Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
The years following the 9/11 attacks and preceding the Arab Spring marked a period of tumult for al-Qaeda. The jihadist organization lost a number of key commanders after the United States invaded Afghanistan, including several involved in planning operations outside the region. Though al-Qaeda did prepare a credible large-scale plot against commercial aviation in August 2006 and nearly brought down an international flight over Detroit in December 2009,1 the organization went multiple years without a successfully executed terrorist attack in the West. For an organization that had to a certain extent staked its credibility on its ability to sustain an armed struggle against the “far enemy,” this hiatus damaged its reputation. Compounding these problems was al-Qaeda’s Iraq affiliate, which had stubbornly ignored the al-Qaeda leadership’s guidance to tone down what they deemed to be excessively violent methods. After overplaying its hand, which provoked an organized backlash from Iraqi Sunni communities, al-Qaeda in Iraq collapsed. In turn, its collapse was a blow to the al-Qaeda organization as a whole.
In his 2008 book Leaderless Jihad, psychiatrist and former C.I.A. case officer Marc Sageman reflected on the al-Qaeda of the 2000s.2 Sageman argued that the capabilities of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership had declined sharply, and to such an extent that the organization no longer exercised command and control over either its nominal affiliates or over like-minded jihadists operating outside Afghanistan and Pakistan. With al-Qaeda now a marginalized organization, Sageman argued, the most potent jihadist threat to the West now emanated from “bunches of guys.” These were small groups of radicalized individuals inspired by salafi jihadist ideology, who planned attacks without coordinating with or receiving guidance from a broader organization like al-Qaeda.
While Leaderless Jihad both reflected and influenced the thoughts of a growing number of terrorism analysts and journalists,3 it also provoked a blistering rebuttal from Georgetown University terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman. Hoffman objected to Sageman’s central claim that al-Qaeda’s senior leadership had become “neutralized operationally.”4Instead, he argued that al-Qaeda was a “remarkably agile and flexible organization,” and that its leadership had rebounded from personnel losses, retained operational control over affiliates, and sustained its ability to plan external operations against the West. While Hoffman acknowledged the threat posed by local and regional terrorist networks, he argued that al-Qaeda continued to pose a greater challenge to American and European security.
The Hoffman-Sageman debate remains largely unresolved a decade after the publication of Leaderless Jihad, as analysts continue to debate fundamental questions about the relevance of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership and the structure of the organization. Is al-Qaeda a top-down, centralized organization or a collection of flat, information-age networks? Do its leaders remain linked with and provide strategic direction to the organization’s affiliates or have they been reduced to a symbolic role? Is al-Qaeda even a single, coherent organization or is it more akin to a social movement, devoid of hierarchy and without a concrete structure?
The lack of consensus on these questions within the analytic community impedes our ability to anticipate the behavior of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, and to counter their future operations. If we do not accurately understand fundamental aspects of al-Qaeda’s structure, we will be unable to either identify and target the organization’s center of gravity or predict how strategic directives from its leadership will affect the behavior of affiliates. As documents recovered from Abbottabad become accessible and first-hand accounts from jihadist movement insiders proliferate, we now have enough information to more definitively answer pressing questions about al-Qaeda’s organizational design.
Close analysis of these primary source materials, which include a vast trove of documents produced by al-Qaeda’s top officials, has yielded two important findings that we present at length in this article. First, al-Qaeda remains a coherent and centralized organization, albeit one that is not perfectly centralized. Second, al-Qaeda’s leadership continues to be essential in determining both the trajectory of the organization as well as its strategic direction. While al-Qaeda sometimes fails to resolve its internal disputes before they boil over into the public eye—a phenomenon seen in earlier years as well (there were highly public disputes in the 1990s in both Sudan and Afghanistan over the state and trajectory of the global jihadist movement)—its affiliates generally continue to adhere to the goals, objectives and strategies outlined by the organization’s senior leadership.5 At the same time, al-Qaeda’s flexible organizational model allows affiliates to adapt their tactical approach to local dynamics.
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