From AEI. I would still argue that we need to understand how Al Qaeda is conducting a form of unconventional warfare in the 21st century.
The 2.1MB 60 page report can be downloaded at this link: http://www.
V/R
Dave
The al Qaeda network: A new framework for defining the enemy
Reuters
Residents gather at the site of a car bomb attack in the Hurriya District in Baghdad, Iraq, July 29, 2013. Seventeen car bombs exploded in Iraq, killing at least 55 people in predominantly Shi'ite areas in some of the deadliest violence since Sunni insurgents including al Qaeda stepped up attacks this year.
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The failure to define al Qaeda properly has confused American policy and strategy. The enemy was not just the man shot dead on May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, nor is it the 1.5 billion Muslims for whom Osama bin Laden claimed to speak.
The United States should have sought to answer key questions about the state of al Qaeda after bin Laden’s death and the succession of Ayman al Zawahiri. What is al Qaeda? Is it only the group directly headed by Zawahiri? Or is it more expansive? How is al Qaeda operating today? How do the groups within the al Qaeda network relate to each other and to the core? Answers to these questions are necessary to inform the crafting of a successful strategy to counter the real al Qaeda.
The year of Osama bin Laden’s death is the year that the overall al Qaeda network became stronger. The al Qaeda network benefited significantly from the breakdown in governance across the Middle East and North Africa. Affiliates such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) all expanded their area of operations and exploited openings caused by the Arab Spring’s unrest. Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s new emir, named two new affiliates: al Shabaab in Somalia, which had a robust, though covert, relationship with al Qaeda, and Jabhat al Nusra in Syria, established with the assistance of AQI. American strategy remained focused on degrading the capabilities of the core group in Pakistan even as the al Qaeda network expanded.
The al Qaeda network is adaptive, complex, and resilient. Today, it has a formal organizational structure, with the core group at its head providing overall direction. Informal relationships and human networks, one of the most important of which was formed around bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s, create an underlying latticed structure that bridges the formal structure of the network.
But even as the network becomes increasingly decentralized, the core group continues to direct the al Qaeda network. AQAP, the affiliate most likely to have assumed control over the al Qaeda network, has deferred to the core group, and its emir may have even accepted a formal position as Zawahiri’s deputy. The decentralization of the al Qaeda network has not made it weaker. On the contrary, affiliate-to-affiliate relationships may have increased the overall network’s resiliency. These relationships may also ensure al Qaeda’s survival even if the core group is defeated completely.
Al Qaeda affiliates have evolved and now threaten the United States as much as (if not more than) the core group; they can no longer be dismissed as mere local al Qaeda franchises. The affiliates have also developed relationships with local militant Islamist groups, similar to the relationships between al Qaeda core and Pakistan-based associates, and they have supported the establishment of like-minded local groups, as the al Qaeda core did in the 1990s.
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