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The Three Waves Of Al-Qaeda - Managers, Murderers and Muppets

Posted February 28th, 2008 by Tom

Highly intruiging sounding book recommended by (itself highly recommended) American Footprints:

I first read Marc Sageman's, Understanding Terror Networks a few years back, and it changed the way I viewed the international jihadist threat.  It was eye-opening.  Sageman (himself, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA operative) employed a unique method (poring over hundreds of biographical profiles of known-terrorists) to reveal truths and dispel myths about the identities and motivations of terrorists that join al-Qaeda-like organizations.  Sageman offers a pretty good summary of this work here.  I have cited Sageman numerous times (examples here and here), and consider him one of the preeminent experts in the field (I am not alone in this estimation).

 

His new book apparently postulates, with backing evidence, three waves of al-Qaeda threat at ten year intervals - first the originals, formed after the 1983 US intervention in Lebanon, who set up and managed the Afghan training camps and founded the philosophical basis of the movement.  Then the second wave; highly committed, quiet, ruthless extremists who followed them to Afghanistan in the 1990s, seemingly post-Gulf War.  My old university colleague Mohammed Atta fits this description - to be of an age to be training in Afghanistan in the mid-90s they'd have to be born in the 60s - Atta was born in 1968.  Both these first waves are aging, on the run, captured or dead.

Finally, the third wave, and here some very familiar things start to appear:

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, whose members were well educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for thrills.

Wannabes, internet culture, young, bored.  We've had a bellyful of those over the last year or so, starting with the Glasgow and London 'firebombs' and culminating in the recent appeal court quashing of the convictions of the four Bradford students plus the jailing of various followers of idiotic ex-crack-addict 'Osama Bin London', famous for telling the arresting officer he had a bomb.  About as far from the real danger as you can get - you're not going to learn much from him.

Sageman, I'm delighted to note, provides good reason to believe what I've suspected for a while - al Qaeda style extremism doesn't need countermeasures beyond than trying to find and stop them under existing laws.  The rules of the game haven't changed and the movement has inherent weaknesses that limit its freedom of maneouvre and render it very susceptible to infiltration and disruption - as the intelligence and capability of the individuals reduces you need bigger cells, which are easier to disrupt.  The conclusion:

Sageman's policy advice is to "take the glory and thrill out of terrorism." Jettison the rhetoric about Muslim extremism -- these leaderless jihadists are barely Muslims. Stop holding news conferences to announce the latest triumphs in the "global war on terror," which only glamorize the struggle. And reduce the U.S. military footprint in Iraq, which fuels the Muslim world's sense of moral outrage.

Sounds familiar - that's the post-Blair British readjustment writ large - get out of Iraq, stop automatically associating Muslims with terrorism, stop going on about global wars on nouns.  Now we need to finish the job - stop bigging up idiots as terrorist masterminds and start having a good long laugh at their expense.  They want us to FEAR!! them, but nothing dispels fear like a good laugh.  Then start rolling back the anti-terror fear laws to a sensible state.