Will the Jihad Ever Catch Fire?

By Gilles Kepel

To Osama bin Laden and the other radical militants of jihad, Sept. 11, 2001, was a gigantic provocation, a great blast meant to free their movement from the spiral of political decline that had ensnared it since the early 1990s. But if the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon demonstrated remarkable technological, financial and practical agility, they did not achieve the political expansion the militants had sought--quite the contrary. The extremist supporters of the U.S. attacks have posted a disastrous record during the past year. In their principal objective--to mobilize the Muslim masses behind a victorious jihad that would overthrow existing regimes and replace them with Islamic states--the extremists have failed utterly.

To say they have failed seems particularly contrarian when so much attention on bin Laden and his followers in the past year has finally granted them the stature they crave. And their failure was by no means a given. Not so long ago, the jihadists appeared to be moving from one success to another: first the Iranian revolution in 1979, then the successful guerrilla war that forced the Soviet army from Afghanistan in 1989. But in Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War, for example, a rupture appeared between moderate Islamists--those of the pious middle classes imbued with conservatism--and the more radical movements that view the Wahhabi kingdom as a U.S. protectorate that must be destroyed. In the first half of the 1990s, radical fighters sought to repeat the Afghan victory by making jihad in Bosnia, Egypt and Algeria. As the host states took repressive measures to smash them, however, these militant groups saw their support from the masses decay. By 1997 a number of exiled leaders of Egypt's al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, or Islamic Group--responsible for the assassination of foreign tourists, native Egyptian Christians known as Copts, police officers and politicians--had come to recognize violence against tourists as a dead end and publicly renounced the practice. The group has not conducted an attack inside Egypt since 1998. Likewise in 1997, one of the Islamist factions waging a civil war in Algeria called for a truce after five years. And mujahedin in Bosnia lost all hope of transforming that nation's ethnic war into a jihad after the signing of the Dayton peace accord in 1995. They were forced to leave the country without seeing their radical fervor infect the local population.

It was within this context of failure that the networks to which bin Laden had lent his name and image began a strategy of substitution. The strategy involved focusing on purely terrorist activities by small groups and striking highly symbolic targets, especially American interests in the Arabian peninsula: the 1995 car bombing of a U.S.-run training facility for the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh, which killed five Americans; the destruction of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. The enormous media impact of these operations was designed to demonstrate that America was not invincible and to renew popular support for militant Islam. But the attacks had only limited consequences and did not destabilize pro-Western regimes to any degree or permit radicals to seize power.

From his refuge in Afghanistan, bin Laden began issuing "declarations of jihad" against America for "occupying" the holy land of Saudi Arabia. In 1998 he ordered followers to "kill the Americans and their allies, civilians and military...in any country in which it is possible." The principal target was the U.S. and its relationship with Saudi Arabia. But the Americans weren't disposed to negotiate or yield to terrorist blackmail. Then came 9/11.

By ratcheting up the scale of terror, the jihadist authors of 9/11 sought to embody a Muslim "vanguard" (as bin Laden himself said in his videotape declaration, broadcast Oct. 7) capable of mobilizing the Islamic masses once and for all. The murderous operation had a double goal: to claim American lives on American soil, and to trigger a U.S. retaliation against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan that would turn the country into a massive cemetery for U.S. troops and precipitate the fall of America. The terrorists had in mind the Afghan rout of the Soviet army, which helped provoke the implosion of the U.S.S.R. The assassination of Afghan commander Ahmed Shah Massoud two days before Sept. 11 was meant to eliminate the Taliban's leading opponent before he could help the anticipated U.S. counterattack. Muslim scholars and clerics around the world were expected to call the faithful to unite in jihad against the impious American army storming the Islamic land of Afghanistan. They had, after all, made a similar appeal in the 1980s after the Soviet invasion.

This time the clerics did not make such an appeal, and the radical plot resulted in failure. The American army--and its allies--did not become mired in Afghanistan, and it was the Taliban that was routed. Al-Qaeda's infrastructure was significantly damaged, even if precious little is known about the fate of bin Laden and his lieutenants or their ability to mount new operations around the globe. The Qaeda threat remains, but beyond the fascination with bin Laden among some Muslim youth who view him as a defiant hero, most of the Muslim world has followed the lead of imams who refused to lend him any support and prevented his extremist fire from spreading. Not only did the Muslim troops of the Afghan opposition fight with renewed determination against bin Laden's Taliban hosts after Sept. 11, but some of Islam's most influential scholars and clerics began refusing to give their support to the Kabul regime. Egyptian Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is host of a religious program on the pan-Arab television channel al-Jazeera, issued a statement condemning the suicide attacks. Such acts helped refute the jihad pretenses of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and rob them of all transnational Islamic support.

In Pakistan, which had long been a principal hub for militants, armed Sunni extremist movements had enjoyed the complicity of successive governments. But General Pervez Musharraf has decided to smash these movements in exchange for strong backing by the U.S. It will be a long, hard haul. As the killings of American journalist Daniel Pearl and 11 French engineers in Karachi demonstrate, General Musharraf is not yet out of the woods--especially given Pakistan's endemic state of cold war with India over Kashmir. But one year after Sept. 11, Southwest Asia has neither exploded nor risen up at the instigation of jihadists.

The imams who feared being dragged into an immediate destructive confrontation with the West--and who therefore denied the hijackers martyr status and even described them as men who had committed suicide and thus would burn in hell--needed to find a new outlet for the anger of radicalized Muslim youth. That was accomplished by transferring the aspirations of jihad to the Palestinian intifadeh and to the suicide bombings perpetrated by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In the eyes of these imams, Israel represents a legitimate target of jihad because of its alleged usurpation of an Islamic land. That conflict represents a just war and was a natural choice to replace the jihad of bin Laden and the Taliban.

And so it was that support for the jihadist violence targeting U.S. interests on the Arabian peninsula came to be redirected toward Israel. After the Oslo peace accords broke down and the second intifadeh led to spiraling violence beginning in September 2000, colossal frustration began to build in the occupied territories--and it only increased as Israel continued to demonstrate its overwhelming military advantage over the Palestinians. That encouraged the rise of movements that consider terrorism a legitimate means of resisting occupation. And indeed, suicide bombings evoke great sympathy throughout the Middle East, where their perpetrators are described as martyrs and where telethons have collected large sums for their families.

Here again, though, the headlong rush to embrace violence is producing a backlash. Suicide attacks have proved so repugnant in Europe and the U.S. that they have begun to erode support for the Palestinian cause there. They have also contributed significantly to the free hand wielded by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has completely destroyed the infrastructure of the West Bank. Palestinian intellectuals and members of civil society have also recognized the bombings as a political disaster and are leading calls for their immediate halt. In taking the intifadeh hostage, Islamic radicals waging jihad have won, at best, a momentary and illusory victory--and one for which a Palestinian population crushed by repression is paying an exorbitant price. That price will eventually undermine the reputation and allure of the most radical Palestinian militants, as it did in the 1990s, when terror strategies were curtailed in Egypt and Algeria. The question is how many innocents will die before the zealots move on.

Gilles Kepel is a professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris and author of Jihad, the Trail of Political Islam