Volume I, Issue 5 Perspectives on Terrorism - Abu Yahya's Six
Easy Steps for Defeating al-Qaeda
By Jarret Brachman
In his 10 September 2007 video release, Shaikh Abu Yahya al-Libi offered
the United States several unsolicited tips for better prosecuting its
`war of ideas' against al-Qaeda.[1] Although his comments
brought al-Qaeda propaganda to new heights of arrogance, the fact is
that Abu Yahya's recommendations are nothing short of brilliant.
Policymakers who are serious about degrading the resonance of the
Jihadist message, therefore, would be remiss in ignoring his strategic
recommendations simply because of their source.
Abu Yahya, a senior member of al-Qaeda, is one of the world's
foremost experts on the strengths and vulnerabilities of the
contemporary Jihadist Movement. He became a household name within the
counterterrorism community when al-Qaeda began marketing him in their
propaganda following his July 2005 escape from detention at Bagram air
base in Afghanistan. In the past two years, Abu Yahya has become the
al-Qaeda High-Command's attack dog, chastising a variety of Muslim
groups for failing to follow the proper path: with the Shia, Hamas and
the Saudi royal family seemingly bearing the brunt of his rage.[2]
Al-Qaeda has also promoted Abu Yahya's softer side, showing him
reciting poetry and informally dining with his students. He has become,
in a very real sense, the Jihadist for all seasons.
Abu Yahya's decision to volunteer strategic advice to the United
States was neither out of goodwill nor self-destructive tendencies.
Rather, his comments embodied the explosive cocktail of youth, rage,
arrogance and intellect that has made him a force among supporters of
the Jihadist Movement. By casually offering his enemy a more
sophisticated counter-ideological strategy than the U.S. has been able
to implement or articulate to date, Abu Yahya's point was clear: the
U.S. lags so far behind the global Jihadist Movement in its war of ideas
that al-Qaeda has little to fear any time soon.
Abu Yahya's strategic plan for improving America's
counter-ideology efforts centers on turning the Jihadist Movement's
own weaknesses against it. He first suggests that governments interested
in weakening the ideological appeal of al-Qaeda's message should
focus on amplifying the cases of those ex-Jihadists (or
"backtrackers" as he calls them) who have willingly renounced
the use of armed action and recanted their previously held ideological
commitments. Using retractions by senior thinkers and religious figures
who already have established followings within the Jihadist Movement
helps to sow seeds of doubt across the Movement and deter those on the
ideological fence from joining.
Although Arab governments, most notably the Saudis and the Egyptians,
have successfully leveraged this approach for decades, there may be
particular value in amplifying these retractions in the West. In
November 2007, for instance, the legendary Egyptian Jihadist thinker,
Dr. Sayyid Imam Sharif, released a book renouncing his previous
commitment to the violent Jihadist ideology.[3] As could be expected
given Sharif's senior stature in the Movement, the story made
front-page news across the Arab world. In the English-language media,
however, the story was little more than a minor blip. The media's
non-coverage of such a major ideological victory against global Jihadism
is due to the fact that few in the West appreciate Sayyid Imam's
significance to groups like al-Qaeda.
Abu Yahya suggests that the public media can play an effective role in
publicizing ideological retractions, particularly by conducting
interviews with those reformed scholars, publishing their articles and
printing their books. The media's effort to promote the retractions
helps to redirect public attention away from the role of the host
government in prompting those retractions in the first place. The more
distance these reformed scholars have from their host governments the
more they are likely to be perceived as legitimate.
Abu Yahya also recommends that the United States both fabricate stories
about Jihadist mistakes and exaggerate real Jihadist mistakes whenever
they are made. These may include blaming Jihadist terrorism for killing
innocents, particularly women, children and the elderly. But he does not
stop there. Jihadist mistakes should not simply be highlighted as being
anomalous or extraordinary: rather, governments ought to characterize
them as being at the core of the Jihadist methodology. In short,
governments need to convince their populations that the murder of
innocent people is a core part of global Jihadism.
The most effective way to pursue this strategy, he contends, is to
exploit mistakes made by any Jihadist group, whether they are al-Qaeda
or not, by casting that action as being emblematic of the entire
Jihadist Movement. Abu Yahya calls this strategy of blurring the
differences between al-Qaeda and other Jihadist groups when it serves
propaganda purposes, "widening the circle." Pursing this
strategy offers the United States significantly more exploitable
opportunities for discrediting the actions of the Jihadist Movement writ
large.
Abu Yahya provides two clarifying examples of existing counterpropaganda
initiatives that he found to be effective in damaging the Jihadist
Movement's credibility. The first example is the rumor about an
al-Qaeda constitution that stated that death should be the penalty for
quitting al-Qaeda. Although Abu Yahya claims that the rumor is
fabricated, he concedes that it has effectively painted al-Qaeda in a
negative light within the Islamic world.
He also points to how the Saudi and Algerian governments successfully
characterized Jihadist terrorist attacks against government targets in
their countries as actually being attacks against the people of those
countries. By downplaying the iconic significance of the buildings and
focusing instead on the human victims, casting them as powerless and
ordinary, both the Saudis and the Algerians were able to "move
emotions" and "whip up storms" across the public against the
Jihadist Movement.
Abu Yahya's third strategic point deals with the government's
prompting of mainstream Muslim clerics to issue fatwas (religious
rulings) that incriminate the Jihadist Movement and their actions. Abu
Yahya shudders at other Muslims' use of "repulsive legal terms,
such as bandits, Khawarij (literally, "those who seceded,"
refers to the earliest Islamic sect) and even Karamathians or
al-Qaramitah, ("extreme fanatics") in referring to the
Jihadists. Abu Yahya is not the first to make these points, however. In
fact, followers of the Saudi Salafist shaikh, Rabi bin Hadi al-Madkhali,
frequently used the following terms in order to assault the Jihadists:
- "Jihadi:" Anyone who believes that Jihad is a purely
individual duty to fight
- "Takfiri:" Anyone who excommunicates Arab rulers or Muslims
- "Khariji Bandit:" Anyone who actively seeks to overthrow Arab
rulers
- "Qutubi:" Anyone who reveres, quotes or even positively
mentions Sayyid Qutb (an early hard-line Egyptian thinker)
- "Hizbi:" Anyone who participates in anti-establishment
activist group
- "Dirty Groundhog": a traitor to one's religion, used
specifically against Saudi hard-line cleric, Shaikh Hamoud bin Uqla
as-Shuaybi in the 1990s
- "Rabid Dogs": a generic label for extremists
- "The Dog": referring specifically to Usama Bin Ladin
- "Perennial Defender of Innovators": an attack against
extremists for rejecting centuries of accepted historical teachings and
interpretations of Islam
- "Betrayer of the Salafi Way": used to attack hard-line clerics
who step outside the bounds of mainstream Islamic conservatism.[4]
Abu Yahya also points to the effectiveness of special committees of
scholars who try to deprogram Jihadists in prison. These rehabilitation
programs, which are now operating in Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia,
Singapore, have become a central part of these countries' efforts to
weaken the Jihadist Movement, at least in the war of ideas.[5]
The fourth component to Abu Yahya's proposed grand strategy is
strengthening and backing Islamic movements far removed from Jihad,
particularly those with a democratic approach. Beyond supporting them,
he counsels governments to push these mainstream groups into ideological
conflict with Jihadist groups in order to keep the Jihadist scholars and
propagandists busy responding to their criticisms. This approach is
designed to strip the Jihadist Movement of its monopoly on the dialogue
and instead unleash a "torrential flood of ideas and methodologies
which find backing, empowerment, and publicity from numerous
parties" against them.
There is no doubt that the Jihadist thinkers are most threatened by
groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas as well as mainstream
Salafists. This is because these groups draw on many of the same
religious texts and appeal to the same constituencies for recruitment
and financial support.[6] The methodologies of groups like the Muslim
Brotherhood, however, are significantly more palatable to their host
governments than Jihadists. This bitter rivalry between Jihadists and
those more moderated groups could be usefully exploited by governments
interested in wearing down al-Qaeda's stamina.
Next, Abu Yahya's recommends aggressively neutralizing or
discrediting the guiding thinkers of the Jihadist Movement. His point is
that not all Jihadists are replaceable: there are some individuals who
provide a disproportionate amount of insight, scholarship or charisma.
These individuals include key ideologues like Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi,
Abu Qatada or Sayyid Imam Sharif; and senior commanders like, Khattab,
Yousef al-Ayiri or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
In order to effectively degrade the Jihadist Movement's long-term
capacity, Abu Yahya suggests that these Jihadist luminaries need to be
silenced, either through death, imprisonment or perceived irrelevance,
thereby leaving the Movement "without an authority in which they can
put their full confidence and which directs and guides them, allays
their misconceptions, and regulates their march with knowledge,
understanding, and wisdom."
The consequence of this power vacuum, he argues, is that "those who
have not fully matured on this path or who are hostile to them in the
first place, to spread whatever ideas and opinions they want and to
cause disarray and darkness in the right vision which every Mujahid must
have."
Finally, Abu Yahya advises the United States to spin the minor
disagreements among leaders or Jihadist organizations as being major
doctrinal and methodological disputes. He suggests that any
disagreement, be it over personal, strategic or theological reasons, can
be exacerbated by using them as the basis for designating new subsets,
or schools-of-thought. These fractures can also serve as useful inroads
on which targeted information operations can be focused: such an
environment becomes a "safe-haven for rumormongers, deserters, and
demoralizers, and the door is left wide open for defamation, casting
doubts, and making accusations and slanders," he explains.
This "war of defamation" as he terms it, leaves the Jihadist
propagandists almost impotent in that no matter how they try to defend
themselves, dispel misconceptions, and reply to accusations, their voice
will be as "hoarse as someone shouting in the middle of thousands of
people."
In the case of the 10 September 2007 video, Abu Yahya may have let his
ego undermine his goal of intimidating the West by offering useful
strategic advice. Abu Yahya's most important contribution is
identifying that the best way to defeat al-Qaeda is by tying it up in
knots: Al-Qaeda must be continuously forced into a series of
compromising positions from a variety of angles so that it hangs itself
over the long term. The challenge for the United States is that it is
not currently positioned to implement many of Abu Yahya's
strategies, which is why he most likely felt fine sharing them. The fact
is that the U.S. is speaking from a non-Islamic perspective, which
discredits anything it says regarding the Islamic faith. Furthermore,
there is little the U.S. government can say to the Islamic world that
will be viewed as anything other than propaganda in support of its
military occupation of Iraq as long as it maintains forces on the ground
there. The U.S., therefore, must be open to, and innovative with,
creating and leveraging a variety of flexible partnerships in its global
efforts to degrade the appeal and legitimacy of al-Qaeda over the
long-term.
Jarret Brachman is the Director of Research at West Point's
Combating Terrorism Center.
NOTES:
[1] Abu Yahya al-Libi. 93-minute video tape. Produced by As-Sahab.
Recorded early Sha'ban 1428.
[2] See Michael Scheuer, "Abu Yahya al-Libi: Al-Qaeda's Theological
Enforcer - Part 1," in the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Focus,
Volume 4, Issue 25 (July 31, 2007) for an in-depth examination of Abu
Yahya's recent statements.
[3] The book, Rationalizations on Jihad in Egypt and the World, is being
released in serialized format by the Egyptian daily newspaper, Al-Masry
al-Youm, November and December 2007.
[4]"Summary of the Deviation of The Madkhalee 'Salafiyyah.'"
At-Tibyan Publications.
[5] See Christopher Boucek's "Extremist Reeducation and
Rehabilitation in Saudi Arabia" in the Jamestown Foundation's
Terrorism Monitor.
[6] For a more in-depth discussion of these dynamics, see The Militant
Ideology Atlas. Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
http://ctc.usma.edu/atlas/ <http://ctc.usma.edu/atlas/> .
Note: Perspectives on Terrorism invites a diversity of opinions to be
presented in articles. The views expressed in this article are those of
the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Perspectives on
Terrorism or the Terrorism Research Initiative.
http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php?option=com_rokzine&view=ar\
ticle&id=18
<http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php?option=com_rokzine&view=a\
rticle&id=18>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
------------------------------------
--------------------------
Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL
PROTECTED]
--------------------------
Brooks Isoldi, editor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.intellnet.org
Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com
Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has
not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of
The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT
YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of
intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods,
techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other
intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes
only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use
this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,'
you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtmlYahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
