Al Qaeda’s ‘War Amongst the People’

Via Abu Muqawama I was directed to the latest issue of the Countering Terrorism Centre’s Sentinel in which you will find a pithy article by by Jarret Brachman and Abdullah Warius on ‘Abu Yahya al-Libi’s “Human Shields in Modern Jihad”‘. It’s excellent, so go read it. Some observations:

1. The sorts of things which Brachman and Warius are saying should not remain hidden in the pages of the Sentinel but should be proclaimed in mosques and madrassahs everywhere–that they are not is perplexing and yet another sign of the nearing 7-year failure to engage with the war of ideas seriously; and,
2. While I am not expert on Islamic theology, nor any theology for that matter, the article reminded me ofanother one in The American Spectator by Angelo Codevilla ‘Heresy and History‘ in which he made the argument that the Wahabbis, being essentially heretics (so said the Ottoman Caliph, an irony one wonders whether or not is lost on AQ’s restored-Caliphate-longing fanatics), will ultimately be defeated by orthodox Islam.

It is not just us who are struggling with how to fight in an era of Wars Amongst the People; it’s the other side too. Part of the problem I have these days with the term insurgency and its antonym counterinsurgency (Faceless Bureaucrat, my co-blogger, prefers term ’surgency’–he’s right, actually, but there’s some selling required) is that both sides look like insurgents when it comes to the ideational campaign; in fact, the ideas we’re selling, at least putatively, are the more revolutionary. But I digress.

We’re all adjusting to a new frame of warfare. So far, our response has been a lot of painful soul-searching and anxiety (and, it should be admitted, a huge amount of faffing about) concerning how to build forces which can handle the complex problems of the conflicts in which we find ourselves, chief among those being how to employ force (amongst other instruments, and actually marshalling those is another huge challenge) not merely accurately but judiciously and with careful discrimination. The other side, as we see with Al-Libi, has taken a different tack, that being to explain the problem away in a transparently self-serving and religiously quite egregiously insulting way (one would think). That’s why they will lose.

Is a Muslim parent whose child has been blown to smithereens by Al Qaeda in an attempt to get at Western forces or, more likely, some other Muslims whom they consider apostate or traitorous, really going to be mollified by the argument that their beloved son or daughter has just been delivered to Paradise a little earlier than planned? I don’t think so. The evidence from Al Anbar does not suggest so either.

When the last Salafist Jihadist meets his sorry end on a gibbet somewhere we should look forward with justifiable trepidation to the emergence of a less-self defeating adversary, one that does not actively seek to insinuate into the noose its own scrawny neck.