Clark, Sageman, and The Next Jihad

Richard Clarke's dark scenario for the future in the current Atlantic demands a read. It drives home the point that the United States is (still) very vulnerable to al-Qaeda attacks. A relatively small number of relatively unsophisticated people could wreak enormous havoc on our country without a great deal of difficulty. But if this is so, why haven't we seen any attacks in the United States since 9/11? I think the best answer is implicit in Marc Sageman's Understanding Terror Networks.

The fundamental reality that Sageman's book, along with basic observation and some other sources, brings home is that al-Qaeda never involved a very large number of people. A lot of folks probably count in some sense as "radical Islamists" or "Salafi jihadists" or what have you, but very few are/were inclined/able to participate in terrorist attacks against the United States. A relatively high proportion of these people killed themselves on September 11, 2001. A large number of additional people were rounded up in the near aftermath of the attacks, either due to increased vigilance by western law enforcement, or else as a result of the Afghan War. This left al-Qaeda primarily active in countries that did not, immediately, take the threat very seriously. This led attacks to be mounted in such countries which, in turn, caused Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia to start taking things more seriously and got a bunch more people rounded up. Since it really was a network -- Sageman's book is called Understanding Terror Networks -- capturing a large number of participants has had a massive disrupting effect on whoever remains.

The next question, however, becomes what of new recruitment? This is where Sageman's insights really come into play. It turns out that, contrary to much sloppy reporting, there really was no recruitment per se taking place, and the much-discussed madrassas were never really "churning out" new terrorists. Instead, in its post-Khartoum, pre-9/11 phase al-Qaeda operated like an elite American college. It put the word out that the network existed, that training was done in Afghanistan, and that you got to Afghanistan through Pakistani border towns. It put the word out that the jihad was good stuff, and issued a lot of propaganda in support of its vision. That done, no one needed to be recruited. Instead, would-be jihadis came to them, and the challenge was to get accepted.

Understood in this way, denying al-Qaeda its Afghan sanctuary has done more than many appreciate to screw up its operations. Even with many leading personnel still at large, without even a vague address to report to, would-be jihadis couldn't really sign up. Thus, despite rising anti-Americanism and the continuing appeal of the Salafi jihad in principle, it was hard for the network to gain new nodes and grow new cells.

But now we need to add the growth of the Iraqi insurgency into the equation. Once again, as during al-Qaeda's Afghan period, a would-be jihadi knows where he needs to go. He knows -- as I know and as you, the gentle reader knows -- that you can fight Americans in Iraq. He knows that the jihad takes place primarily in the "Sunni triangle" and the "triangle of death" both in the vicinity of Baghdad. He knows that the Syrian border is said to be the source of most of the insurgency's external inputs of manpower, money, and materiel. In other words, once again if you want to join the jihad, you know what to do. But of course once you get to Iraq, if you do make contact with someone, he'll want you to fight in Iraq not in the USA. Thus, having created a new global locus for the jihad as part of the strategic error that was the Iraq War, we also get the side benefit of "flypaper." Basically, US civilian casualties are displaced onto US military personnel and Iraqis of various stripes.

So far, so good (or so bad). The real question, however, is what happens if the jihad in Iraq ends? It would be remarkably odd if we wind up killing every single jihadi before going home. Either we'll need to start pulling troops out with many jihadis still in the field, or else we'll start gaining the upper hand and many jihadis will make themselves scarce. Either way, a new generation of recruits will have signed up, new networks will have been formed, and when people depart Iraq (either because we've won, or else because we've lost) they'll go somewhere else and start waging jihad there. Most of the native-born Iraqis who've joined up for the fight against America will probably stay put in Iraq, but not all of them will. You still won't be talking about a huge number of people, but the flipside of the insight that al-Qaeda was never a particularly large organization is that al-Qaeda never needed to be a particularly large institution to mount attacks on the scale of WTC, Bali, Madrid, etc.