Images of slain al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden are displayed for sale at a market in Quetta
His words provoked a new debate on two very old questions, both still urgent and important: What is al-Qaeda? And is it more or less dangerous than it was?
Answering the first question is relatively straightforward. Islamist militancy is a phenomenon going back further than the foundation of the group al-Qaeda by Saudi-born Osama bin Laden in 1988. There have been waves of revivalism in the Muslim world since the days of the Prophet Muhammad. These have frequently come in response to external political, social, cultural or military challenges. Intense and varied reactions were provoked by European colonialism in the 19th century from Afghanistan to Algeria, from Morocco to Malaysia and beyond.
The end of European colonialism in the Muslim world in no way diminished the immediacy of that challenge nor the venality, brutality and incompetence of local regimes. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, scores of different violent extremist movements, in part products of a large new interest in Islamism across the Muslim world, were waging armed struggles against local governments in the name of religion.
Al-Qaeda (usually translated as "the base") was founded – in Pakistan towards the end of the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets – to channel and co-ordinate the dispersed efforts of these movements into one campaign. It believed that striking at a universally accepted global enemy, the United States, would lead to the destruction of "hypocrite" unbelieving regimes across the Muslim world in the short term and, eventually, to the creation of a new, ill-defined, utopian religious rule. This latter goal was long-term, a cosmic struggle, possibly indefinite and certainly undefinable in terms of time.
Aided by a range of external factors, al-Qaeda was to some extent successful in achieving its less-abstract aims, striking the US hard and drawing together an unpre-cedented network of affiliates in the late 1990s. This then helped – particularly by the response to the September 11 attacks on the US and other operations – to disseminate its ideology further in this decade.
The high point was reached in 2004 or 2005. Even as it appeared to peak, the wave of extremism was receding. Since then, the central leadership of al-Qaeda has suffered blow after blow. It is not just Bin Laden who has been killed or rendered inactive, but pretty much everyone else in the senior and middle ranks of the organisation. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda central, may be an effective, utterly dedicated and experienced organiser but he lacks Bin Laden's charisma. Saif al-Adel, the only other veteran leader remaining, lacks his stature and may not be at liberty at all but instead detained in Iran.
Interrogation documents
Key players who few, beyond specialists, had ever heard of – such as the very capable Libyan Atiyah Abd al-Rahman – have gone. British security officials describe "al-Qaeda central" as being "hollowed out", largely by controversial drone strikes. Equally damaging for the group, al-Qaeda's training infrastructure is minimal, certainly compared with the dozens of fully fledged camps that were in use on the eve of the 9/11 attacks. Back in 2008, according to interrogation documents, handlers were forced to admit to new recruits coming straight from Europe that their facilities unfortunately bore no resemblance to those depicted in recruiting videos.
Nothing has improved since. Volunteers are fewer than before. There are younger members rising up the thinning ranks, but this is promotion by default rather than merit.
Equally damaging has been the rejection by communities in the past 20 years. Almost every attempt by al-Qaeda central to win genuine popular support has failed – in Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Polls show approval ratings for Bin Laden peaking in 2004/05 and then show a steep decline. This is particularly true when communities have direct experience of extremist violence or rule. The al-Qaeda brand is irremediably tarnished. Even Bin Laden was apparently thinking of relaunching the group under a new name, his correspondence reveals.
The two most spectacular attacks in recent years – in Algeria and the strike on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants from the Lashkar-e-Taiba organisation – were carried out by entities that have, in the first instance, tenuous connections with al-Qaeda's senior leadership and, in the second, none at all. This indicates the degree to which the remnant led by al-Zawahiri has become, at best, only one player among many.
The result is that the centripetal force the group once exerted has gone and we have returned to a situation similar to that of the old "pre-al-Qaeda" days with a whole series of different local groups involved in local struggles with negligible central co-ordination.
There are major differences with the previous period, of course. Decades of violence have led to much higher structural levels of radicalisation and polarisation. The technology and tactics used by all protagonists in these "shadow wars" has evolved. Then there are the consequences of the Arab Spring uprisings – for the Sahel and Syria and elsewhere. But, nonetheless, the unthinking use of the term al-Qaeda, as has so often been the case in the past, obscures rather than illuminates the real chaotic and fractured, if still dynamic, nature of modern Islamist militancy.
Of course a threat remains. But the big attacks – those that could potentially pose something a little closer to Cameron's "existential threat" – are unlikely. These would need to be in a major European or US city or involve at least one passenger jet. If British intelligence, despite having a team devoted for months to checking and rechecking every possible potential lead, could not come up with a single credible threat to the London Olympics last year, and its US counterparts were confident enough to declare a similar lack of immediate danger during the recent presidential campaign, it appears fair to assume that bombs in London or New York are a fairly distant prospect for the moment. The biggest threat to aeroplanes comes from a single highly proficient bomb maker in the Yemen.
Simply strayed
The location of the major attacks appears closely related to al-Qaeda's ability to focus the dispersed energies of contemporary Sunni Islamist extremism. Through the 1990s, attacks were restricted to targets – in Pakistan, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere – that were distant from Western populations, with the exception of the first abortive plot to bomb the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993. US troops who were attacked in Somalia in that year in the famous Blackhawk Down episode had simply strayed into someone else's war.
By the late 1990s, US interests were being attacked, but in East Africa or the Yemen. It was only in the first six years of the past decade that the violence approached the West – first in Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, then in Madrid and London.
But since then the dynamic has reversed, tracking the new weakness of the al-Qaeda senior leadership. The big attacks still come, but in Islamabad, Mumbai, Kabul and Baghdad, and now in the deserts of the Sahara. Nor do they strike targets that resonate throughout the Muslim world. A gas refinery in southern Algeria is not the Pentagon.
This is owed in part to vastly improved security precautions and competent intelligence services that co-operate much more effectively.
Intermittent attempts to down aeroplanes have been defeated, if only just. Hundreds of potential troublemakers have been stopped long before they even begin to contemplate actually perpetrating a violent attack. MI5 officials say that, in part because of closer collaboration with a range of other agencies and in particular the police, they are able to head off possible threats much earlier. One compared their operations with the famously tedious stonewall tactics of the Arsenal team 20 years ago. "It's boring but it works," he said.
There is, of course, the fear of a "lone wolf", a solo, self-radicalising extremist. The example most often cited is Mohamed Merah, the French-Algerian who killed three soldiers as well as three Jewish schoolchildren and a teacher last March.
A spokesperson for Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the man who orchestrated the recent refinery attack in Algeria, told French media that France could expect "dozens like … Merah and Khaled Kelkal" who would spontaneously rise up to kill and maim.
An old style of terrorism
But real lone wolves are rare. Kelkal, who carried out a series of attacks in France in 1995, plugged into a broader network of militants run and recruited by Algerian groups active at the time. Merah did the shooting on his own, but came from a family steeped in extremist versions of Islam and anti-Semitism, and had been to Afghanistan and Pakistan to train. He was, French and Pakistani officials say, connected to Moez Garsalloui, a high-profile Belgian militant, now dead, who had been recruiting widely and was well known to intelligence services.
Merah was thus not only part of an old style of terrorism – recruits making their way to the badlands of Pakistan to get trained and then returning to carry out attacks – but was also much less effective than predecessors such as those responsible for the 7/7 attacks in London. The number of people making that journey is now a fraction of the levels of six or seven years ago. Back then, scores, if not hundreds, made their way to the Afghan-Pakistan frontier to fight alongside the Taliban or other groups. Now the number is in the low dozens, according to intelligence officials in Pakistan, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
The other fear is of a new generation of veteran militants returning from the battlefields of the Sahel to wreak havoc in the US or, more realistically, Europe. There are some reports that Canadian or even French passport-holders were among those who attacked the refinery.
However, there are two reasons to be relatively sanguine. First, the facilities available for training in the region are minimal and there would seem to be no reason for why extremists graduating in terrorist studies from there would be better able to carry out effective mass casualty attacks than men such as Merah. Second, we are yet to see a wave of violence involving veterans of more long-lasting and extensive violence elsewhere in the Maghreb or the core of the Middle East.
Iraqi veterans have proved dangerous in Saudi, even in Afghanistan and in the Maghreb. But that is not the same as posing a direct existential threat to the West. There seems, British intelligence officials say, to be no reason why the Syrian theatre should produce a greater threat today than the Iraqi theatre has done. Nor, indeed, Mali.
Salafi-Jihadi
Does this all mean that Islamist militancy will simply die away? Of course not. A phenomenon with such long and complex roots will evolve rather than disappear. That is what is currently happening in this new post-al-Qaeda phase. Wherever the various factors that allow the "Salafi-Jihadi" ideology to get traction are united, there is likely to be violence.
Extremists do, as Cameron said, "thrive when they have ungoverned spaces in which they can exist, build and plan", and the aftermath of the Arab Spring has not just opened up new terrain but also exacerbated existing problems of lawlessness and criminality. Flows of arms from Libya have made a bad situation worse. And if you add the fighting in Mali and the attack on the Algerian refinery to a list of all the incidents occurring around the globe involving extremist Islamist violence, it is undoubtedly a frightening picture.
Last month there were arrests in the Philippines, anti-terrorist operations in Indonesia, deaths in Pakistan (owed to infighting between extremist groups), air raids in Afghanistan on suspected al-Qaeda bases, battles in the Yemen, shootings and executions in Iraq after the release of a video showing brutal executions, reports of trials in the UK and Germany and fighting in Mali. But does this add up to al-Qaeda 3.0, more dangerous than ever before?
There's a simple test. Think back to those dark days of 2004 or 2005 and how much closer the violence seemed. Were you more frightened then, or now? The aim of terrorism is to inspire irrational fear, to terrorise. Few are as fearful today as they were back then.
So that means there are two possibilities: we are wrong, ignorant or misinformed, and should be much more worried than we are; or our instincts are right, and those responsible for the violence are as far from posing an existential threat as they have ever been. – © Guardian News & Media 2012