still able to find recruits in
the West. In November, Jonathan Evans, the head of Britain's domestic
intelligence agency MI5, said that record numbers of U.K. residents are
now supportive of Al Qaeda, with around 2,000 posing a "direct threat
to national security and public safety." That means that Al Qaeda will
threaten the United States and its allies for many years to come.
However, encoded in the DNA of apocalyptic jihadist groups like Al
Qaeda are the seeds of their own long-term destruction: Their victims
are often Muslim civilians; they don't offer a positive vision of the
future (but rather the prospect of Taliban-style regimes from Morocco
to Indonesia); they keep expanding their list of enemies, including any
Muslim who doesn't precisely share their world view; and they seem
incapable of becoming politically successful movements because their
ideology prevents them from making the real-world compromises that
would allow them to engage in genuine politics.
Which means that the repudiation of Al Qaeda's leaders by its former
religious, military, and political guides will help hasten the
implosion of the jihadist terrorist movement. As Churchill remarked
after the battle of El Alamein in 1942, which he saw as turning the
tide in World War II, "[T]his is not the end. It is not even the
beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
Noman Benotman, bin Laden's Libyan former companion-in-arms, assesses
that Al Qaeda's recent resurgence, which he says has been fueled by the
Iraq war, will not last. "There may be a wave of violence right now,
but ... in five years, Al Qaeda will be more isolated than ever. No one
will give a toss about them." And, given the religio-ideological basis
of Al Qaeda's jihad, the religious condemnation now being offered by
scholars and fighters once close to the organization is arguably the
most important development in stopping the group's spread since
September 11. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell
tacitly acknowledged this in his yearly report to Congress in February,
when he testified that, "Over the past year, a number of religious
leaders and fellow extremists who once had significant influence with
Al Qaeda have publicly criticized it and its affiliates for the use of
violent tactics."
Most of these clerics and former militants, of course, have not
suddenly switched to particularly progressive forms of Islam or fallen
in love with the United States (all those we talked to saw the Iraqi
insurgency as a defensive jihad), but their anti-Al Qaeda positions are
making Americans safer. If this is a war of ideas, it is their ideas,
not the West's, that matter. The U.S. government neither has the
credibility nor the Islamic knowledge to effectively debate Al Qaeda's
leaders, but the clerics and militants who have turned against them do.
Juan Zarate, a former federal prosecutor and a key counterterrorism
adviser to President Bush, acknowledged as much in a speech in April
when he said, "These challenges from within Muslim communities and even
extremist circles will be insurmountable at the end of the day for Al
Qaeda."
These new critics, in concert with mainstream Muslim leaders, have
created a powerful coalition countering Al Qaeda's ideology. According
to Pew polls, support for Al Qaeda has been dropping around the Muslim
world in recent years. The numbers supporting suicide bombings in
Indonesia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh, for instance, have dropped by half
or more in the last five years. In Saudi Arabia, only 10 percent now
have a favorable view of Al Qaeda, according to a December poll by
Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based think tank. Following a wave
of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year, support for suicide
operations amongst Pakistanis has dropped to 9 percent (it was 33
percent five years ago), while favorable views of bin Laden in the
North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, around where he is believed
to be hiding, have plummeted to 4 percent from 70 percent since August
2007.
Unsurprisingly, Al Qaeda's leaders have been thrown on the defensive.
In December, bin Laden released a tape that stressed that "the Muslim
victims who fall during the operations against the infidel Crusaders
... are not the intended targets." Bin Laden warned the former
mujahedin now turning on Al Qaeda that, whatever their track records as
jihadists, they had now committed one of the "nullifiers of Islam,"
which is helping the "infidels against the Muslims."
Kamal El Helbawy, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who helped bring in
moderates at the Finsbury Park mosque in London, believes that Al
Qaeda's days may be numbered: "No government, no police force, is
achieving what these [religious] scholars are achieving. To defeat
terrorism, to convince the radicals ... you have to persuade them that
theirs is not the path to paradise."
Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank are research fellows at New York
University's Center on Law and Security. Peter Bergen is also a senior
fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Osama Bin
Laden I Know.