So what happens to al-Qaida now?
First
break down the network into its constituent elements: the hardcore
leadership, the various affiliated groups that have some kind of
organisational link to al-Qaida and the ideology, al-Qaida-ism.
The
hardcore leadership has always been defined as Bin Laden and his
Egyptian associate, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and a few score associates in
Pakistan. Zawahiri is apparently still alive. However, the ageing former
paediatrician has none of the charisma of Bin Laden. He is good on
ideology, strong on strategy and even organisation but can never be the
focal point for active followers, whether aspirant jihadis or veteran
militants, that Bin Laden was.
There are younger leadership
figures, some who have been promoted as al-Qaida has tried to fight its
creeping marginalisation in recent years. But people such as Abu Yayha
al’Libi, who is in his mid-40s, can never replace “the sheikh”. The
central leadership of al-Qaida has been splintered in recent years,
often pitting Saudi, Egyptian and Libyan militants against each other.
It is now likely to definitively fracture.
What of the affiliate
groups or the “network of networks”? Decentralising was always an
integral part of the strategy of bin Laden. Al-Qaida was conceived as
an umbrella group, channelling and focusing the diverse energies of the
various groups active across the Islamic world in the 1990s. This worked
for a while but the main regional groups now – al-Qaida in the Arabian
Peninsula (largely the Yemen), al-Qaida in the Maghreb (largely Algeria)
and al-Qaida in Iraq are largely independent of the main leadership.
Each is rooted in specific local factors and history. Their alliance
with al-Qaida was usually nominal in any case.
This reminds us how
al-Qaida was always only one of scores of radical groups that together
constituted the dynamic, varied and evolving phenomenon of Sunni Muslim
violent extremism. Though the death of Bin Laden will fundamentally
change the landscape of contemporary militancy it will thus not
necessarily have a big immediate effect on affiliate groups beyond
discouraging their leadership by showing how, even if it takes 10 years,
fugitives do eventually get caught and killed.
The final question
is perhaps the most important. What will the effects be on the
ideology? Here the situation is less clear. Bin Laden’s greatest success
was to make his particular interpretation of radical Islamism globally
known. There were other strands of militant thinking and strategy around
in the late 1990s but 20 years of “propaganda by deed” made bin Laden’s
the dominant one. A thriving jihadi subculture has emerged. Al-Qaida
has become, in many ways, a social movement. Bin Laden’s death means the
removal of the figure at the centre of this construct. This is
undoubtedly important.
Also, many of the myriad factors that have
fed radical militancy in recent decades – some of which stretch back
decades or even centuries in the Islamic world or in the Islamic world’s
relationship with the west – are still as potent as ever. We are living
in a new era of polarisation, conspiracy theory and religious identity.
The strategic impact of Bin Laden’s actions depended in part on the
reaction of his enemies, particularly the United States. The
consequences of his death do so too.
That said, in recent years
the increasing marginalisation of al-Qaida – culturally, socially and
geographically – has been very clear. The Arab Spring demonstrated how
Bin Laden’s message had been rejected by those hundreds of millions he
once sought to radicalise and mobilise. Al-Qaida had orchestrated no
major successful attack for more than five years. The recruits were
coming to the makeshift Pakistani camps but only in enough numbers to
assure the core group’s survival not its success, at least not in the
short term.
The most likely scenario in the future is continuing
low-level violence and threat shifting around the periphery of the
Islamic world depending on local circumstances and the emergence of new
leaders. “My life or death does not matter. The awakening has started,”
Bin Laden boasted in late 2001. It will be at least another decade
before we know if he was right.
