Does Bin Laden Still Matter?

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Does Bin Laden Still Matter?

By Eric Etheridge

Most of the assessments of Al Qaeda written for the eighth anniversary of 9/11 last week were rather harsh about the current state of Osama bin Laden’s operation.

“Al Qaeda failed,” pronounced Tony Karon in Time.

Today . . . Al Qaeda is believed to comprise a couple of hundred desperate men, their core leaders hiding out in Pakistan’s tribal wilds and under constant threat of attack by ever present U.S. drone aircraft, their place in Western nightmares and security determinations long since eclipsed by such longtime rivals as Iran, Hizballah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. This year’s official threat assessment by the U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence cited the global economic downturn as the primary security challenge facing the U.S. The report found “notable progress in Muslim public opinion turning against terrorist groups like Al Qaeda” and said no country was at risk of falling to Al Qaeda-inspired extremists. It argued that sustained pressure against the movement’s surviving core in the Pakistani tribal wilds was degrading its organizational cohesion and diminishing the threat it poses.


Ian Black and Richard Norton-Taylor offered a similar take in The Guardian:

Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda is under heavy pressure in its strongholds in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas and is finding it difficult to attract recruits or carry out spectacular operations in western countries, according to government and independent experts monitoring the organisation.

Speaking to the Guardian in advance of tomorrow’s eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, western counter-terrorism officials and specialists in the Muslim world said the organisation faced a crisis that was severely affecting its ability to find, inspire and train willing fighters.

So what’s an embattled jihadi to do? On Sunday, Osama dropped a new 11-minute audio message (read a translation) and at Foreign Policy, Marc Lynch sees evidence of a leader attempting an organizational turnaround: “It appears to be vintage bin Laden, a major improvement over recent Al Qaeda communications and potentially a signal of a new stage in its strategic efforts.”

For those reasons, Lynch says the message “deserves attention in ways which many recent Al Qaeda communications have not.”

The speech itself represents a vintage bin Laden appeal to the mainstream Muslim world, with a heavy focus on Israel and the suffering of the Palestinians and very little reference to salafi-jihadist ideology. This is important, because one of the reasons for Al Qaeda’s recent decline has been its general exposure — or branding, if you prefer — as an extreme salafi-jihadist movement rather than as an avatar of Muslim resistance. It has lost ground from the brutality and ideological extremism of its chosen representatives in Iraq, because of nationalist outrage over its ‘near enemy’ attacks in a variety of Arab and Muslim countries, and because of the battles it has chosen with far more popular Islamist movements such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. But this does not mean that it can not learn from its mistakes.

This tape seemingly represents an effort by bin Laden to recapture the mantle of a generalized resistance to the West and to Israel and to downplay the salafi-jihadist tropes so beloved of the jihadist forums. Where the ideologues of the forums eviscerate Hamas, bin Laden speaks in general terms about Palestine. Where the forums obsess over fine points of salafi-jihadist doctrine, bin Laden speaks only about political conflicts in Palestine and Afghanistan. American strategic communications efforts towards the end of the Bush administration and into the Obama administration had considerable success in hurting Al Qaeda’s image by making it a debate about them, not about us. It appears that Al Qaeda Central has absorbed this lesson and is attempting to turn the tables and it make it once more about America and Israel. . . .

Overall, this tape struck me as something significant. Al-Qaeda has been on the retreat for some time. Its response thus far to the Obama administration has been confused and distorted. Ayman al-Zawahiri [bin Laden's number two] has floundered with several clumsy efforts to challenge Obama’s credibility or to mock his outreach. But bin Laden’s intervention here seems far more skillful and likely to resonate with mainstream Arab publics. It suggests that he at least has learned from the organization’s recent struggles and is getting back to the basics in AQ Central’s “mainstream Muslim” strategy of highlighting political grievances rather than ideological purity and putting the spotlight back on unpopular American policies. Several recent commentaries by leading Arab analysts - including today’s column by the influential al-Quds al-Arabi editor Abd al-Bari Atwan [UPDATE: translation of column here]– suggest that this may be paying off. American strategic communications efforts will need to up their game too.

At Counterterroism Blog, Walid Phares concurs: “There is without any doubt a shift in the strategic communications of Al Qaeda.”

The latter’s advisors, some of whom we can detect are operating from within the American political culture, have convinced Bin Laden (assuming it is voice on the tape) that it would be strategically preferable to single out one issue, the US-Israel relations, and try to break it by putting Americans in general and perhaps some in the Administration, under pressure: the offer is that the entire War on Terror could end from al Qaeda’s side if Washington would let go of its alliance with Israel. This is why I found that this tape, unlike any previous one, shows a non traditional al Qaeda approach. It could even [signify] that a possible re-alignment has been taking place between various forces of Jihadism in the Greater Middle East.

Jarret Brachman begs to differ with such analysis. “Don’t believe the hype,” he writes at his own blog.

Some analysts have been arguing that UBL’s new audio tape is novel in content and/or approach. Eh -I don’t see it. . . . None of UBL’s commentary in this video is new – it’s all been field tested and focused-grouped before, mostly by him, Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Zawahiri’s errand-boy, Adam Gadahn.

Let’s be brutally systematic so that I can squelch all this hullaballoo. Let me remind you of two other statements, his Aug/Sept 07, “Message from the Lion Shaykh, Usama Bin Ladin, To the American People…” and his May 2008, “Reasons of Conflict on the 60th Anniversary of the Creation of the Israeli Occupation State.”

His script is almost exact if you play it out across those videos and his 9/13/09 one.

Brachman then proceeds with a detailed textual comparison of the three bin Laden messages across several topics, including “the Power of the American Jewish Lobby.”

In 2007, he said:

The people who wield real power and influence are those who have a large capital. As long as the democratic system allows big corporations to support candidates, whether they are running for the presidency or for Congress, there should be no cause for wonder–and there is none–at the failure of the Democrats to stop the war. You have the proverb that says: You pay, you talk.

In 2008, he said:

The strength of the Zionist lobby in your media also became clear as it portrayed matters contrary to the reality in the service of the Israelis.

In 2009, he said:

the White House, which is in fact a hostage in the hands of pressure groups, especially major corporations and the Israeli lobby.

“Need I go on?” Brachman concludes.

This is not a strategic realignment or esoteric literary references or anything new. This is stock Al Qaeda just stewed a bit longer. Same ingredients. Same lines of argument. Those who try to say that UBL is up to something new and dastardly with this statement either don’t get it or are looking to create buzz.

At the Washington Independent, Spencer Ackerman reads bin Laden’s rhetoric as an “appeal to the lowest common denominator of Islamic extremism,” and reads that in turn as a sign of bin Laden’s weakness, not of his turnaround savvy.

Previous bin Laden tapes have made contentions about strategy, as when he, for instance, justified his Iraqi franchise’s murder of civilians. Now he’s giving the world the Islamic extremist equivalent of motherhood and apple pie, which is to say anti-Semitism. If ever there’s a sign that he’s having trouble capturing the imaginations of even his fellow extremists, there it is.

Ackerman is in fact so convinced Osama’s “done” that he subjected his latest message to the indignity of autotune (here, let me Google that for you). “As promised,” he wrote in post earlier today on his own site, “Welcome to Usama bin Ladotune.”

I had a vague feeling of worry while working on this that I would inadvertently revive UBL’s career, but he’s done, and no gimmick can save him. As you’ll notice, he didn’t even put much emotion in his vocals.

Credit where due, he can actually ride this beat at key moments. He might get someone from BMF to talk on it. But for a long time he’s been looking to get his chain tooken, and I figured I’d do it myself. I’m so Brooklyn.


Gregg Carlstrom at The Majils agrees with Ackerman’s analysis that the shift in bin Laden’s rhetoric “reflects a weakened Al Qaeda.” But he says “it’s wrong to conclude (as Ackerman does on Twitter) that this means the end of Al Qaeda.”

The reason is that the original Al Qaeda — defined as bin Laden and the core of advisers around him — has ceased to be the operational locus of “greater Al Qaeda.” The majority of attacks conducted by Al Qaeda are actually conducted by affiliates with vague, ill-defined links to the core of the group.

These groups, unlike the core of Al Qaeda, do not seem to have recruiting problems. . . .

Bin Laden, then, serves as a sort of spiritual leader for the group. His job isn’t to attract new recruits; his job is to unite Al Qaeda’s disparate affiliates under one banner.

Each affiliate has different motivations, though, and that prevents bin Laden from getting too specific in his statements. The issues that motivate Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb might not matter to the Abdullah Azzam Brigades or the Al-Shebab movement in Somalia. There are a few exceptions to that rule, though, and those are the issues bin Laden focused on in today’s statement.

Put another way: Bin Laden is trying to rebuild his popularity in the ummah, but that’s a secondary goal; this recording seemed like an effort to “rally the troops” and encourage them to keep fighting.

Carlstrom links, as does Lynch, above, to an article by Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor al-Quds al-Arabi, “the most independent of the London-based pan-Arab dailies,” according to the blog the Boursa Exchange, which provides a translation of the article.

Whereas eight years ago there was one address for Al Qaeda, the caves of Tora-Bora in Afghanistan, today there are a number of different addresses for different branches of the organization, which are perhaps stronger and more dangerous than the “main” branch. There is now Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula and in the Islamic Maghreb, in addition to the branches in Iraq and along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. There is also the Somali branch, which has revived and rebuilt and is now stronger than it was in a previous iteration.

Al Qaeda is like the many-headed dragon of myth – when one of its heads is cut off, it sprouts several more in its place. . . .

Al Qaeda does not carry out large-scale attacks in the West because it is no longer a top priority, as it was during the days of the ‘Republic of Tora Bora.’ They no longer need to send suicide bombers to New York or London or Madrid because there 100,000 Western troops in Afghanistan – half of them American – and more than 140,000 US troops in Iraq. This has saved them, and their leaders, the burden of having to plan how to penetrate security and create new explosive devices like liquid bombs. The other point worth highlighting is the West’s skill, and the US’ particularly, in turning the Middle East into a collection of failed states where extremist groups like Al Qaeda can find safe havens: Iraq is one of them. Afghanistan and Somalia and Pakistan and Sudan and Yemen on the verge of joining, with the Gaza Strip and Lebanon on the same path.

Aside from the American attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan, the most important development of the past eight years has been the growth of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Yemen and the Islamic Maghreb. Pakistan has a nuclear capability. Yemen is a base of operations in the Arabian peninsula, threatening Gulf oil production, a pillar of Western economic life. As for the appearance of a branch of the organization in the Islamic Maghreb, it has access to a stock of 30 million Muslims in Europe, some of whom face the threat of racism, unemployment and marginalization. . . .

It is true that the traditional leadership of Al Qaeda is aging. Sheikh Osama bin Laden, the organization’s leader, is 52, and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is in his 60s. In addition, they face difficult life circumstances due to the fact that they are targets. But the new, young generation of Al Qaeda’s leadership may be more dangerous and more severe, and they are already in leadership positions.

Or as Lawrence Wright put it last week at the New Yorker, “The fact that Al Qaeda is still kicking, twenty-one years after its founding, is a testament to its adaptability—and to the failure of the U.S. and its allies to penetrate the organization.”