Beyond Bin Laden (2 page)

It was the spring of 2004, and the general before us was Stanley McChrystal, about to earn his second star. We were confident, having captured Saddam Hussein a few months prior and with the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan seemingly going well. We never got the chance to go after Osama bin Laden, though. A few weeks after we gathered in that airplane hangar, units from the Pakistani military marched into South Waziristan, clashed with Pakistani Taliban, and after negotiating their withdrawal, declared there to be no Al Qaeda in the FATA.
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The 2004 Shakai Agreement, as it came to be known, in which the Pakistani military largely acceded to the demands of the militants in the tribal areas, was a harbinger of things to come. Over the next five years, Pakistani military officers would strike a series of deals with militants that would cede large portions of Pakistan's old Northwest Frontier Province as well as the entirety of the FATA to militant groups, while elements within Pakistan's security services would arm, train, and reconstitute the Afghan Taliban and its allies.

But in retrospect, maybe the Pakistani military was right about Al Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal areas: Seven years later, when U.S. special operations forces finally killed Osama bin Laden, they found him not in some remote cave but in a fortified compound just one mile down the road from the Pakistani Military Academy in Abbottabad.

By 2011, though, I had long since left the U.S. military. In May 2004, I boarded a military transport out of Afghanistan, turned in my equipment, and shortly thereafter matriculated as a civilian graduate student at the American University of Beirut to study the peoples and politics of the Arabic-speaking world. For most of the next five years, as the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan worsened, I would live and study in Lebanon, Egypt, and Morocco.

The first time I visited the Middle East was just after September 11, 2001, when I deployed with my platoon of light infantry to Kuwait before later fighting in Afghanistan. And I had also served in Iraq in 2003, this time leading Army Rangers trying to kill or capture the last remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime, in the misguided belief that a few "dead-enders" were all that stood between Iraq and peace. That kind of initiation into the Arabic-speaking world hardly set the stage for value-neutral research, but it certainly provided me with a unique perspective on the region as a scholar.

Al Qaeda was the reason I first went to the Middle East. What I find to be most remarkable today, though, in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden's death, is how little Al Qaeda now matters. Turning on Al Jazeera the morning after the president announced the death of Bin Laden, the news of the killing led the broadcast but competed with the ongoing crackdown in Syria and the civil war in Libya for the attentions of the network. And neither of those two events, like the popular movements in both Egypt and Tunisia that preceded them, had anything to do with Al Qaeda or Bin Laden. As Ghassan Charbel wrote in
Al-Hayat
,

Or as the Islamic scholar Radwan Sayyid of the Lebanese University told
The New York Times
, "Bin Laden was the phenomenon of a crisis of another time."
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How, though, did Al Qaeda fall so far, so fast within the Arabic-speaking world? What changed?

In the end, the Middle East simply moved on from Osama bin Laden, and though Al Qaeda's own mistakes had something to do with it, the death knell for the movement has been a generation of Arabs that, with no thanks to and little help from the United States or any other Western power, simply demanded something else.

In the Arabic-speaking world, at least, Al Qaeda is defeated. Its short, unhappy, and ultimately suicidal life in the region was in large part a response to the challenge posed by Western power, which, now on the wane in the region, has allowed Arab publics to chart new courses for themselves independent of both the West and the extremists.

If the peoples of the West have grown used to imagining Arabs living out their lives merely in response to the actions of the Western powers, that is understandable. The intellectual story of the Arabic-speaking world for much of the past two centuries has been one of competing visions for how the Arabic-speaking peoples should respond to the challenges presented by the social and political ideas of the West. Western nations have, quite literally, been invading the region since Napoleon's defeat of the Mamelukes in 1798 outside Cairo. For over two hundred years, then, the peoples of the Middle East have had little option but to respond to the Western ideas and capital that followed along with invading armies.

The historical period Eric Hobsbawm coined the "long nineteenth century" began with the twin revolutions in France and in the factories of England, and ended in the killing fields of the Somme.
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European growth in the years between, though, both in terms of capital and the creation of new, non-monarchical systems of government, was intense, and competitions between the imperial states of Europe soon spilled into Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. For the first time in centuries, the peoples of the Arabic-speaking world were forced to adapt to or reject the norms of a European world that often arrived by force of arms.

Making matters more complicated, if the Arab peoples could claim some credit for the European Renaissance, in that they had been the ones who preserved many of the classical texts that informed European thinking and insofar as Arab thinkers such as Al-Farabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sina), and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) had influenced medieval European philosophy, the post-Enlightenment political and social ideas that sprang from Europe were alien. Arab intellectuals confronted Western ideas that had evolved in isolation from the Middle East. The first generation of Arabs to deal with the challenge posed by the West, though, were intrigued enough by new Western ideas to encourage their peers to believe that they could adopt new institutions and ideas from the West without compromising their own values.
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But the next generation, embodied by the Egyptian scholar Mohammed ‘Abduh in Albert Hourani's classic
Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age
, began to see the nations of Europe both as a potential threat and as forces to be respected. ‘Abduh attempted a synthesis, seeking to adapt Islamic values in a way that still had relevance to new paradigms. It was then possible for the intellectual heirs of ‘Abduh to break in two directions. As Hourani wrote:

Out of the former school, the writings of medieval Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Taymiyya on the role of
fiqh
, or jurisprudence, as the primary source of political thought were influential. Ibn Taymiyya's reflections on power and governance are characterized, in the words of Tarif Khalidi, "by a powerful longing for the ‘golden age' of the first four caliphs, a period they considered normative for all later Islamic history."
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This strand of Islamic fundamentalism, which sought an answer to the West's challenge in the earliest days and men of Islam, lost out to the more secular regimes that came to power in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq following the Second World War and which cracked down on Islamist movements—when not cynically using those same Islamists to counter leftist parties.
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Leaders of organizations such as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood were, once thrown into the prisons of Cairo and often tortured, radicalized to the point of advocating violent action against not just the regimes of the Middle East but the infidel societies of the West.

The attacks of September 11 opened a violent new chapter in relations between the Western and Arabic-speaking worlds. Following the attacks on Washington and New York, the United States and its allies initially limited their military response, targeting only the Taliban government that had been protecting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but after the fall of the Taliban, the Bush Administration soon shifted its focus onto the Middle Eastern regimes that the United States believed had been supporting terrorist movements worldwide.

If any state in the region had been supporting violent, fundamentalist Muslim terrorists, it was prominent U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, from which fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers hailed. In his five-volume magnum opus
Cities of Salt
, Saudi novelist Abdul Rahman Munif captures the way in which the desert Bedouin communities of the Arabian Peninsula were transformed by oil wealth that in turn allowed those societies to enforce and promulgate an austere, brutal strain of Islam. The nihilistic violence of Al Qaeda was, as much as anything, the product of this uneasy marriage between austere Wahhabism and billions upon billions of dollars of oil wealth.

The United States, though, given its vital economic interests in the Gulf, could hardly challenge the country from which so much of the violent ideology fueling Al Qaeda had actually emerged. Iraq, by contrast, offered low-hanging fruit in the form of an internationally isolated regime that did not help itself by intimating that it might have active chemical and biological weapons programs. And so on a fateful day in March 2003, U.S. military forces and their allies rolled across the Kuwaiti border to depose the regime in Baghdad.

If the United States was humbled in the years to follow in Iraq, though, Al Qaeda was devastated. First off, as Thomas Hegghammer has demonstrated, Iraq soon became such an enticing conflict for would-be jihadi warriors that it distracted from other potential targets.
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But the Arabic-speaking world was largely horrified by the violence in Iraq, and if the Americans enjoyed much of the blame for the chaos Arabs saw unfold on their television screens each night, Al Qaeda's brand suffered even more. By 2005, it was clear that those dying in Al Qaeda suicide attacks throughout Iraq were not primarily Americans but mostly Iraqis and Muslims.

In Iraq itself, meanwhile, the heavy-handed way in which Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers treated the long-suffering Sunni Arab population—ostensibly Al Qaeda's allies in the conflict—finally wore too thin. For the Sunni population of Iraq, tribal affiliation matters more than religious affiliation, a fact appreciated by neither Al Qaeda nor, initially, the United States and its allies. Among those insurgents detained by U.S. and allied military forces in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, the U.S. military was surprised to discover that very few were religiously motivated. Most—and especially most Iraqis captured—identified primarily with their tribe rather than their religious sect, and once incarcerated, a minority of those detained even participated in daily prayers.
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The "tribal revolt" against Al Qaeda, then, began when it attempted to impose its own religious and cultural norms on the local environment, which included forcing tribal leaders to marry their daughters to Al Qaeda fighters—a tactic Al Qaeda had successfully employed in Afghanistan and Pakistan in part to increase kinship-based alliances and to embed Al Qaeda within local communities.
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When tribal leaders resisted, Al Qaeda militants assassinated those leaders, and the tribes in turn appealed to their erstwhile enemies, the U.S. military units in the area, for assistance. What followed was a series of military operations, driven by new intelligence gathered from Iraqi allies who had weeks earlier been allied with Al Qaeda, in which U.S. special operations and conventional forces decimated the ranks of Al Qaeda in Iraq and converted thousands of Sunni militiamen into "concerned local citizens" helping U.S. and Iraqi military forces improve security.

At the same time Al Qaeda was being defeated in Iraq, it suffered reverses on other fronts. In 2003, while the United States was getting dragged into the maelstrom of Iraq, Al Qaeda stepped up terror attacks in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the first time. Whereas Saudi citizens may have applauded Al Qaeda attacks against far-off Western targets, they were shocked and disgusted by the attacks at home, which mostly succeeded, again, in killing their fellow Muslims.

Additionally, those Saudi terrorists, who had returned home to take on what they saw as the corrupt and sclerotic House of Saud, were no longer truly Saudi.
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The norms they returned home with, to say nothing of their dress and mannerisms, made them stick out within their native society, making them less than ideal guerrillas. Over the course of 2004 and 2005, then, Saudi authorities were able to wage a comprehensively successful counterinsurgency campaign against militants in the kingdom. If Al Qaeda's ultimate goal had been to topple the regime in Saudi Arabia, their efforts met with catastrophic defeat.

The years following the attacks on September 11 were thus a period of sustained military defeats for Al Qaeda across the Arabic-speaking world. Although Osama bin Laden was often admired as someone who stood up to U.S. hegemony, support for the tactics and goals of Al Qaeda plummeted. Jordanians, like the Saudis, may have privately applauded Al Qaeda attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq, but that support, unsurprisingly, did not extend to suicide bombers attacking Jordanian wedding parties in Amman.

At the same time, meanwhile, the spread of new media throughout the Arabic-speaking world enabled the public to gather their news and information from a wider variety of media than ever before, often independently of regime censors. As scholars such as Marc Lynch have described, the advent of Arabic-language satellite networks such as Al Jazeera transformed public discourse in the Middle East.
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Ordinary Arabs from Morocco to Oman could call in to talk shows and ask pointed questions about the regimes under which they lived. The ministries of information that are a hallmark of every Arab regime could not compete with the diffusion of satellite dishes, and regimes that worked so hard to depoliticize their publics in the 1950s and 1960s now scrambled importantly against forces beyond their borders. Nervous Arab regimes angrily remonstrated the emir of Qatar, which hosted and funded Al Jazeera, but the wily emir had taken out the ultimate insurance policy in the form of a massive U.S. air base that replaced the one in Saudi Arabia that had so angered Islamic fundamentalists.