Despite attention to Islamic State, al-Qaida may be bigger threat, report says

By Howard Altman 

September 20, 2015

Thanks to its well-publicized savagery, the Sunni jihadi group calling itself Islamic State is gaining the lion’s share of attention given to violent Islamic extremist groups by the military and the media.

But a new report produced for a Tampa-based military command suggests that both despite and because of the current notoriety of Islamic State, al-Qaida may very well remain the bigger long-term threat.

“Al-Qaeda’s strategy is better positioned for the long term, though IS’s emergence has placed significant pressures on al-Qaeda’s network...” is the conclusion reached by “The War between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda: Strategic Dimensions of a Patricidal Conflict.”

The 40-page report was produced for Special Operations Command Central, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, by spot-on, oft-contrarian analyst Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and his consulting firm Valens Global.

That al-Qaida might be better positioned to last than Islamic State goes against conventional wisdom, Gartenstein-Ross acknowledges.

But that matters not to him.

“That is our view,” he said of the report, co-written by Jason Fritz, Bridget Moreng and Nathaniel Barr of Valens Global. “It is very contrary to the conventional wisdom in the field, but the fact that it is contrary doesn’t bug me. I have been contrary for the past 4.5 years or so and most of the time, my record has born out pretty well.”

The report dives deep into the differences between the two jihadi groups, of which one begot the other.

Al-Qaida, on the one hand, has a slow-cooking, long-term strategy of building up popular support, easing locals into understanding Sharia law before imposing it, and using hit-and-run attack tactics instead of taking territory it cannot hold. All with the goal of a global Ummah, or Islamic world. Islamic State, on the other, wants a caliphate right now, instantly installs Sharia law by brutalizing opponents and “apostates” like Shia and Christians, and has suffered greatly from failed attempts to take territory, such as the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, which there was no way it could hold once pounded by coalition airstrikes.

The report likens al-Qaida and its deliberate and population-centric revolutionary strategy to that of Mao Tse-tung, while it likens Islamic State’s slash-and-burn, iron-fisted-rule strategy to the “Focoist writings of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and Regis Debray.”

Mao believed in “the primacy of politics over warfare” while Guevara’s approach is to take great risk to inspire support.

Mao’s approach, of course, led to the People’s Republic of China.

Outside of bringing Fidel Castro to power in Cuba, the Che method embraced by Islamic State “has been attempted unsuccessfully many time since,” argues the report.

In short, al-Qaida wants to win hearts and minds, while Islamic State wants to cut them out and put them on a spike for all the world to see.

Of course, the Mao-Che comparison is not a perfect analogy, according to the report, but a good starting point.

Another way to look at it, as least from my experience having covered the mafia in Philadelphia and New Jersey, is that AQ v IS is a battle for supremacy between the old guard mobsters and the young bucks frustrated with the methodical ways of yore.

Gartenstein-Ross laughed when I suggested his report reads like a draft of “Godfather VI.”

“I agree with that analogy entirely,” he said.

The origin of this struggle is well-known, having begun back in the dark days of Operation Iraqi Freedom. That’s when Islamic State’s forerunner — al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) — was employing the same kind of brutal tactics, including videotaped beheadings, that are a staple of the Islamic State’s powerful messaging.

Like Islamic State, AQI used those tactics to great short-term effect, both against Iraqis and the U.S. military and its allies.

But it was just those tactics that enraged al-Qaida’s senior leadership back then, and threaten to undo the group’s gains now, the report argues.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida’s No. 2 at the time and playing the role of the old-style consigliore, warned Jordanian thug Abu Musab al-Zaraqawi, the emir of al-Qaida in Iraq, to change his ways.

But Zarqawi, playing the role of the upstart capo leading a vicious group of breakaway mafiosi, paid no heed. He ran roughshod over even Iraq’s Sunni population, to the point where, greatly aided by the surge of troops in 2007 and David Petraeus’ population-centric approach to war, the Sunnis rose up and AQI was ultimately defeated after Zarqawi was schwacked in a U.S. airstrike.

AQI was later expelled from AQ, setting up the current conflict between the parent organization and its wayward offspring.

Al-Qaida learned greatly from that experience, the report argues, employing the Petraeus hearts-and-minds strategy to its own advantage throughout Africa and the Middle East.

Under this new approach, Zawahiri (who unlike either Zarqawi or bin Laden is still breathing) “instructed affiliates to avoid conflict with Middle Eastern governments when possible” because that would distract from the goal of building bases of support.

Unlike Islamic State, which trumpets every time a group like Boko Haram issues a pledge of bayat, or fealty, Zawahiri formed covert alliances with other jihadi groups around the world, opting to operate largely in the dark because doing so helped avoid bringing the collective counterinsurgency might of the U.S. and its allies raining down upon their heads.

Islamic State remains a dangerous opponent, however, both to the U.S. and its allies, as well as al-Qaida.

It is still a formidable fighting force, quick to adapt, rapidly learning lessons of defeat for future success, as the group’s capture of Ramadi proves.

And its powerful social media messaging, videos of burnings, beheadings and other horrors inflicted, has helped position Islamic State as the seeming go-to organization for jihadis the world over spoiling for a fight against infidels. Thus it has been able to backfill its battlefield losses with a seemingly ceaseless influx of foreign fighters.

The group’s social media campaign has also led to a spike in lone wolf attacks, the report notes, perhaps the most economical and operationally secure form of attack on foreign soil because you don’t have to spend any money and you don’t have to worry about an elaborate plot being stopped in the aspirational phase.

(Islamic State’s social media success is a double-edged sword, the report points out. With so many Twitter, Facebook and other accounts working on its behalf, Islamic State can’t maintain the kind of operational security it would like over all of them, which on at least one occasion resulted in death from above of one of its Twitter-happy members).

The balance of power could eventually tip toward Islamic State, according to the report, if enough jihadis feel that al-Qaida’s incrementalism doesn’t meet their needs.

The key, says Gartenstein-Ross, is what happens with groups publicly aligned with core al-Qaida, like al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

If they swing toward Islamic State, it would be a “game-changer,” he said.

“The franchise that means the most to al-Qaida is AQAP,” he said. “If they lose that, it is such a significant blow to the organization that we can start talking about an actual ISIS victory.”

That, however, is still a long way off from happening, he said. And despite Islamic State’s bluster, which has proven wrong elsewhere, it may never happen.

“The actual events on the ground don’t at all match the propaganda being put out surrounding that,” said Gartenstein-Ross.

He added that while “there are a number of ways too much attention is paid” to Islamic State, “they deserve to have attention.”

The group, he noted, has “killed tens of thousands of people, instituted sexual slavery, attempted genocide against entire minority groups. It is a horrible organization and a very strong one.”

But al-Qaida, lurking in the dark and biding its time, may yet prove to be the more virulent nemesis.

The key for the U.S. is to understand and exploit the differences.

“However, if we fail to understand the two organizations’ strengths, weaknesses and strategic and tactical postures,” the report concludes, “the jihadist movement may emerge from this period of competition stronger than before.”

The Pentagon announced no deaths last week in support of ongoing operations.

There have been 2,347 U.S. troop deaths in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, seven in support of the anti-ISIS campaign Operation Inherent Resolve, and five U.S. troop deaths and one civilian Department of Defense employee death in support of the follow-up Operation Freedom’s Sentinel in Afghanistan