Terrorism for the Sane

I am currently reading (well, actually listening too) a book called “America's Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies”. The book details the origins of al-Qaeda, the roots of the Taliban, the lead up to 9/11, and tries to give explanations and motivations behind each faction’s actions. There are a lot of points that could be discussed in reference to the book, but perhaps the most profound for me was the dissection of al-Qaeda’s motives.

There is a fundamental question that one needs to ask when pondering the motivations behind al-Qaeda’s actions is; are all al-Qaeda’s actions rational? Does al-Qaeda have a goal that it is trying to achieve in a rational way? Put another way, is al-Qaeda acting more like Chinese Maoist rebels, or more like Timothy McVeigh. Maoist rebels had a goal and used rational means to achieve it. Timothy McVeigh, while certainly having a goal, was completely delusional to think that blowing up the Oklahoma City building was going to achieve his ends. This is an important question, as it frames how to deal with al-Qaeda. Handling a religious suicide cult is much different from handling an organization trying to achieve its goal in a rational way.

George Friedman, author of America’s Secret War, argues that al-Qaeda is a rational organization with an achievable goal. Friedman categorically rejects simplistic “they hate our freedom” and “they want to make use Muslims” arguments. Instead, he argues that al-Qaeda wants to achieve a united Islamist caliphate that spans across the entire Islamic world. He argues that for al-Qaeda, the failure of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a defining moment. Al-Qaeda looked upon the Soviet defeat and thought that they saw a strategy for rebuilding and Islamic empire.

The Soviets poured hundreds of thousands of men into the blood bath of Afghanistan and were resoundingly defeated. A handful of poorly armed but highly motivated rebels were able to defeat the largest military in the world on its own border. To al-Qaeda, this was proof enough that force of will alone could expel foreign influences, topple corrupt and secular Islamic governments, and beat back overseas interventions.

Al-Qaeda’s rational goal with 9/11, according to Friedman, was to provoke the Americans into involving themselves militarily in multiple Islamic nations. The goal was two fold. First, al-Qaeda wanted unite the Islamic world by provoking the Americans into invading Islamic nations. It was al-Qaeda’s belief, that if the Americans were seen to be crusading against Islamic nations, the long victimized feeling people of the Islamic world would unite to defeat a common foe. Al-Qaeda’s second goal in provoking the Americans was to spawn an American defeat. It was al-Qaeda’s belief that the Islamic world felt impotent against the western world, and that this feeling of impotence is what kept them from striking forward and rebuilding the Islamic empire. By provoking the Americans into Soviet Afghanistan style defeat, al-Qaeda hoped to show the Islamic world the impotence of the Americans, and by extension the impotence of the governments that the Americans supported.

Al-Qaeda than has been thwarted both by their miscalculations and the active steps taken by the Americans. The invasion of Afghanistan in particular with its ‘light’ footprint never became the blood bath that al-Qaeda had hoped for. The pan Islamic uprising never occurred as either the governments of Islamic nations showed themselves to be more stable than al-Qaeda anticipated, or their citizens less enraged by American actions than they had hoped.

Even Iraq, which certainly still could become the “proof” of American impotence, has turned out to be far less than al-Qaeda had hoped. Instead of an Islamic uprising against the Americans, we instead see sectarian strife that has as much to do with inter-Islamic disunity than it has to do with resistance to American occupation.

Regardless if Friedman’s analysis is correct, his argument underlined for me that we spend very little time trying to actually understand al-Qaeda’s motives and instead rely on policy debate that revolves around cheap clichés like “they hate our freedom”. Al-Qaeda needs to be viewed as an organization that is rational and does things for rational reasons. Perhaps we might be better served to view al-Qaeda as being more like Maoist rebels with rational means and ends, than a crazy suicide cult that can’t be blocked (short of killing all its members) because it has no rational goal or method of achieving it.