A fragmented cause loses its mystic oracle

ERIC SCHMITT
International Herald Tribune
05-03-2011
A fragmented cause loses its mystic oracle
Byline: ERIC SCHMITT
Type: News

Administration officials in the United States say Al Qaeda remains a threat after the death of Osama Bin Laden, but that the fragmented group lacks a critical ideological cohesion without him.

The death of Osama bin Laden robs Al Qaeda of its founder and spiritual leader at a time when the terrorist organization is struggling to show its relevance to the democratic protesters in the Middle East and North Africa.
Experts said Bin Laden had been a largely symbolic figure in recent years who had little, if any, direct role in spreading terrorism worldwide. While his death is significant, these officials said, it will not end the threat from an increasingly potent and self-reliant string of regional Qaeda affiliates in North Africa and Yemen or from a self-radicalized vanguard in the United States.

"Clearly, this doesn't end the threat from Al Qaeda and its affiliates," said Juan Zarate, a top counterterrorism official under President George W. Bush. "But it deprives Al Qaeda of its core leader and the ideological cohesion that Bin Laden maintains."

Obama administration officials predicted that without Bin Laden's spiritual guidance -- and his almost mystical ability to inspire followers by standing up to and evading U.S. and allied efforts to hunt him down -- Qaeda leaders' efforts to obtain nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and to use them against the United States, will weaken.

"Bin Laden was Al Qaeda's only commander in its 22-year history and was largely responsible for the organization's mystique, its attraction among violent jihadists and its focus on America as a terrorist target," a senior administration official told reporters early Monday.

Some U.S. counterterrorism officials have held that Bin Laden's longtime Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, was more instrumental in the tactical planning of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, than Bin Laden himself. But the senior Obama administration official said Mr. Zawahri "is far less charismatic and not as well respected within the organization."

Mr. Zawahri will most likely have difficulty maintaining the loyalty of Bin Laden's followers, the official said.

Indeed, the Al Qaeda of today is a much different organization than the one Bin Laden presided over a decade ago. It is much less hierarchical and more diffuse. And Al Qaeda's main headquarters in Pakistan has come under withering attack from the C.I.A.'s armed drones.

Meantime, regional affiliates have blossomed in North Africa, Iraq, East Africa and Yemen. All have been personally blessed by Bin Laden, but each has developed its own strategy.

That was Bin Laden's vision from the start. His plan was to spin off terrorist subsidiaries that could request ideological guidance or material support from time to time but were meant to be largely self-sustaining.

Years before Bin Laden's death -- he has been heard from only rarely in recent years, in often-scratchy audio recordings -- the mantle for the Qaeda brand was taken up increasingly by Mr. Zawahri and, more significantly, by Anwar al-Awlaki, a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the Yemen branch is known.

Mr. Awlaki uses idiomatic American English in his online speeches to extremists and potential recruits in the West. His followers and other radicals can learn all they need about building a crude bomb through instructions on the Internet.

U.S. and European law enforcement officials say they worry most about Mr. Awlaki's kind of "lone wolf" threat, which is much harder to detect than, say, the team that planned for years to attack the World Trade Center's twin towers and the Pentagon.

It is an inauspicious time for Al Qaeda, as it seeks to exploit the fervor that has been unleashed in the democratic protests in the Middle East and North Africa. The demonstrators, however, have largely ignored Al Qaeda's call to use violence.

"Al Qaeda has been struggling on the sidelines of the Arab revolution, its popularity in Arab and Muslim countries has been declining, and there are internal divisions about the direction of the movement," Mr. Zarate said.

Copyright International Herald Tribune May 03, 2011