Hi, my name is Bill Braniff, and

in this lecture we're going to be looking at Al-Qa'ida through the political lens.

If you think back to our last lecture, I mentioned the idea of Islamism,

this modern political ideology that states that Islam should serve as the foundation

of governance in a given community.

I want to expand on that just a little bit.

When many people use the term Islamism, they're using it as a synonym for

jihadism, so it assumes the violence.

And again, that's not how I'm using it.

I'm using a much broader definition of the word Islamism.

It does not imply a certain interpretation of Islam in this current lecture and

in how I'm using the term.

So Islamism does not necessitate

an understanding of Islamic law like the Taliban understands.

You could have much more diverse or progressive or different interpretations

of Islamic law that serve as the basis for an Islamist government.

And the United States government has had relationships, for example,

with other Islamist governments in different times and places, in which that

government was not governing according to the very fundamentalist interpretations

that a group like the Taliban or al-Shebab adheres to.

In how I'm using the term Islamism for

this lecture, it also doesn't imply the degree to which Islam informs governance.

So there are some Islamist groups that think that Islam should inform governance,

meaning that the ideals described in Islamic law should be present in

the ideals described in the constitution or

whatever the legal framework is for that country.

There are other Islamist groups that think that Islamic law should be

the law of the land in a very strict or literal way.

And so, all I'm saying when I use the term Islamism,

I'm trying to use it in the broadest sense possible in order to include the broadest

landscape of competitors to a group like Al-Qa'ida as I can.

If you're an Islamist activist, or frankly, if you're an activist of

any kind, there are three ways that you can try to influence the world around you.

You can engage in missionary work, and that means you go out and

you knock on doors and

you try to influence the way individuals behave in their individual lives.

And if you're successful at this grassroots form of activism, at the end of

the day everyone in your community is going to behave in a certain way.

And so you'll achieve societal level change from the ground up.

You could also be a political activist.

This is someone who tries to work within the government,

within the existing governmental institutions in order to

influence governance, in order to change society from sort of the inside out.

This is a middle of the road, right?

It's not grassroots up, but it's also not violently overthrowing the regime and

replacing it with one of your liking.

It's working within the system in order to change the system.

A group like the Muslim Brotherhood is a great example of an Islamist group.

This is an organization that was created in 1928 in Egypt, and

through social service provision, it has gained some popular support.

That popular support turns into political support at the ballot box over time.

And they were actually able to win over the most seats in Parliament, and

even the presidency in the post-Arab Spring world before

really losing their grip on Egyptian government.

But this is a long-term incrementalist approach to activism.

And then you have violent activism, and within violent activist groups in

the Islamist sphere there are really three kinds.

Historically, local jihadist groups have been the most predominant,

the most numerous.

And when I say local jihadist groups, what I mean is groups that are using

violence in order to overthrow their current government and

replace that government with a theocratic government that

believes in the right kind of Islamic law, according to that organization.

So there are lots of examples of this throughout history.

There are also groups that I would call irredentist,

or I want my land back groups, right?

These are groups that try to reclaim land that has been lost to the Muslim

community, or gain autonomy in lands where there's a Muslim majority but

the Muslim population does not have political authority.

So two examples of irredentist jihadist groups would be Hamas,

with respect to historic Palestine and

trying to get the Israeli state out of Muslim majority historic Palestine.

There's also the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is a group that is really

a state-sponsored terrorist organization that Pakistan uses to

try to attack India and weaken India in order to create autonomy for

the Muslim community in Kashmir, Indian controlled Kashmir.

And then finally there's the global jihadist groups.

And these are groups which may support the idea of overthrowing local

apostate Muslim regimes, and may support the idea of getting Israel out of historic

Muslim Palestine, but they go about seeking that end state in a different way.

For a group like Al-Qa'ida, in order to achieve that Islamist end state,

they think it's important or essential to target the far enemy first, right,

before targeting the near enemy in the case of say, the Mubarak government or

the State of Israel.

What do I mean by this?

For a group like Al-Qa'ida,

they've watched local and irredentist groups fail for decades.

In fact, many of the cadre, the leadership cadre of Al-Qa'ida have been

part of local or irredentist groups that have failed to overthrow their

own governments successfully, failed to reclaim lost land successfully.

And when Al Qa'ida, really in the form of bin Laden,

after the 1991 invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, when bin Laden

looked at the power dynamics in the world, when he went to the Saudi royal family,

for example, and offered his Muslim army, the army that had just

defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, according to his own mythology.

When he offered that Muslim fighting force as a solution to the threat

of Saddam Hussein and the potential for him to roll into Saudi Arabia and

seize oil fields in Saudi, he was really laughed out of the room, so to speak.

And instead, the Saudi Arabian government enlisted the support of

the United States government and the United States military in order to protect

the land of the two holy places from Saddam Hussein.

Al-Qa'ida realized and bin Laden realized in this moment

that these local regimes were really the puppets of a puppet master, right?

A stronger power that had to first be dealt with before these local regimes,

these local puppet regimes could be overthrown.

And so Al-Qa'ida embarked on what it calls an attrition strategy.

And what I mean by that is Al-Qa'ida seeks to attrit the United States' and

the West's political, military,

and economic will to remain engaged in the Muslim world,

to bolster the regimes of the Mubaraks and the Salehs of the world.

And if an individual taxpayer in the United States, for

example, can come to the conclusion that it's just not worth

US resources to support these regimes in the Muslim world.

It's not worth the United States to try to rebuild Afghanistan.

It's not worth the United States to try to foster a democratic pluralistic Iraq.

If the United States decides to withdraw its own resources from the Muslim world,

then groups like Egyptian Islamic Jihad, or

Gamaa Islamiya, then groups like the groups in Syria and

Iraq operating right now, Jabhut al-Nusra, for example, can be successful.

Because the United States will have left the equation, western governments will

have left the equation, and now local and irredentist regimes can be successful.

So in the last lecture when I talked about Al-Qa'ida trying to reorient the violence,

the tactics and the targeting preferences of already militant groups,

this is what I'm referring to, the idea that Al-Qa'ida will try to change

the trajectory of a group like the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat.

This is an Algerian group that was trying to overthrow the Algerian government and

replace it with a theocratic government of its own liking.

Well, Al-Qa'ida was successful in reorienting that group,

convincing it to change its name to Al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb.

You could imagine the sort of conversation, your small problems with

the Algerian government are really part of a much broader problem, right?

There's this global conspiracy against the Muslim world from the West.

And until we address this global conspiracy, until we reorient the violence

of your organization to start attacking US embassies, US business persons,

tourists, until you make the United States withdraw from North Africa and

the Sahel, then you'll never be successful.

You're not the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat,

you're actually Al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb.

So this is what I mean about reorienting the violence of these groups.

It's part of Al-Qa'ida's attrition strategy.

The thing about an attrition strategy that makes it particularly insidious

is that Al-Qa'ida doesn't have to exert command and

control over all of these associated and affiliated groups.

All they have to do is convince a certain portion or

a subset of the actors within a group, like Al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb,

to target the West in order for it to become another problem that

the United States government has to deal with or contend with.

And so, if Al-Qa'ida can reorient the violence of groups in North Africa,

in West Africa, in the Horn of Africa, in Yemen, in Pakistan, in India, right?

You start to get enough issues that it just becomes untenable for the US to

remain engaged, and our willingness will have been attrited, right?

This attrition strategy can play out even if Al-Qa'ida is not actually commanding

and controlling the violence in all of these places.

On the other side of this Islamist spectrum with the political activists and

the missionary activists, all Al-Qa'ida really has to do is convince enough

disenfranchised political or missionary activists to adopt violence, right?

They don't have to reorient the entire Muslim Brotherhood organization or

the world's largest missionary organization, Tablighi Jamaat.

They just can be a source of individual recruits.

Individuals who get fed up with the pace of change

in these other forms of activism and

decide that violence is necessary in order to really achieve an Islamist end state.

So Al-Qa'ida draws individual recruits from the one side of this graph, and

tries to reorient organizations or

subsets of organizations on the other side of this graph.

They're not a mass mobilization movement.

They're not the largest organization, by a long shot.

But they're centrally located conceptually, and they try to leverage

the strengths of these other movements and use them towards their strategic vision.

5.F: Bill Braniff (University of Maryland), "Al-Qa'ida Case Study, Political Lens"

Understanding Terrorism and the Terrorist Threat

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