Sun Tzu, The Enemy and Fighting the Ideology

Excerpts from Understanding the jihadis, by way of Sun Tzu by Sebastian Gorka (emphasis mine)

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…Sun Tzu advised us that if we wish to guarantee victory, we must know two things: who we are and who the enemy is.

In regard to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the latter question is mudded by the scores of talking heads and self-appointed military experts who have swarmed the North American media since 9/11. Far too many bandy about the terms Taliban and al-Qaeda with abandon, never taking a moment to define what they mean or to discuss the relevant links involved.

Words matter, even — or especially — when bullets are flying. And the question of who the enemy is has become all the more important since the arrival of a new U. S. administration, and especially after President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech. Whatever the strategy that replaces George W. Bush’s global war on terrorism, its architects must first define the nature of the enemy and the nature of the conflict we are in.

The Taliban are not al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda is not the Taliban. Yes, the Taliban gave safe-haven to Osama bin Laden and his organization after he was expelled from Sudan in the late-1990s. Yes, members of al-Qaeda and even bin Laden’s own family have intermarried within Taliban power-groups, including the so-called Quetta Shura. But the Taliban must be understood as a heterogeneous group of warlords with variegated pasts and disparate interests…

The only meaningful way in which the collective noun “Taliban”…must be used, is as a descriptor for those individuals and forces which either subscribe to the fundamentalist totalitarianism that characterized Afghanistan before October 2001, or who exploit this ideology to protect vested interests…

Al-Qaeda is even harder for sophisticated Western minds to comprehend clearly and realistically. The easiest way to begin is to understand what it was.

Al-Qaeda was, until October 2001, the deadliest terrorist group in modern history, and it was a group with global capabilities. (One datum: The Provisional IRA, one of the deadliest terrorist groups of the 20th century, killed fewer people in 30 years than al-Qaeda did in 103 minutes on Sept. 11, 2001). Al-Qaeda — the organization — was not destroyed in the actions that followed 9/11, but it has been severely degraded in terms of its command-and-control capabilities. It is of course linked to the Madrid and London attacks, among others, but it is no longer capable of doing the “start to finish” of globally synchronized multiple attacks, which was its trademark attack method.

That is the good news. However, al-Qaeda is no longer “just” an organization. Counterintuitively, while al-Qaeda’s operational capability has drastically decreased, its ideological significance has grown. According to one U. S. think-tank, The American Security Project, in the last 10 years, global incidents of Islamist terrorism have increased 10-fold (and that is without counting the figures for attacks in Iraq or Afghanistan).

It is in the intangible arena that the historical significance of Osama bin Laden and his organization lies, because al-Qaeda represents a successful redefinition of the concept of jihad. Building upon the ideological and theological arguments of prior Salafists, such as Sayyid Qutb, Hassan al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brotherhood) and Abul-Ala Mawdudi, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, have successfully given the concept of jihad new content.

…America, along with its allies, has proven its ability to tangibly attack the organization that threatened us. Now, eight years later, perhaps it is time to begin in earnest to attack the intangible ideology that is the driver behind the threat.

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Related Posts:

Why the “War Against Terror” cannot be won by guns alone

Tackling Terrorism: One Step at a Time

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