North of Osama bin Laden’s last hiding place is the town of Muzaffarabad, prime recruiting and training territory for groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (“the army of the pure”) who have waged jihad for almost two decades against the Indian state in disputed Kashmir.
South and west are the lowlands, where groups such as Jaish-e-Muhammad (militia of Muhammad) have training bases, and the semi-autonomous tribal areas, described by one MI6 (British intelligence) officer as “the Grand Central Station” of international militancy. This is where Pakistani Taliban, Uzbek and other central Asian groups (the networks led by warlord and cleric Jalaluddin Haqqani), several Arab groups (including Algerians, Libyans and Egyptians) and others are all to be found.
The vital questions in the wake of Bin Laden’s death are: do these groups pose a genuine threat to the West and what strategic direction will they now take?
Though most of those in the Pakistani tribal zones have no formal link to al-Qaeda, several have already shown signs of interest in the kind of international attacks and global agenda that Bin Laden pioneered.
The Pakistani Taliban was responsible for the training and commissioning of Faisal Shahzad, a young Pakistani who tried to kill hundreds in Times Square, New York, in May 2010. There is also Ilyas Kashmiri, a Pakistani who was behind plots in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe.
Fierce disputes
Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the biggest militant groups in the world, is based mainly in the eastern Pakistani province of Punjab. It is torn by fierce disputes, pitting hardliners who favour waging war on the Pakistani government and other “hypocrite, apostate” regimes against those who hope to remain close to the Pakistani security establishment. These tensions in part led to the 2008 attack in Mumbai in which more than 160 people died.
But the various affiliates of al-Qaeda around the globe — with one exception — have shown little interest in pursuing the global agenda that was the raison d’être of Bin Laden’s group. The most recent addition to the network of networks that he and his associate Ayman al-Zawahiri had woven together was a Somali militant group. Last July they attacked restaurants in Uganda. But the reasons for the bombing — to deter Uganda from sending more troops to peacekeeping forces in Somalia — were local.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqim) was formed in late 2006 to create a new alliance of existing militant groups along the north African shoreline and provide a springboard to Europe. In this it singularly failed. Aqim was dominated by Algerians who had little interest in reaching out to Libyan or Moroccan counterparts. Though some targets of attacks were international — such as the United Nations — most remained locked into a local dynamic. Last weekend, a blast shook Marrakesh, killing 16 people.
In Iraq, too, the trend has been towards a more local agenda. Though proving tenacious, al-Qaeda in Iraq is still limited to the northwestern corner of the country and has shown no interest in launching attacks.
The exception is Yemen, from where al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Aqap) has embraced a global agenda and launched several foiled strikes on American targets. A key figure in Yemen is Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric who has used the internet to build a large international following.
He was in touch with an American army major who, in November 2009, went on a shooting rampage on a US military base that killed 13, and his sermons influenced British student Roshonara Choudhry who, in May 2010, stabbed a British MP.
Already parted company
Bin Laden’s death barely leaves these “affiliate groups” bereft. Most had parted company, organisationally and ideologically, with al-Qaeda central leadership a long time ago. One group that will have to adjust rapidly is the Afghan Taliban. Bin Laden spent 15 years trying to convince Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the movement, to embrace the global agenda fully. In this the al-Qaeda leader had some success, particularly among the younger members who have risen to replace older men killed or captured.
However, after the dramatic raid on Bin Laden’s compound, a Taliban spokesperson was noncommittal, merely saying that without hard proof that the Saudi-born militant was dead, the movement would refrain from making any comment.
Al-Qaeda, founded by Bin Laden in 1988, was only ever one of scores of militant groups, all with deep roots in the individual circumstances and histories of different parts of the Islamic world. Sometimes its leader succeeded in binding a few of these groups together around a single agenda, to fight a common enemy — the West. Now that Bin Laden has gone, the centrifugal forces that defined the chaotic world of Islamic militancy before al-Qaeda’s dominance are set to reassert themselves. —