10 years after the US embassy attacks, al Qaeda is winning

Ted Tedford

An uncharacteristically downbeat assessment. It would be interesting to see how AQ's senior leadership view their campaign. I doubt they consider they have made anything other than tactical successes in recent years, and there is plenty of evidence of an impending operational, if not strategic, failure, in Iraq. This is well-documented.

The flaw in the 'organic' AQ structure has also be exposed: they've lost control of the franchise. Zarqawi has contaminated the AQ brand in Iraq, and that is having a global impact.

As to The West marching in to an elephant trap of AQ's making, I suspect it is truer to say that AQ recognised the deep psychological damage being done to 'The West' by moral relativism: the weakness of the response to the embassy bombings confirmed that. They didn't dig the trap: 'we' did. They just squeezed the jaws a little.

Fraser Allonby

AQ are not winning. They have not staged a major successful attack in the West since July 2005. The successful surge in Iraq and escalation of the conflict in Afghanistan with the potential to spill into Pakistan hardly rings true of introspection and hand wringing.

AQ have been successfully countered over the last few years which has exposed what a small band of fundamentalists (emphasis on mentalists) they were in the first place.

ACT

Yeah, they're winning, we're all about to become subject to the universal Caliphate . . . Mind you, all sarcasm to one side, if we have walked into an 'elephant trap', let's not forget the people like, well, you, who cheered us on as we tumbled down into it. Maybe, just maybe, the likes of Frank and even Boris got British participation in Iraq right, whereas you didn't? As ever with all right wing pro-war types, it's the exquisite lack of humility that's so intriguing.

Ruairidh

I agree with Ted’s post. AQ didn’t design the elephant trap the west did and I’d go further to say that our hand wringing over liberty and Magna Carta is not just not part of their strategy but of no interest to them. The debate in the west, the laws we do or don’t introduce are ultimately of no importance to AQ except merely in a tactical sense for recruitment purposes. Our government is illegitimate in their eyes whether we detain for 42 days or 2 days.

It is wrong to say we are losing simply because there is a lack of unity about how to proceed. It just means we are not pursing as coherent a strategy as we might. AQ’s strategy is no more coherent as Ted points out. Zarqawi was a strategic disaster for them and their tactic of attacking soft western associated targets in Muslim countries has resulted in countless more Muslim dead than western. A fact that is not lost on their intended audience.

From AQ’s perspective they are most certainly losing when seen from their original aims and objectives. The movement started with the aim of curbing the west’s power and securing Wahabbi style Islamic governments across the Muslim world. Judged against this criteria they have gone backwards since 1998.

In 1998 you had one pro-AQ Islamic government in Afghanistan. You also had an anti-west government in Iraq and across the Muslim world governments were wary of working with the west against domestic Islamists for fear of stirring up domestic unrest.

In 2008 both Afghanistan and Iraq have pro-western governments. Every Islamic country to suffer a terrorist attack from Morocco to Indonesia has come off the fence and cracked down hard on domestic Islamists and worked with western intelligence agencies to counter the common threat. Islamist terror groups across the Muslim world that have aligned with AQ have taken a battering. The AQ safe haven of Waziristan is nothing compared to what they had ten years earlier. AQ has painted itself into a corner and is on the verge of strategic defeat in Iraq. It is a grim picture indeed for UBL.

It will probably be decades before AQ and violent extremist Islamism are eliminated as threats and it will take a serious effort and dedication from the west to see it through but we are winning that campaign.

BrianSJ

Matthew,
Thank you very much. They are winning, and we are not showing determination to win. Another book to read is 'Brave New War' by John Robb.
An obstacle to any success on our part is the Western military culture, and its approach to procurement. Lewis Page's 'Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs' is spot-on. We may have to choose between a comfortable approach to buying military toys and winning.

Austin Barry

Whether AQ, as such, is winning or not is rather beside the point. The metatastic growth of of Jihad almost everywhere is the problem and we ignore or accommodate it at our peril. Defeating Jihad on the home front will require a much more robust approach than Hazel Blears chirruping about community cohesion. A moritorium on immigration from certain countries should be the initial step, but that would cause outrage in the redoubts of the righteous in Islington and Tipton.

Marbury

"AQ is winning because there is more introspection and hand-wringing in the West than there is united determination to defeat the enemy. It is as simple as that."

I'm not sure AQ would see it that way. I think after Sept 11 they had higher hopes than to cause a bit of hand-wringing in the West. They imagined chaos and collapse in its institutions. They also predicted further attacks on a similar or bigger scale. None of this has happened (yet). Not only that but their training camps and infrastructure have been ripped apart and destablised (although they are recovering, in part). So, I don't know if AQ would say they're winning. I don't know that I would either.

Ted Tedford

BrianSJ: Your point about procurement is an important one, but not central to the argument. Wider 'Western military culture' - at least in the Anglosphere - is what has brought us to this point, and what will allow us to continue to correct, refine and improve our ways and means to address the challenge from AQ and bin Ladenism.

It's the ability of delegated commanders, from CINC CENTCOM to battle-group and company leaders, to adapt and develop, and, eventually, as we are seeing in Iraq, deliver improvements. The problem is whether the political will can be maintained. The leaders with the clarity to see the scope of the problem - Bush, Blair, Howard, a few others - are/were hampered by their other faults and flaws, and their failure to bring their electorates along with them - for fear of upsetting the delusions about the quiet life that set in in the 1990s.

The problems with procurement are side-issues - expensive ones, I concede, and that's no excuse for not addressing them. But the kind of kit we soldier with is of little direct bearing on whether or not AQ will win. Our absurd loss of proportion about acceptable casualty levels and risk management is of direct bearing, and is a by-product of the solipsistic 'elephant trap'.

This is not to endorse needless casualties, but, as Ruimsfeld pointed out, you go with army you *have*, not the one you'd *like*. The military have immediate tasks, and there is not time to sit around and wait until everyone is equipped perfectly to fight a COIN campaign. We weren't properly equipped to fight the Falklands, but, if we had waited until we were, the Islanders would have been speaking Spanish.

TrevorH

You would probably have been amongst those who were saying the Germans were winning in March/April 1918. By November of that same year they were suing for peace.

The similarity here is that after a tough year in 1917 Lloyd George saw fit to withhold reinforcements from the BEF thus creating a weakness the Germans exploited. Lloyed George wanted to win the war but was unwilling to put in the resources to do it. He hoped to wait for 1919 and the complete arrival of the Americans.

In the light of a self imposed war we continue to under fund/resource our armed forces, in particular our army. This gives AQ/Taliban opportunities to exploit.

You might argue there is a stalemate. others might argue we are putting AQ under pressure. We are not losing - we (in Britain/Europe at least) are lacking in will to win. Exerting constant pressure on AQ will cause them to crack. We have not created the resources to do that.

And BTW - '42 days' will do nothing to prevent terrorism and its highly unlikely that it will do anything to convict terrorists.

Ian C

AQ are winning nothing, but Islamic fundamentalism could be if we continue to wring our hands in the manner we have been.

AQ is merely a symptom of a a greater problem within the Muslim world and it has so far been played out as a war on the west, mostly because the USA and a few others have been the focus of the problem. In reality, it is not until the Muslim world modernises itself and spreads its income and assets more evenly among themselves will this cease to be a problem that is currently deflected at the west as the source of all evils.

Islamic terror kills more Muslims each year than any other victim group. We are not losing if AQ is winning, although we could if we are not smarter. Muslims are losing.

But the wake up call has been heeded to some extent in those countries, in large part because the US and others invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Much more has to be done and it is not until the Wahhabist elements are sent packing from both the Middle East and the west that we will be safe and Sufis dominates the Muslim world.

Jak

The problems in the Muslim world will not be resolved until Western colonialists are out along with the elites they installed throughout the 20th century - don't people get it? Muslims want Islam as their way of life and not secularism!

Frank Pulley

This thread is closed then? What happened to my small-wee-hours attempted rebuttal of Matthews assertions in this post?

liamjq

Do people still talk and "think" like Jak? That i suggest is the reason the world finds itself in this mess at the moment.

Frank Pulley

Do I detect censorship here, rather than mediation? If so, is it the Editor, or someone protecting his tender sensibilities? Fraser the Sailor professes to welcome the craic, not so the head honcho?

BrianSJ

Ted Tedford
Yes, good points. Richard North has made similar points very eloquently. He has also pointed out the lack of joined-up thinking between military operations and aid e.g. getting Afghans to grow cotton. The opposition e.g. Hamas, Sadr have this off pat.
The point about the acquisition is much wider than buying the right kit by traditional means (with supplier capture etc.), if taken in the Brave New War context.

Memnon

As an aside:
I've always considered it odd how nobody's ever commented on AQ's ghastly Arab racism, manifested in the African bombings. 200 people minding their own business, in their own countries, were blown away in order to kill 12 Americans. In the minds of AQ, we Africans had the status of mere objects. THis, surely, must be the only crime of AQ's that nobody can possibly rationalise, no matter how much they detest western policy/culture/history.
As an organisation dedicated to dragging as much of the world as possible back to the 7th century, AQ's attitudes are of a piece with the genocidaires of Sudan, not to mention Saudi Arabia retaining slavery until 1962. As an African myself, and fully aware of the west's sorry history of racism and slavery, I've got no difficulty choosing between western humanism on the one hand, and dark age theocracy with its embedded racism on the other.

Chris

What do we think AQ's definition of winning or success is? If simply maintaining its profile and enlisting the chattering classes in giving it the oxygen of publicity in the Spectator is its criterion, then it is succeeding pretty well. In every other respect, it must as an organization be on the ropes - it has split into hundreds of franchises, its senior leadership has been decimated and the US has tightened its grip on every aspect of its activities. More importantly, the Islamic world has turned agaianst AQ because of its nihilistic tendencies and is looking to other radical forms of militancy and assertion.