The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence housed at the University of Maryland, offers a course looking at the who, what and how of Terrorism Studies, by introducing students to cutting-edge research from the social and behavioral sciences and the experts investigating these topics. The course will begin with a unit looking at widely held myths about terrorism and utilizing empirical data to discuss the realities of broad trends and patterns in terrorist attacks over time. The course will then review the psychological factors at play in individual radicalization and recruitment into terrorism, followed by an analysis of terrorist group dynamics. The course will next look at terrorist group operations, including their attacks and some of the supporting behaviors that allow them to carry out attacks, including use of media, financing, recruitment, and training. The course will conclude by looking at the factors that drive terrorist group persistence or endurance versus terrorist group desistance, and will bring the varied course concepts together through a detailed look at the case of Al-Qa’ida. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to study and work with the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the largest database of terrorist incidents in the world, learning its capabilities and developing basic skills in searching and displaying terrorism data.
5.F: Bill Braniff (University of Maryland), "Al-Qa'ida Case Study, Political Lens"
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来自 University of Maryland, College Park 的课程
Understanding Terrorism and the Terrorist Threat
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从本节课中
Module 5: Al-Qa'ida Case Study
与讲师见面
Dr. Gary LaFreeDirector
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
Bill BraniffExecutive Director
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
Kate IzsakEducation Director
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Reponses to Terrorism
Joyce Rasing
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.
