The Al Qaeda Paradox

Steve Coll

The New Yorker

Compared with their position in the period from 2002 to 2004, Al Qaeda and its affiliates, such as Jemaah Islamiya in Indonesia (which has been involved in hotel bombings similar to the attack today on the Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton in Jakarta), have become politically marginalized. Opinion polling, election results, and theological discourse all describe an Al Qaeda network that has been rejected by the great majority of Muslims. Al Qaeda has largely brought this outcome upon itself. Unlike Hezbollah and Hamas, it has never developed a political strategy that appealed successfully to the craving among many Muslims for justice and better governance. Al Qaeda runs no schools or hospitals and it competes in no trade-union elections. It operates no semi-legitimate political front, as Hezbollah and Hamas do.

Why has Al Qaeda isolated itself in this way, particularly when there are alternative models, such as Hezbollah, lying in plain sight? There is a strong millenarian streak in the belief systems of Osama bin Laden and some of his colleagues; they believe that God ordained the war they are fighting and that its outcome is in many ways predetermined. Also, bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, simply lack political skills. They are modern men, but, unlike the leaders of Hezbollah, they lack a vision of modern politics. They have randomly murdered far too many of their own potential followers. Their idea of justice is abstract and distant—it involves the punishment of unbelievers, some of them living far away, and not the righting of wrongs close at hand, whether those wrongs are unemployment, or routine local problems such as grazing, or boundary disputes. Al Qaeda has been up and running formally for twenty-one years now. By this point in the history of the Soviet Communist movement, Lenin had seized control of a great state. By this point in the history of Cuban Communism, Castro was in Havana. And Osama? He’s hunkered down along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, a fugitive “guest” with a price on his head, waiting for death, embedded in a political economy that is a cross between Gaza and the New Jersey of “The Sopranos.” By the lights of its own announced ambitions in 2001, then, at least in political terms, Al Qaeda has failed.

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