'Each man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world'
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

'Artists are tricky fellows sir, forever shaping the world according to some design of their own'
-- Jonathan Strange, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Sunday 30 January 2011

Egypt and the Monopoly on Violence

States, 'lay claim to the "monopoly of legitimate physical violence" within a particular territory'
-- Max Weber, 'Politics as a Vocation', R. Livingstone (trans.), The Vocation Lectures (Hackett publ.), 2004, p.33


The police have retreated from the front-line of the protests as the army step in to protect key installations including the Egyptian Museum and gangs have apparently tried to free inmates in at least four jails across the country. As an internal instrument of repression, and tool of the government, the police are seen as directly responsible for prosecuting the internal clampdown on dissidents over the last thirty years. Egyptian jails are notorious for systemic, inhumane violence against domestic inmates. 


So the events of the fifth night come as little surprise. With the government's grip on the country slipping, the police fear retribution and retaliation will come as the power transfers to the population in that moment following the collapse of government. The police have dropped back to their departments, manning these buildings in force. 


The fourth part of the equation of state is coming into force. First the population, then the government, the police, now the army. It is important to see how the army are perceived in Egypt. Whilst the police are a much despised government tool of repression, the army represent a cohesive force that protect against external threat and thus garner much more support among the population. Correctly, the army have been conducing a show of force in the hours before the curfew on the sixth day, but they are not as yet presenting offensive measures against the protestors. 


This throws the nation into a new dynamic. The government has now lost its monopoly on violence, since the police have retreated, leading to anarchy and bands of civilians grouped together to defend property. The army now operate in the space between government and population. They can open dialogue with either the protestors or the state, but their support is the sine qua non of a return to order from this Hobbesian 'state of nature' that threatens the country. As of today, with Mubharak apparently sheltering at an army base, it appears that the army and government are operating together but that relationship can change. 


A second scenario is plausible - the army could assume power, preventing the 'void' which Secretary of State Clinton warns against in an interview with Fox News. El Baradei needs to provide a more visual figurehead over the next twenty-four hours and begin talks with the army. Large scale retribution against the police could create a long-term destabilisation of civil society. Expect the consequences of these prison break-out attempts to receive larger analysis in the world media in the coming weeks. 


Unnerving to the population - the government has shut down the office of al-Jazeera in the capital and revoked its license to operate in the country. Protestors fear this is to limit the media exposure over the coming night to a ferocious clamp down on rioters from the army, who have moved in force to the capital ahead of the 8pm curfew. Lack of access to internet and mobile networks further serves to limit the dissemination of information, especially visual, from the cities to the world media. 

Saturday 29 January 2011

Davos Looks On

Not afraid to use Wikileaks when it suits, The Daily Telegraph has muddied the waters of the Egyptian protests: in today’s paper they lead with a story about cables showing US government support for a young Egyptian dissident. No motivation for this apparent move has been given, but it does place American backing behind both groups and serves only as pro-Western propaganda – now, which ever side emerges with more credibility or control, the US can acknowledge its positive, proactive role in proceedings.

Mubharak gave a national televised address yesterday – in a US presidential style visual – that could not be streamed over the internet or to mobile phones, since the government had closed all five national internet service providers to internal traffic. The five nodes still processed traffic through the country, but wary of the cohesive, aggregating snowball effect of social media here, it also closed mobile networks across the country. The Street reacted to the speech with apathy – believing that it did not go far enough in its concessions. For it to take thirty years and mass rioting for the president to now mention the economy and corruption appeared to many that at least the popular aggravation has worked to some extent and more can be expected today.

The president is playing a one-time game – the measures he has introduced here in an attempt to quell the riots will not be successful again. Internet rerouters through proxy servers or wireless grids will develop in response to this action when the internal network is finally restored. And the economy suffers when business cannot access the information superhighway – imagine your own economy if national access to the Internet was shut down for a number of days. When protestors are incensed at corruption, low living standards and denial of human rights, access to the Internet can be seen as a freedom of sorts. This denial of service attack from president to populus is a one-time deal – he either quenches the protests or he goes. And what will be left? This national discontent will scare investors and in the short-term, economic prosperity may plummet to new depths. 

Coincidentally, the World Economic Forum at Davos has been convened whilst the riots are ongoing. At Davos, as Peston notes, there are a total of US$3 Trillion worth of investment funds – heads of state become ‘super-salesmen’ in an attempt to procure some of these liquidity injections for their own national infrastructure and corporations. What can have a worse effect on an already disenfranchised population than the advertisement that the Middle East is currently sending out across the international airwaves? 


Riots in Jordan, Lebanon and a complex series of protests in Yemen, with the latter being subject to an ‘Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’ warning to other Sunni Muslims of a Christian-Shi’ia pact over the country. The regime is back by the United States, even though it is the second poorest (after Mauritania) country in the Middle East – the role of Islamist and Jihadi elements in the country has meant that the US has sought to stabilise the weak government there. A ‘senior Yemeni official’ survived an ambush on Friday suggesting that Islamist and Jihadi elements are stepping up their campaign against the government to coincide with the popular protests across the Middle East. These mixed messages are what the Islamists want to conflate – popular discontent juxtaposed to militant religious grievances. 

Friday 28 January 2011

Egypt is not Tunisia

Belgium doesn’t matter,’ Kenneth Waltz once quipped, asserting the predominance of some state-actors over others in the international system.
The world media documented the Tunisian ‘revolution’ (BBC World Service Podcast) as a curious onlooker – a detached First World audience revelling in the fog of Maghreb politics. Jihadi and Islamist entities attempted to associate themselves with the popular demonstrations – this was an apostate regime with Western backing, thus commensurate with most jihadi rhetoric but this is about base Fukuyama-esque principles of material prosperity and recognition – religion is absent here.

The Jihadis operate in a bipartite system – there being a dynamic only between the individual and God – all other aspects of the world are deemed subordinate to this fundamental relationship. Islamists, rather than being an umbrella group incorporating the Jihadis, have a statist agenda that sees a tripartite relationship between the individual, the state, and God. But these current protests are between the individual and the state; secular anger against tyrannical regimes overseeing rising poverty.  

Events in Egypt have engaged the West: to paraphrase Robert Fisk, more people go on holiday to Egypt than Tunisia, so events there have greater resonance for a Western audience. Action there has engaged policymakers, too. Sitting astride the Maghreb and Middle East. Egypt was the setting in the 1950s for Nassar’s unique brand of pan-Arab nationalism – so anathema was his government to Western policy in the region that 1956 saw the Suez Crisis unfold, a military action that led to the resignation of Anthony Eden as British prime minister. 

Today, other countries hold more sway but Egypt receives the second largest aid package from the USA to any country in the Middle East (second only to Israel) and Mubharak is a key US ally in a volatile region. Again this has the makings of an Islamist uprising – an apostate ruler backed by the United States – but this is once more a popular protest against tyranny. Sallust writing in the first century B.C observed that, ‘few men desire freedom, the majority want nothing more than fair masters.’ Islamist elements in Egypt, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement now almost a century old, will try to hijack the protests or juxtaposition the popular anger to its own, and unlike Tunisia, Islamist groups are well-embedded there.

But Mubharak, having ruled for over three decades, understands the nature of power. Recognising the unique role of social media in organising protest, users have experienced profound problems over the past 24 hours accessing the Internet/Social Media sites. In a sign of the potential magnitude of the unrest, Mohammed el Baradei has flown back to spearhead the protests, using twitter (in Arabic and English) to project his message to the world mediaThis will resolve if, or when, the Mubharak regime loses the monopoly on violence – in Weberian terms, the state’s authority rests on its monopoly on violence. Crackdowns thus far indicate that Mubharak still has control, but the army and police are key, particularly in Egypt where the police hold disproportionate civil power compared to the army.

In Jordan there have been protests against the regime, with economic disparity between rich and poor being the main focus of anger and resentment. Jordan is another key ally in the region with an extremely able intelligence service. The Muslim Brotherhood has led protests but the crux of discontent is economic, rather than Islamist
In Lebanon, there has been widespread protest against Hizbollah, who have toppled the three year-old unity government and ousted the Prime Minster Saad Hariri in favour of a Hizbollah-endorsed PM. The causal issue was the expected announcement of a UN Tribunal indicting three members of Hizbollah over the killing of Saad Hariri’s father, Rafiq, in 2005. In 2006, Hizballah received a huge boost in popularity following its battle against Israel in the 2006 (See, for instance, the poll numbers in Shibley Telhami, “2008 Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll,” Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland with Zogby International, 95‐97) but this ostensibly shadow government has lost popular support since its apogee in 2006 and risks large-scale alienation of the people.

In 2003, Philip H Gordon wrote an elegant article for Survival entitled Bush’s Middle East Vision which deconstructed the United States’ goal of coercing the democratic wave in the region. But it seems that Western images have little to do with this new popular discontent. Western back rulers are suffering Arab ire, seen as puppets that grown rich and disconnected from their people while the Street becomes increasingly disenfranchised. Neither is the anger religious. Religious vehicles may ride the wave, but el Baradei is a man of science, former head of the IAEA who often took on the US head-on and thus has impeccable credentials on the Arab Street.

Caution in analysis must be urged. In the aftermath of the Tunisian uprising, there were media elements already referring to the new ‘democracy’, but we are in a transition government that seems to favour retribution over reconciliation, and more bloodletting seems likely to follow. Transition governments, by their very name, suggest something ephemeral: the Transition Federal Government in Somalia, for example, is beset by Islamist forces (Al-Shabab; Hizb al-Islam) and has had to align with the Sufi umbrella organisation, Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jama (ASWJ). 


Follow: 

@ElBaradei

www.taghyeer.net

Thursday 27 January 2011

Review

Moghadam and Fishman eds. (2010) Self-Inflicted Wounds: Debates and Divisions within al-Qa’ida and its Periphery, Harmony Project, Combating Terrorism Center, West Point

The Enemy Within

‘Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win’
-- Sun Tzu

Nearly eight years into the global war on terrorism, we have yet to engage successfully in the battle of ideas against radical Islamism. There is a growing recognition among counterterrorism specialists that the current struggle with al-Qa’ida must involve an ideological component to deprive it of supporters and recruits. An inside perspective on how extremists view themselves and their struggles, as well as a nuanced understanding of the ideological fissures that divide them, are steps in this effort.
-- Hafez, Self-Inflicted Wounds: Debates and Divisions with al-Qa’ida and its Periphery, p.41

Audrey Cronin’s 2008 Adelphi Paper highlighted al-Qaeda’s ‘most potent source of strength as its powerful image and carefully crafted narrative.’ It has seemed that the West was complicit, after 9.11 in feeding the brand. Only has recent scholarly endeavour focused on analysing jihadi discourse – obtaining, translating and analysing the wealth of data that exists, and thus attempting to draw inferences from what is found there. Cronin’s paper turned the long war notion on its head when she stated that, ‘focusing on how terrorism ends is the best way to avoid being manipulated by it.’

This latest CTC volume from the Harmony Project builds on Vahid Brown’s important 2007 work, Cracks in the Foundation: Leadership Schisms in al-Qa’ida, 1989-2006, that served to reorient scholarly focus; rather than edifying, homogenising and perceiving al-Qaeda as monolithic, ubiquitous in the Muslim world, Brown (a scholar of Bihai systems of thought) sought to deconstruct the entity through painstaking discourse analysis and understand internal conflict of the group driven by, ‘brand versus bureaucracy,’ as Brown notes:

‘In what boils down to a struggle between branding and bureaucracy, al-Qa’ida has consistently put its ability to inspire a broader movement over the development of its organizational capacities to pursue strategic military goals. While its guerrilla strategists have fought for the resources to build an effective military organization, its two supreme leaders - bin Ladin and Zawahiri - have preferred press releases over battlefield preparedness.’
(Brown, 2007)

Consisting of ten chapters that correspond to three broad areas of divisions—
theological, internal, and external areas of conflict , the latest report offers a conceptual framework, further dividing the drivers of disagreement into seven types: ideology, strategy, tactics, goals, enemy, organizational structure, and power.

Brown’s original thesis still flies and foregrounds many of the related theses in the chapters:

‘If bin Ladin and Zawahiri have power over these far‐flung affiliates, it is based on reputation and brand, not direct operational authority. Considering that affiliate leaders control more operational elements than bin Ladin and Zawahiri, it is reasonable to think they may actually be the critical leadership nodes in al-Qa’ida.’  

Despite the multitude of sources and new material that increases exponentially in the blogsphere, the databases such as Harmony, Open Source, OSINT, FBIS, BBC Worldwide Monitoring (to name a fraction), there is a need here to maintain a deep-rooted scholastic rigour. On occasion, it is betrayed here. The well-documented writings of Dr Fadl that were serialised and demonstrate an apparent reversal of his jihadi beliefs are highlighted in this volume. But Lahoud, in her brilliant The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction, explores this apparent ‘reversal’ by tracing a line through the entirety of Dr Fadl’s extant writings, as well as the circumstances surrounding that writing’s publication to add context to the reversal. Further, Hafez says of that ‘in 2005, U.S. forces in Iraq captured a letter by Zawahiri addressed to Zarqawi. The letter is dated 9 July 2005 and its contents were released by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence three months later’ (p.38). Whilst he is right to cast doubt on its authenticity in the footnote, further research would have led him to the London Times article from 2006 that suggests Israeli intelligence passed the letter to Washington and were angered when its contents were made public. This is possibly an attempt to add another layer of ‘history’ to the letter to further its ‘authenticity’ but it is worth noting here. Lahoud for example, believes the letter to be consistent with the style of Zawahiri (Lahoud Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction (2010) p.208).

For a bipartite ideology that ignores the state and its rulers, creating a single dynamic between God and the individual, Jihadism has encountered a singular problem – how to play at politics when the doctrine of your beliefs does not allow for such a field. Al-Rahman wrote in a latter to al-Zarqawi that ‘policy must be dominant over militarism. This is one of the pillars of war that is agreed upon by all nations, whether they are Muslims or unbelievers. That is to say, that military action is a servant to policy.’ Jihadi ideologues are well appraised of Western scholarly thought on strategy and this appears to be what the paper calls a Clausewitzian train of thought but which more explicitly seems to identify with the Powell Doctrine.

Important distinctions are reinforced. Brooke’s separation of near (apostate regimes) and far enemy (Western Imperial backers) helps further to group the rhetoric that emanates from the jihadi ideologues and can assist in explanations of strategy, fitna (civil strife in the sense of internal schism) and ideology. Brown’s recent work on the Global/Local dichotomy and the sway that Nationalist sentiments still hold has been borne out recently, especially in papers on Somalia.

Stenersen’s chapter on the Taliban shows the early separation that bin Laden enacted by his global jihad. As a trainee asked bin Ladin in the summer of 2000, ‘how is it that you raise the call to fight America, knowing that the Taliban wouldn’t hear of such a thing, for reasons of the safety and security of Afghanistan (may God protect the Taliban)?’ Alia Brahimi, in her rigorous working The Taliban’s Evolving Ideology identifies a letter written from Mullah Omar to President Clinton, in 1996, ‘making a bifurcation between the domestic and the international arenas.  He sought to re-assure the Americans that the Taliban had neither the intent nor the capability to attack the US: “whatever we are—even  if we are as you say fundamentalists—we are far from you and we do not intend to harm you and cannot harm you either”’ (Brahimi, p.5).

Finally, Abu Waleed al-Misri, editor of the Taliban’s Arabic‐language journal, wrote: Afghanistan, the strongest fortress of Islam in history, was also lost because of a series of losses that reached a disastrous level because of the deeds of Bin Laden in Afghanistan. This disaster is worse than the calamity of the Arabs and Muslims in their wars with the Jews in 1948, which the Arabs call the “catastrophe” and the 1967 war, for which they invented the term “Setback.”

Attacks on Muslims are seen a main source of alienation and internal disagreement in Jihadi actions. Hafez writing that, ‘First, these attacks, even if permissible from a jurisprudential viewpoint, alienate broader Muslim support, which is essential for the long war against the United States and local tyrants. Second, these attacks unnecessarily open too many fronts when the priority should be given to expelling invading forces from Muslim lands. Third, indiscriminate attacks against Muslims tarnish the image of Islam and, thus, defeat the broader objective of drawing people to the Islamic faith.’ Under Zitouni’s leadership (1994 to 1996), the GIA descended into such indiscriminate savagery as to alienate the entire international jihadi movement, and ‘what happened in Algeria in the mid-1990s’ has become a euphemism in jihadi discourse for complete abandonment of any vestige of religious or ideological coherence in the nihilistic pursuit of violence.

Though there is a certain repetition in the chapters, especially from the application of certain sources (Zawahiri’s internet Question and Answer from early 2008 is widely used), this volume represents the cutting edge in dissection of jihadi discourse gleaned, with the majority of references (the 240 page document contains over 700 footnotes) coming from jihadists forums, sites and blogs. Stenersen writes presciently on foreign/local fighters in the arena of Afghanistan, and is complimented by chapters on Ikhwan/Jihadis, AQ/Hamas and AQ/ Shias: ‘Al-Qa’ida is indelibly tarred by its association with attacks on Shi’a and is therefore identified strongly in the minds of many Muslims as a radical sectarian movement that cannot claim to be the defender of Islam.’

Still there are problems with the ubiquity of the al-Qaeda label, Moghadam and Fishman observing that, al‐Qa’ida remains operationally capable, as demonstrated by the Christmas Day 2009 bombing attempt of Northwest Flight 253; by the suicide bombing of a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan; and by the murderous rampage of U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan at Ft. Hood, Texas, to name a few examples.’ Where the influence of al-Qaeda in these acts is still largely open to debate: Hasan wrote emails to al-Awlaki but was acting under his own conscience, driven by Jihadi ideas, but far from a ‘member of al-Qaeda.’

The editors of the volume urge caution in their final policy recommendations, observing that, ‘one of the main findings of this volume is that the global jihad movement’s dynamism and multi-dimensional nature-both hierarchical and flat, distinct and amorphous-makes it concurrently more susceptible, but also more impervious, to divisions.’ The jihad movement, it is noted, operates in a highly contested Islamist marketplace.’ And, ‘long after al-Qa`ida will have been destroyed, a variety of jihadi groups will continue to fight in various places around the globe, in some cases with little interest in the United States, just as they did before 9/11.’

See Further:
Deol, Jeevan and Kazmi, Zaheer, eds. (2011) Contextualising jihadi thought (Hurst & Co., London, UK) Forthcoming
Lahoud, N. (2010) The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction (New York: Columbia University Press)

Sunday 23 January 2011

Review

Lahoud, Nelly (2010) The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction (New York: Columbia University Press)

Academia Hits Back

‘Omar Rahman said: The prosecutor says that those who raise the slogan that power is for God while they themselves want to monopolise power have been described by Muslims and Islamic history as “Khawarij”’

-- Ayman al Zawahiri in Mansfield, L. ed. (2006) In His Own Word: A Translation of the Writings of Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri (TLG)

In the aftermath of 9.11, academics divided into two camps – those who saw this seminal event as a chasm separating the new millennium from the world of the past and others who were at pains to stress that the lessons of history could allow us to successfully adapt for the future.

The view of Islamic violence became similarly binary – a Kilcullen world view that saw the inexorable growth of jihad according to complexity theory (see also the longwarjournal for propagation of this thought) against the more cautious evaluation of the threat, most prominently from leftist academia. As the tenth anniversary of 9.11 looms, it appears that those who have favoured the applications of history and those who have urged a more measured reading of the jihadi threat are in the ascendancy: as such, Lahoud’s contribution is a timely and prescient addition to this ascendant view.

Building upon a seminar for Harvard’s Islam in the West programme that Lahoud gave in 2008 entitled, Will al-Qaida Self Destruct?, this book offers a comparison of the early Islamic Kharijite sect with the doctrine of today’s Jihadis: ‘Doctrinal differences among the jihadis serve as a major obstacle to their unity and this respect parallel with the Kharijites’. Lahoud, firmly in the Hegghammer camp at Harvard, demonstrates the departure of the jihadis from Islamists, an important distinction that will do much in the future to enhance the study of the phenomenon.

Discussion of the Kharijites with regard to current Islamic fanaticism is not new. Tamara Sonn utilised the Kharijis for her discussion on irregular warfare and terrorism in Islam [see Johnson, James T. ed. (1990) Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification of Limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press) esp. Chapter 6; also see for example, Kenney (2006) Muslim Rebels: Kharijites and the Politics of Extremism in Egypt (Oxford University Press)] but Lahoud’s strength is in making the comparison (whilst stressing ‘the jihadis are not the historical descendents of the Kharijites’) that much more relevant with her explicit argument that:

‘What the Kharijites show by way of comparison is that religious groups defined by scriptural rigidity are more often defeated by their own quibbles and internal disputes over doctrine than by the sword of their enemies.’

The notable difference of course, as Lahoud alludes to, is that jihadism is a global phenomenon perpetuated by the Internet. Indeed, Lahoud’s contribution is all the more welcome for her utilisation of Islamist sites, blogs and forums as sources – affording an insight into how the scholarly evaluations of jihadi doctrine may look in the future. The Kharijites, by contrast, were geographically constrained.
Ultimately for Lahoud:

‘While violence has heightened the profile of jihadism on the world stage, the individualistic basis upon which jihadism is premised has not allowed a co-ordinated use of violence to meet strategic long-term objectives; it has prevented any form of unity, or an effective political structure to emerge out of jihadism.’ (p.14)

Lahoud isn’t alone in documenting the contradictions apparent in the jihadi phenomenon. Alia Brahimi (‘Crushed in the Shadows: How Al-Qaeda is Losing the War of Ideas’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 2010, 33(2), pp.93-100); Christina Hellmich (‘Creating the Ideology of al-Qaeda: From Hypocrites to Salafi Jihadism’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 2008, 31, pp. 111-124) Patrick Porter (‘Long Wars and Long Telegrams: Containing al-Qaeda’, International Affairs, 89, pp.285-305); Jarett Brachman and William McCants (‘Stealing Al-Qa‘ida’s Playbook’, Combating Terrorism Center) have all produced recent tracts stressing containment whilst allowing the apparent rifts in the global jihad to play out (see also ‘Self-Inflicted Wounds: Debates and Divisions Within al-Qaida and its Periphery’, Combating Terrorism Center, West Point) also Harmony and Disharmony. Not just ideological, the schism between domestic Islamists allying with the influx of foreign fighters that espouse ideas of global jihad have led to infighting from Afghanistan to Somalia (for the latter, see ‘Somalia’s Divided Islamists’, International Crisis Group, Africa Briefing No. 74)

What the jihadis need is a Powell Doctine – some strategy that subsumes violence to the serving of political ends. But by its very nature, as a bipartite ideology that exists only between the individual and God, bypassing any political structures or deference to ruling parties, the jihad phenomenon is destined to amorphous fitna – an ideology characterised by internal dispute occasioned by sporadic acts of seemingly random violence.

Through examination of the writings of key ideologues and examining the historical precedent within the Islamic tradition, Lahoud has produced a work that can exist as the foundation stone for further examination based on her findings: though with the occasional repetition of point or quotation, this book frames the current world of jihad within a brilliantly dissected trajectory.

Lahoud isn’t frightened to contradict established wisdom and it is her analysis that proves the more inviting – from the apparent recent dissent of Dr. Fadl and al-Maqdisi [for the perceived wisdom see Bergen and Cruickshank (2008) The Unravelling, The New Republic, June 11 and Wright, Lawrence (2008) The Rebellion Within, The New Yorker, June 2] to the Taliban and al-Qaeda [see also, Strick A. and Kuehn, F. (2011) An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al-Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan 1970-2010 (Hurst and Co.)]. Anne Stenersen at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment is also preparing a volume on the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. For an alternative view of the motivation behind the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan see Cornell, Svante E. (2006) ‘Taliban Afghanistan’ in Shaffer ed. The Limits of Culture: Islam and Foreign Policy (MIT Press) p.275.

Further scholarly work should examine the impact of the 1967 symmetric war between the Arab countries and Israel that seems to have had such an impact upon the early jihadi ideologues and led to the development of the idea of asymmetric warfare in combat with apostate regimes and their western backers: al Zawahiri has written of 1967 as a moment of seemingly large impact on the psyche of the Islamic world. Another area of research is the interface between Islamists and Jihadists – this promises to be the next area of focus – as Islamic militant vehicles continue terrorist activities across South East and Central Asia. Lahoud never really explains how the phenomenon she describes might ever 'self-destruct' but Islamist blogs and forums promise plenty of interest as the ten year anniversary of 9.11 approaches. As Lahoud notes, ‘Jihadism is in the eye of the beholder, it means different things to different jihadis.’

Tuesday 18 January 2011

The Maghreb Street

And so the Street rose up after a month of mass protests that featured new found civilian solidarity and resulted in the overthrow of a nation's president. But the uprising was not the violent extremity of an Islamist insurgency resulting in the toppling of an apostate regime, rather it was continued economic uncertainty that precipitated civil unrest, or as Sadiki describes it, 'an amalgamation of civil unrest, grassroots mobilization and what one could call a coup d'esprit'.

It seems that Fukuyama’s thesis still has relevance – when he states that man has two thirsts, firstly for economic prosperity and also a ‘struggle for recognition’ [Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin), p.xiii] he succinctly identifies two elements that exist within a civilian population (Fukuyama further argued that economic prosperity was best fed by capitalism and recognition by liberal democracy and that these systems would dominate in the future).

The riots across Tunisian cities can be explained by these two elements – economics and a ‘struggle for recognition’. There have also been notable protests in Algeria (over food prices)  and Amman, Jordan (over general economic downturn). There have been reported cases of self-immolation in Cairo, Egypt; Nouakchott, Mauritania (the poorest Arabian country by many indicators) and Jordan, intended to replicate the Tunisian catalytic event with the Washington Post observing that events in Tunisia had ‘resonated across the region among young Middle Easterners, most of whom have lived under autocratic rule for their entire lives.’

Bill Clinton when campaigning highlighted the main concern for the American voter succinctly: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ For America, read the Maghreb, read the Middle East, read any civilian population where the material pursuit of affluence is of import. Economics have created an uprising of an extent that militant ideologues could not possibly conceive. Consider Montasser al-Zayyat, speaking in Cairo in the early 1980s:

‘We have tried to express legitimate Islamic aspirations but these aspirations were lost amidst the smoke of shells and the noise of bullets.’
[Quoted in Mansfield, L., ed. (2006) In His Own Words, p.159]

And contrast this awakening with the continued militancy today, of for example, al-Alwaki, when he wrote to al-Shabab that:

‘the ballot has failed us but the bullet has not.’

Islamist groups have attempted to cash in on this uprising, to identify with its masses but Islamist insurgents are self-constituted elements that fail to speak for the grievances of the people. Walzer (Just and Unjust Wars (1977), p.180) has observed that guerrilla war is people’s war – a special form of the levée en masse, authorized from below. But for Islamist irregulars though they may claim they are fighting on behalf of ‘the people’ and invoke ‘the people’ as the source of their authorization they are nevertheless ‘self-constituted’ combatants. Even in countries where Islamist parties predominate, as in Kuwait where they account for half of the fifty seats in the National Assembly, for the voters, economic concerns are still paramount.  

Echoing Churchill (‘Great quarrels…arise from small occasions but seldom from small causes) the catalytic event was the self-immolation of a twenty-six year old man in Tunis following an altercation with police. Fisk, writing in the Independent exclaimed, ‘If it can happen in the holiday destination Tunisia, it can happen anywhere, can’t it?’ Echoing those Orientalist constructs of the Middle East so repugnant to Said, Fisk further laments that:

‘The truth, of course, is that the Arab world is so dysfunctional, scelerotic, corrupt, humiliated and ruthless…and so totally incapable of any social or political progress, that the chances of a series of working democracies emerging from the chaos of the Middle East stand at around zero percent.’

The crux of Fisk’s article is to be found here:

‘It’s the same old problem for us in the West. We mouth the word “democracy” and we are all for fair elections – providing the Arabs vote for whom we want them to vote for.
In Algeria 20 years ago, they didn’t. In “Palestine” they didn’t. And in Lebanon, because of the so-called Doha accord, they didn’t. So we sanction them, threaten them and warn them about Iran and expect them to keep their mouths shut when Israel steals more Palestinian land for its colonies on the West Bank.’

For Fisk the post-colonialist – the occupation settlements have become ‘colonies’. The redoubtable Fisk’s weary resignation is tangible but others see hope arising from recent events. Larbi Sadiki argues cogently that in the Tunisia effect lies the possibility of a democratic wave of the domino effect. But there are already problems – the main trade union refusing to recognise the national unity government, and three ministers resigning as a consequence

The struggle with notions of authoritarian rule has a long and torturous history. Sallust wrote, ‘Only a few men seek liberty. The majority seek nothing more than fair masters’, almost as Caesar was writing in The Gallic Wars that ‘Human nature is universally imbued with a desire for liberty and a hatred for servitude.’ For the time being in Tunisia, an anarchy under the gaze of the army has replaced police repression: The Maghreb street has spoken – it wants prosperity, recognition and it wants the West to stay out of its affairs.

Further: @bbclysedoucet is tweeting from Tunisia on the front line of the rioting

Monday 17 January 2011

Sweden

 A Very Non-Huntington Cultural Fault Line

‘The great divisions among humankind and the dominant source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.’

-- Samuel P. Huntington, Foreign Affairs, 1993, 73(2), p.22

American society, in the wake of the Arizona shootings has been conducting soul-searching: Obama at his most eloquent demanding that:

at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized - at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do - it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.

In the immediate aftermath of the act, conservative blogs blamed unknown jihadis whilst liberal bloggers blamed right-wing activists allied to Sarah Palin. It did not take long for screenshots of Palin’s gunsights to emerge which in itself sparked further left/right controversyBut America has not been the only nation struggling to control fissures in its society: the December 2010 martyrdom operation of al-Abdaly in Stockholm has led to a media-captured rise in right-wing sentiments. The Daily Telegraph have reported that al-Abdaly’s family may have to flee the country

Andrew Brown writing in Foreign Policy observed that, as in the United States, there was vindication for both left and right wings:

‘Jan Guillou, writing in the left-wing Aftonbladet, claimed that Sweden made the terrorism problem worse, partly by "joining in the American crusade inAfghanistan" and partly by repressive laws against "encouragement to terrorism" that would never be used against white Swedes. Meanwhile, Ulf Nilson, a former foreign correspondent writing forAftonbladet's right-wing rival Expressen, caused an uproar when he referred to the diminishing number of "pure Swedes" and the growing influence of Islam in the country.

Brown notes that the ‘figures for 2009 show that 14.3 percent of the Swedish population was born abroad. When you add second-generation immigrants, the total rises to 18.6 percent.’ The largest group is still Finns and other Scandinavians, but refugees from the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia have been the fastest-growing groups for decades.’ Yet the writer sees this change to the homogeneity to society as less of a problem than the rise of the Internet. When Brown was in Sweden some decades ago, he notes that he had to get books from the local Swedish library, and talk Swedish with his neighbours. The Internet by contrast affords all citizens to inhabit their own world – Arabic, English, French, with whatever community online that they most identify with and the problem being that it is not ‘geographically anchored.’

There have been other incidents to in Sweden recently: a lone gunman, still at large, who targets (and has killed) members of ‘minority ethnic’ backgroundsIn 2006, the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks incited numerous threats for his depiction of the Prophet which was initially printed in a Danish newspaper and reprinted in several Swedish dailies, prompting the Swedish embassy in Islamabad to stress that it ‘regretted’ the decision to print the inflammatory images, in talks with the Pakistani governmentBangladesh held street protests in 2010, burning the Swedish flag, after Facebook held a competition in drawing caricatures of the Prophet

Primarily, this societal friction has been about the Swedish right to freedom of speech and the victory of secularism over religion, but intrastate protests have been relatively easy to enable in the country. The Sweden Democrats, a right-wing immigration party, whose power base has been historically limited the southern province of Skane, won 5.7% (20 of the 349 seats in the Riksdag) of the national vote to exercise considerable influence in national politics. The party walked out of an anti-racism ‘sermon’ given by Bishop Eva Brunne in October 2010 to mark the opening of the new parliament. Electoral support suggests a clandestine wave of sympathy for this right-wing agenda in Sweden, which has been offset by immediate protests – 10 000 people took to the streets of Stockholm to protest in the wake of the Swedish Democrats electoral gains

Problems in Sweden, exacerbated by the Internet which heightens hysteria and can generate collective responses to perceived issues of injustice, have been set against the greater backdrop of Northern European angst  - Denmark too has encountered national angst arising from the perceived problem of non-assimiliating immigrant elements.

Huntington took the phrase ‘clash of civilizations’ from Bernard Lewis’ 1990 essay The Roots of Muslim Rage, both scholars seeing the fault lines between cultures as the predominant theme in world affairs. How then do these apparent internal fault lines play out? History suggests that internal state identities only rupture upon the arrival of a cocktail of circumstances – great economic instability, historical enmity between groups, rousing figureheads and catalytic incidents. “Great quarrels, it has been well said,” said Churchill shortly before the onset of World War II, “arise from small occasions but seldom from small causes.”  

Huntington was correct: states still do dominate the world stage and non-statist Islamist groups should find their stars dwindling as more research and policy focus on the states behind the non-state actors. Gunaratna and Iqbal’s recent book, Pakistan: Terrorism Ground Zero develops this idea. It is easier to initiate intrastate rather than interstate cultural conflict: states’ actions are dominated by realpolitik generated by a corpuscular sense of risk: in the seminal The Limits of Culture: Islam and Foreign Policy (ed. Brenda Shaffer, 2006, MIT Press), Shaffer concludes of state actors that, ‘when cultural interests conflicted with material interests, cultural ones rarely trumped material ones…once the cultural identity of a state has been articulated, constraints are set on the policy options that a state may utilize’ (p.326). Non-state actors have no such corpuscular, static concerns – physical presence is fluid and ideology can feature more prominently in action as well as rhetoric. Europe must embrace the problem and develop a solution – the Internet, global facilitator, seemingly also enables discrete identity and jeopardises the functioning of society. Since the collapse of Communism, rather than witness the victory of universal values, we rather observe the explosion of particularisms - how does a society intent on assimilation include rather than exclude whilst avoiding betrayal of the values it claims to protect?


Monday 3 January 2011

Sageman, Hoffman and Anwar al-Awlaki

Karen J. Greenberg of New York University’s Center of Law and Security has said of the well-publicised dispute between Marc Sageman and Bruce Hoffman:

“Sometimes it seems like this entire field is stepping into a boys-with-toys conversation. Here are two guys, both of them respected, saying that there is only one truth and only one occupant of the sandbox. That’s ridiculous. Both of them are valuable.” (quoted in the NYTimes)

This either/or division of academics and policymakers as they step into either the camp for leaderless jihad or the camp for top-down terrorism must be seen as a dangerous development in the burgeoning field of counter-terrorism: focusing on one negates any possibility of ameliorating the threat from the other. The pertinent question is not which view is right, but, ‘How closely wedded is the leaderless jihad to the militant Islamic groups that exist with known structure?’

The Stockholm bomber, Taimour Abdulwahhab al-Abdaly, was a known user of Islamist Forums and Islamist Youtube pages were prominent on his social media pages. Al-Abdaly is also known to have spent four years travelling in the Middle East, having reached Amman in 2006 and returned to Europe in 2010. Which element here creates the Stockholm bomber? If we remove the Internet activities do we prevent a Swedish martyrdom operation, or is it his travels in the Middle East (and possible interaction with Islamist groups) that led to al-Abdaly’s suicide explosion?

It is difficult, if not impossible, to know, but in the Hegelian tradition, Hoffman’s thesis and Sageman’s antithesis creates synthesis: the Yemeni-based cleric Anwar al-Awlaki presents compelling evidence for a blurring of the two worlds, a merging of the two camps. Al-Awlaki utilises social media, especially YouTube, to disseminate his ideology; he is a U.S citizen, fluent in English. It appears that al-Awlaki is both linked to Islamist groups in the Global South, but also instrumental in the burgeoning jihadi network on the Internet. Al-Awlaki’s activities and statements have been scrutinized by the NEFA foundation since it emerged that two of the 9.11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mindhar were in contact with al-Awlaki in San Diego. He has since been linked, in the capacity as a ‘spiritual advisor’ or ‘figure of inspiration’ for Nidal Hasan and Umar Farouk amongst others.

Martyrdom Motivation

If there is a bottom up, popular, Internet-based pattern of Islamist terrorism in the West, and if ‘religion is the opium of the people’ then this ‘leaderless jihad’ needs spiritual motivation. Development of English-language motivational material is at the heart of al-Alwaki’s work and considering his global appeal (Sharif Mobley, Faisal Shahzad and Roshonara Choudhry have all cited the impact of al-Alwaki upon their actions) he has achieved success. Consider these points from his 2009 44 Ways to Support Jihad:

29. WWW Jihad
“The internet has become a great medium for spreading the call of Jihad and following the news of the mujahideen. Some ways in which the brothers and sisters could be ‘internet mujahideen’ is by contributing in one or more of the following ways:”
• “Establishing discussion forums that offer a free, uncensored medium for posting
information relating to Jihad.”
• “Establishing email lists to share information with interested brothers and sisters.”
• “Posting or emailing Jihad literature and news.”
• “Setting up websites to cover specific areas of Jihad, such as: mujahideen news, Muslim POWs, and Jihad literature.”

Al-Awlaki perceives the future of the jihad to be disseminated through the Internet: one cannot send a drone to destroy and idea and the Internet is the best medium for the dissemination of ideas. Yet there is an obvious hypocrisy in utilising an American invention to rail against America. The relatively ‘free’ nature of the Internet is one of the great Western technological triumphs. Accessing any of al-Alwaki’s material you are probably using Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Explorer or Mozilla’s Firefox, all American inventions.

42. Learning Arabic
“Arabic is the international language of Jihad. Most of the Jihad literature is available
only in Arabic and publishers are not willing to take the risk of translating it. The only
ones who are spending the money and time translating Jihad literature are the Western intelligence services…and too bad, they would not be willing to share it with you. Arabic also happens to be the predominant language of the foreign mujahideen in every land of Jihad so without it you might end up talking to yourself. It is important for the mujahideen to able to communicate through a common language and Arabic is the proper candidate.”

Al-Awlaki recognises the obvious barrier between Hoffman’s Al-Qaeda and Sageman’s ‘bunch of guys’: language. It also shows al-Awlaki’s aim –for the Western ‘jihobbyists’ (Jarret Brachman) and the Islamist fighters to be in contact – idealised Jihadis that will motivate the Western Islamists.

43. Translating Jihad literature into other languages
“As I stated in the previous point most of the Jihad literature is in Arabic. Brothers and sisters who speak a foreign language in addition to Arabic should translate the most important works into their languages.”
“Every movement of change is preceded first by an intellectual change. It is said that the time of Salahudeen was preceded by an upsurge in writings about Jihad. We are seeing this happen today. This revival of Jihad needs to take place among Muslims of every tongue.”

Invoking history is a common theme amongst Salafi ideologues – and Saladin as one of the greatest Muslim warriors is often mentioned, especially given the nature of his reconquest of lands lost to Christian forces.

Al-Alwaki singular talent and focus lies in creating English-language materials that motivates the would-be jihadi. The cleric’s works include a series of lectures entitled Constants on the Path of Jihad, (for influence see for example) echoing the influential book of the same name by Yusuf Al-Ayiri (the late leader of ‘Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia’) — which is believed in the intelligence community to support leaderless jihad: these have been uploaded to YouTube.  Al-Awlaki has produced The Hereafter—(al Akhirah) a CD set that describes the pleasure of the afterlife; it is marketed on alghurabaa as, ‘In breathtaking style the listener hears of the events that occur just before death and the events that come after it’ (Excerpts are also available on YouTube). Further al-Awlaki develops the idea of heroic afterlife in 25 Promises from Allah to the Believer and Virtues of the Sahabah.

Moreover, possibly conscious of the gender-bias inherent in Salafi ideology, he has created Young Ayesha (RA) & Mothers of the Believers (RA)—CD—CIIE in a possible nascent appeal to women. Of joining jihad, al-Awlaki has written that ‘if my circumstances would have allowed, I would not have hesitated in joining you and being a soldier in your ranks’. Yet he does not state the circumstances that prevent him from so doing.

Al-Awlaki is also a compelling figure if you subscribe to the failed states thesis or even if you don’t (see for example., Chowdhury, Arjun (2009) ‘Failed States: Inside or Outside the ‘Flat’ World of Globalisation? Review Essay’, Security Dialogue, 40(6), pp.637-659. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen (LSE) has written about the nature of the threat, stressing a ‘country on the brink of failed statehood because of a mix of internal rebellion, a resurgent Al Qaeda presence, dwindling reserves of oil and water and the flow of men, money and arms from Somalia - just across the Gulf of Aden’. Yemen is the poorest or second poorest of the Arabian states (after Mauritania) depending on source used.

Al-Awlaki is thus a well-educated U.S. citizen who currently ‘works out of’ one of the poorest Arab states, as such, whilst it may not be proven that failed states produce terrorists, there have been notable examples of poorer states (lacking a state-centric monopoly of violence over its populus) being safe-havens for figures associated with Islamic militancy (for example, bin Laden in Sudan). It seems logical that tribal-based societies operating in the absence of strong central government afford the better safe havens but Yemen is also his country of origin and he is protected by the Awlaki tribe (For the concept of safe havens in Salafi ideology see here).

Both Sageman and Hoffman could use al-Awlaki to support their theses: Al-Alwaki has apparent ties to Islamist groups in Yemen, but his gaze is always turned to the West. Consider ‘Inspire’, a Yemeni-based Ezine from Islamist groups in the Arabian Peninsula but written in English, holding such sway in the Western psyche that an FT article was moved to opine that, ‘in another possible indication of AQAP’s [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s] intentions, Chicago’s skyline was featured in a recent issue of the group’s English-language magazine, Inspire.’

Hoffman’s Grass-Roots

Hoffman’s stinging critique of Sageman ('The Myth of Grass-Roots Terrorism', Foreign Affairs) is to exaggerate the latter’s thesis. Sageman posits the ‘bottom up’ approach, the leaderless jihad, but he never suggests a grassroots, ‘Islamist pandemic’. So Hoffman is right and Sageman would agree – there is no grassroots movement, if by grassroots we take the Princeton definition of ‘the essential foundation’, ‘source’, or ‘common people at a local level’. Coincidentally, al-Qaeda translates as ‘the foundation’ but it is not grassroots.

Al-Awlaki sent an encomium in December 2008 to Al-Shabaab, thanking them for, ‘giving us a living example of how we as Muslims should proceed to change our situation. The ballot has failed us, but the bullet has not’. The ballet has failed militant Islam because it lacks wider appeal, as al-Awlaki knows all too well. Olivier Roy recorded the failure of all political Islam, when observing that, ‘Post-Islamism does not imply the emergence of a secular society as such. It is primarily the reaffirmation of the autonomy of the political, of the struggle for power, of the logic of national or ethnic interests, of the precedence of politics over religion.’ [Roy, O. (2004), Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah  (C. Hurst and Co.: London), p.4]

United States Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates is wary of the propaganda war when he notes, ‘It is just plain embarrassing that al Qaeda is betting at communicating its message on the Internet than America. As one foreign diplomat asked a couple of years ago ‘how can one man in a cave out-communicate the world’s greatest communication society?’

Obama’s presidential campaign was spurred on by a grassroots internet movement among young technical-savvy Americans that operated as a reaction to Bush’s Republicanism. Al-Awlaki would like to create something similar but utilising American vehicles and English-language to rail against American vehicles and the English-speaking world generates a self-evidently hypocritical methodology.  


For more on the debate on failed states as propagators of terrorism:
Ikenberry, G. J. (2004) ‘Why States Fail: Causes and Consequences’, Capsule Review, Foreign Affairs
- (2004) ‘State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century’, Foreign Affairs
Mallaby, S. (2002) ‘The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire, Foreign Affairs
Van de Walle, N. (2005) ‘Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism’, Capsule Review, Foreign Affairs
Lisanti, D. (2010) ‘Do Failed States Really Breed Terrorists?’, Conference Paper, CAPERS workshop, NYU, May 14 

There are now a number of “failed states indices” (quantification of a problem is understanding it?) – see for example: