Al-Qaeda and America's ideological sin

Al-Qaeda emerged as the diabolical mastermind of anti-American terrorist violence for the first time with the August 7, 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya.

 The then US president Bill Clinton retaliated by firing cruise missiles from ships in the Indian Ocean at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. A chemical factory in Sudan was also bombed. The factory-owner won a suit worth a few million dollars against the US government in a New York court for the damage caused.

 Then followed the emblematic terror act in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, and the al-Qaeda emerged as the deadly enemy of the lone superpower. This time, the then US president George W Bush declared his intention of “smoking him (al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden) out”.

When US armies overran Afghanistan in November-December, 2001, the Taliban tactically melted away, but the al-Qaeda was not decimated. In May, 2011, Osama was ambushed in a house in Abbotabad, Pakistan, gunned down and buried at sea in order to prevent the emergence of a Laden cult!

And now, 15 years after the first al-Qaeda attack in Africa, 12 years after the 9/11 attacks, the US government has temporarily shut missions in Pakistan and West Asia fearing attacks from the group again.

Apart from the core mother organisation, there are apparently now two al-Qaeda affiliates — al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and Al Nusra Front in Syria.

America’s war on global terrorism, which is in reality a US-al-Qaeda war, continues. The others have been willy-nilly drawn into it. The Taliban gave shelter to al-Qaeda but there is no proof that it in any way abetted al-Qaeda’s terror acts. That is why, the Americans are willing to negotiate with the Taliban because they accept that Taliban and al-Qaeda are separate entities.

Strategy and security experts from the Western world and India have expended enormous intellectual energies to define and describe al-Qaeda’s terror challenge to the civilised world. Surprisingly, some simple questions have not been asked. What are the origins of al-Qaeda? What is its real organisational strength? Why is the organisation surviving even after it has been decapitated?
Al-Qaeda should have been eliminated in Afghanistan in 2001 or after the killing of Osama in Pakistan in 2011. If it is still functional, one must ask why.

Have the Americans and the rest of the civilised world not understood the al-Qaeda phenomenon? Or are acts of terrorist violence being attributed to the al-Qaeda because it simplifies description? No one seems to realise that the antibiotic of counter-terrorism through war and propaganda is not working and that there’s a need to return to the drawing board and try to grasp the problem all over again. Pointing to traces of al-Qaeda in all acts of terrorism is a fruitless exercise because it does not seem to point to meaningful action. Terror experts have become lazy.

In an ideological war, jihadi terrorism is a valid counter-point. But to identify it with a single organisation and with one man distorts strategic perception and could even prove to be delusionary. The challenges that al-Qaeda poses to the US will become manageable if it is recognised that not all enemies of the US carry the al-Qaeda identity card. Pakistanis, Iraqis, Egyptians, Iranians and even Turks dislike, oppose and even hate the United States for their own reasons and they have nothing to do with al-Qaeda.

 In order to deal with jihadi terrorism, US strategists and securitywallahs may also have to own up to the original American sin that in order to fight the Communists and other socialist variants, they spawned jihadi terrorism that has turned into the proverbial Frankenstein’s creature, a monster that takes protean forms and gives no respite to the US.

Unless American ideologues admit to their complicity in creating jihadi terrorism it will not be possible to find a way to counter it effectively. The Americans will have to learn that they should desist from financing and arming Islamist fanatical groups, including states like Pakistan, to corner their own imagined rivals and opponents and enemies like the former Soviet Union and petty tyrants like Saddam Hussein and Bashar al Assad. The Americans will have to change their political way if the world is to be rid of jihadi terror.

Rao Jr is editorial consultant with dna