The Protean Enemy, By Jessica Stern, Foreign Affairs July/August 2003

In The Protean Enemy, Jessica Stern provides the outline of how Al Qaeda and its radical allies have transformed and renewed themselves in new and surprising ways in the face of the United States’ “War on Terror”. While the article offers some fascinating nuggets and insights into the world of radical Islam, the broader political picture seems less alarming than the author implies.

Al Qaeda’s apocalyptic political vision appears to have been adopted by groups that previously held more conventional goals. Traditional Al Qaeda allies such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan were the first to jettison their limited political objective—to overthrow oppressive secular rulers—for a broader anti-Western agenda, in part to secure funding from jihadi sources. Al Qaeda itself began as a conventional movement to help liberate Afghanistan, switching to the goal of ejecting US forces from the Middle East, before it initiated a global war against the West. As Stern writes, one of Al Qaeda’s aims “has become to restore the dignity of humiliated young Muslims. This idea is similar to the anti-colonialist theoretician Franz Fanon’s notion that violence is a “cleansing force” that frees oppressed youth from “inferiority complexes”, “despair”, and “inaction”, making them fearless and restoring their “self respect”. Al Qaeda’s real audience is not the West but the Muslim world.

Stern describes how the “War on Terror” has helped Al Qaeda expand its circle of friends, from the predictable collection of radical Sunni groups in south and south-east Asia to the more surprising case of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, a radical Shia group. While alliances with Sunni terrorists like the anti-Indian Lashkar-e-Taiba and Pakistan’s anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba is par for the course, the alleged tie to Hezbollah is disturbing, not least because of the Shia movement’s military prowess. Stern notes that the tri-border region of South America, where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet, is now a new clearinghouse for terror, a venue for Colombian Marxists, American white supremacists and Islamists like Hamas and Hezbollah to interact. Stern cites the well-connected Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir as saying that links between Saddam Hussain and Al Qaeda that may have been forged as early as 1998. Whether or not these links predated the 11 September attacks, Islamists and Baathists in Iraq appear now to have joined forces in Iraq to conduct an anti-American guerrilla campaign. While occasional cooperation with the armed wing of Hezbollah would be unsurprising, it seems less likely that the two have become become strategic allies, since such a partnership would endanger Hezbollah’s political interests in Lebanon and Iran, by inviting US retaliation.

More fascinating is Stern’s suggestion that Al Qaeda has adopted neo-Nazi activist Louis Beam’s the idea of “leaderless resistance”. This approach requires individuals and groups to operate independently of any central command, making it harder for law-and-order organizations to use electronic surveillance and human intelligence to identify the chain of command. A second neo-Nazi innovation adopted by Al Qaeda is using the internet to recruit educated and technologically savvy foot-soldiers, whose Western passports provide them with better access to potential targets. The question is whether Stern is conflating the general diffusion of insurgent skills and technology with real cooperation between two unlikely allies. One could, for instance, imagine radical animal rights activists or anti-globalization anarchists to behave similarly.

Stern also describes how Al Qaeda-affiliated groups may have sprung up in the US prison system, where converts to Islam offer a promising pool of recruits. (Fans of the HBO series “Oz” will grasp the irony of using neo-Nazi tactics to recruit black Muslim radicals from prison.) The Pakistan-based Jamaat-ul-Fuqra, a “terrorist group committed to purifying Islam through violence”, is said to be active in US prisons. Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted and killed while attempting to interview Jamaat leader Sheikh Gilani about his links to the alleged “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. Perhaps more disturbingly for Indians, Stern describes the strengthening connections between violent radicals and the Tablighi Jamaat. The Tablighi Jamaat, started out as a social revivalist organization like the Hindu Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Some of the better known Western jihadis such as Jose Padilla, Richard Reid and John Walker Lindh were indoctrinated by the Tablighi Jamaat before they moved on to military training organized by other groups in Afghanistan. The Jamaat is influential in Pakistan, and army officers affiliated with it were arrested in 1995 for plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. As many Indians know, the Tablighi Jamaat has also been involved in competitive mobilization with its Hindu counterparts in communally sensitive areas of India (such as Gujarat) which makes its apparent radicalization particularly worrisome for Indian social stability.

In general, while Stern’s article makes for fascinating reading, her tone tends to be alarmist and some of her political conclusions seem amenable to alternative explanations. While an Al Qaeda-Hezbollah alliance would be truly alarming, Stern doesn’t clarify whether or not this is a strategic alliance or more akin to the occasional cooperation intelligence agencies sometimes engage in. Do reported meetings between Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda imply close cooperation between the two, and possible involvement in the 11 September attacks, or was this an alliance of convenience driven by the likelihood of a US attack? Does the Tablighi Jamaat actively propagate armed resistance, or do its more extreme members gravitate to jihadi groups because they are already drawn to radicalism? The answers to these questions are in many ways subjective, and how we connect the dots really depends on our previous beliefs. Jessica Stern has an impressive store of knowledge about jihadi groups, but it remains to be seen whether the developments she describes add up to a renewed radical assault, or whether they are the predictable shifts of a movement that is on the defensive.

A. Dubey