The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  The notion of reestablishing the caliphate was not part of the original fundamentalist movement or al Qaeda political ideology but seems to have been the invention in 1952 of a Palestinian jurist, Taqiuddin Nabahani, who had studied at al-Azhar University and was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He broke with the Brotherhood in publishing a book in 1950 in which he argued that the most serious obstacle to the Palestinians’ recovery of their country from Israel was Palestinian nationalism, which copied the concepts and techniques of the original Asian and North African “national” liberation movements. So long as the Palestinian “nation” was pitted against Israel it would lose, Nabahani argued. As a nation it did not exist.

  His argument was parallel to the call for reconstitution of the “Arab Nation” that had been influential between the world wars and in the 1950s. He said an Arab federation had to be established like that which had existed from the time of Muhammad until Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258. This seemed a more effective vehicle for resistance to the West, offering a vision of the reunion of millions of Arabs who until recently—the defeat of the Ottoman Empire had occurred just some three decades before—had thought of themselves as members of a single social and political entity distinguished by religion.

  Taqiuddin Nabahani formed a political party called Hizb ut-Tahrir, which ran candidates in several elections in Jordan, but by the end of the 1950s he decided that his program could not succeed through electoral methods and resolved to create an underground movement based on individual cells. This attracted the attention of intelligence services across the region, and by the 1970s, Nabahani having been killed, the movement seemed to have been completely suppressed.

  Twenty years later the group reappeared in Central Asia, notably in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where the people of the ex-Soviet Muslim republics wanted to reclaim their Muslim identity, as did some members of the Asian Muslim immigration in Western Europe, particularly in Britain. The group also found adherents in Indonesia. It publishes two quarterly journals in Britain, from where its ideas have been exported to the Indian subcontinent . The group’s activities are considered legal in Britain, but it has had problems there and in Denmark and Germany because of its hostility to Israel. In France and Spain its cells are illegal.

  According to an analysis in June 2008 by Jean-Pierre Filiu in Le Monde diplomatique, “As a transnational phenomenon Hizb ut-Tahrir is at home in a globalized world and this ease may explain its return to popularity. It also shows how such marginal or extremist networks compensate for their weakness through projecting their desires onto an abstract fantasy of Islamic unity. In October 2006 al Qaeda, denying the reality of its marginal status, proclaimed the foundation of a virtual caliphate and entrusted the task of setting up as an Internet presence to a jihadist in Baghdad.” According to Filiu, “the result was pathetic.”10

  The idea of a revived caliphate has nonetheless attracted much attention in Washington, despite its utter lack of political feasibility, and President George W. Bush solemnly described it (in September 2006) as posing the threat of “a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.” (No real caliphate ever reached from Europe to Southeast Asia.)* The Heritage Foundation and the Nixon Center have sponsored studies and seminars on Hizb ut-Tahrir (which calls itself “HT” in the English-speaking countries), in which some have attributed to it (without hard evidence) a million activists in forty countries, calling it a “new Comintern.”

  The idea also serves for both Islamists and their American enemies as a remarkably guileless paradigm for the entire Islamic “war” against the West, which for more than eight years has been essentially a fantasy in which, aside from a few sensational bombings in Western Europe, of often uncertain provenance, the United States and its allies have participated more eagerly than the Muslims themselves.

  Al Qaeda’s illusion that the Grand Caliphate might be restored seems shared by so weighty a figure as Henry Kissinger, who has expressed concern that “a universal political organization” based on a fundamentalist interpretation of the Qur’an would leave “little room … for Western notions of negotiations or of equilibrium in a region of vital interest to the security and well-being of the industrial states.”11 This view of balance as the objective of diplomacy contrasts fundamentally with that of former Republican secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, repeatedly expressed, that the Westphalia system of balance of power is outmoded, “leads only to war,” and should in the interests of all be abolished and replaced with an association of democracies led by the United States—a view that seems shared by figures in the Obama administration.12

  There is a persistent belief among American analysts and politicians that today’s manifestations of fundamentalist Islamist violence are of unprecedented character and scope. John McCain was asked in 2008 by Fortune magazine what the greatest threat to the U.S. economy is, and he replied, “Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle we’re in against radical Islamic terrorism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence.”13 A similar belief is commonly heard in journalistic discussion, but it also exists in the academy, where Columbia University professor Philip Bobbitt said in a 2008 book, which gained serious attention, that Islamic insurgence could combine with modern nonstate organizational and communications possibilities to threaten modern society itself. The British historian Niall Ferguson called Bobbitt’s the most important political work written since the Second World War.14

  Yet the notion of a new “universal” caliphate incorporating any of the advanced industrial societies of the present-day West is surely to any realistic observer a delusion. The Western states are immensely more powerful by any measure. The fundamentalist movement is internally divided and materially weak. For reasons of cultural solidarity Islam may be mobilized to resist foreign aggression or invasion, but overall it falls into that category of political societies that can be described as invulnerable to invasion but incapable of successful aggression. As in the case of China or Russia, the invader is simply swallowed up and finds himself digested or assimilated, without ever effectively controlling what he has conquered; and eventually he is spat out.

  This, one would think, will be the unfortunate fate of Barack Obama’s attempted military solution to the crisis by shifting the weight of the American war in the Muslim world from Iraq to the Afghanistan-Pakistan front, sending a “surge” of military reinforcements to Afghanistan—expected to bring the total to more than 100,000 by the spring of 2010 —and sending just as large a surge of American civilian development specialists, auxiliaries, contract workers, and “security” mercenaries. Few of these can be expected to have an appreciation of what really will be entailed in any American effort to take effective control (with the principled rationale of building a democracy there—and in Pakistan), nor why the forty million Pashtuns in the region, as well as the separatists of Pakistan’s Balochistan Province, and neighboring India, Kashmir, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and even Yemen, will not all prove actively hostile to such an undertaking.

  Elsewhere than in Iraq and Afghanistan-Pakistan, al Qaeda’s existence remains largely notional. Its real objective (and the base for its association with the Taliban) is destruction of the Saudi monarchy, which sponsors the rival Wahhabi interpretation of strict Islamic observance. The phenomenon is essentially an affair of intra-Muslim doctrinal and political rivalry in which Westerners are secondary players (unwelcome, and ultimately dispensable).

  A dispute exists among specialists as to whether al Qaeda, as such, is really a structured and disciplined international movement with a leadership and staff in Waziristan, or whether it is a mutually supportive international association of self-nominated enthusiasts and groups with local as well as international grievances. There is a question whether in the West it is—as some Western police specialists have suggested—mainly a phenomenon of “guy
s hanging out,” motivated by a thirst for glory and adventure and influenced by what they hear at the mosque or have read in the papers about the war in Iraq and the bombing of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some possibly have “trained” in Waziristan, but as it takes very little training to acquire the knowledge of basic arms and explosives use, and elementary military tactics, they are more likely to have acquired their skills from the Internet and in local gyms or national military service.

  What is undoubtedly the most conscientious and comprehensive recent analysis of the matter was published in October 2009 by the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and presented in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington on October 7, 2009. Its author, Marc Sageman, is a medical doctor and psychiatrist who served as a U.S. Navy flight surgeon before joining the CIA, for which between 1987 and 1991 he was in Islamabad and New Delhi directing the U.S. multilateral program with the Afghan mujahideen. He has since held academic positions as well as returning to the practice of medicine.

  The most recent of his works on terror networks and jihad groups is this comprehensive survey of al Qaeda activities since its founding, prepared in a collaborative project with the U.S. Secret Service, the New York City Police Department, and consultations with other American and foreign security and intelligence sources. The document (or Senate testimony) should be consulted in its whole (www.fpri.org), but those of its findings of particular interest here are that in the past two decades there have been sixty planned attacks (or “plots”) in the West by al Qaeda or groups linked to it, and three have succeeded. (His analysis antedates the Christmas Day 2009 attempt to destroy an Amsterdam–Detroit passenger airliner.) Marc Sageman lists three categories of terrorist groups associated with al Qaeda: the core organization itself; self-organized autonomous groups having one or more members who are or have been in contact with al Qaeda, or had some form of training with it; and spontaneous copycat groups with no contact or training with al Qaeda.

  The first attack in the West was the 1993 original attack on the World Trade Center in New York City by means of a truck with explosives placed in an underground parking space. The most recent (at the time the study was published) was a planned attack on the headquarters of the French General Directorate of Internal Security just outside Paris (whose planner was arrested before the attack took place). Of the sixty plots, all but one have been solved, and that one’s plan and would-be perpetrators are mostly known.

  Al Qaeda itself was directly linked to 20 percent of these sixty episodes. Most—78 percent of them—were the work of “autonomous homegrown groups” with no real connection to al Qaeda, but nevertheless its admirers and emulators, usually inspired to act by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

  Of the sixty “neo-jihad” plots in the West, nine were actually 1990s Algerian militant bombings in Paris, revenge for the French government’s support for the military government then in power in Algeria. Three were al Qaeda’s own successes (the 9/11 attacks, the London Transport bombings, and—indirectly, as al Qaeda people did not take part—the Madrid train bombings). Thirty-six other planned attacks were disrupted by police arrests, and ten failed because of mechanical or organizational incompetence by the terrorists.

  The al Qaeda core organization became active in the West in 1993 (the first World Trade Center attack), peaked in 2001 with the 9/11 bombings, and since has appeared in decline. Excluding war casualties or victims claimed by groups calling themselves al Qaeda, only two other attacks were successful: in London and Madrid. Some three thousand Americans and others were killed on 9/11; fifty-two people died in London, and 191 died in Madrid.

  According to the Foreign Policy Research Institute study, there has since been no “resurgent al Qaeda” in the West . The overall pattern of international terrorism since 2001 is increasingly that of a “leaderless jihad,” resembling the spontaneous series of terrorist actions and murders of heads of state in Europe and America that were carried out more than a century ago by autonomous utopian anarchists.

  Al Qaeda’s relations with the Taliban today are troubled. According to Sageman, any “Taliban return to power in Afghanistan will not mean an automatic new sanctuary for al Qaeda.” He concludes that “effective counter-terrorism strategy [is] on the brink of completely eliminating al Qaeda,” the result of effective international and domestic intelligence cooperation and good police work. No armies were involved.

  Various “terrorist plots” announced by security officials have usually turned out to be inspired by bounty hunters and involve people manifestly incapable of the crimes they professedly intended to commit . One group in Miami offered to blow up the tallest building in the United States if their secret FBI interlocutor would identify the building and tell them in what city it was located, finance their transport, and counsel them on where to find explosives. In Canada a so -called “Toronto 18” terrorist cell turned out to contain no one who could name the Canadian prime minister the group intended to murder. Senior al Qaeda cadres, such as Abu Musab al-Suri, have complained that recruits from Europe were treating the training camps as a way to cleanse themselves after having “spent time with a whore in Bangkok.” Not long after 9/11 a recruiting document found in a Paris mosque said: “[Jihad] is better than a holiday in Los Angeles! It’s adventure!” A young Frenchman trained in Afghanistan during the same period said he “wanted to learn about guns, test his physique and get close to war without taking too many risks.” A man involved in a scheme to blow up nightclubs in Britain thought that a camp in Pakistan would be like something he’d seen on television, with assault courses and rifle ranges, but “it wasn’t like that at all.” These examples are all from a recent issue of the London magazine Prospect (April 2009), which also notes that few of the would-be heros had more than sketchy notions of religion.

  The two major attacks on public transport in Europe, in London and Madrid, have been claimed by “spokesmen” for al Qaeda, but police in Britain and Spain have denied that evidence exists to actually link the principals to that organization. Its adherents have carried out attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa and on the destroyer USS Cole, in harbor in Yemen. The movement obviously is active in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, but there is no published evidence that it is the sophisticated global organization possessing the power to carry out attacks at will that it has been reputed to be.

  In Britain, Italy, Spain, France, and the Balkans, the Muslims arrested for terrorist action or planning have consistently proven to be local, usually non-Arab, mainly alienated Maghrebi, Pakistani, or Bosnian young men from the Muslim immigration. The reputation of the movement is largely sustained by the press, spurred on by official alarms—during the Bush years, usually timed to coincide with elections or poor showings in domestic political polls. There has been doubt about how real the connection was between the actual al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan and the self-proclaimed al Qaeda “of Mesopotamia” in Iraq, whose ruthless tactics seem to have alienated rather than recruited Iraqis. Fundamentalist militants active for decades in Algeria, conducting a savage but unsuccessful campaign against military-dominated Muslim governments, gave themselves international notoriety and a new identity among Muslims by calling themselves “al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb.” The same must be said of the newly self-proclaimed “al Qaeda of the Arabian peninsula” in Yemen, which claimed responsibility for the 2009 Christmas Day attempt to bomb an American passenger airliner arriving in Detroit from Amsterdam. During the past half century northern and southern Yemeni tribes have been at war, at various times identifying themselves as Nationalist, or Arab Socialist and Nasserite, or as a Marxist People’s Republic. Now they can claim an al Qaeda emirate. “Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose,” as the French say. In the Mali desert in West Africa, according to a New York Times report in 2008, “as many as two hundred fighters” from al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb pose “the biggest potential threat” confronting an American military mission which was then
providing counterterrorism training (and job training!) to young Muslim men—the new U.S. Army Africa Command at work.*

  There also is evidence that one reason Muslim support for al Qaeda has faded has been moral repugnance at its killing of bystanders and the innocent . A group of what the Pew Global Attitudes Project considers representative Muslim populations (including inside Israel and the Palestinian Territories) indicate that there was in 2003 an average 37.3 percent “confidence” in Osama bin Laden to “do the right thing.” In 2008 the same figure was 11 percent . American students of the history of terrorism in Europe and Ireland, such as Audrey Kurth Cronin of the National War College in Washington, describe a characteristic arc of commitment and activism in terrorist organizations, which suggests that al Qaeda is now on the declining side of the curve. Officials argue that if it were to be left unmolested in a territory of its own, as was the case in Afghanistan in 2001, it might regroup. However, this invites comparative analysis of the actual threat presented by such an isolated group, acting under serious external restraints, as against the costs and losses of the present American and NATO attempt to “clear and hold” Afghanistan (and, who knows—Pakistan and Yemen as well) against the movement.

  Afghanistan is a nation of 251,773 square miles (652,090 square kilometers) with a population of some 22 million people, according to the current Statesman’s Yearbook (London). Pakistan consists of 307,293 square miles (796,059 square kilometers) with a population of somewhat more than 141 million people. For comparison, the two add up to a territory nearly twice the size of united Germany, with twice Germany’s population. The strategy for Afghanistan proposed by the United States Army in October 2009 was to “clear and hold” the territories disputed by the Taliban. To accomplish this in Afghanistan and extend it into the quasi-impenetrable tribal areas of Pakistan and those other areas of northern Pakistan where the Taliban have been active, or to separatist Balochistan, or in the worst case, to all of Pakistan (possibly provoking Indian intervention), seems an ambitious plan, to say the least.