Post –Osama , better post- Al Qa’ida

I am in a lounge inside an international airport and I just finished to trade some comments about something with a senior intelligence officer . Now I sit alone drinking a superlative coffee and starting to realize that Bin Laden was hunted more than Adolf Hitler. When I come to this idea I get sad.

In the ´80.s there was an equivalent collective drama and the protagonist were Carlos the Jackal but his face was not so notorious like that of OBL. It was because a different era with less access to media ,maybe… .

OBL was found and among them who will benefit for this event we can account also the Pakistani intelligence that will see a sharp increase of the legend about its ability to deceive the whole world , including its own government.

Now it seems that the new leadership is not to strong…one moment please, so strong ?

What did Al Qaeda achieved in 10 years ? Nothing.

Maybe it is time to understand something we have been missing since years.
Al Qaeda is a group characterized by :
- crude unsophisticated rhetoric
- obnoxious behavior
- ugly sectarianism
- the tendency of its various “franchised” affiliates to alienate almost everybody
-a predilection to engage in vicious infighting

But not only this. Too many have used terabytes and ocean of ink to try to understand because this message of violence could have some appeal for the youths. A lot of theories raised and they talk about almost anything from the social evolution since the VII AC to how “rap Jihaidist”music can affect a fragile mind… .
But we have not found an answer and, more important as well as more tragic, we have missed something.

What ?

We missed the internal and lethal crisis of this movement that continued to receive support and gain adherents despite of its ideology, and not because of it. Inside our ivory towers of supposed knowledge about others we were so concentrated on talking about “how we can conquest hearts and minds” that we did not track something in the streets. And this something is that the majority of Muslims find its vicious sectarianism, callous narrow-mindedness and pedantic fixation with details at the expense of the whole picture, extremely infuriating, and often repulsive. The only ,(residual),support come thank a powerful anti-Western rhetoric and to the legend of an over-estimated ,( by the intelligence communities), operative power .
It is better to remember something : 1989. It was a moment of hope in the west. But unlucky we cannot tell the same for the Greater Middle East. And unlucky there was not shortage of people that wanted to fight for their (own)local wars. Hamas,Hizbhullah,Kasminiris…and Al Qaeda.
Yes we have not to forget that at the origin AQ was a local enterprise run by OBL obsessed to driving the US Troops outside the KSA. By the way, we think that we have to put it also inside the internal struggles in the Kingdom and we are sure that ,one day, someone will start to write alto this missing chapter of the history. Then and only when he associated Ayman Al-Zawahiri also emerged within a group whose ideology distinctly called for targeting the “proximate enemy”,(read the dictatorial regimes at home rather than Israel or America).

BUT with both failing, ( to target the KSA elite and the dictatorial regimes in the region), they were forced in to exile. At this point to get sufficient support for their local wars they decided to make a virtue out of a necessity and declare war on America,the West and Israel.
And this is the key point that we always missed and are still missing. OBL &. Co. declared war to the USA/West/Israel NOT because they had success at home and were strong BUT because they have any success at home and they see that this could be the best marketing tool to promote themselves.
On clear words : OBL Saudi supporters shared the ideology of the monarchy, which enforced the structures of Wahhabi Islam. To ask them to a fight against an Islamic monarchy would have not been an easy order, but to direct their frustrations and ire against the “infidel Americans” who occupied the “Prophet’s Peninsula” was an easier sell. Then the fight against the US/West started to be the best marketing tool they had also to try to re-direct the anger of the varied local insurgencies towards America, and thus secure global support for his local war. We shortly rememenber that AQ never attacked an Israeli target ,( both in Israel or abroad),and this to confirm both how its military power was /is more supposed than real ,( or at least a lot over estimated),and that Palestinians were never a reason to fight for OBL.

But also in this case the success was limited because :
-many groups refused to join the fight
- some withdrew after joining.
- when the group appeared to expand into some new regions,(Iraq, Yemen , North Africa), this was even more disastrous for it because the new adherents were the worst advertisement for any movement: brutal and brutish, maliciously sectarian and pathologically bloodthirsty, ( at a such level that the achieved the sad score to provoke more revolts against them than against their enemies)

In a sentence : they demonstrated the bankruptcy of the terror route.

And if we want an evidence look at the Jasmine Revolution: where is Al Qaeda?

When do we decide to enter in a post-Al Qaeda world ?

Paolo DealbertiDealberti©2011

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