Has Bin Laden Lost His Way?

With much comment about the demise of al-Qaida it is worth taking a step back and looking at how the analysis of the group and its activities and nature have changed over the 10 years since the world first started paying attention to it in the aftermath of the double bombing of American embassies in 1998.

The analyzes have evolved considerably over time and have varied widely at any given instant. Since the multiform nature of al-Qaida began to be understood, all analysis have all stressed different elements of al-Qaida – the hardcore leadership, the network of networked groups, the ideology, the "homegrowns", etc. Each one has revealed as much about its author's ideological, personal or institutional approach as it has about the terrorist group.

The analysis can be placed on two scales. One considers to what degree al-Qaida should be seen as an organization or ideology and to what degree the individual responsibility of actors such as Osama bin Laden should be emphasized or minimized. The second considers, at least at the current moment, whether al-Qaida, however defined, is winning or losing.

To start with the first scale – that of the nature of al-Qaida - the consensus has shifted. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 al-Qaida was almost universally seen as a tight-knit, hierarchical organization but around 2003-2005 "al-Qaida the ideology" became far more established as the conventional wisdom. This coincided with the eradication of the group's physical infrastructure in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq and an upsurge of violence across the Maghreb, in Saudi Arabia, and bomb attacks in Europe, successful or otherwise, that appeared to have little connection to "AQ central".

In the last two years we have seen a shift back along the scale with the role of the hardcore leadership being seen once more as critical to the continuing threat. This idea is particularly prevalent in Britain which, due to historical links with Pakistan, has suffered from the fact that since 2004 the al-Qaida leadership has reconstituted its bases and capacity in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region.

In addition to tracking reality, the analysis has also followed politics. In general, those analysts who emphasize "al-Qaida as ideology" tend to be from the left and their analysis is thus in keeping with an approach which favors broad historical trends, stresses political, economic and social factors and minimizes the effects of personal agency in explaining historical events. Right-wingers tend to favour the analysis of al-Qaida that emphasize individual actions and direction from above, whether that be "brainwashing" or the effect of charismatic leaders. Again, this mirrors a historical approach too. The latter view is usually prevalent in counter-terrorist and intelligence institutions – never known as bastions of a social science approach to conflict resolution.

Finally, national cultures play a role too. From 1998 analysts and counter-terrorist officials in collectivist-minded France favored the "al-Qaida the ideology" analysis, while their American counterparts felt happier with an analysis based more heavily in the capacity of the individual to act, to alter his own life story and that of others. Bin Laden, in some ways, thus becomes the American dream in negative: the American nightmare.

As for success or failure, the question is equally loaded. A key question here is what are al-Qaida's final goals? The defeat of the west and the creation of a global caliphate or the overthrow of "corrupt and apostate dictators" in the Middle East? Equally important is the debate over the strategy adopted by the al-Qaida leadership – particularly in the view of the current doctrinal splits within the contemporary Islamic militant movement – to attain those goals.

If the aim is to radicalize and mobilize "the Islamic masses" – as Ayman al-Zawahiri described in his 2002 book, Knights Under The Banner of the Prophet - then al-Qaida has failed. If its goal was simply to constitute a powerful and threatening hard core of militants, disseminate their message and survive the western reaction to their attacks, then it has done better.

To complicate matters further, positions on the organization-ideology or success-failure or even left-right axes get very mixed. There are conservatives who see al-Qaida as battered but still at the head of a radicalized and angry Muslim world and are therefore far from joining the "al-Qaida is on the ropes" camp – a strand of anti-Bush American and anti-American conservative European thought can be situated here - but there are other conservatives who see al-Qaida as battered but, having failed to raise the Islamic masses in a general uprising, on the way to defeat. The same variations play out among more left-leaning analysts. The analysis of al-Qaida as much as the entity itself is heavily influenced by local factors.

I personally think the days of "al-Qaida the organization" are numbered – though I am not sure where that puts me on all the various axes outlined above. There have always been "al-Qaidas" rather than "al-Qaida" – and the relation between the various elements of ideology (hardcore and so on) is constantly evolving. I continue to believe that the primary aim of Bin Laden and his associates – as it has been for so many militants of different ideologies over the centuries – remains the radicalization and mobilization of the masses. Their attacks remain "propaganda by deed". Without broad support among the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, Bin Laden and his close associates know that any other ambitions are unattainable. They have not received this support, despite the multiple errors by leaders in the west and in the Islamic world and are therefore doomed to progressive marginalization. But it is a process that will take decades.